Japanese Girl Sensation: Virtual Boyfriends (Webkare)

The site is a huge hit over here. Girls sign up and become members of a social network but also users of a dating simulation in cartoon style. They have to try to hook up with one of four male Anime characters (who are the "stars" of the site) through "conversations" and must collaborate with other Webkare members in order to move on in the game. Eventually they conquer the heart of the chosen cartoon boy.

It's pretty weird but clever. Dating simulations have been popular in Japan for quite a while now, but Webkare marks the first time the concept has been brought online and combined with social networking functionality.

Bruce Sterling sez: "I wonder why anyone thinks that William Gibson, author of 'Idoru,' is anything other than a hardboiled realist."

3D Virtual Reality Environment Developed at UC San Diego Helps Scientists Innovate

"When you're inside the StarCAVE the quality of the image is stunning," said Thomas A. DeFanti, director of visualization at Calit2 and one of the pioneers of VR systems. "The StarCAVE supports 20/40 vision and the images are very high contrast, thanks to the room's unique shape and special screens that allow viewers to use 3D polarizing glasses. You can fly over a strand of DNA and look in front, behind and below you, or navigate through the superstructure of a building to detect where damage from an earthquake may have occurred."

[. . .]

The room operates at a combined resolution of over 68 million pixels -- 34 million per eye -- distributed over 15 rear-projected walls and two floor screens. Each side of the pentagon-shaped room has three stacked screens, with the bottom and top screens titled inward by 15 degrees to increase the feeling of immersion (while also reducing the ghosting, or 'seeing double', that bedevils VR systems).

(Via KurzweilAI.net.)

And just think of the, er, "recreational" applications!

Immersive 3D: 'Please touch' coming soon?

The ability to touch and manipulate 3D images is key to the future of interactive entertainment, not to mention every other episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Now two UC-Santa Barbara researchers say they've built a prototype room-sized 3D display using projectors, a user-tracking system, and two FogScreens, which produce 2D images using microscopic water droplets and ultrasound.

I've been fumblingly attempting to create a representational avatar of myself in Second Life. One of the many hurdles I've encountered so far is tracking down a pair of eyeglasses that fit, hence the "steampunk" welding goggles in the "photo" above.

My SL handle is "Hiromi Luminos."

Lifelike animation heralds new era for computer games

The company says "Emily" is considered to be one of the first animations to have bypassed the "uncanny valley" -- which refers to the perception that animation looks less realistic as it approaches human likeness.

Virtual Transgender Suit, avatar termination and other online world tales

A study by psychologists at Nottingham Trent University has found that 54 percent of all males and 68 percent of all females "gender swap"--or create online personas of their opposite sex.

A real life manifestation of that practice, the Virtual Transgender Suit replicates the aesthetics of the typical virtual female form and catapults them within a real world context. The piece was specifically designed for men to wear in the real world, creating a bridge between real (where cross-dressing is not really socially accepted) and virtual.

(Via Next Nature.)

A Bridge between Virtual Worlds

The discussion of linking together today's virtual worlds is not new, but this is the first running code that demonstrates previously hypothetical approaches--another tangible sign that Linden Lab is serious about interoperability. "We are still early in the game. The point of the beta is to give the rest of the development community the chance to try the protocols themselves," says Joe Miller, Linden Lab's vice president of platform and development. More than 200 users have signed up for the beta program, and currently 15 worlds have been connected.

Build a better being

Will Wright's hugely successful games SimCity and The Sims let players shape the structure of urban areas and the lives of virtual humans; his upcoming game, Spore, lets them control the universe.

Although it is just a game, the young gamers of today may grow up to be the bioengineers of tomorrow. If Spore has any influence whatsoever, we foresee an utterly comical genetic future.

Obscura demonstrates Minority Report display

Obscura Digital has released a video of a new technology it's dubbed a multi-touch hologram.

The demonstration shows a man interacting with holographic images projected before him, moving them around and resizing them much as you would on Microsoft's Surface.

However, unlike Microsoft's pet project all the images are projected in the air, bringing fond memories of Minority Report to PC Pro's offices.

(Via KurzweilAI.net.)

"Do Humans Have 23 years to Go?" Play Superstruct and Find Out -Invent the Future!

The Institute for the Future is inviting the world to play Superstruct, the world's first massively multi-player forecasting game. It's not just about envisioning the future -- it's about inventing the future, creating superstructures to solve and counter super threats facing the planet.

The Future of the Avatar

Regardless of how creepy this may appear to people viewing the world from our current vantage point, and what we consider normal by today's standards, avatars are destined to become routine, everyday fixtures in our future way of life.

But here's the most important part. Avatars will only live in the computer world for a short time longer. It is only a matter of time before they emerge from the computer and appear as visual beings, walking around among us.

When I first saw this I naively assumed scientists had devised a way to make magnetic fields visible to the unaided eye. Although such is not the case, it's still the coolest use of CGI I've seen in quite a while.

