Plugimi (Sascha Pohflepp)

More about our (Linda Kostowski’s aka realfakewatches and my) workshop/project at Ars Electronica 2007 – Export to World is a contribution to the Second City event in which lots of empty shops on Linz’s Marienstrasse will be transformed by numerous projects that focus on Second Life and its likes.

The biggest buzz about SL, and aruguably also what attracts many users and especially big corporations to it, is its economy and the fact that you can basically sell everything. Yet, it feels a bit strange that in this “metaverse” the paradigm of physical objects as commodities is being reproduced, or simulated in a way that is almost identical to how the first life works. When the Copybot made its brief appearance in SL, the outcry was enormous since many of the vendors felt that their business was endangered. But, was the copybot not only revealing that the things in SL are actually made of data and thus are susceptible to the same effects that music has been facing ever since songs could be digitalized?

The other funny thing is the actual kind of objects you can buy in SL. There are many people who try out their impressive scripted creations in the sandboxes, but there seem to be many more who just want to go to shops and equip their digital homes with food, couches and toilets. SL in many parts either feels like an infinite shopping mall or a residential area and the question why you would want just that in your second life when you could have anything imaginable hasn’t been really answered if this claims to be the new frontier of our world.

We want to comment on some of those aspects by exporting some items from Linden Labs’ digital environment into the physical world in the form of papercraft-models and see what happens. We bought a range of things for a couple L$ and we will hopefully also be able to help people to export their own items during the festival. However, the process as a whole turned out to be pretty work-intensive, especially with complex objects.

Here’s how it works – initially, you have to grab the actual data from SL. This is done through Michael Frumin’s awesome piece of software called OGLE which in turn plugs into GLIntercept. The combination of those two allows to capture the 3D-data and output it into a format readable by most modelling applications. – The imported scene looks very awkward and is encapsulated into some strange geometry which has to be cut away first. (There’s a vaguely eerie quality about those scenes, like being a ghost in Second Life. I remember that turning off clipping in Quake and leaving the map actually used to give me a similar feeling.) – After cutting free the wanted object, you have to re-texture the object with the images that OGLE also saves along and export it as a whole or its parts, depending on how complex it is. – To actually make papercraft-models, we are using a Japanese software called Pepakura Designer that can unfold three-dimensional models onto sheets of paper. Preparing the unfold can be a bit tricky and needs some massaging which we still are collecting experience in. – The result is a 2D object which is ready to be printed out and glued together to become a 3D object again, this time outside of the computer.

Our first exported object was a free donut and we actually only realized in the process that this is probably one of the most difficult shapes to unfold and glue, but anyway, it’s done. You can see some visual documentation of the process in this set on Flickr or behind the various links above.

Back from Tokyo. Was really wonderful. I need to go back as soon as possible, it’s just so much fun there that I just want to turn Wapanese. Took some photos too.

The Dislocate-symposium was very inspiring, you might want to take a look at the coverage on WMMNA. Buttons was exhibited in a tiny space and unfortunately the Agfa-button cracked on the second day. Wasn’t that bad since the camera still works, but I suppose that I have to make a button myself for the next exhibition – the 30-year-old plastic seems to be too brittle. I made two new cases and have documented the making to some extent, for anyone who might be interested.

Up next, after a week of vacation, will be a workshop at Ars Electronica in Linz, titled Export to World. Linda and I have been invited by Aram Bartholl to be part of the Second City-event, so we will be helping people make 3D-papercraft-models of objects that we will have selected and extracted from Second Life. More on that as it progresses.

You can now finally order watches with custom times over at realfakewatches. This means that for a few Euros more, you can choose a time which means something for you or someone else and we’ll lazer it for you.

Off to Denmark to talk about Blinks & Buttons at reboot in Copenhagen, which looks fantastic judging by the list of speakers. I got a dreadfully early slot on Friday as of now, but I’d be most happy to see you there.

Just a few notes about the very inspiring Mediamatic Hybrid World workshop a couple days ago. We’ve talked a lot about (and tried out) various location-based and presence services like Twitter and Jaiku and I’m beginning to see what the real benefits of those might be. I’ve actually started to use Jaiku (plugimi.jaiku.com), especially because I was very impressed by the aggregating-features that the service offers. By fetching one’s different traces (ie. RSS-feeds) from blogs, Flickr, etc. and contextualizing it with time and location-information from Plazes, it really succeeds in creating a kind of presence of that friend. The only downside is the fact that you still need a special Nokia phone and a data-flatrate to really use it the way it’s supposed to work. But, that’s probably a question of time and it’s easy to imagine how well it would work on Apples upcoming phone.

What needs to be stressed is the fact that the usual argument against Twitter and its likes (”And then I get messages from random people writing that they sit on the toilet, right?”) has very little validity since it’s actually your friends streams which you subscribe to. And, having an idea what they are presently doing might vastly change interpersonal relationships because the stream of information/awareness (ideally) is near-permanent (or, as permanent as the participants want it to be). Challenging to tell what the further implications of wide-spread use of such technologies will be. Jaiku’s Jyri Engeström argues that it would ultimately lead to greater honesty of such a Hyper-connected generation, bold statement.

What it certainly does is bring people closer together. In roughly two weeks of using it, it made me aware of two friends being around. Maybe we would have bumped into each other anyway, but the awareness that Jaiku created certainly made it more likely to happen. Connected to that are some thoughts from the workshop about how to deal with technology and serendipity. While thinking with Katharina about her project, it occurred to us that one of the things that especially location-based technologies do is to facilitate serendipity by creating awareness of friendly people spatially somewhat near. Question is of course, if we really want that.

One idea that came up was to use a phone (such as the Nokia N95) which would usually display the information on a map with you as the focal point as a kind of compass to visualize it in a more ambient and fuzzy way. When someone friendly appears in one’s vicinity, the phone would start to vibrate and turn until it is pointing in the friend’s direction, much like a compasses’ needle would point north.

This way, it would take some cognitive load off the user (currently, Jaiku-users are pretty focussed on their phone’s screen) but still facilitate serendipity to some extent. Unfortunately I missed the end of the workshop, but, awesomely, Katharina actually managed to build and present a prototype (see video!)

PDF (7,4 mb)

On my way to Amsterdam to attend Mediamatic’s Hybrid World Lab, giving lectures about Blinks & Buttons and map-mashups as well as helping the participants with their projects. After that I’ll be 4 days in Barcelona, to cover OFFF. Say hi if you’re around!

I’ve been a little submerged over the last days and will be for a couple more weeks. That is because I’ve been asked to join the design-team of a soon to be released mobile social networking system and was immediately sucked into the crazy start-up vortex.

It’s a neat system which partly is very close to the ideas behind Blinks & Buttons what makes it even more fun to develop. Plus, it’s very enjoyable to work on something that soon will be actually used by many people before switching back to thinking about more distant futures in October.