Metaverse Meetup Pics Now on Flickr
Posted Monday, February 26th, 2007, at 10:13 am Eastern by Mark Wallace
If you missed last Friday’s metaverse meetup (which I’m still trying to find time to blog about at length), or even if you were there, you might be interested to check out a couple of Flickr sets that have been posted from the event. Dig a few select shots from John Swords, as well as many more from Eric Gruber. Plus, of course, this one above, of me blathering to the assembled about some recent thoughts on the metaverse. Cool crowd.
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OK, fun’s fun, but it’s time to take the “Uffie” link off your header. Admitting you have a problem is the first step.
> OK, fun’s fun, but it’s time to take the “Uffie” link off your header. Admitting you have a problem is the first step.
Oooh, this is an interesting one. I like how the Uffie link fights against how horrifically boring and culturally narrow “serious” virtual world coverage can be, and it opens the door to a set of people who are traditionally alien to this space (and vice verse), which I think 3pointD does a great job of.
How does Dr. Wallace respond? Does Uffie have a future? Do other Uffie-like-things have a future here? Does fun have a future? Is what we’re doing fun? And if not, why not?
/grabs popcorn
Does Uffie have a future?! You need to ask??
Actually, as the Web reaches its tendrils deeper into me, or I into it, via things like Twitter, MySpace, Upcoming, Last.fm and a bunch of other things I’m trying out or am interested in trying out, I’ve been thinking of making 3pointD’s About page into a Fimoculous-like lifelog. Which means… even more Uffie! And should be a fun project, to boot.
Edit: Does the Uffie *button* have a future? And the survey says… Yes!
This ain’t your grandma’s 2pointD.com =).
Mark, is Peter geeksleeping in that picture, or is he just really, really deep in thought?
Let me qualify: Uffie’s relevance (as far as I could make out from MW’s rap about her show, most of which I didn’t understand because he’s always been smarter than me) is tied to her disposability, or baked-in guarantee to evaporate and be replaced with yet another cultural cellophane poptart. If it turns out that she’s not actually biodegradable, and keeps meme-ing around until, say, late Spring, I propose that her relevance be re-examined.
And Paffendorff, don’t eat all the popcorn, “Hallowen” is on tonight.
Hi Gene, not quite sure what you mean, but this is good, it all ties together (and sorry if you were miffed and thought I meant that maybe you were a grandma or something :p, not the intent at all).
I like Mark’s coining of “Discovery Chain” in the Dylan post. So very Twitter of you, Mark.
Here’s a partial discovery chain around Uffie and this post, tying it all together at the end through popcorn:
*My roommates and I found out about Uffie when we came across a video of our downstairs neighbors dancing to it online (thanks, MySpace, you bring us closer together than RL). I liked the song so I googled a phrase and found Uffie.
*I shared Uffie with Mark and he liked her too.
*Branching off of this and some other side project ideas I went and found a random lyric generator, random music generator, random art generator, and singing text-to-speech (haven’t found a great one yet, if anyone has suggestions), with an idea to combine them all to make an avatar named Daisy Daisy (from a lyric sung by the first singing computer thanks to IBM in the ’60s) who could automagically perform infinite new material at an unending concert and release for sale a new album with new cover art every ten songs. I thought maybe Daisy Daisy could perform with Uffie in SL, and there was an Uffie influence in the way she was conceived.
*This month I posted the Double-Shot of Mark Wallace: 6pointD double meetup outings, including the Uffie concert Mark blogged.
*In the comments I asked when the 3pointD album was coming out, and suggested calling it, “I Don’t Ever Want To Hide Anything From You, And Be With You Everywhere We Want To Go — by Mark Wallace and Friends”
*A friend tagged a photo with my name on Facebook and I left a comment saying it looks like we’re in a band, posing in front of a graffiti covered wall. I suggested we call ourselves “Never Surrender” (in quotes) and come up with a way to make our music by simply listening to music, tracking it on Last.fm and algorithmically piecing it together in new ways. I was thinking about this because I’ve been thinking about how you create generative content systems for virtual worlds (kind of a mix of lifelogging and Spore, where the world fills with new content based on things other people do and their evolutionary pressures — to consume is to produce).
