Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Second Life - Group notice: Continuano le lezioni su UniTo
Group Notice From: Enrico83 Rossini
Lunedi' 15 dicembre 2008, dalle ore 10.00 alle 12.00, lezione in diretta streaming.
Sara' possibile assistere alla lezione "TECNOLOGIE DELL'ISTRUZIONE E DELL'APPRENDIMENTO" con la prof.ssa BARBARA BRUSCHI, docente di Scienze della Formazione presso l'Universita' di Torino.
La lezione, sara' trasmessa in DIRETTA STREAMING dalle 10.00 alle 12.00 presso l'Aula magna virtuale di Scienze della Formazione
OGNI LUNEDI' FINO ALLA FINO ALLA FINE DEL SEMESTRE.
From Facebook: VolaVola/Fly Me (Machinima)
VolaVola/Fly Me – the Movie
a new feature film from Berardo Carboni
Facebook Group dedicated to the project:
"VolaVola/Fly Me" is a new feature machinima by the Italian director Berardo Carboni (Shooting Silvio - now distributed by 20th Century Fox ).
The project is currently in production in the virtual world of Second Life.
VolaVola is a project for the making of 2 movies from the same script, a first draft in progress is shot entirely inside Second Life with the innovative technique of machinima and will be an animation movie; the other will be made mostly in the real world with traditional technologies and players in flesh and bones. The animated version will not only be the extraordinary storyboard of the movie but will have its own dignity, the two projects will be indeed strictly connected.
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Volavola is about the relationship between man, happiness and time, it’s about emotions getting weak and the need not to get lost in habits, the need to keep searching, it’s also about the natural decline of love and the need to protect it, to keep it alive.
VolaVola investigates how it gets more and more difficult to determine what is real and what is fake. In the two movies indeed we will find at the same time real avatars and real people will act just acting themselves and fantasy characters.
Volavola’s main them is the values of digital society as an important human heritage analysing it from a sociological (although vaguely surreal) point of you, and not from a futuristic one, and considering them as one of the few things to protect in order to make the world a better place to live.
Volavola takes place in the real world, in Rome, where, as everywhere now, more and more often it happens to bump into places and people from another universe.
The second movie, shot thorugh machinima and where avatars act, is intended for niche but popular on a global scale, it will be broadcasted in Second Life cinemas, in streaming on the Internet, as attachment of new technologies and new trends magazines and TV channels with compatible contents.
The movie shot with actors in flesh and bones and traditional technology is intended for a wider audience and is designed to follow a classic distribution route.
See:
SYNOPSIS
Volavola is a choral story which tries to describe the different aspects of contemporary life by comparing lifestyles, feelings and world views of three different generations.
As the story goes on, the main characters’ events, apparently unrelated at first, link so much with each other to eventually belong to the same family. The three main stories are about Ugo and Francesca, Annalisa and Carlo and Matteo and Sofia.
Ugo and Francesca grew up into a world which seems so far away now, where media used to have no central role in consciences growth and the definition of needs; they live present life but they are deeply confused, filled with a deep sense of nostalgia; they keep looking for a new balance and a new harmony. But they might be lost forever.
Annalisa and Carlo grew into the showbiz and they need to be part of it, to be good-looking and famous forever as in soap operas. Annalisa is a well-known journalist; she is not so young any longer and cannot accept the idea of time going by, leaving evident marks on her body. Carlo is younger than her, but he is not famous yet. Carlo and Annalisa need each other but misunderstandings, their selfishness and their craving for success drag their story in a growing spiral of madness.
Matteo and Sofia are growing now, in the Internet era, they feel distant from the models of the past; they express their identity through new instruments; their future is hopeful and uncertain at the same time: it is difficult for them to sort their dreams without models and reference points. Their story remains suspended in a dreamlike atmosphere, culminating in a no longer linear time and space, as it always happens in dreams, myths and in pure happiness moments.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
IEEE Spectrum Tech Alert - 20 November 2008
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Tuesday, December 9, 2008
IHT.com Article: Visualisation. New tools to help with information overload
New tools to help with information overload
By Alice Rawsthorn International Herald Tribune
Monday, December 8, 2008
Image Slide Show: http://www.iht.com/slideshows/2008/12/05/arts/design8.1.php
What would tell you more about a city? A geographic map that identifies the buildings, roads, rivers and so on? Or one that gauges how people feel about the city by recording their emotional responses as they move around it?
