Journalists sometimes call themselves “hacks,†a tongue-in-cheek term for someone who can churn out words in any situation. Hackers use the digital equivalent of duct tape to whip out code. Hacks/Hackers tries to bridge those two worlds. This movement started in the US but journalists and bloggers worldwide are joining… Continue reading
Remember the guys who used the Kinect to move around and play in World of Warcraft? I was frustrated that Second Life did not have the scoop… but here we are now: those same people from the University of Southern California, Institute for Creative Technologies, demonstrate how they use the… Continue reading
My newspaper colleague Dirk Selleslagh recently had an interview with the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. The first minute is an introduction in Dutch, the interview itself is in English as perfect translation technology is not yet available…
Microsoft announces Avatar Kinect. Notice how it seems to be possible to give the avatars facial expressions. Of course, I don’t think this will be a user generated world, boasting its very own economy etc. Maybe it will fail miserably, like Google’s Lively did. But then again, maybe it’ll take… Continue reading
So I’ve been monitoring that State of the World 2011 conversation on The WELL (with Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowski), learning about design fiction (see also critical design) and watching an awesome video about Claytronics (programmable matter). Sterling, on his blog Beyond the Beyond: “Check out this bonkers Discovery Channel… Continue reading
In our first blog about other venues where people discuss virtual worlds, we talked about Quora. While Quora is very new, The WELL is almost ancient: The WELL is a cherished and acclaimed destination for conversation and discussion. It is widely known as the primordial ooze where the online community… Continue reading
Oh my! Is our Second Life community, and especially the geeky part of it, losing it’s innovative edge? New World Notes posted a few days ago about how the Kinect is being used to move around and play in World of Warcraft. Watch this video: Interesting to note: in 2008… Continue reading
One of the impressive things about virtual worlds are the communities which create not only those worlds, but also a social media ecosystem around the actual virtual environments. This is a first post in a series about those “other places” where we meet. Instead of starting out with the usual… Continue reading
Shocking! Maybe Second Life is a game after all! For years now residents of Second Life explain over and over again that they are not ‘players’ but ‘residents’, that one does not ‘play Second Life’ and that it is not a game even though one can play games in that… Continue reading
Okay, still trying to figure out how to use this in a newsroom context, but KinectHacks says this is The Most Extreme Kinect Hack they’ve seen so far, so here it comes (waiting for Draxtor Despres to incorporate some Kinect magic in one of his news machinimas): Adding another one… Continue reading