A MUST READ interview with John Gaeta and Rudy Poat, two people who worked on The Matrix is available at Gamasutra: Beyond Machinima. John won a special effects award for his work on The Matrix and is clearly a visionary. This interview provides among other things, some excellent insights into the why of GriotVision, 3D and the handwriting on the wall of the Web from the perspective of knowleldgeable people involved in film and games. A little while ago, in Madden On The Holodeck, I said:
People tend to view TV and film as the ultimate form of media. However, media is evolving beyond these limited formats into the realms of the immersive and interactive.
John Gaeta and Rudy Poat are taking media to the another level, developing a hybrid environment that draws from the best of games and film
Another example that I think would be fascinating, is that in the year 2006 we can only really be thinking about these things in terms of an animated feature, but we all know that it’s only a matter of time until we are able to do some virtual cinematography inside of a game system. Essentially we’ll be able to create a hybrid environment using some of the techniques used in film. That’s all starting to filter into games now, and it’s adding a heightened sense of realism. Even importing moving, high def environments like a seascape that changes into something I can interact with at a certain distance. There are many interesting “mashings” that are about to happen over the next few years.
… Should we make all virtual humans and environments to do the next exponential leap of Bullet Time? Is it worth it? Is it not? Why bother? Having gone through some of those painful decision-making times, I realize that the best thing to do for trying to birth a sort of hybrid medium is to try a bunch of small experiments.
I like the “small experiment” approach and have been using it for a while(see GV-Pod? for video clips). There are some new small experiments brewing, not unlike what Gaeta and Poat are working on:
We’re planning on doing some episodic stuff. We have some very different spin away content pieces, interactive, short form bits of content that are purely distributed over the web also. I can’t really explain it better than that. It’s experimental web stuff. It’s going to be a pretty good interactive experience, I think.
GriotVision is attempting to evolve a hybrid environment for all communication and information systems, not just film and games but there’s a lot to learn from the virtual cinematography capabilities these guys are developing.
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[…] This thread of discussion misses the point - a new paradigm is being born and Google is positioning to become a major petri dish for it. YouTube is the other shoe dropping as they’ve already made significant moves into the virtual world paradigm. Tim O’Reilly put it plainly this past summer: It’s also clear that Google Earth is entering into the same territory as Second Life. It’s so easy to imagine all of the alpha geek behavior on Second Life hitting the mainstream via people building real-world equivalents on Google Earth. And it’s easy to imagine interoperability, with virtual worlds adopting KML, so that first and second life become interoperable and connected. (I was going to ask about the Google Earth/Second Life connection with sketchup as the connector, since it seems so obvious to me, but the first question from the audience beat me to it. It’s impossible to miss this idea.) […]
[…] Something just isn’t right here. I mean I’m all for small experiments, but given that AOL is pretty deeply invested in the social networking space(Hometown, AIMPages) in order to compete with MySpace, so I’m wondering what is really going on with with their toe-dipping: […]
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