No contest. The second map would say much, much more about what it's like to be there, which is why the British designer, Christian Nold, has devised a series of Emotion Maps of San Francisco, Paris and other cities. For the San Francisco version, he combined the finger cuff sensors used in police polygraph tests with a global positioning system to monitor the instinctive responses of 98 people as they walked around the Mission District. His guinea pigs then explained why they'd felt happy, sad, angry or whatever in various places, and if their reaction was triggered by something they'd just seen, or memories of past experiences.
Nold's Emotion Maps are examples of the design process known as visualization, which uses advanced software to illustrate complicated data so that we (that's the 99.99 percent of us without doctorates in applied mathematics) can understand it. Visualization comes in the form of still images, moving ones and three-dimensional models that depict elusive, often abstract phenomena such as the movement of Internet traffic, scientific theories or a city's emotional landscape. If you spot an elaborate information graphic in a newspaper or magazine, that may well be an example of visualization too. At a time when we are bombarded with more and more information of increasing complexity, visualization, or "viz" as it's called for short, is fast becoming one of the most exciting areas of design.
Visualization was a key theme of Design and the Elastic Mind, the landmark exhibition on the relationship of design with science and technology held earlier this year at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. It is also featured in "Data Flow," a new book published by Gestalten, and the "Native Land, Stop Eject" show now on at Fondation Cartier in Paris. In that exhibition, the philosopher Paul Virilio and the filmmaker Raymond Depardon explore the tragedy of enforced emigration. They collaborated with a team of visualizers led by the U.S. architecture group, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, to create stunning visual analyses of its causes and impact on different communities
There's one simple reason why visualization is becoming so important, and that's our desire to understand what's happening in the world at a time when it's becoming harder and harder to do so. "Design always moves where it is needed most," said Paola Antonelli, curator of Design and the Elastic Mind, who is now working on a major visualization project. "The surge in computing power has generated a surge in information output, and heated up interest in visualization design."
Helping us to decipher information has always been an important role for design. Some of the greatest design projects of the 20th century did exactly that: from the diagrammatic London Underground map designed by Harry Beck in 1931 to enable passengers to find their way around an over-crowded transport system, to the cyclogram, a visual diary produced by Georgi Grechko of the 90-day flight of the Soviet Salyut 6 spacecraft in 1979.
The challenge of presenting information clearly has become more difficult as the volume of data has exploded, and new types have emerged. Traditional design formulas, like graphs and pie charts are fine for interpreting facts, but not for illustrating the complexities of contemporary life such as population shifts or the structure of an online social network. A new type of imagery was needed to depict their subtleties and fluidity. Cue visualization.
Producing visualization required the development of new tools capable of analyzing huge quantities of complex data, and interpreting it visually. In the forefront is Processing, a software system devised by the American designers, Ben Fry and Casey Reas, to enable computer programmers to create visual images, and designers to get to grips with programming. "Processing is a bridge between those fields," said Reas. "Designers feel comfortable with it because it enables them to work visually, yet it also feels familiar to programmers."
The original version of Processing has been used by tens of thousands of people to create everything from teaching aids for schools to animations for bands like R.E.M. and Radiohead. The number of people using it has doubled every year for the last three years, and seems set to increase again following the launch last month of a more sophisticated version, Processing 1.0.
Processing and other types of visualization software also encourage people from different disciplines to work together, at a time when collaboration is increasingly important in creative fields like design. "Visualization is not simply an evolution of graphic design, but a complete and complex design form that requires spatial, narrative, synthetic and graphic sensitivity and expertise," explained Antonelli. "That's why we see so many practitioners - architects, product designers, filmmakers, statisticians and graphic designers - flocking to it."
They've also flocked because of the explosion of demand for visualized imagery. The chief catalyst has been the Internet and the emergence of thousands of Web sites dedicated to crunching and decoding information. Seeing visualization online has made the rest of us more receptive to its use in newspapers and magazines. At the same time, our exposure to the Internet, video games and the arsenal of visual imagery that bombards us each day has made us more visually sophisticated, and keener to decipher complicated information visually, rather than in words or numbers.