*I posted the picture to my blog asking if anyone wanted to be in a fake band. Several people responded, and also suggested that we call the band WELLO, which is what the graffiti over the door says. Glitchy (pictured in the band photo) commented with an iTunes signature maker that was barking up the right tree for how we could make music by listening to music.
*A friend saw the post and said: “Wello is best, graffiti never lies. (Now I’m imagining a world where all graffiti comes true. I would totally visit a world where the legal parameters were dictated by everyone bored and juvenile enough to scrawl on desks. Wouldn’t build a summer home there, though)”
*This idea appealed to me pretty massively, and inspired Mark to post the living canvas post. It inspired me to rent Roger Rabbit last night so I could see the mixed-reality and study Toon Town for the first time since I was a kid, since it came to mind when I thought of a world full of living graffiti.
*My friend with the living graffiti idea (who was also at the Uffie concert) came over to watch it with me and we made popcorn, which brings us back to…
Me promising I won’t eat all your popcorn, but I’ll probably skip Halloween and watch Roger Rabbit again :). I’m also going to add some project ideas to 3pedia, and include WELLO there. I’d like to get some WELLO/Daisy Daisy style stuff together for the next Metaverse Meetup which will synch with Virtual Worlds 2007 at the end of March.
Shwoow, that would have been so much easier to lifelog. But I’m likeing discovery chains quite a lot.
The sentient graffiti idea is SO ’90s.
Everything old is finally happening?
> The sentient graffiti idea is SO ’90s.
Oh, and let’s see the discovery chain. That would be interesting.
Trippy. So will we be treated to a debut super-mix-tape-mashup special next month?
Along those lines, and I throw this idea on the open source hopper if anyone’s motivated enough to build it: I’d like to see a variant on the idea of using those in-car FM transmitters to share whatever track you’re listening to with the rest of the folks within your local area.
The premise is this: Some people simply have “random,” some have ranked playlists, and some people actually craft playlists that reflect something about what they are doing. An urban track to reflect the mood, or an upbeat track because they’re on the move, or perhaps a bit of speed or death metal because they’re on a murderous rampage with power tools in the subway…
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to tune into that, like a micro-context-specific radio station?
I think so. My playlists suck. I don’t have the patience or time to build playlists around whether I’m commuting to work, checking out Central Park, or going on murderous rampages.
So, I’m thinking a nice little bluetooth doohickey that you plug into your handy iPod accessory port - because anyone with taste must certainly buy an iPod and not one of those “other” music players and besides its a fairly well documented interface with power… And that coupled to an A/D converter, and some sort of interface to the ‘pod to configure it, and you walk around broadcasting a 30 meter bubble of your tunes. It’d have to be open source, anyone selling something like that could probably be gunned down by the RIAA in broad daylight - but the social implications would be interesting. You’d whip out your own, tune around the dial and see what your neighbor was broadcasting.
Some folks do it with the “shared earphone” approach, but I don’t know that many social people in New York, and usually they’re asking you for money, not music.
Thoughts?
- Bill
Thanks for the linky, Mark!
Cool idea, Bill. Makes me think of a couple of things:
*Sounds like another project idea that could be put on 3pedia for anyone who wants to to add to, link to similar things (paging Dr. Glitchy), and build if they’re so inclined and motivated.
Back when I started the now hibernating Second Life Future Salon and blog (way back in the simpler times of March 2004) I had wanted to create a repository of project ideas that people post and work on. Maybe 3pedia can be used that way?
*Makes me brainstorm WELLO albums that grab lots of other people’s music, not just the fake band’s ;).
Ack, I just have to put it on 3pedia. I think I’ll put some bounties up too, to sweeten the mix. If I can’t set aside a few hundred dollars a month to seed and motivate I’m doing something wrong!
Dang Paffendorf, I’m pretty sure you have now put more words into this than there are distinct Uffie lyrics. Respect.
