What does the success of Minecraft mean?

‘Could Minecraft be the next great engineering school?’ Scott Smith asks at Quartz. He explains that Minecraft can be considered as a particularly interesting MOOC – and an example of peer2peer learning. Minecraft has become a kind of anarchic massive open online course (MOOC) all on its own, without developing… 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

Apps on top of the real world

This seems to be pretty cool, but as you’ll see in the ‘read more’ section, it’s much more than just ‘cool’: And here is how it works: It’s build by Stockholm-based 13thlab.com and it’s an app available on iOS. Using advanced computer vision, Minecraft Reality maps and tracks the world… Continue reading

Microsoft has its own Project Glass

“Microsoft has it’s own Project Glass cooking in the R&D labs. It’s an augmented reality glasses/heads-up display, that should supply you with various bits of trivia while you are watching a live event, e.g. baseball game. ” The information is based on a patent application, so don’t expect a Microsoft… Continue reading

Find out about the future by looking at Defense

The computer visionary Doug Engelbart designed in the 1960s the NLS – the “oN-Line System” – a revolutionary computer collaboration system implemented by researchers at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). The NLS system, so explains Wikipedia, was the first to employ the practical use… Continue reading

3D printing: does the revolution look vintage already?

Nice overview of 3D-printing: Hat tip to Bruce Sterling on Beyond the Beyond. I liked his comment: Really makes one anticipate 3d printing in 2022, when all this contemporary stuff looks charmingly crude and tentative. Very “early teens.” So does our revolution look vintage now already? More about all this… Continue reading

Liveblogging going full circle: Circa News

Cir.ca is an interesting mobile news app. As Online Journalism Blog says: It’s a simple idea: look at the latest news, pick stories you want to follow, and get a notification when something new happens on that story. The key difference is that updates are not delivered as traditional articles,… Continue reading