Paralysed man takes a walk in virtual world

The patient, who has suffered paralysis for more than 30 years, can barely bend his fingers due to a progressive muscle disease so cannot use a mouse or keyboard in the traditional way.

In the experiment, he wore headgear with three electrodes monitoring brain waves related to his hands and legs. Even though he cannot move his legs, he imagined that his character was walking.

Interactive Architecture on the Mission Eternity Sarcophagus:

Etoy.corporation launched the Mission Eternity Project in 2005, foregrounding on the one hand respect for the human longing to survive in some way after death, and on the other a sense of irony about dated sci-fi fantasies we contrive to satisfy that desire. The Sarcophagus is one materialization of this project. It is a mobile sepulchre that holds and displays portraits of those who wish to have their informational remains cross over into a digital afterlife. The size of a standard cargo container that can travel to any location in the world, the Sarcophagus has an immersive LED screen covering its walls, ceiling and floor.

In other words, an immersive version of Rudy Rucker's "lifebox." What home's complete without one?

frogConcept: A Digital Escape

The future isn't all rosy. Increasing pollution, overpopulation, poverty, and climate change -- society's impact on the earth is reaching a breaking point. And while we may work to slow the onset of these catastrophes, reversing them is no longer an option. The question becomes, how do we live with the troubles we've already caused?

I don't think Frog Design intended this to be ironic, but its VR facemask is about as sterile and chilling as any proposed futurist technology I can recall seeing. It's like something a George Lucas storm-trooper might wear on a date.

I do, however, like the mask's inadvertent resemblance to the minimalist Gray alien face; it supports my tenuous thesis that the Grays are anemic caricatures of ourselves served up by the collective unconscious in order to caution us against the dangers of rampant dehumanization.

The Grays inhabit an imaginal realm of boundless technology, yet their agenda suggests their existence is defined by a near-insurmountable void, perhaps the result of recklessly toppling the ecology of their parent world. Despite its promise of an insulated, illusory dystopia, the frogConcept mask stirs similar fears.

Weird Science! NYU Student Invents Virtual Girlfriend

Give her kiss on the check and she rolls over and buries her face in the pillow. And yes, she stays fully clothed at all times. Nonetheless, Burrows suggests his new alternative to a full-body pillow or (ugh) blow-up doll could provide late-night comfort for traders, lawyers, or any other single guy in Manhattan who simply works too hard to keep a girlfriend.

Something tells me I'd manage to scare off even a two-dimensional woman.

Scientific research inside Second Life

This week's Science News discusses several real scientific research projects inside Second Life. For example, Drexel University neurobiologist Corey Hart (no, not that Corey Hart) is building a virtual frog to study the neural pathways involved in hopping. Meanwhile, Robert Amme, a physicist at the University of Denver, is modeling a nuclear reactor as a training tool. Indeed, many research institutions are leveraging the simple sim tools of SL to create immersive science learning experiences.

If we inhabit a simulation, might scientific research be a suitable justification for our existence? If so, what kind? And what happens after the experiments have run their course?

The idea that technological civilizations almost universally snuff themselves has become understandably fashionable among those convinced the Fermi Paradox qualifies as a genuine conundrum. If I chose to play along, I'd argue that the sort of full-immersion VR technology represented in the above "commercial" would pose at least as great a threat to emerging civilizations, neatly accounting for the alleged absence of ET visitors.

(Personally, I don't think Enrico Fermi ever intended his eponymous "paradox" to be taken literally; I think he was posing a thought experiment -- but I could be mistaken. If anyone knows more about Fermi's famous question, leave a comment.)

(Video found at Sentient Developments.)

One Avatar, Many Worlds

DAZ 3D, a company based in Draper, UT, that makes software and models for creating 3-D art, recently announced the MogBox, a program that would allow users to design a high-resolution 3-D character and transport it as an avatar to multiple virtual worlds. MogBox is designed to maintain the same look and feel for the character from one location to another, while adjusting for the graphics capabilities and styles of different virtual worlds. This typically means scaling down the high-resolution image, simplifying the textures on the surface of the character, and adjusting the figure's polygonal building blocks to follow the rules of different digital worlds.

(Via KurzweilAI.net.)

"I am happy being who I am. If I was cured, I wouldn't be who I am."



I'm not autistic. Not by a long shot. But as an extreme introvert, I'm well aware of the mainstream's sensibility toward anyone who deviates from the "norm" -- and I don't find it remotely encouraging.

I'm especially troubled by the assumption that depression is necessarily a disease to be "treated" with barrages of pharmaceuticals. Is it conceivable that melancholy offers the experiencer a window on reality just as valid as those embraced by the mainstream?

I'm not negating the reality of extreme, incapacitating depression. But the governing medical paradigm, in collusion with consumer society, has spawned a binary that perhaps owes more to economic and social imperatives than actual wellness. And it usually comes in three innocuous-seeming words: "ask your doctor . . ."