I can only add that, when it comes to a representation of a world where graffiti (if it’s understood as mostly a text stream output of the inchoate urges and anxieties of the teenage id) all comes true, then Halloween is your movie. More than Roger Rabbit, anyway. Although I didn’t plan to get all meta with it, I just was genuinely (and a little pathetically) excited that it was on.
But since we’re talking about the foggy borders of RL, here are a few geeky things I’d like to see somewhere, and I think that they’d be faster and cheaper in the metaverse than out here. Maybe most of them exist in there already and I haven’t seen them yet:
A chemistry museum where, at any scale you like, you could watch enzymes disassembling a protein, chromosomes unspooling, DNA and RNA cycling through their jobs, etc.
A multiplayer game to teach kids economics, where you could role-play business owners, labor strategists, mess with exchange rates and see the consequences, etc. This would include user-controlled visual aids (including but not limited to the classical-econ graphs, in more easily understood 3D forms) that could operate with or independently of the games.
A huge, interactive, multi-media timeline for history geeks, that would allow you to immerse as much as possible in a given historical moment, learn about diachronic change and synchronic difference, demystify the illusion of progress through spatial and temporal change, etc. (this idea is a little hazier, and is the result of having had a fever last night).
It would be cool to command ten thousand serfs (and those pesky, quasi-unionized guild-member craftsmen) in the building of a medieval cathedral, in accelerated or real time.
Also, we could recreate the Cow Palace and the Altamont Raceway so WELLO could have a suitable live venue.
OK, gotta run.
> Dang Paffendorf, I’m pretty sure you have now put more words into this than there are distinct Uffie lyrics. Respect.
Haha, as distinct from Prokofy’s towers dubbed “whinescrapers”, I dub my screed a “shinescraper” :). Actually, I don’t want to sully the discovery chain. I like that format, and would like to see them drawn out for just about everything.
On your ideas, you should meet Alvis, who should be around here somewhere. I think our mission now is to figure out how to use 3pedia for organizing all these projects.
Happy Halloween!
Hey, happy WELLOheen too!
And BTW it struck me again last night that Uffie is just two short letters removed from Whuffie, which really just fits nice, and makes me wonder what other “u/ffies” we could coin in the 3pointD realm:
“Whuffie is the ephemeral, reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow’s sci-fi novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. This future history book describes a post-scarcity economy: All the necessities (and most of the luxuries) of life are free for the taking. A person’s current Whuffie is instantly viewable to anyone, as everybody has a brain-implant giving them an interface with the Net.”
@Tony: Peter is neither geeksleeping nor deep in thought. He’s thinking to himself, “When the hell is this thing going to be over so I can get out of here with my gf?”
@William: that’s genius, I absolutely love that. Especially if you could message the people you were tuning into, or see who was tuning into you or something. I see marriages made and broken, crazy ARGs, entire neighborhoods dancing to the beat of a single drum. (Can I rebroadcast what I’m picking up?) One Nation Under A Groove!
@John: All awesome ideas.
We have to get some of these up on 3pedia at some point. I’ll try to make that happen soon.
I put a proto Projects page up on 3pedia and blogged a little about it here. I want to *use* 3pointD.
Cool, I tarted up the main Projects page
@Jerry, you, me, Alvis - lets get together for beer or coffee one night next week. Let us nail this “idea” idea. I know there are other “idea” ideas on the table, but an opensource “idea” idea seems excellent. You mentioned 3pedia, which I will check out. Brooklyn or Manhattan, whichever. More on the way.
@Mark, thanks. Technology is already turning social bonds upside down (good/bad.) Remember, way back in the IRC days, people were having “affairs” online. Imagine what happens when you discover deep shared emotional states with strangers. Uh oh. As far as ARGs and advertz, this is also a byproduct of the shared model - but I think we’ll simply have to route around the unwanted with intelligent software. Besides, even the best FCC-compliant BT radios will only do a few hundred meters, so you’re not exactly trapped. Mesh broadcasting - novel, complex. No reason it can’t be done, maybe not with this setup in particular, but technology enables, even as it confounds.
