3pointD.com

• YouTube - Roddick vs Pong
  from january but new to me. play @ stoppong.com
  (tags: video tennis 8bit roddick pong)

Christian Westbrook of the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog) has made what sounds like a cool text-to-speech translator that works within the virtual world of Second Life. Each participant in a converation chooses a voice and a language that they’d like their chat translated into, and the device speaks the translation in real time. Listen to a sample on Christian’s blog, linked above. I haven’t been able to rendezvous with Christian to check this out, so I’m not sure whether the voice component works behind SL or streams in-world, but it’s a nice idea. Who knows, perhaps soon you’ll be able to listen to 3pointD while you go about your virtual business.

Wow, look at all those cars. Even better, watch this 3-minute video of them. [Via Jim Rossignol.] You’ll be surprised: seeing 1,000 non-colliding cars stream around a road course in the excellent racing game Trackmania Sunrise actually gives a look at something like an organized system tending toward chaos, or at least toward entropy. Beginning as a well ordered fan of hoods, roofs and airfoils (watch for this moment at the start of the race, just after the title card reading, “1K Project II”), the cars end up in a chaotic mess by the end, stuck into a pond at all angles. It’s a beautiful mess, though, and shows how even a single-player game can become something more than the sum of its software, in the right hands. (more…)