Discuss The State of the World

The venerable and ancient community The Well is still alive and kicking – it was bought by community members from salon.com. Right now and for the following days you can participate in the annual discussion with author, journalist, futurist and design guru Bruce Sterling and with entrepreneur and Internet veteran… Continue reading

In the pursuit of meaning

(warning: philosophical nerdiness) It is funny how one can keep encountering strange, weird words such as ‘ontology’ – which means something like ‘the study of what there is’ – but the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains that this is just a first approximation. Anyway, I stumbled long ago on this… Continue reading

Virtual communities on Google+

Getting tons of invites for communities on Google Plus. A limited selection: communities for Digital Culture (look for Ted Newcomb to get an invite), Second Life (288 members already), Second Life Arts (135 members), Opensim Virtual (‘First there was Second Life, then there was Freedom), MetaMeets (3D internet conference), Augmented… Continue reading

“The ideal technology is invisible and ambient”

I did not make it to the LeWeb conference in Paris, France, but I’m looking at the abundant streams of tweets and blog posts about the event. I won’t talk in this post about the Instagram-Twitter drama – it has been covered widely on so many other places. My personal… Continue reading

Apps on top of the world: another Minecraft-in-Reality

In an earlier post about MetaMeets I briefly mentioned the Dutch artist Sander Veenhof with his eye-opening and often subversive usage of augmented reality. In yet another post we referred to Minecraft Reality, an app which allows you to position constructions built in the virtual Minecraft-environment into the physical world…. Continue reading

Changing the world while exiting the trough of disillusionment

I’m recovering from the second MetaMeets day, but here comes my report about the second part of this two-day conference in the beautiful ‘s Hertogenbosch (the Netherlands). This day was hands-on: we had a workshop during which we learned to use sculptris to make a model, meshlab to clean it… Continue reading

‘Virtual worlds are not dead, they only smell funny’

Allow Flufee McFluff to introduce this post about the first day of the MetaMeets conference: [iframe] [/iframe] You can find the mindmap on which my own presentation (slideshow) was based in the previous post. I update the mindmap in function of what I learn during this two day-conference. Some highlights… Continue reading

MetaMeets! Virtuality Meets Reality

Tomorrow I’ll participate in the MetaMeets gathering in ‘s-Hertogenbosch,The Netherlands. What we’l do and talk about: MetaMeets is a seminar/meeting about virtual worlds, augmented reality and 3D internet, this year’s topic will be The Art of Creation : Virtuality meets Reality. Virtual worlds and 3D internet have been developing continuously…. Continue reading

Becoming a Cyborg should be taken gently: Of Modern Bio-Paleo-Machines » Cyborgology

“We, the biological part of the machine, are providing the tools for its uplift, we embed cameras everywhere so it can see, we implant sensors all over the planet so it may feel, but above all we nudge and we push towards a greater connectivity, all this unaware.” And also:… Continue reading