Going up to John’s in-world demos of processes - absolutely cool. Even better is tying that back to real world data. That’s something that really catches my attention. Maybe we can start taking snippets from real world gene sequences and mapping them programmatically in SL? If it has been done, I don’t know about it yet. Seems fairly straightforward since a lot of the data is open and freely available and in documented formats.
Andy?
Bill
W. Ward- I like tying the indicators to real-world data. How about a kinetic sculpture that reflects what’s happening in the Dow, or in all the world’s markets? A great big abstract thing that changes its shape, color and size with defined parameters- maybe right now, it could be growing a towering orange furry tentacle as all those guys up the street from me at the exchange struggle with theifr losses in China, for example.
Does anyone know how to do this?
> @Jerry, you, me, Alvis - lets get together for beer or coffee one night next week.
I’m down.
> Does anyone know how to do this?
In Second Life or real life? :) Check out AngryBeth Shortbread’s blog. She’s done some cool things like this in SL.
Great Metaverse Meetup! Thanks Mark and Jerry for your thoughts!
@ Bill, Jerry and Everyone
An idea-idea farm has always occupied a special niche in my inner memetic trailer park. Fortunately, the broader info/comm/tech market seems to be evolving toward new-fangled hyper-efficient get-things-done-fast-while-eliminating-redundant-behavior structures that might house idea-idea farms. IMO such idea-idea farms will represent the next evolutionary step in boosting social intelligence and processing, making individuals and groups smarter. Sooo, do let’s grab a beer soon, say this Saturday (or whenever works) and blast out a concept. I could see this working as a branch of the Metaverse Roadmap or via the 3Pedia (with Mark’s blessing of course). Perhaps 3Pedia could become integrated into the Roadmap Project — living projects. It’d totally fit in with the idea development stuff that Johnny Smart, the ASF connection, and I used to kick around adamantly. And the more peeps with solid/marketable/sick-ass ideas willing to participate the better — so step up if you’re a social do-gooder with an insane metaversally oriented brain. Location: Brooklyn is cool if more Brooklyn peeps join in. Somewhere near Union Station would be ideal pour moi. Let’s roll.
Maybe the next Metaverse Meetup could be an Open-Source Idea Harvest Party for an idea-idea farm? :P
@JohnB: YES. In fact I suggested this for the NMC art festival that Ciemaar Flintoff, Sandhya2 Patel and I did early February. We shipped in temp/baro data and wired it up to some old-school weather instruments in world. I had originally suggested that we use a shape that morphed based on the data to form some sort of pseudo-weather-emotional representation. You could correlate the temperature and sunlight (I had a light sensor on the telemetry box,) and pressure to sort of anticipate the general mood of the people in Manhattan. Obviously if it’s colder than a witch wearing a brass brassiere, cloudy, and the pressure’s on the way down - people are likely to be a bit more annoyed than if it’s sunny, the temperature is a bit higher, and the pressure is on the way up. I’m totally down with that, and it’s actually fairly easy to do by modding the shape scriptomagically with some magic pixie dust, or perhaps just some LSD thrown in. Pulling data streams from Yahoo Finance or something can always be done (albeit not always legally these days,) and we could certainly map that to a morphing bear/bull depending on which way the dow is going and by how much. I need another idea-log… Ciemaar and I go out to dinner just about every week and usually leave with a notebook page or two full of ideas like this. SL is just such a fertile ground for experimenting with new things. Unfortunately, the idea about adding hours to the day is two or three items down on the list.
@Alvis: Good to see you here and good to have met you Friday. Saturday is fine with me and I don’t care if we do Onion Square or Brewklyn. I think the key is to find somewhere we can sit in a quiet setting. Anywhere with loud music or fast table turnover will ruin it. I don’t know the hangouts in those necks of the woods, but I think we can come up with some action plans and break them into practical bits. Should be flexible enough that people can come and go at will. You know how attention deficit is these days. Agreed on the market direction. Risk averse bastards. IM me in-world as “Williem Leandros” or ping me at wwwardpoboxcom and we’ll nail the time/place.