CYland Media Art Lab inSL

This spring the St. Petersburg media arts gallery CYland commissioned Pinkpink Sorbet with creating an inworld presence in Second Life (TM). Since Mechatiki have been honored to assist in the effort we noticed the place has been looking more and more complete as the summer progressed, and first random visitors are showing up. Yet there hasn't been an official vernissage and we are wondering when we will get to munch free pixel sandwiches. Our Magggnnus Woodget will address this question in the following interview with Miss Sorbet:

M: CYland SL has been quietly opening it's doors to inworld visitors during the summer, but there hasn't been any official opening yet ...
P: That's right. We allow already residents to explore the inworld gallery as it evolves right now, and we will have a kind of opening event in October with Pinkpink´s SnailsLab. Then in November during Cyberfest, which is organized by Cyland in RL in St. Petersburg, we will have a mixed reality event in which CYland SL will be presented officially to the outside world.
M: What can one see at the gallery right now?
T: There is already a lot to see and explore at CYlandSL - several videos from the CYland archives are being streamed, there are a number of info-displays and notecards to find which give some background on CYland in the real world, as well as interactive artwork like a representation of Anna Frants's RL interactive piece Drum Painting and of course the sculptures by Mechatiki.
M: There is a significant number of ashtrays at the gallery ...
P: Right. Those are a personal project of Pinkpink - some of them are vehicles to explore the gallery in, others are pieces of furniture, which for example circle over the gallery. I am hatching a plan for an inhabitable ashtray the size of a house. In general that is one of the things I love about second life - that it gives you the architectural freedom to ignore conventions that consider gravity or weather and other RL nuisances. Here we can have an open air gallery floating 2000m above the ground.
M: An important part of CYlandRL seems to be to have artists in residence. Is that part of the plan for cyland SL as well?
P: In some form yes. We are thinking of working together with the RL artists to represent some of their work inworld, but also to approach inworld artists at some point to show here.
M: I heard Anna Frants and Sergey Teterin of CYlandRL have been at this year's Burning Man event in Nevada. are you planning on participating in Burning Life in October?
P: Yes, Anna and Sergey are Burners now. And no, we won't have parcel at BL - mostly because the mode of allocation confused me and the landrush times were not so Euro-friendly but i plan to go there as a spectator and witness the creativity of inworld Burners.
M: Tell me about the mixed reality event in november.
P: Cyberfest is happening from Nov. 20th-29th and features a variety of international media artists. I will be in St. Petersburg to present the virtual CYland to the real life festival visitors. The RL festival will be video-streamed into SL and the virtual gallery will be displayed on one or more computers in the real world. I am planning to set up a PC for visitors to go inside the virtual world and show them around the gallery and help them interact with the SL environment.
M: That sounds groovy. Thank you for the interview. I wish you the best! The Slurl for CYland SL is http://slurl.com/secondlife/Chronocules/218/211/2001/ btw.

Miss Sorbet has also recently opened a blog for CYland SL - http://cyland-sl.blogspot.com/ that you can watch for future events.

Oillonaire

An animated sculpture that reacts to the greeting "good day sir" when spoken in chat by drawing his hat. With his right hand Oillonaire toasts with an Oiltini, what else.
Have a first hand look inworld at CYlandSL gallery.

The Winner Is ...

Now that I have a trophy I just need to come up with a competition to award it to somebody.

tikiTOUCH 1

A smartphone prop from our electronics lab - no communication features incorporated, it simply makes the owner look busy and connected ;)

On touch it switches between eight different screens, two of them screenshots from this blog.

The touchscreen mobile which is available on XSL and inworld animates the avatar wearing it with a texting / smartphone animation.

Recursive Life

Above video demonstrates the plugin Aimee Trescothick wrote for the recently introduced new media API connecting the parcel media stream to a remote computer via VNC (Virtual Network Computing).

This will be generally very useful for any type of presentations that run  on a PC, but the specific use to sign into SL from within SL will also help tutoring new residents, when they can see what their tutors do on their viewer.

Alas, before we can all reap the fruits of Ms. Aimee's labor we "will need to wait for now for the LLmedia plug-in API to find it's way into the normal Second Life viewer, right now it's still under active development and only available in a developer release that is not guaranteed to be stable. I would hope to release the VNC plug-in around the same time that happens."

(via NWN)

Back to School with Mechatiki Office Supplies!

