Eshi... sings!

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Eshi Otawara is so gifted, in so many ways, it hardly seems fair! Virtual artist and celebrated fashion designer, Real Life painter... and now it turns out that the woman has a voice.

It's so hard to distinguish her voice amidst the sounds of a very loud, very happy crowd at the recent Second Life Community Convention, but here's an earful. Accompanying her on guitar and also singing is Cylindrian Rutabaga, and sitting in the middle is Robert Bloomfield (aka Beyers Sellers) from Metanomics. He also has one heck of a voice. Talent, people.


Many thanks to Pato Milo for capturing this moment

Love you loads, Eshi.

Torley amplifies my awesome 3X over

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Torley Linden - Linden Lab's Resident Enlightenment Manager just keeps contributing to the quality of my Second Life® and my Real Life. In the span of just 24 hours, the man has dropped three jewels onto my lap.

For starters, I came across this video he created to demonstrate how funtastically cool Vectorpark's new Flash game, Windosill is.


The physics are perfection!

Then, I'd been looking for just the right music for a little machinima I was making, and discovered this treasure-trove of Torley's original compositions and improvisations, all of them downloadable MP3s.

Finally, to demonstrate a bug he'd encountered on Twitter, @Torley created this video using Jing, a nifty and effective freebie screen capture program.

In fact, anytime I follow Torley's cookie crumbs (and they are all over the Internet), I come away smarter, cuter and better equipped to meet the challenges in both of my lives.

Reach smeech... Second Life won't cut it with Nielsen yet, but it is POWERFUL in other ways

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

I was Twittering just now, and up came a twitter from a favorite follow of mine, Chimera Cosmos (aka @LDinSTL_Chimera), that read: "Yes! RT @metaMeerkat: inSL: @cybergrrloh says if one does not talk Second Life® when talking socialmedia, one misses an opportunity for REACH."

While I didn't attend @cybergrrloh's presentation - and I'm sure she provided many compelling ideas - I don't think for a nanosecond that Second Life is a tool worthy of consideration for advertising and marketing, not even exponentially... yet. However, I do believe in the power of the platform. Let me give you an excellent and very recent example:

DB Bailey (aka David Denton, AIA, in Real Life) is an architect in both worlds. I've blogged about his very virtual, very Not Possible IRL buildings many times here.


DB Bailey in front of a building he created for Stanford University

Not long ago, DB teleported me to a shopping mall he had created in Second Life. Given that I focus primarily on quality content in virtual worlds that would Not be Possible in Real Life, this was unusual, but it turned out to be a worthwhile trip. It seems that DB had been working with a potential Egyptian client, and the two had gone back and forth for two years... but DB had not been able to secure that client's buy-in on the project. One day, out of frustration or a creative burst... who knows, DB logged into Second Life and recreated his proposed shopping mall down to the plants. "I'm surprised how fast I did it," he shared with me.


Photo courtesy of The Arch Network

What happened next will underscore the point I am trying to make. The virtual platform of Second Life - where user-created content is possible - is mostly untapped and extremely powerful: DB showed the virtual and three-dimensional shopping mall to his client, and within three days he was on his way to Egypt to work on the Real Life project. He's there now. You can read about it here.

My Twitter handle is: @Bettinatizzy

A real life "sim"

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Second Life® artist and creator AM Radio thinks that this aerial image of Venice looks astonishingly like an average parcel rental island, and we agree.

Via Vincent Wilkie and Black Eiffel

By the way, if you haven't already, you may want to drop by AM's Flickr stream and check out the sketches he's been posting. Seeing them helps me to understand how he's "fathered" the Far Away, Husk, the Refuge and the Expansion, and Beneath the Tree that Died, among other installations.

Juria's very, very mixed realities

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

In Second Life®, Juria Yoshikawa is the odd looking woman who took the grid by storm with her colorful abstract kinetic art for three seasons and then abruptly disappeared for several months, because - in Real Life - Juria is the male 40 year old Lance Shields, a Tokyo-based multimedia artist and creative strategist at a global marketing company who has been all but consumed with his job + working on an MBA.

Now Juria is coming out of from under her textbooks, thanks to a retrospective show sponsored by Atlanta's Kennesaw State University in Second Life (teleport directly from here), and a first... a showing of her work in Real Life.



