photographer Robbie Cooper shows just how focused young video game players can be. it looks to me like there are pieces where the kids are just watching something, less engaged, maybe those are from cut scenes between game levels?
my first real job was working for a virtual reality input device company long, long ago. i worked on the software for exoskeleton-style hand and wrist devices. there was a question i recall in those days of how virtual reality would go mainstream if at all. mostly it was a kind of gadget excitement i think, a love of the gear itself. you might say that virtual reality as defined then by jaron lanier and others failed, because we are not wearing 3d headsets and using data gloves to do much of anything. but that supposed failure to me merely shows how much the human mind can find immersion without them. give me compelling content, a high resolution screen, and i’ll nearly forget that i’m playing a game. modern video games prove to me that lanier and others’ vision was spot on. entering a virtual world is quite compelling. and when you expand that to social interaction, perhaps sites like facebook are as immersive without graphics at all.
my cousin has a band named anodyne gearheart. i like the name; gives me an interesting visual and emotional image. and now artists in japan have given me an additional way to imagine it. the gears work!
this is a nit about configuring dns. you may not find this interesting unless you’ve had to relate to this too.
so named’s dns soa records contain an “expire” value in seconds, yet a key concern with dns is how long dns records are cached. one might then suspect that the “expire” value had something to do with that no? sadly no! this value has more to do with how secondary servers replicate information. if you want to adjust how long the record is cached typically, you will mostly be interested in the default “ttl” value or “time to live“. this is how long the record should live cached, before it is updated again from the master record holder.
i updated these records on a server i share with many friends, and as you might expect the “expiry” values were all set as if they were time to live values — which must be a common problem, no? the term expire sounds like how long the cached values take to expire. it’s a really unfortunate use of language. sometimes i think a fair portion of user interface design relates to clarity in concept and clarity in language, and the same holds true in programming and programmatic interfaces.
saturday night live apes cnn’s big, gestural, interactive display. but hey, who doesn’t like playing with a cool new piece of technology? said ape-ing is about two minutes in.
howard rheingold, the writer credited for coining the term “virtual communities”, and the author of the more recent smart mobs, has started vlogging. here’s a sample:
i’m personally excited to see the recent outbreak of video clips, screen casts, mashups, and animated slides on the web. who has the time to read text? it will be tricky, however, to use the richer content without worsening accessibility.
i wonder if i found this bug report for firefox funny because i spent so many years at apple knee deep in their bug tracking system called radar. the discussion threads in those bugs have a certain aesthetic and tone, and this bug report’s alternating between real bug regression and comments about infidelity and relationship is funny odd.
we had a few funny bug reports in radar, though none so based in real life drama that i knew of. my favorite was the “spilled soda on keyboard, keyboard no longer working” report where the engineers kept send it back for regression with different brands of soda. ya ya, we’re nerds.
bmw is experimenting with a fabric-based car exterior, somewhat like early airplanes. here’s a cute promotion with chris bangle, director of design at bmw group.
there are some nice sound bites in there, like “emotion is really the added value of this… really we want to provide a higher emotional plane in all of this” and i’m ignoring the goofy “flexible” pun.
the wrinkles when the door opens aesthetically didn’t work for me, though that’s easy to fix by framing the door. points for thinking out of the box folks. what else would work well with material like this if it were just mass produced? could we build houses with it? disaster relief structures? pants?
i’ve been blogging since april of 2003. and my interests have migrated but somewhat settled on three topics: design / professional, personal, and meditation related. but lately i’ve encountered some writers block, perhaps because those three categories are so disparate i don’t know who my audience might be for any given post.
focus? naw… let’s splinter instead into three blogs and subscribe to just the topics you’re actually interested in. if you stumbled here, use the tabs across the top to discover the other now separate blogs.
this site will host my thoughts on experience design, usability, interaction design and perhaps even software design and development.
in my previous post, this video mashup was highlighted. it is by youtube user blimvisible, self-described as a housewife not a video professional. it’s an amazing commentary on media remixing and the change of copyright, and it is just beautifully done. in it, she uses a myriad of appropriated clips from movies and regina spektor’s song “us” with the prominent lyric “living in a den of thieves”.
we’re living in a time when copyright in the u.s. is being extended, when big companies like disney attempt to protect their intellectual property. the mickey mouse image has an estimated worth of $3 billion.
and at the same time, we’re living in a time when remixing and digital production is so easy now and accessible it is exploding. next, i ask you to watch this ted talk by larry lessig on how our copyright laws are strangling creativity. but from my post yesterday, you could say the copyright laws have a potential to hamper a cultural shift that is tremendously important - moving us away from a spectator-based, suburban TV culture to a more participatory, interactive community again.
i fear our collective understanding of this issue concerning copyright, and our ability to change the laws, is really going to lag behind. so i’m trying to get the word out.
i highly recommend you watch this lecture by anthropology professor michael wesch, where he discusses youtube and participatory culture. don’t worry, it is not dry and academic. it is uplifted and paints the largeness and the positive potential of video and the internet. watch it all the way through even though.
guerilla usability is a creative outlet for
mostly it was a kind of gadget excitement i think, a love of the gear itself. you might say that virtual reality as defined then by jaron lanier and others failed, because we are not wearing 3d headsets and using data gloves to do much of anything. but that supposed failure to me merely shows how much the human mind can find immersion without them. give me compelling content, a high resolution screen, and i’ll nearly forget that i’m playing a game. modern video games prove to me that lanier and others’ vision was spot on. entering a virtual world is quite compelling. and when you expand that to social interaction, perhaps sites like facebook are as immersive without graphics at all.