If you are trying to look busy this fall, Mechatiki Research has just the items for you, whether your avatar is sinistral or a righty:


Pencil with writing animation for right handers and for lefties. These two differ in that the right hand version includes an animation for the left hand - which holds something like a notebook or clipboard. The left hander's version is more for writing on a table.
However the Left Handed Writing Pack includes an animation (Full Perms) that provides a right hand holding animation too.

The right hand Writing Animation (Full Perm) we have to offer is the same that is in the pencil above.


Next up we have this Clipboard that lets you use your own pages to browse through.
We offer it with a reading animation included or without.
The Reading Animation is available seperately (Full Perms) as well.

Maybe we can also interest you for these beautifully designed Office Chairs ... Xccutive version and regular.
Next you'll need some stylish Desk Lights (in a choice of three colors: Charcoal, Bordeaux, Steel)


And last but not least there's the Desktop PC and flatscreen Monitor to decorate your busy, busy desk.

(PC and monitor are also bundled up in this Office Pack with some other items not mentioned above!)

Just btw and totally unrelated: for alcoholic beverages check out our other offerings - click the Xstreet link in the sidebar to the right!

T Linden shows direct Mesh import Sneak Peak at SLCC09

At his keynote today at SLCC09, Tom Hale aka T Linden presented a sneak peak of 3D mesh import into Second Life. Despite his cautionary reminder that sneak peaks have no release date and some might never be released, this is a large step forward from just talking about mesh import as something to support "in the future".

This means a) greater possibilities for creators who know how to work with standard 3D software and b) 3D creators who have not thought about using SL before may find a new environment for their work.

After going on to present new media support features T concluded by mentioning the Lab wished to bring the presented features into reality during 2010.

SLCC09 - Keynote by M and Philip Linden

Today Mart Kingdon and Philip Rosedale held their keynote at the Second Life Community Convention in San Francisco. And my avatar went to the inworld location where they streamed the audio. Just the audio. Which lead to members of the virtual audience asking why there was no video stream from the convention at the point where M started showing and commenting on slides to the RL audience. I overheard one avatar saying that budget cuts were responsible for the cancellation of 5 actually planned live video streaming events. Which sounds at least bizarre.

Below two segments of the Q&A that followed the keynote (video from inworld, audio from RL):

It's Raining Fish

Recreating an unexplained natural phenomenon, this interactive installation makes it rain fish. (All fish involved are animated using Puppeteer)
When a visitor steps on one of the two dark rings on the ground, "physical" (they interact with environment) fish start falling from the air and helplessly twitch around (for a minute, as they are "temporary"). Visitors can both kick the fish around or move it using the mouse and play fish bowling sorts of or something.

The big fish in the center reacts to the visitor too. When it is touched it goes through an agitated animation.

Visit It's Raining Fish at Brooklyn is Watching!

In memoriam SLX / Xstreet Forums

The latest announcement concerning the merging of the Xstreet Forums into the main SL webpage does not mention a specific date, but it's wording suggests a rather soon closing.
Ann Otoole who has provided a lot of interesting reading material on the Xstreet forums has written a blog post I would like to refer to: Death of a Community.

... Bye bye thread on XstreetSL forum.

SL6B Public Lab Video

A short video of the Mechatiki Public Lab at the Second Life 6th Birthday Exhibit.

"The Future of Virtual Worlds"

"The Future of Virtual Worlds" is the motto that Linden Labs posed onto Second Life 6th Birthday Exhibitors. Mechatiki Public Lab's answer is simple: "The future is kinetic and interactive."

On our parcel in the "SL6B Polaris" region, which occupies the south-east corner of the cluster of SL6B regions, we released several species of kinetic creatures in an open-air experiment.
After almost a week of studying their behaviour we are able to present some preliminary findings:
- Hupfi: a creature that has been witnessed to show lively movement in a confined space (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxyusJnl92g), has been a lot calmer in the open environment, only occasionally escaping the no-roof container and barely winding up immobilized at the parcel border.
- Pet Creatures: bred from the ordinary Marsdog this creature's escapist behaviour seems to be directly proportional with it's size. The largest specimen had to be brought back in from the parcel border most often, while the two smallest individuals have been moving around inside the parcel all the time.
- Flag Creature: the reliable "foot soldier" among our creatures behaved very much like expected. moving along slowly but steadily, covering a lot of ground. Has wound up on parcel border only once so far (involvment of avatar interaction can not be excluded).
- Right Arm: this one had the most curious expectancy attached, for when released for the one and only time before this current experiment, it took off towards the sky at one point, never to return. Has not happened here so far happily/sadly (?).
- Walkies II: demonstrated calculable behaviour by calmly creeping along the ground, helplessly twitching and thrusting.