While Juria works on a scale larger than conventional gallery work because she is interested in people experiencing the work in a physical way - flying through them, riding on them and socializing within the art - her creations will be shown and sold via FLART (flat art) during the Boston Cyber Arts Festival at Jeff Lipsky's (aka Filthy Fluno in SL - Yes, the one who was featured in last month's New York Times) CounterpART Gallery April 23 thru May 10.

See also:

* Haute on the grid... Being dOts - Machinimator and artist Evo Szuyuan captured the experience on video
Seeing Spots, Being Dots (Dance of Mayhem Plus Homogeneity) from Juria Yoshikawa on Vimeo.

* The Hall of Twisty Smears... Rezzed

* Memespelunk - Second Life through Juria Yoshikawa's eyes: Expect the unexpected

Real Life inspires: Theo Jansen's "Beach Monsters"

Powered by the winds, Dutch engineer and artist Theo Jansen's kinetic sculptures are, quite simply, breathtaking.

Hard to believe but... I seem to have made it into the Hall of Fame of Data Visualization!

Posted by Alpha Auer

Blowing one's own horn is really not such a terribly cool thing to do but this occasion does seem to justify the act:

I wear many different hats, which sometimes converge and at other times do not. While, here in Second Life® I am incorrigible Alpha, heavily into tails, ears and all manner of nonsensical playful activity, in a parallel universe I am actually a design researcher in the field of data visualization; collaborating with a computer scientist and an architect in work that has even brought us an IBM award last year; not to mention that I also supervise some long suffering PhD students who exert good brain power on little conundrums such as how best to visualize heterogeneous data sets of one million plus nodes. (One of the cute little critters even had the audacity to leave a comment at the very location of my current glory, totally taking the piss... grrrr ;-)

So, how do the hats converge? Well, if there were such a thing as paw boots in Real Life, I would most definitely be the first in line to get a pair, and moreover I have been known to trample on many a tender academic toe with my lovely Doc Maartens during somber occasions such as faculty board meetings and the like (alas)...

The web portal Visual Complexity is the one indisputable Mecca of data visualization, the place where everyone connected to the data visualization field dreams of having their output posted at. And mine seems to have gotten in! I did not apply, they must have found me, which makes the whole thing even better!







The Bridge Project is not part of my collaborative research in data vis but a solo venture, undertaken as part of PhD work at the Planetary Collegium (as I said, I like to wear many hats ;-). Indeed, I am not really sure that the Bridge Project can even be termed as proper data visualization since it only contains some hundred nodes, which is a laughably small number in terms of a data vis study worth its salt. Instead the Bridge is a free fall artistic project which I created with VRML. I presented it both as creative work and as a theoretical study at numerous conferences, including the Siggraph Sketches Program in 2005 and the EuroGraphics Computational Aesthetics Conference of the same year. Both very nice, both very prestigious - but this Visual Complexity add-in is most certainly the cherry on the icing and I want to share with all the world.

You can download and view the project from here. Oh and, it is absolutely NPIRL of course: You have to fly in VRML to be able to look at it... ;-).

The underwater sculptures of Jason de Caires Taylor

Posted by our guest blogger, Amalthea Blanc

As a group, NPIRL continues to trail-blaze into new avenues of self-expression, regardless of whether these avenues are in the metaverse or in the digital world at large. However, it's worth to keep up with fresh, amazing talent that keep pushing the limits of what “real life” can do. If that edge is something that defines our common interests, we have to be aware that it's not a static barrier. Case in point: the art of Jason de Caires Taylor.

Take a look for yourself at the video below or at the photography of his underwater sculptures.




Vicissitudes

The art of Jason de Caires Taylor transcends sculpture through its placement in the water medium. It's a fascinating approach to art. The corals, fish, and nurturing quality of water continue to modify and alter the initial sculpture, embracing it and allowing it to become a true part of the environment. In other words, the medium and the message blend together, in harmony.


The Lost Correspondent

Another notable aspect is the fascinating effect these works have on the viewer – they hypnotize through their silence and through the beautiful play of light among the water waves. Some have said that this particular type of art is eerie, probably because it taps into this feeling of “other world” that all of us have ingrained in our senses.


Visages


Nature Morte

More images and information about the artist can be found here.

Whatever next? A Furry in Istanbul?

Posted by Alpha Auer (your eyes and ears in Istanbul... ;-)

The Amber Art and Technology Festival is up and running here in Istanbul, going strong until the 16th of November. While more information on the contents and the mission of this 2 year old festival can be obtained at their website http://08.a-m-b-e-r.net/, I would like to write a very fast communication on two installations presented as part of the festival, both of which involve Second Life® and both of which can be participated in online over the next few days.

