Group Model Tasks

Following our studio meeting today, here are the task assignments:

Jacob: Boundary map, contours, roads & footpaths
Kimberley: The stack vent & the Eastern Distributor tunnel
Jules: Vegetation, street furniture/power lines, solar data
Jodi: Terraces adjacent to the southern boundary, Russell's building
Vinh: Palace Hotel, Moore Park "pointy bit" on southern side of intersection
Noa: Purple building
Jason & Dennis: Buildings on the western side of the laneway (split this between yourselves)
Fruz: Antique shop & other buildings on eastern side of intersection, photography

Make sure you've got your information before next Thursday, as that's when we'll be meeting to do the modelling. Also, if you still aren't acquainted with Solid Works, make sure you get some time in with the tutorials before Thursday so you don't run out of time and let the team down.

We'll have the laptops booked for Thursday, and on Friday we'll be putting the model together first thing. I'll make sure I've got mine done before Thursday, so that you can all work off a common base map in Solid Works. Post any questions or issues as comments for this post.

More signs of WoW culture

The Sydney Morning Herald is picking up a story written by the New York Times, that compares World of Warcraft to Star Trek in terms of cultural impact. wow.

I think WoW is fundamentally different to Star Trek, in terms of fan culture. For one, WoW is more about team and character building than it is about collectables and idolisation. As with all computer systems however, the fundamental problem is that most people have to sit at a computer to take part. What if WoW could enrich going to the shop, or going to school? I'm not talking about home schooling here - I'm talking about transfer of culture. We all use social networking websites, they add a rich layer of communication to the social networks we have in the physical world. Why can't games like WoW add a rich layer to our physical lives too? Why can't we benefit more from the things gained in games?

EDIT: Maybe telectroscopes can be used to connect the physical and game world.

"When the sun illuminated the lens of the Telectroscope next to the Thames, it was, of course, still nighttime in New York. So the screen inside the scope broadcast back only an empty sidewalk silently framed by the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline.

But then something miraculous occurred.

A police officer and a street cleaner walked into the frame. Stopped. And waved."

EDIT: This youTube clip shows that you can play virtual soccer without sitting at a console. Maybe you can play WoW similarly without sitting at a console...



EDIT: Other directions for enriching reality with digitality include the new IPhone, and CitySense. The IPhone incorporates a good interface, can sense which way you're pointing it, has GPS, fast internet and an ever-increasing amount of grunt for games. Most of all, like the IPod it will probably attract the whole range of community. CitySense takes that platform to another level, effectively turning real life activities of the mobile phone toting masses into an intelligent "discovery application" capable of leading us to what we want to do, rather than where we want to go.


Blackberries tell us things [DMNews]
IPhones are only going to get more awesome [BusinessWeek]
Telectroscopes: telescopes through the world [CNN]
How some guy kicked the WoW habit [SMH]

Health Is Not Lonely

I think we mostly knew this already. Pretty much everything we do fits into our social sphere, and any addictions we have are likely to be found in our friends too. This can be a good thing and a bad thing, and it depends entirely on the mentality of your social setting. If your friends are gun ho on doing crazy shit, you're probably going to want to go along with them or get new friends. Alternately, if your friends all decide they all want to fix something in their lives, and make a go of it as a group, you have a greater support structure in place if you decide to be part of that effort to (for instance) quit smoking.

Yes, according to the New York Times (so you know it's true)

"Smokers tend to quit in groups... which means smoking cessation programs should work best if they focus on groups rather than individuals. It also means that people may help many more than just themselves by quitting: quitting can have a ripple effect prompting an entire social network to break the habit."

I suspect that this principle applies to almost any aspect of human health. This links into Fruzi's post about community health clubs. In this context, Christopher Alexander's model can be broadened to deal with any addiction or trend we see as negative in the community, and possibly even to detect illnesses lurking beneath the surface. We've become a very transient people, and the neighbourhood we grew up in may not be the one we will spend even the next 10 years in. As such, local issues change too quickly to relocate specialised healthcare whenever the community demographic changes.

A community health club should be a platform for self directed health rather than a static formula. It should enable people to address things in their lives, bring their friends along (maybe make new friends), and to do so in a setting where support and consultation is available from people who are experienced or qualified to give good advice. It should encourage participants to bring their own time and effort into the arena, so that we can have a Wikipedia/Facebook/Flickr solution rather than a Britannica solution.


