Entries Tagged 'Uncategorized' ↓

The idea behind the project is to produce a virtual world steeped in the rich lore and characters of the playwright’s work.

A Midsummer Night’s Virtual World

CNet understands that Google/YouTube is just handwriting on the wall of the Web…

The first 10 years of the Web were focused on text, graphics and pages. With broadband users popping past half of all online users, text is passe. The next generation of sites will be video-heavy, and users will be as much a part of the experience as the content. Get your ad agency’s video production folks together with your word-of-mouth marketers–they’re going to need to collaborate to invent tomorrow’s Web experience.

Get ready for the social-video Web

Most of the buzz about Google’s acquisition of YouTube has focused on video, price and copyright but the really big story is about how videos are a harbinger of the big new paradigm of communication - story-driven virtual worlds. Earlier this year, in discussing how digital technology is transforming the way video is made and viewed, a Time magazine cover story observed:

… movies have two big problems: the way they’re made and the way they’re shown. It has often been noted that if Henry Ford were to come back today, he would wonder why no one had come up with a better idea than the internal combustion engine. A similar thought may occur to any visitor to a movie shoot. Dozens, maybe hundreds of technicians adjust the lights, apply the makeup and dress the set, much the way it was done almost 100 years ago. And as in D.W. Griffith’s day, the film still runs through a camera, then is processed, reproduced many times and sent to theaters.

The addiction to doing things that way baffles Lucas. “Do you still use a typewriter?” he asks a TIME movie critic. “Do you go to a library and consult books for most of your research? Is your story set in type, letter by letter? No. Your business takes advantage of technological advances. Why shouldn’t my business?”

In a nutshell, virtual worlds are among other things, a means of lowering the cost of video production so as with big Hollywood producers are turning to digital tools, the ever-increasing number of YouTube video producing storytellers will look to lower their costs with virtual world technology. The people who got rich during the gold rush were the folks selling picks and shovels, not the gold miners.
GoogleEarth is already a fast-moving train that’s found it’s way into the daily life of a huge audience

Neat toys are about more than creating Web pages on which Google can slap ads. Google Earth, the ubiquitous cable-news prop and workplace time waster that lets users view incredibly detailed geographic photos from around the world, has been downloaded more than 100 million times, and embedded in each download is a request from Google to place a toolbar, a Web gadget that includes a search box,

Fortune

(emphasis mine)

and there has been speculation that it is a move into virtual worlds, an attempt to create a Second Life for Google. There’s already a sizable amount of video produced in virtual worlds on YouTube and Google video and it makes sense for Google to get people using their tools to produce such machinima.
Global technology PR firm Text100 produced a video showing how companies can use Second Life to improve both internal and external communications which really conveys what this handwriting on the wall looks like. And yes, the above link will take you to YouTube Google.

A recent NY Times article about Ornette Coleman says that

… the reason he appreciates Louis Armstrong, for example, is that he sees Armstrong as someone who improvised in a realm beyond his own knowledge. “I never heard him play a straight chord in root position for his idea,” he said. “And when he played a high note, it was the finale. It wasn’t just because it was high. In some way, he was telling stories more than improvising.”

Thanks for the link Nelson!

Second Life may or may not be an OS, but it is, for many, the future of online interaction. It’s not Microsoft that should be quaking in its boots- it’s Myspace, et al.

As soon as enough people figure out how to get set up and do cool stuff in Second Life, I believe it will take dominant control over the interactive space. It’s what Sims Online should have been combined with what many of the social networking sites are trying to become.

http://www.yme.nl/thoughts/2006/03/second-life-for-myspace.html

This is the answer to the $64B question. It’s also a good description of how the GriotVision multicasting ecosystem will emerge. Take a content mesh connected by a mesh network of devices and wrap it in a 3D mesh(think Croquet or Second Life). Throw it on top of a mesh of computers for computation and storage, then step back cause things will happen quickly!

As strange as it may sound, consumers are way ahead of most enterprises when it comes to using grids (and paying for them). Most of us live on the grid at home - we use Google and Yahoo!, we love eBay, we upload and share photos and movies, and gather our news from various sources on the web. Most of us bank from home, we leverage network email services - and if you think about it, that transformation all occurred within the last decade. In the blink of an eye.

The Network Is The Computer

As Gartner notes

Grid computing uses a mesh of computers to perform complex tasks, but is not fully understood by all its potential users.

In a jungle, ignorance can exact a high price but opportunities are plentiful for people who figure out how to interconnect the mesh.

GriotVision is a powerful new paradigm for media and information technology.