"Avatarium – A Consumer Paradox" is by Paul Sermon (known as Sylvester Grut in Second Life). "Since the early nineteen-nineties Paul Sermon’s practice-based research in the field of contemporary media arts has centered on the creative use of telecommunication technologies. Through his unique use of video conference techniques in artistic telepresence applications he has developed a series of celebrated telematic art installations that have received international acclaim and have been cited on numerous occasions amongst his peers in this field".

On a personal level, I have been an admirer of Paul Sermon's work for a long time, my favorite installations of his being Telematic Dreaming and Telematic Seance. "Telematic Dreaming" especially strikes an emotional chord with me that sadly very few other works in our seemingly unemotional contemporary art milieu manage to achieve. The reaching out of the two lonely figures of artist and viewer/participant, separated by huge distances and dispersed lives, within the intimacy of a bed had me quite choked up when I first saw the images and read about the context of this intensely delicate piece.





Here in Istanbul, Paul Sermon, has struck out on a far more playful tone, by bringing Second Life avatars into Real Life. And into a totally, artificially, absurdly unreal Real Life shopping mall at that: Virtuality superimposed upon virtuality: City's is one of the chi-chier shopping malls of contradictory old Istanbul; all gleaming brass and marble, brandishing a level of polish which simply cannot be perceived as real, placed as it is, smack in the middle of a city some 4000 years old. So right here, amidst the stores of the likes of Jean Paul Gaultier and Prada, my furry reporter friend (who has been such an invaluable help to me in recent weeks) made her altogether bizarre appearance earlier on today!





The whole experience gets fed back into Second Life in real time displayed on numerous video screens inworld. So, you can in fact, admire yourself prancing around City's of Nisantasi here in Istanbul if you teleport to Sylgrut, Paul Sermon's Second Life location, between the hours of 1.00 AM and 5.00 AM SLT through Friday November 14th, directly from here.

...

The second installation is entitled Hello World and I will need to give you Taso Telling's artist's statement in full, since I have not yet seen the piece in action myself due to the fact that this work will only have its opening tomorrow, Thursday November the 13th between 8.00 AM and 8.30 AM SLT.

"Hello World! is an art installation which takes place both in SL and RL in Amber Art and Technology Festival in Istanbul. The work brings together the RL and SL audience, through real time video streaming.



The theme of the festival is "interpassivity", and SL audience will meet the Real audience "Caged" in interpassivity as the Real Audience turns into the Virtual Artwork. Thus the work intends to question the relationship between the artwork, the audience and the artist and also the so-called superiority of real life over second life, and promotes open source and open content share culture. Anything in the installation is copyleft!

Metaverse should not be a place to reconstruct but to deconstruct our borders, superiorities, chains and mind cages. So let's give a chance to it!

Taso Telling (aka Umut Tasa)"

Thus if you teleport from here to the Amber Festival location at Cirrus between 8.00 and 8.30 AM SLT tomorrow, Thursday the 13th, you will have your rare opportunity to stare at us, poor new media aficionado Istanbulites, helplessly caged here in Real Life staring back at you! ;-)

Juana Manuel observes the Day of the Dead by celebrating the living

I asked Juana Manuel why she celebrates the living in her virtual life on her Day of the Dead altar, and she explained it this way:

"On my Real Life altar, I only have dead people. My reasoning for putting living people on the Second Life® altar is sort of convoluted. Two of the people on the altar had life threatening medical issues and almost died this past year. The rest are people with significance for me. One is an image of a place that "died" and is no longer the same build: Nexus Prime. I think that our avatars are manifestations of our souls and that in Second Life, we are disembodied souls... ghosts, actually."


Photo courtesy of al-zahra

Juana used Nebulosus Severine's sugar skulls to adorn the altar. The skulls are scripted so that you can name them via hover text.

"The other is that am into the Tarot, and in the symbolism of Tarot, death is more like change, or a passage, or a transformation. I feel like I have been changed profoundly and transformed by Second Life and the people I have met here. Some of the people represented (on the altar) are going through major transformations -- like the death of relationships, etc."

Teleport directly from here.

See also: Real Life inspires: Commune with the people you miss

The beautiful rich world we choose not to connect to: Strawberry Holiday

There are times when I long for those Wednesday mornings when Second Life® would go down for maintenance and I'd be forced to step away from it all and plug back into Real Life. I sometimes wish there was an enforced day-off for all virtual worlds, so that my will power wouldn't have to be exercised.