Big Social Factor in Quitting Smoking [New York Times]

Ex3 Position Statement

The site during the day lives on the boundary between the explorative, the realm of texture, taste, fragrance, sounds – and the peripheral, that of driving past without noticing anything other than the slight chill down the spine, as the ominous smoke stack spewing out its filth looms briefly overhead.

While the various scales and movements around the site exhibit a split world, still more subtle is the disconnect between wildly different pedestrian identities that inhabit the area. There is the drunk who wakes up in the shadow of narrow back lanes, or on the doorstep of a young family’s heritage terrace. There are the groups of subversives who graffiti everywhere and anywhere, in an attempt to extend their ownership over a place already mired by signage posted by the “official” owners of buildings. There is the social shadow cast over every local by the Eastern Distributor ventilation stack, on a site owned by the RTA and distinguished by its inhabitability. Clearly, the site is distinguished by cultural silos.

Far below the surface is a stream of cars, most active in the periods marking sunrise and sunset. The arrival of accompanying smog is the most widely relevant output of the site; it is the opening and closing act of the site’s daytime drama.

Pollution spewed from the site itself sits in watch over the silos of human activity. It broods, watches, infects. The brooding, the space, the melancholy of the activity that occurs is the inhabitant, is the character of the site. One feels that the site, the bricks and mortar, sand and cement may be built on, but the character of the site, the one that exists there at this time will not be shattered, will not change. One feels that it will move, walk down the footpath to the alleys and back lanes of Surrey Hills, stand up the sign of no trespassing once again and continue on uninterrupted with its life.

The work of high power simulations these days is a reconfiguring of player positions, finding ways to enable collaboration of personified identities – teams, organisations, matter. In embodying the perceived meaning of these identities, we hope that such identities can be dealt with rather than overlooked.


Experiment brief [RussellLowe.com]

Commuters are Like Sheep

This is a little random, but I believe right on topic. The Sheep Market is a project paid for by Amazon and made using Processing (P5). I was involved in the Processing community a while back, when P5 was still in alpha release.

In the Sheep Market, there are so many sheep that the cumulative effect is awesome. Each sheep was created by a different random person through a webpage, and when you click on one you can see an animation of the sheep being drawn. Everyone draws a sheep differently. There are 10,000 sheep in all, each a mini story. After watching a couple of sheep being drawn, that cumulative effect becomes even more awesome because all of a sudden you're staring at a huge library of human character studies instead of a huge library of crude drawings.

When you approach the project site, the cumulative effect of all the cars is also awesome - though in a different way. The stream of cars is alienating, for a variety of reasons. And because you can't pick one up and see the character in each, you can't really deal with the reasons you're being alienated. There's no way to see the value in all those people and machines. It's just too random.

10,000 sheep at $0.02 each [The Sheep Market]
Processing, initiated by Ben Fry and Casey Reas [processing.org]

Unreal Reference

I've been on the hunt lately for good, thorough UT3 reference manuals. Here are a couple good sites which I've had a quick look through. It seems obvious that there is editing, and then there is editing:


A complete kismet reference by the makers of the platform [EpicGames]
Details of something which I very much want to get into: UnrealScript [utwente.nl]
Unreal Wiki [beyondUnreal]
Unreal Developers Forum [beyondUnreal]
A pretty huge list of tutorials all over the web [IceCreamYou]
Player-specific kismet [Epic Forum thread]
Exporting from Max [PlanetUnreal] [waylon-art]


Btw Russell, we were talking about the ability to pull stuff into and out of the internet while in gameplay... At a glance, it looks like the LibHTTP library in UnrealScript might enable it.

This post on the forum looks very interesting, particularly in light of architectural workflow. Imagine if you could meet an engineer in the UT3 model of a building you're designing, while inside the VM collaboratively modify the building's elements, and then have that communicated back to your drawings or BIM.

Serious Non-Games for Girls

Ok, it doesn't shock me that women are alienated by most of the games out there. Women in game development are probably like women in architecture - sorely and bizarrely lacking, for the most part. And yet... I cant bring myself to take seriously a game called "Coolest Girl in School". Apparently it was however nominated for 4 awards at an Australian industry association event.

"Coolest Girl in School is the world's first mobile role-playing game made specifically for girls and the potential audience is huge... Well over half (60%) of casual mobile gamers are women but very few games are made specifically for female audiences."

I think this links in with my post on game mashups:

"until we (women) start making games ourselves there is no way we will be able to see representations on screen that we can recognise and identify with. We need to start making a generation of games that women want to play and get them excited about creating their own content"

Game Girls [Sydney Morning Herald]