Take a scientific question like the genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees. Would you prefer to plough through an essay on the subject, or to glance at the visualization created by Fry in which the 75,000 letters of coding in the human genome form a photographic image of a chimp's head? Virtually all of our genetic information is identical, and Fry highlights the discrepancies by depicting nine of the letters as red dots. No contest again.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
CfP: World of Warcraft and Philosophy
Title: World of Warcraft and Philosophy
Editors: Luke Cuddy and John Nordlinger
[http://www.neo-philosophy.com/WoW%20CFP.html]
Abstracts are sought for a collection of philosophical essays related to World of Warcraft (WoW). While the focus of the book will be WoW, we would like to extend the possible themes covered to other MMORPG games in general such as Everquest, Ultima Online, Lineage, Runescape, etc.
This volume will be published by Open Court Publishing (the publisher of The Simpsons and Philosophy, The Matrix and Philosophy, and The Undead and Philosophy, etc.) as part of their successful Popular Culture and Philosophy series. Recently, Open Court published The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy, edited by one of the current editors. We are seeking abstracts, but anyone who has already written an unpublished paper on this topic may submit it in its entirety. Potential contributors may want to examine other volumes in the Open Court series.
Please feel free to forward this to anyone writing within a philosophic (or philosophically-inclined) discipline who might be interested in contributing.
Possible Topics Include (but are not limited to):
Questing and Friendship
Guilds and Community
Meeting game play friends in real life
Identity Creation (via avatar)
Gender/Sexist Roles
Why do classes matter?
Regional Contrasts (Chinese vs. US experiences)
Politics: Alliance vs. Horde (“us” vs. “them”)
The learning of virtual skills and abilities
Economic/monetary system
Gold Farming and Other Revenue Pursuits
Ethical issues (e.g., should honor be measured in points?)
Emergent gameplay
Emerging Dialects
Resurrection
The power of game addiction
Levels of Freedom
Is there really a difference between the real world and Azeroth?
Security and privacy
WoW and Creativity: music, fan art, virtual community
Cultural Influences and Crossover (South Park, Watch the Guild)
Contributor Guidelines:
Abstract of paper (100–750 words)
Resume/CV for each author/coauthor of the paper
Submissions must be by e-mail with MS Word attachment
Submission Deadline: Currently open until January 5th, 2009 (our initial decisions will be made around this date, with papers received afterwards being considered on an as-needed basis).
Email Submissions to:
lcuddy12@gmail.com
johnnord@microsoft.com
Editors: Luke Cuddy and John Nordlinger
[http://www.neo-philosophy.com/WoW%20CFP.html]
Abstracts are sought for a collection of philosophical essays related to World of Warcraft (WoW). While the focus of the book will be WoW, we would like to extend the possible themes covered to other MMORPG games in general such as Everquest, Ultima Online, Lineage, Runescape, etc.
This volume will be published by Open Court Publishing (the publisher of The Simpsons and Philosophy, The Matrix and Philosophy, and The Undead and Philosophy, etc.) as part of their successful Popular Culture and Philosophy series. Recently, Open Court published The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy, edited by one of the current editors. We are seeking abstracts, but anyone who has already written an unpublished paper on this topic may submit it in its entirety. Potential contributors may want to examine other volumes in the Open Court series.
Please feel free to forward this to anyone writing within a philosophic (or philosophically-inclined) discipline who might be interested in contributing.
Possible Topics Include (but are not limited to):
Questing and Friendship
Guilds and Community
Meeting game play friends in real life
Identity Creation (via avatar)
Gender/Sexist Roles
Why do classes matter?
Regional Contrasts (Chinese vs. US experiences)
Politics: Alliance vs. Horde (“us” vs. “them”)
The learning of virtual skills and abilities
Economic/monetary system
Gold Farming and Other Revenue Pursuits
Ethical issues (e.g., should honor be measured in points?)
Emergent gameplay
Emerging Dialects
Resurrection
The power of game addiction
Levels of Freedom
Is there really a difference between the real world and Azeroth?
Security and privacy
WoW and Creativity: music, fan art, virtual community
Cultural Influences and Crossover (South Park, Watch the Guild)
Contributor Guidelines:
Abstract of paper (100–750 words)
Resume/CV for each author/coauthor of the paper
Submissions must be by e-mail with MS Word attachment
Submission Deadline: Currently open until January 5th, 2009 (our initial decisions will be made around this date, with papers received afterwards being considered on an as-needed basis).
Email Submissions to:
lcuddy12@gmail.com
johnnord@microsoft.com
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