Strawberry Holiday took a close look at the relationship between our Real Life and our propensity to plug into everything technological when she created Disconnected, which she unveiled today. I asked her about that and also learned a bit more about what's been keeping her unplugged from our pixelated world.





It's great to have a new Strawberry installation, especially when we know you've been so busy in your Real Life. What's going on there?

I've been working as the director of a preschool and toddler center. As part of that, I teach a preschool classroom and art lessons to preschool and kindergarten age children. While love this part of my life, I'm really starting to feel that I'm not contributing as much as I could be and I'm itching for a change. With all the changes in the country and so many states working to make early childhood education, namely preschool, part of the public education system, I've decided to go to law school and help influence the laws and decisions that actually impact children instead of just being a cog in the works.

Were you an artist before you joined Second Life®? If so, what were you doing and are you still doing it?

I have a bachelor's degree with a focus in visual art. I explored the art of light in college with enough credits for a minor in Neon. I've also done small metal and jewelry work as well as 2D drawing and painting. Now most of my art is done in-world, except for some limited drawing and painting and the lessons I do with the children.



Has your increased distance from your own Second Life helped you to gain some perspective or insight that led to the concept behind this work?

Besides the decision to go to law school, there's another aspect of my life that has been taking up some of my time. I've been spending more time with the love of my life as we prepare to move in together after nearly two years of dating. We met in a club in Seattle but after dating for only about six months I moved away up to the beautiful island of San Juan near Vancouver BC for my current job. So the majority of our relationship has involved a sundry of vehicles, cars, ferries and seaplanes to taxi us back and forth to each other! As I'm considering Law Schools, we're also preparing to move in together in Seattle. All these changes, both happy and stressful, really have caused me to realize how lucky I am to be at this stage in my life.

The last few weeks, between when I took the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) and before I received my scores, I really wanted to focus on building. I did want to make sure that I was keeping time for my Real Life and not getting overwhelmed by Second Life so I could keep enjoying my love and the anticipation of the LSAT close to me. (Strawberry has since learned that she not only passed but also scored very high). Working on this balance kept bringing to mind a picture I drew back in 2005 of a woman surrounded by technology but a close-up into her brain showed that she wasn't plugged in.

And that's how I came to the concept for this piece. In Second Life, it's so easy to show concepts that I could never really capture in paintings. The image of the woman alone in her space surrounded by the flashy images and noise of technology (that all seems the same) while not connecting or living within herself is powerful. Especially with the soothing trees and calm grass that surrounds her. Just outside her walls is a beautiful rich world that she chooses not to connect with.







Did you have any collaborators?

The first challenge of this build was finding space, which Truthseeker Young has generously donated for the duration of the build. WendyOfNeverland Fussbudget provided production support, doing tedious things like updating scripts in dozens of prims, or deleting every other blade of grass, or sanding and activating scripts as needed! Without her this would have been impossible. And Moongold Munroe was commissioned to develop the sound scheme for the build. They complete the build!

Your new grass is sumptuous. How'd you go about making it?

My grass has developed over the last 6 months. Originally inspired by the wheat at AM Radio's Wheatfield, it was first used in Throes of Rapture, a collaborative build with the Fallopian Fighters. This particular version of the grass is different because while the graphic is in the shape of individual pieces of grass, what is masked over it is a photo of a field of daises in the grass, giving for a much more rich texture. Not possible in real life, I know, but its green, and on the ground so our minds read it as grass!

Teleport directly from here.

Hello OpenLife®?

I have been away from Second Life® for one week. My mother died and my sorrow as well as all the things that needed to be taken care of after her demise kept me in Real Life.

The support and the affection that I received throughout this week from my RL friends and relatives (and especially that of my students who came out in full force to be with their nasty old school marm) has made me wonder as to how wise of a thing it is from an emotional standpoint to be spending such extended periods of time in a second life, to which I am after all only connected to through this ephemeral thing called technology. One power outage, one satellite failure - and I am pretty much on my own here, aren't I?

The trouble with all of these good intentions of cutting down on my virtual life and giving my real life more of a priority is that at this point Second Life has become the place in which the very concept of creativity excites me in a way that I have not felt excited about creativity in a very long time indeed.

