Recent Comments:
Digital native or immigrant? Just askin'
Second Life Insider
Apr 7th 2007 4:53AM The efforts of libraries have greatly influenced me towards being a digital emigrant. I reach to the internet first for information, but I look for bibliographies, then search in periodicals indexes and library databases. The web is good for (some) new content, but most old content and esoteric scholarly content is not digitised. People assume that everything is available, but even subscription databases such as UMI Proquest and Lexis Nexis are incomplete.
For example, if I want to scan photographs of a building that was featured in the Japanese architecture journal Kenchiku Bunka, I have to find it in the Avery Index, then look it up at a library. Even if someone else had scanned them and posted them on the internet, they most likely would be a 800px or smaller JPEG, hardly useful for anything beyond a thumbnail.
Basically, good luck finding the image you're looking for as a 300 dpi 8x10 on the internet. Or finding a peer-reviewed thesis for free on Google.
And yeah, right, like anything on YouTube can compare to DVD resolution (which you can get off IRC with some concerted effort).
Great Builds: Kasteel Verloren
Second Life Insider
Mar 24th 2007 9:56PM I ordinarily dislike buildings, both in-world and out, that rely too heavily on historic representation. However, it would seem from your pictures that the Kasteel Verloren has a wonderful level of depth, and that it really does feel like a castle, rather than simply a pastiche of one. I shall definitely plan a visit.
Lets not forget LittleBigPlanet
Second Life Insider
Mar 21st 2007 2:07AM The setup reminds me of The Incredible Machine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_Machine), a classic physics / Rube Goldberg game from Sierra or, specifically with the stamps, Brøderbund's KidPix, both from the early to mid-nineties. The key similarities (with TIM) are (a) the use of realistic physics and (b) the ability to construct complex systems from a kit of parts.
The main differences are, of course, the introduction of the puppet avatar and three-dimensional space. An interesting similarity, though, is that, while LittleBigPlanet is indeed based in three-dimensional space, all of the objects displayed basically faced the camera, as if the entire setup were on a theatrical stage, and the camera seemed only to pan and zoom, rather than change in angle.
Also, while the depth of the stage seemed to be a lot shorter than its width, the camera, in the course of its panning and zooming, would use focus to indicate depth of field (around 5:05 in the video). The abilities (a) to set focal length and (b) to set depth of field I would really welcome as part of the Second Life rendering engine. Focal length does exist in SL (as evidenced by the occasional, rather odd telephoto angle), but field-of-view controls are rather crudely connected to zoom, such that it is often unclear whether one is moving the camera or zooming in. (see http://www.lslwiki.net/lslwiki/wakka.php?wakka=FOV)
