The Alien Factory

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Once in a blue moon (heh!) I just grind my heels in the ground and quit blogging for a bit. When I do, I get downright stubborn about it and nothing can compel me to post a thing on this blog for days or even weeks. It's my way of staying sane, I guess.

I was in this mode just about a month ago when, on a whim, I whipped up a little machinima to share the fun of a new avatar-generating gizmo that Madcow Cosmos had come up with, with a little help from his friends Tezcatlipoca Bisiani (scripts) and Lorin Tone (sounds). I happened upon my vid just now as I was browsing through friends' works and thought "what the heck," so I'm posting it here for posterity. Y'all have probably seen it already and that's okay. You can just watch it again! Oh, and you can get your own alien avatar for free here, at Alien Isles of course.



And if alien avatars aren't your thing, you can head on over to the Museum of Robots where Madcow and his pals have created a variation on the same theme: Yep, you guessed it, a Robot Factory and also free. Teleport directly from here.

I've also been meaning to tell you that Madcow's got a new blog, too. So there you have it. You've been war..told.

Autonomous beat-making robot - I want one in both lives

Via Let's Make Robots by way of NYC Resistor, comes this delightful thing... an autonomous beat-making robot. Might be fun to make it in Second Life®, maybe?



In Real Life, you can have your very own one-of-a-kind Yellow Drum Machine created for you for the paltry sum of $1,200 US.

Too steep a price? Here are the instructions to make one in Real Life, but you'll need to pony up approximately $750 for the building materials.

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.

Great finds: Don't mess with the drill bit robot

Onakagoo Dibou's manga Drill Robo avatar (Doriru Robo) has its own dedicated space in a retail district on the Shimokitazawa region.



Occupying the entire center floor of the outlet, Drill Robo's arm has vanquished its first enemy... the roof!



Teleport directly from here.