Real Life art and design had been leaving me thoroughly cold for quite some considerable time before I had even heard of Second Life: Real Life art I gave for the reasons here, and Real Life design for the deplorable symbol of status and income that it is. The remarkable thing that metanomics has brought about is a world in which neither the production nor the consumption of creative output is an indicator of financial resources. After all, the poorest of poor avatars can create the most stunning of outputs in a sandbox. And kitting yourself out through the acquisition of the creative output of others is not an indicator of your financial status but only of your ingenuity, your imagination and your resourcefulness. After all, in a world where the equivalent of a few real life dollars will buy you the fanciest of cars how can what your Rolex watch tells us about your wallet be of any possible consequence?

There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that at this stage the Residents of Second Life are in the process of creating a social structure unique to the metaverse. But unlike the one in Real Life, what seems to me to be happening here is that (maybe even for the very first time in human history?) we may have the emergence of a true meritocracy. A meritocracy in which nothing but your imagination, your creativity and ultimately your hard work will determine your social status. Wow!

I returned to my second life this morning to find out that in the meantime all hell has broken loose. The Openspace pricing and policy changes announced earlier this week by Linden Labs are very hard to forgive indeed. Surely, Openspace abusers can be held under check through different means? How about charging such Residents based on the calculation of additional prim usage on an Openspace? And not only is this hard to forgive it is also hard to understand: Second Life is no longer a sole option. The competition is already here and it is hard core. Bett has already signed up at OpenLife®, I shall be doing so the very minute after I have posted this, especially now that I have read that OpenLife is also expected to have a working economy by the end of this year. And surely Linden Labs must be aware of the colossal resources that are spent at IBM for the development of a fully three dimensional world wide web which, as we are given to understand, will operate very much along the model of today's virtual worlds.

I am hoping that Second Life will revise this decision. Although it does not personally affect me, it bothers me: My island is an educational island and who is to say that tomorrow there will not be policy changes related to educational islands also? That what we have here today is only the thin end of a truly nasty wedge yet to come? But beyond that it bothers me since it tells me something about the governance of Second Life that makes me very uncomfortable indeed: Shortsightedness.

Ravenelle and Torley sound out on maintaining balance between both lives

Ravenelle Zugzwang began Second Life® in December 2002 as Ravenelle Feaver, which makes her almost 6 years old, while Torley has been around forever, first as Torley Torgeson and later as a Linden employee.


"The photobooth" taken by Ravenelle

Not long ago, Ravenelle shared a bit of wisdom with me when I complained of being overwhelmed by my Second Life, saying "Keeping a good life balance is a never ending challenge. When I get word that someone is off balance with their life I share my meat story... and thankfully Torley has documented it for me and others here." This really struck a chord and I have taken it to heart. To me, it speaks to priorities and staying true to your ultimate goals.


Morning coffee by Ravenelle

Still, I wondered about their secrets for longevity and how they manage to keep it fun and productive.

Torley, I am under the impression that you keep a healthy balance of interests that are grounded in both real and virtual worlds. How intentional is this, and do you sometimes find yourself leaning more in one direction than the other and having to take steps to rectify things so that the balance is restored?


This scale was created by Madcow Cosmos

Torley Linden: It's absolutely intentional. My Second Life is built upon my first life and they cycle into each other. Rewards in one life inform and better the other. It's a cross-reality ecosystem, I tell ya! In the very beginning of my Second Life, my First Life was frail. I was in this very depressed, sad state, and finding friends and adventuring inworld helped boost my confidence.

It's a dynamic balance, for sure, which changes day by day. But all things said, my "lives system" is blessed with equilibrium.


Torley and Rav keep it playful

What advice do you have for the passionate Second Life user (like myself) who is often challenged by issues of balance?

Torley Linden: Learn to recognize - and only you can tell - the difference between unhealthy obsession and what we call "gladdiction," a glad, or healthy, addiction. Regularly check to make sure parts of your life that need attention to are being paid that tribute. Otherwise, it's like a weed infestation starting at one corner and killing your whole garden. Always look for lessons from First Life you can apply to Second Life, and vice-versa — whether it's artistic ideas, inspirational self-help (of the practical, not the kooky quack kind), and fellowship with other like-minds.

Take breathers, but don't be overly dramatic. Don't say "I'M LEAVING SECOND LIFE!" because of drama that's understandably hurt you when, in fact, your emotions are just a transient phase of maybe a few days, or weeks at most. Follow-up your words with profound actions, for there are many great ideas but few awesome executions (in comparison). GIVE YOURSELF SPACE when you need it, but don't stay there forever — socializing and learning from others is good!

