Tuna's trippy textures

"trippin'! It's when everything is the most important thing in the world"

Bostonian Tuna Oddfellow (rez: 8/15/2005) is a magician in Real Life, and a really pleasant fellow, too. Known as "Fish the Magish," he has performed at all manner of events for the past 30 years, and is the recipient of the "Best of Boston" award by the Society of American Magicians.

In Second Life, his biggest claim to fame is that he was the winner of last June's $3,750 US prize (then $1 million Lindens) for his participation in NBC’s "America’s Got Talent" in-world contest.


Tuna Oddfellow, working a screenfull of HUDs.

Shava Nerad, his Real Life fiance and Second Life wife - their February 9th wedding was featured in last week's online edition of Businessweek - handles his bookings and public relations in both worlds. She also works as a consultant and does avatar makeovers.


Shava's butterfly outfit was a knockout, especially in the setting.

So, why am I telling you all this? The textures, man. Tuna's textures. A couple of days ago Impossible IRL'er Truthseeker Young TP'ed me to a location in the sky that took forever to rez, but when it did, the only word I could utter was "whoa!"

I was inside a hypercube that was pulsing with the most insanely beautiful - and busy - textures, and in the company of many friendly but extra exotic and strange avatars. It was Tuna who was responsible for this.


A harlequin'ed megaprim, spooling out some wicked effects.

Tuna Oddfellow: I really feel like we're doing something native to Second Life and groundbreaking, just with immersion... and I like playing with the art, and widgets!

Bettina Tizzy: In what way do you think it is ground breaking?

Tuna Oddfellow: The megaprims are loaded into a wearable Hypercube. I layer them, I use transparency and partial transparency and glow to produce layered effects. I basically torture the prims! ;) It's like a fully surrounding kaleidoscope.



Tuna Oddfellow: Shava turned to me one day when I was playing with stuff, and she said, "OMG, we've got something here, this is giving me vertigo." And that was last year sometime, maybe fall. Since then we've been working to make the show more and more *effecting*.


Thanks for that TP, Truthseeker!

Tuna Oddfellow: People come and they forget they are in a chair behind a computer. They forget the boundaries. We destroy the "fourth wall" of the computer screen and pull people into the reality. To me this is what virtual reality is supposed to be like, right? Not a chat client with graphics, but something that makes you *feel* different. People don't just get dizzy, they get happy. They feel stoned. They are exhilarated.



Bettina Tizzy: The textures are gorgeous. Are they very high resolution?

Tuna Oddfellow: I love fractals. And I love playing with the GIMP to mashup images. They are generally between 512 and 1024, and then seamlessly tiled.

Bettina Tizzy: So you are wearing this hypercube?

Tuna Oddfellow: When I'm on my own land, yes, like last night, I leave the cube on the floor, as it were. But when people hire me to do a show at a sim, I can either set it up there, or it's all set up to be wearable. Like a one-man band! My screen is completely covered by HUDs.

The funky music was streamed from a radio station in Louisiana.


Tuna does a weekly party on Monday nights from 7pm to 9pm SLT on his own land (teleport directly from here.) Occasionally he'll do a Saturday event for the European time-zone-challenged crowd. You can check out his upcoming gigs here.

Not Possible IRL Field Trips with Seifert Surface

NPIRL members received a notice on August 14, 2007 advising them that it was MATH FINALS WEEK. And so it was...

Our very own Seifert Surface is a postdoctoral mathematician who can explain, in terms a layperson can grasp, what in the heck is going on with the many (dozens and dozens - is that a legitimate quantity, Seifert? ^.^) elegant, math-inspired sculptures he's not only built but often scripted.

But his work isn't just about mathematical representation. These things are... beautiful. Yep. And fun. And most would simply not be possible in Real Life. Well, maybe some of them would be but you would need a budget equal to the GNP of a small nation to realize them.

So... on Friday, August 17th, this math-mage hosted TWO tours for NPIRL'ers at his Future sim, rezzing things from his inventory, activating kinetic sculptures such as a rotating 4D hypercube and a procedurally-generated Fibonacci sequence, and then...he explained them! T'was great fun walking all over the Costa-Hoffman-Meeks surface and then having him personally demo his interpretation of Robert Heinlein's Crooked House.



I'm sorry if you weren't there. Was way cool. For those of us who have always thought of math as a PITB (you figure it out), this was math therapy. But go check this place out anyway! On a practical level, *his elevator and transporter system alone* are reasons enough to drop everything and run over to have a look.
The Future
***
It was simply not possible to see all the ingenious things this man has created in even two sessions. Here are some extra links and things to kick your experience up a knot or two:

NMC Campus - Sculpture at the NMC Campus
Seifert's Sculpture Garden, The Future

Hey Scope Cleaver: thank you for introducing us to Seifert. He's a keeper!