Visit until June 29: slurl.com/secondlife/SL6B Polaris/148/44/2

SL6B Upcoming

It's about to tell the world Mechatiki Research are establishing a Public Lab at Second Life's 6th Birthday event, opening June 23rd.

We are currently preparing the the proper fencing to keep the chance of escaping creatures at a reasonable minimum.

At the exact opening of the events we will release various live kinetic creatures on our parcel and watch what they are up to for the next week! (Inviting you - the public - to interact with them.)

Here's the SLUrl already, though I don't think the public can access the sim before June 23rd ..

... There will also be free drinks.

Brooklyn is Watching Podcast #60

Recurring readers may remember I mentioned that I had exposed a family of kinetic Marsdog sculptures to the visitors in SL as well as RL of Brooklyn is Watching - an interworld art project interfacing a Second Life sim with a gallery in Brooklyn.

Last weekend it was kindly discussed in the weekly podcast - click here to listen to it.

This was a really, really interesting listen for me , for more than one reason. Firstly my art was being discussed by people I had never met in either world - interesting, but a situation that can easily occur in real life too. So taking into account that the few lines of info I had provided on the brooklyiniswatching website were disregarded I thought my work scored pretty good - the four debaters at first didn't know what to think of or do with the objects, and yet they were discussing one of the larger ones (I suppose from listening to the podcast) in it's seeming stasis, lying on the back, gradually finding  out about the tounge-sticking and feet moving, ending up learning about the physical character of the sculpture through collision. I regard the discussion a win for my art in that it seemed be able to make four guys talk about it quite intelligently about it for several minutes without saying it sucked big time - on the contrary it seems to have invited interaction.

To me the discussion had a special twist and was particularily interesting because one of the panelists apparently wasn't familiar too much with SL itself, so his reaction to Second Life art was not filtered through the lenses of limitations seasoned users are aware of and generally was to be expected to approach the works with a more intuitive attitude than someone who has internalized the workings of the UI. 

While I have never met any of the illustrious round I have already had time to google the two non-regulars ... and the one I suspect must be the SL noob, Jason Robert Bell, is not only author of a caveman-robot comic, but he is also selling what I have just ordered as a first gift for little Emma Danger over the pond: a little plush Caveman Robot!

All in all the podcast has made me curious for more, Brooklyn is Watching is definitely a project to watch for some serious world connecting art discourse. Follow this SLUrl to visit the inworld location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Popcha/72/140/27.

Josh Ellingson exhibit

When I read the announcement a few days ago on (the non-SL related blog) Suicide Bots that Josh Ellingson, the artist that had designed the Robogames 2008 poster, would have his first exhibit in SL at the Museum of Robots, I got all excited because the art on the poster was impressive. And indeed Josh - or Grover Zelin in SL - did deliver.
Highly recommended!

Photos on my Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shifzr/tags/joshellingson/

Give us a Phone Call in Second Life

Today Linden Labs announced a new product in limited beta: phone calls from the real world into the Metaverse. Historic indeed:

"This marks the first time a Resident will be able to communicate with a non-Second Life user within Second Life. The service goes into a limited Beta trial today and will launch as a full offering in Q3."

At least for now, if you are not in the US or GB long distance rates will apply, since the number to call is composed of any one of a list of now 8 US and one London phone number followed by an individual "access code".

So to call our avatar Magggnnus Woodget dial any of these numbers:

Boston +1 617-861-0749
Chicago +1 312-348-3694
Dallas +1 972-813-0067
Los Angeles +1 213-271-2575
New York +1 212-660-9951
Philadelphia +1 215-475-5291
San Francisco +1 415-490-9443
Washington D.C. +1 202-629-9859
London, UK +44 20-7100-5624

followed by the "access code" 128033. If you are in San Francisco for example you would dial 490-9443 128033 ...

Of course I would have to have voice turned on to take the call I suppose, but I actually have started to experiment with it (the feedback noises were terrible).

Here is the announcement on the SL blog and this link leads to the access code dispensary.

Brooklyn is Watching - Art

Brooklyn is watching is a mixed reality exhibit taking place in a gallery in Brooklyn and simultaneously in SL, where the visitors in Brooklyn can see into SL, not vice versa.

Since the exhibit invites anyone to contribute some art and document it, I obliged and gave Brooklyn a family of Marsdogs to watch:

They should be there for a few days before they get returned, unless of course they propel themselves through the air over the parcel's borders at some point, which sounds not unlikely since they are physical and animated at the same time.

