“Bloom” is a playful collaborative platform for building virtual gardens in Second Life. It aims to make friends collaborate to create a unique virtual garden together, and take their designs back home, or share it with other residents. Bloom focuses on the ideas of simulation, interactivity, group collaboration and emergence to create a compelling creative experience. The idea is simple: the more friends you have helping you design, the more interesting your garden gets! Collaboration is the key to variety in Bloom..
It all begins with a 10×10 mt square board, similar to a checker board but with numbers on each 100 faces. These boards are modular, so residents can design their own gardens as large as they want. As the participants begin wandering on this platform, the scripted faces will generate representations of various natural objects and plants, such as grass, flowers, trees, stones or water. As the participants continue travelling and begin to interact through their paths, the scripted faces will make connections between them to visualize their contribution. The idea is to have fun together by creating a virtual garden..
Bloom project is designed by the winning ‘Production Zone’ team in ‘Making Sense of Virtual Worlds and User Driven Innovation” Workshop, held in June 7th-9th 2010 in Magleås, Denmark. The design team of Bloom consists of: Associate Professor Mia Consalvo (School of Telecommunications, Ohio University), Dr. Yesha Sivan (Head of Information Systems program at the Tel Aviv Yaffo Academic college), Assistant Professor Jeffrey Wimmer (Technical University Ilmenau, Department of Virtual Worlds / Digital Games), PhD candidates Maria Bäcke (Digital Games, Blekinge Institute of Technology), Mitchell Harrop (University of Melbourne), Ates Gursimsek (Roskilde University) and Elia Giovacchini (Stockholm School of Economics)..
With all the events that occurred at the virtual worlds international workshop earlier this month, we generated many videos and photographs to capture it all.
The videos of the keynotes are already on the blog. You can find the video from the mixed realities Metanomics show at the Metanomics website.
You can see photographs taken during the Metanomics broadcast here:
There were a mixture of presentation types occurring at the workshop. Besides the conventional 12-15 minute presentations, people also created posters or pecha kucha. The posters session has a series of photographs to show the speakers and the posters:
The pecha kucha session shows the presenter giving their 6 minute 40 second speeches:
Finally, part social activity, part treatise on defining what is a virtual world, participants partook in a treasure hunt. They searched the convention center for materials to create presentations about the nature of the place they were at. Pictures show their searching and creating during this fun activity:
Stay tuned to the blog for more follow-ups to the international workshop.
A variety of new human-computer, or human-machine, or human-gaming, interfaces have been revealed recently, and each could potentially impact the mainstreaming of virtual worlds.
Each interface portends to offer a new way of engaging with the content that is being relayed through the technology: in these cases, the computer or the console/handheld gaming device.
John Underkoffler, who worked with Steven Spielberg to realize the holographic computer interfaces in the Minority Report, discusses how they have been creating a strikingly similar computer interface. Calling it the Spatial operating environment, the technology represents computer files as 3D images that can be manipulated into a variety of layouts to facilitate access. Manipulation is done through motion sensors on the hands — the same type of manipulation found on smart phones or devices with touchscreens. The difference being that by placing the sensors directly on the hands the screen vanishes, as it did in the movie.
Microsoft unveiled the update for their X-Box 360. What had been codenamed “Project Natal” is now Microsoft’s Kinect. As competition to the Nintendo Wii, whose naturalized interface propelled it into the stratosphere of sales and promoted more causal gamers to move to console games, the Kinect hopes to do away completely with a handheld interface device. Instead, motion sensors, voice recognition, and facial recognition are supposed to give Kinect the ability to have the person’s actions directly correspond to the actions in the game, making it the most naturalized gaming interface devised that did not require virtual reality body gear. Kinect will also provide an additional competitive edge as it includes interface software to play movies without the use of a remote.
Finally, not to be left behind in the innovation race, Nintendo is releasing a version of their handheld system, the DS, to produce 3D imagery without the need of wearing 3D glasses. Nintendo 3DS is the first 3D gaming system that is not the vertigo inducing redness of Virtual Boy (also Nintendo) and does not require the use of any additional interface device, aka the Virtual Boy or 3D glasses.
The first two innovations in interfaces discussed here could potentially foreshadow the type of naturalized, or more naturalistic, interface virtual worlds need to become more commonly accepted by the public. This assertion, of course, is assuming that one of the barriers to the wider distribution of virtual worlds technologies into the mainstream of medium use is the requirements placed upon the user for how to engage with the world, i.e. the interface. The argument being that because virtual worlds are 3D representations of space, then the most natural means to interact with/in them would be as we do in the 3D space that is the physical world: with the entirety of our bodies and not just our hands.
This point is up for debate: would more naturalized, body motion control interfaces make casual users more likely to engage in virtual worlds?
The current issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research (Volume 2, Number 5 (2010): The Metaverse Assembled) contains an article by Virtual Worlds Research Project participant, Associate Professor Louise Phillips, entitled “Producing knowledge in collaborative research about virtual worlds: discursive constructions of Second Life“. In the article, Louise analyses how Second Life is ascribed particular meanings in the discourses drawn on by participants in the Virtual Worlds Research Project. To gain access to the article as well as to other articles in the issue, just click on http://jvwresearch.org/index.php?_cms=default,0,0
Professor Edward Castronova, Indiana University, joined us last week to partake in our workshop about Sense-making and User-driven innovation in virtual worlds held by Roskilde University and Copenhagen Business School at the wonderful place Magleås Kursuscenter. Before the workshop he gave a public lecture with the title “On Magic and Money – The Growing Economic Importance of Virtual Worlds” and an interview with Danish Radio, Harddisken. You can listen to the interview here:
Harddisken, Danish Radio, Interview with Edward Castronova
Key note session 4 from VW workshop, June 2010, Magleaas Independent Consultant John Lester: Knowing When to Let Go: The Mind, the Metaverse, and Metaphor
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