I saw some images from a show titled “Closer: Commonwealth vs. Kenzo Minami” a week or so ago on a few different art & design websites and was sufficiently underwhelmed that I didn’t investigate further. A shame since I’ve had an interest in modularity since design school (we spent a whole semester doing nothing but working with modules) and in tiles since realizing some years ago that the ones used in videogames could be fabbed. In any event, while surfing through the Archinect site I found a gallery of images (Link) from the show that are much nicer than what I’d seen elsewhere.
Continue reading →

I caught this last night, “New machines make slots a multiplayer game” (Link), and while sleeping on it hasn’t yielded any additional insight, there’s something intriguing about the idea of mashing up casino slot gambling with – of all things – an MMORPG. I can’t find the original article on Reuters, so here are a few excerpts from the C\Net site:

Slot machine makers, keen to find a new selling point for a traditional game, are trying to increase the social aspect of slots by linking up machines so players can share payouts and the thrill of winning.
…
The trend began last year with the latest edition of the popular Wheel of Fortune slot game from International Game Technology, which allows up to nine players to sit around a large spinning wheel and share in the winnings.
… Continue reading →

There’s an interesting article on Wired called “Second Life Will Save Copyright” (Link). I’ve been working on a rather long post for a while and this piece touches on some thoughts I’ve been having in regards to Second Life (and virtual worlds in general), intellectual property, and community enforcement. Among other things. Definitely worth taking a few moments to read.

You might also want to stop by Jamais Cascio’s “Open the Future” blog (Link) to follow some of his outsider thoughts on the subject (Link 1, Link 2).

Lastly, for reference, you can check out a series of links on the Second Life event that prompted all this discussion in an entry I posted earlier (reLink).

Seems as if the Second Life publicity frenzy is finally dying down. As a result there’s been relatively little news surrounding Dell Computer’s entry into Second Life. Having taken a few minutes to take a tour of their virtual digs, I did, however, find something worth sharing: a production room with a bunch of almost steampunkish drafting tables hooked up to individual virtual rapid manufacturing machines. Once you sit your avatar down you get to choose computer components from a drop-down menu accessed via graphics that appear on the drafting board (this makes the choice of the board understandable, since it functions like a huge computer monitor which is what would be more realistic). When complete, the fabber rez’s a virtual PC {which is, of course, a doppleganger for the one you can order using that information and the embedded link to the Dell website}.

This sounds familiar.

Both Second Life enthusiasts and a fair number of other people have become aware of what’s called a “CopyBot”. I became aware of this pretty early on and have been watching things develop and I have to say I’ve not been disappointed: it’s a nice mess.

I’ll dispense with the technicalities behind “CopyBot” and simply call it what it is: a tool for replicating digital content inside the Second Life virtual world. What’s interesting to me is that this is, in some important ways, a virtual doppelganger of future rapid manufacturing systems. There’s not that much difference between a virtual device that can replicate and a real world rapid prototyping device that uses similar digital data and some basic raw material.

For those who never quite understood why I’ve tied some topics together, the CopyBot story and the fallout surrounding it should help clarify my thinking. In any event, there are a number of sites carrying the story and I thought I’d post some links that might be of interest.
Continue reading →