And if it works for you (as it did for us), grow bolder about what you share. Some Resis are quite anonymous and keep their lives separate. Of course, there are contexts when this is appropriate, but we've often observed it has to do with something damaged (e.g., baggage, broken trust ) in First Life that hasn't "leaked through" to Second Life.

To wit, we're advocates for using Second Life as a tool to deal with your bagagge, as opposed to dumping it (and inflicting suffering) on others. Unite yourself.

And always: "CHOP THE SLOP!" It means, hunt down what's NOT contributing to either of your lives and kill it. For instance, say you have a friend who's always harping on about how jealous they are of other content creators, and basically spews bile and venom in your conversations. If you've deeply encouraged them and guided them to help resources to get better — and yet, they still drag on you — then it's time to remove them from your lives.

That gives you more time to spend with people who contribute to, not drain, your well-being.

See also: Celebrating Second Life's power couple

Real Life inspires: The most alien looking place on Earth

My jaw dropped when I followed a Digg post for The most alien looking place on Earth (PICS). The article by Rachel and Avi Abrams boasts some of the most astonishing nature photography I've ever laid eyes on.

If you create virtual landscapes, you should definitely have a look. The website, Dark Roasted Blend: Weird and Wonderful Things, reads (and looks) like a Real Life version of this blog. In fact, I'm adding it to our blogroll.

Just some cool stuff, and a hello to our Real Life readers: Hello!

Real Life continues to inspire us, and from what I'm hearing via my emails and other sources, we are reciprocating. Hello to frequent visitors to this blog: Lucasfilm, Disney, the Louvre Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles (MOCA), and scores of universities from around the world, among others.

I've been informed that a lot of people in China cannot read this blog, although I know for a fact that some make it in. Via one of my fave sources for it's-out-there-ideas, we make money not art, check out China-born-now-residing-in-New York Cai Guo-Qiang's show at the Guggenheim.


Many thanks to Jessica Williams for allowing me to post this photograph

From the ever-fascinating Space & Culture blog, we have these eerie and abandoned Ruined Futures from the north coast of Taiwan.


Photo by Yusheng (Yusheng, thanks!)

Thanks to Interactive Architecture, I am reminded that a lot more things are possible in Real Life than we often imagine. Take this exhibit that just closed at the SCI-Arc in Los Angeles,

Quasar was an immersive light and sound space made from prototype membranes and realized as an interactive light/sound object and comprised of a dense array of interlinked elements describing an intricate three-dimensional structure. The gallery was fitted with sensors that draw real-time data from the installation and the people within the exhibition, which was then synchronized with streamed real-time data of solar activity and nuclear processes provided by SLAC and NASA. This information was then fed back into the object through layers of LED strands, re-visualizing the space in order to create an interactive spatial experience.


Quasar Exhibition from Aaron Bocanegra on Vimeo.

Quasar was a site-specific installation by the LA/NY-based design/media firm slap!, founded by architect Jean-Michel Crettaz, and produced in collaboration with the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and Stanford’s Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology.

New Real Life - Second Life physical interface

Last night, musician and technologist Komuso Tokugawa attended a Second Life-related event at the bar BarTube in Tokyo. While there, he met with several people who are collaborating on a Havok 4 sim owned by Softbank (the company that acquired failing Vodafone and turned it around), to work with prototypes and try out new ideas.

According to Komuso, Tori Teatime and a couple of other people from the Softbank-sponsored sim have developed a mechanism that allows for an interesting new physical interface between Real Life and Second Life.

One person would stand there in the bar tilting a 3-axis accelerometer that was hooked up to a modified client to send control data via chat.



Now here's where it gets interesting... the accelerometer had a built in tilt sensor, and as he tilted it, so did a box full of avatars - some of them quite large - that was being held by a robot in-world.



You can visit that robot in Second Life (teleport directly from here), but somebody in Real Life needs to be tilting that accelerometer to make it all happen. Now that the Second Life client is opensource, we can expect more of these exciting developments. More pics and info on Komuso's blog.

Komuso, by the way, is the musician and particle master who - together with MoShang Zhao - gave us the real time-Internet/SL music jam SynaesthAsia, undoubtedly one of the best events I've ever attended in Second Life. Here's a great video of it by multi-talented Osprey Therian.