Eerily lifelike animation heralds new era for computer games [Times Online]

August 19, 2008 at 11:29 pm | In Future, Robots | Leave a Comment
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Watch this. The future is now. ‘Emily’ will set a new precedent for photo-realistic characters in video games and films, says her creator, Image Metrics. Now imagine that realism backed by natural language speech enabled software robots…and we’ve got ourselves a useful android. Article: Lifelike animation heralds new era for computer games – Times Online.

Crowdsourcing: Products from the "people formerly known as customers"

August 17, 2008 at 9:35 am | In Metaverse, Web2.0 | Leave a Comment
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Interesting (while promotional) video about the impact of Crowdsourcing on product development and change of whole markets. The author of the book he’s promoting with this trailer likes two definitions for crowdsourcing best:

The White Paper Version: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.

The Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.

I liked a definition he offers in the video (near end) even better: “(the former examples) show how these successful forms of crowdsourcing came up organically from the people formerly known as customers, from people formerly known as the audience”.

By the way: Croudsourcing is a concept that has massively been played out in the sci-fi novel “Rainbows End” by Vernor Vinge, as my friends on FF know all too well ;-)

Eerily Realistically Rendered 3D World. Watch this!

August 12, 2008 at 1:13 pm | In Future, Metaverse, Web3D | Leave a Comment
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Watch more than the first 30 seconds, because you’ll think this is clearly a fake (*) until you realize that those camera movements are simply not possible in real life. Later on they show avatars, lightning and embedding of all ther media like pics and movies etc. just with a click on the wall. Dusan Writer asked: What IS this??

UPDATE: Techcrunch: “little is known about LivePlace, other than that the WHOIS lists the domain’s owner as Brad Greenspan, one of the co-founders of MySpace. Note: It appears that in the 20 minutes since Techcrunch spoke to Greenspan about this post, someone was told to take LivePlace down (apparently nobody was supposed to find it).”

*) UPDATE #2: In fact there was discussion that the first 30 seconds were stolen from a different (pre-rendered) design project.

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