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chaotic.terrain is an exploration-motivated 3D game, in which a player finds himself or herself in a lush but deserted world. The world is a vehicle for and manifestation of a nonlinear story, which is an abstract interpretation of my mental/emotional "landscape" over the course of the project's life. A player must find and choose a path out of each of the five regions (each with distinct landscapes), and each choice made affects the appearance of the world and direction the story follows.

From the author's mouth, ladies and gentlemen. Now that's good blurb. To see some screenshots from chaotic.terrain, see our last post about it.

In the Kids Connect workshops, the kids from Amsterdam and New York will interact with each other in Second Life, the online virtual world.* Performance in SL has just started to take off -- last summer when I began planning a SHARE presence/performance inworld, there were only a handful of "performances", not including machinima -- with music, visual performance, both, and stranger things cropping up every month. From a new Pitchfork article on music in SL:

While touring remains the most reliable money-maker and merch-mover for indie bands, it's also a creaky, 19th century business model-- and a grueling way for new acts to reach new audiences. The internet helps bands save time and money in hundreds of ways, as they post their gig schedules, direct their online street teams, and stream and archive concerts for the folks who were too far away to attend. But what if artists could leap all the way into cyberspace-- where they could play one show to a worldwide audience, and practically for free? [...] [Astrin] Few [a SL musician] recalls that only a handful of performers played around Second Life until very recently-- he says the boom came this past January-- and new venues keep opening to handle the demand. His long-time patron Drift Monde, who runs three venues and an ampitheater, has helped many artists get started in Second Life, giving them a slot at her jazz club, the dockside stage, or the Lily Pad Lounge, which has a Wind in the Willows décor and frog-shaped chairs squatting around the stage. She's supported many new acts in Second Life, and she's also seen "a big jump in the last three months. Seems like every day there is someone new."

Read on. * It's like a massively multiplayer game, but it's not a game. Picture a vast 3D chatroom, full of personal websites -- except the websites are fantastical houses, malls and meeting places full of people with custom-designed skins, clothing and objets.

p.s.

My personal opinion on what constitutes a compelling performance in SL differs considerably from most.

Prospective students, hark! Pay heed. And otherwise pay attention. The Integrated Digital Media Institute will host a free workshop in Max/MSP, the graphical programming environment for audio and video performance, taught by Anton Marini, IDM grad student and Max/MSP wundermensch. Join us Thursday the 27th for this illuminating educational opportunity. Speaking of which, this workshop falls on the same date as the graduate info session for those considering a Master of Science in the Integrated Digital Media program. Stop by, see the lab, and talk to us about what this program can do for you and vice versa. Max/MSP workshop (sound and graphics) starting with an overview for newbies, and showcasing some recent developments for more experienced users 6:30-8:30pm 2nd floor of the Wunsch building [MAP] For more information, contact Carl Skelton Director, Integrated Digital Media Institute c/o Humanities and Social Sciences RH 701, 6 MetroTech Center Polytechnic University Brooklyn 11201 USA 718-260-4018

IDM grad student Mary Ann Benedetto has got together a working version of her thesis, which is a loosely narrative game built with the Torque game engine. It's a loosely narrative, chaotic landscape, populated with fragments of identity. From what I gather. What's amazing is the relatively short time it's taken from concept to demo. Torque does the heavy lifting for you so you can concentrate on creating a world. More screenshots from Mary Ann's game after the jump.

One very interesting branch* of the growing Internet of Things follows the potential for virtual representations of places and buildings to closely model and project forward their real life counterparts. Take the blueprints for, say, a new building on the Polytechnic campus, pull them into a 3d modelling program like Digital Project and pump the resulting model full of details about the building materials -- right down to the wattage of the bulbs in the bathrooms. Have the contractors specify the delivery dates for the supplies. Pipe the model to an open source game engine and you have a remarkably helpful visualization tool for the critical path of your construction. When the building is done and open, keep the model around and use it for maintenance (when are those bulbs estimated to burn out? Let's buy more). Open it up to the students and faculty: rather than hand out URLs on paper (paper! sheesh), just dip into the virtual campus and get the class readings from the professor's avatar. Peter Robertson, an IDM graduate student, is on his way to doing just that. Starting with the historic Wunsch building (once a church and station on the Underground Railroad), Peter is modeling the campus's buildings in Digital Project** and readying them for the Internet of Things. There are some screenshots of the Wunsch building in DP after the jump. * Or perhaps more accurately, group of cells in the blastocyst. ** One bit of interesting trivia about Digital Project is that it's based on CATIA, which was originally a program for modelling curved things like the wings of fighter jets. The first person to use it for architecture was Frank Gehry, whose wavy organo-metallic structures tend to look like, well, the wings of fighter jets.