There’s an interesting little business product that’s appeared inside Second Life. It’s called “mob*vend” and it was created by SL resident Shep Korvin (blogLink). mob*vend is, best I can tell, basically a standard vendor that senses the number of avatars within some defined range and then, depending on the feedback, adjusts the price of its product accordingly. The larger the crowd, the lower the price. This continues until it reaches a minimum sales price and announces that to the crowd. They then have one minute to make a purchase before the thing resets (I’m not clear on the details at this point but suspect those avatars in attendence are no longer counted). Continue reading →

Towards the end of this past year I traded emails with PSFK’s Piers Fawkes regarding a comment I made on a couple of the video predictions submitted and posted on the PSFK site (Link). The videos were posted by – what seem to me to be – wide-eyed design graduates who have recently joined the professional ranks and have the kind of optimism I expect from a young graduate. Only what I heard (mostly in the first video) was a regurgitation of the Design Hype I’d been speaking out against for over a year (most notably in my one-sided sparring with BusinessWeek’s Bruce Nussbaum – reLink1, reLink 2, reLink 3, reLink 4, reLink 5, reLink 6, reLink 7, reLink 8, reLink 9)

On that PSFK post I commented: Continue reading →

After my earlier post (reLink) where I showed some images of the best in product visualization (both what’s available to the public and what’s in the labs), I thought I’d show the flip side; the relative low end of the scale. I’d considered jumping into There or Active Worlds, but went with Second Life for a number of reasons: a) it routinely gets slammed in the gamer press for low quality graphics, b) objects are often created by people unfamiliar with 3D modeling, and c) unlike other platforms of which I’m aware, the content is user-generated *inside* the virtual world. This isn’t a crit or analysis or anything like that. It’s just an observational post, so pushing the envelope in those ways made sense to me. Continue reading →

The above quote by Marc Gobé, head of Desgrippes Gobé Group New York, comes courtesy of Brand Noise’s interview (Link). Here are a couple of clips I’ll be keeping for future reference:

Design is the new advertising. The agencies should fold, they’re out of line and out of touch. The only advertising that works is about product that you’re drawn to any way.

– Continue reading →

Besides the whole Neuronet/IAVRT thing that’s taken up some of my time, I’ve been thinking that I need to try (again) to focus this blog more narrowly on those subjects that are easily understood as being related. There’s a few reasons for this. One is that I don’t think most people see how, for example, I connect something like an indy(?) band’s video on Revver (reLink) to the future of product development and virtual worlds. Even if they’re dedicated readers of this blog, the lines are too tenuous for many people. One other reason is that I recognize my own tendency to stray too far afield; dangerous given my own widely varying interests. Consequently, I wanted to start off the New Year with a post about something that isn’t new, but which is starting to gather steam (pun intended): product realism inside videogames and virtual worlds. Continue reading →