XStreet Login Change - not so gret akshuly

This one has a pre-quel. A while ago on the XStreet marketplace webpage, the login cookie suddenly expired in a very short time-span. Something in the background had changed and this little detail was not considered. Which caused an uproar amongst users that were - like me - used to keeping open one or more tabs in their browser with the XStreet page on it, frequently checking it, be it for new forum posts, traffic or products. Logging in every time you want to refresh a page can be a major pain in the ass and actually get me to not use a page so often anymore. Happened so in this case, I changed my behaviour to only checking the page once or twice daily for the period of time XStreets new owners - Linden Labs - took to decide to fix this.

Now back to present time: this monday May 11th another change to the login occured. Now everyone with an SL account can login to XStreet with their SL login. Everybody has to use their SL login now to get into the XStreet page.

And now it comes. The cookie again expires in a very short period of time. Five days counting, two Jiras and several threads on the XStreet Forums and no fix in sight - so now it's a feature. Nice Job.

Vote:
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-1095
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-1099

And just for giggles here is the traffic for my items on XStreet for the last month:

(With all SL residents suddenly having XStreet accounts and this being advertised you would expect and influx of new eyes in the last few days, no?)

Give someone the swineflu ... (T-Shirt)

Thanks to Robin Wood's free T-Shirt template (and the CDC's generous image service) Mechatiki Research is now able to offer the Dollarbie H1N1 T-Shirt with the popular 2009 swineflu virus on it. Get it on XStreet or pick it up inworld at Mechakitty Design.
Also new: the charcoal Mechatiki T-Shirt. Available on XStreet (1L$, so it is gift-able) as well as inworld at Mechatiki Space landing point (0L$).

E-ducators Welcome

SL resident Times Sands has published a 6 page article titled "A Technical Update on Second Life's Readiness for E-Learning", which is an informative look at where the technology stands today and what is still needed from an e-ducator's perspective.

It also contains a point to which I can attest to from first hand experience:

"... A reverse question is whether Second Life might be a useful venue for creating training content to be delivered in the real world? And the answer is a resounding Yes. Virtual films (called Machinima) are being made in Second Life faster and less expensively than would be possible in the real world (if they were even filmable in the real world at all)."

... Mechatiki Production's eager staff are ready to take your orders.

New Sculptures

"Fat Man" and "Senor Cohones", the latter actually an intermediate stage of the other, which I decided to conserve as a sculpture of it's own, you will notice the identical leg positioning.

Both can be admired and purchased at Mechatiki Skyloft, which has seen a little re-decorating lately, a new wall here, a shiny new lamp there - come to see it today! While you're there grab one of the delicious free drinks, grab a glass of wine from the table or use ye goode olde Kybernetic Martini Assembling Contraption ... and at the bar you'll find some useful paraphernalia if you seek to equip your own home bar - a shaker, lime, olives ... or the bar itself.

Purely Senseless Technology

Product Anouncement:

Two new useless items from the Mechatiki workbenches (one you can at least sit on) - the Bulbus Apparatus and the Operator Armchair were launched onto the Second Life market place.

Regard the videos below or have a look at both contraptions at Mechatiki Skyloft!

Bulbus Apparatus on XStreetSL.

Operator Armchair on XStreetSL.

RL invades SL

... In a positive way.

Per accident (err, youtube's related video suggestions) I stumbled upon videos from the fine folks of UC Berkeley - they're doing some pretty cool stuff actually. On their grid of 40 Opensim servers and in SL.

Like Ortho-Mapping for example. In other words: mapping orthoimagery (aerial views, in this case of the earth) onto terrain.

Watch the videos below to get a bird's view of the Berkeley area:

From the text going with the second video:

Real-life geographic information is modeled at three levels, or scales of detail. The (1:42) Level 1 build mimics Google Earth with globe-type data at 1/42 scale. The (1:16) Level 2 build adds LiDAR first-return data to include the tops of every building and trees at 1/16 scale. The (1:3) Level 3 build is the best we can do, solid geometry 3D graphic primitives and real-world textures hand-tuned for optimal streaming at 1/3 scale.

"Mimicking" being a bit of an understatement in this case, ha! I can see Earth Grid fed with real time real life data before me already.

Teh Sikrit Lab

... is how I affectionately call my offline Opensim region, which despite it's limitations and quirks I have installed to do some prim tinkering for import to Second Life.

After all it has it's merits when it comes to building - no lag! No expenses for texture uploads. And of course the sheer unlimited amount of prims available (45000 per region). Which means after a week I have still some left for more achievements such as the Office Chair Xccutive or this Tower PC.

Click here to view Flickr Set.

Standalone SL for Corporations coming soonish

LL have announced "Second Life Behind a Firewall", SL server software for solvent corporate customers to run on their own hardware:

"Today, we’re pleased to share that the stand-alone version of Second Life solution is currently in the alpha phase. We have nine alpha installations in the field at organizations such as IBM, Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC), New Media Consortium (NMC), Intel, and Northrop Grumman. And, we’re planning to go into a limited closed beta phase this summer with general availability later this year."

Certainly a step towards a broader acceptance of the platform in RL business environments - I can see corporations starting to use SL worlds for internal collaboration etc. more readily when their own sysops are to blame for downtimes.

Next SL Viewer Release to bring major progress

Besides facilitating the new adult content policy LL announced recently (which is also the reason this release will be out later than anticipated) the next release of the official client will incorporate features like shadows, flexi prims and bulk permission editing!

Boy Lane, developer of the alternative Cool Viewer, divulged on the forums along with posting a link to his pre-alpha Shadow Viewer 1.23 release:

"... It is purely meant as an early preview, perhaps to take some nice snapshots, and play around, but it is not meant for any serious work. It is something pre-alpha, it will crash. ...

Included features are:
Bulk permission editing (part of official 1.23 to come)
Enhanced building tools (part of official 1.23 to come)
Flexible Sculpties
Double click to wear attachments
Large Prims (only for Opensim grids)
Maximized Network Bandwidth
MUPose Style
Worn Inventory Tab
Teleport History
...and a number of more goodies and (hopefully) stability fixes. Too many to mention here ..."

Yummy.

Wireframe

Tinkering with settings and controls is always a good idea! *laughs* Well, often enough it actually IS. 

I'm not quite sure when the wireframe rendering option (in the Advanced menu, activated by Ctrl+Alt+D) will be useful ... but now I know it is there:

Makes for a nice retro 80s look, doesn't it? 

Siriwhatwasthat?

A new name popped up on my new-worlds-radar: Sirikata.

"Sirikata is an BSD licensed open source platform for virtual worlds. We aim to provide a set of libraries and protocols which can be used to deploy a virtual world, as well as fully featured sample implementations of services for hosting and deploying these worlds."

When I looked around on their site and subcribed to one of their lists, I recognized a name among the subscribers - Kyle Machulis of teledildonic fame and ex-LL-employee, who I had met 2007 at a dorkbotSF at San Francisco's Porn Palace where he presented some of his dildonic equipment, while I was there helping present the Mind Reading Martini Maker.

Says Kyle about Sirikata: "Turns out the sortof-project manager of sirikata was an ex-coworker from Linden, and contacted me about it. I've pretty much just been lurking on the list, haven't had much time to interact, but I've got high hopes for the platform, as there were lots of things I wanted to do at Linden/SL that never happened."

All I want to add is that listening to artist Chris Platz in that video above makes me feel like I spend my days playing in the sandbox. .. Wait, that can be a good thing actually!

Shamrock Hunt at Jabberwocky

I am happy to announce Mechatiki Research are participating in this year's St. Patrick's Shamrock Hunt at Jabberwocky (March 14-17)!

We wrapped the non-animated version of our new mechanic left hand prosthesis in one of Ona Ra's beautiful sculpty shamrocks and set them for 1L. And then I carefully hid it near our local outlet (for spoiler click image above to visit flickr).

Make sure to continue the search after picking up our hand - additionally to the many high quality items that will be provided, there will be a cash prize in one of the shamrocks that are hidden around the market place.

Filth Is Here To Stay

- but it's going to be segregated.
NWN's Hamlet sums up the just-announced Upcoming Changes for Adult Content like this: "In summary, content designated as "Adult" will be forced off the main continents, and resettled in a Linden-managed "Adult Continent"."

"There’s obviously a lot to discuss, " Linden Labs are aware, so they opened a total of 5 (five!) forum threads for residentsto discuss this mother of all policy changes.
This is also the first time in a long while that we hear of Age Verification again, which is mentioned as ONE of several means to ensure that prude residents (who still have all to be over 18) don't encounter things too exciting for them.

It will be interesting to watch A) the uproar of panicking residents jumping to conclusions B) how in the end the classification of content will actually be done. And of course the handling of moving residents and businesses onto a yet to be created (and named) continent.