These last few days I read some articles about 3D printing in major mainstream publications. Talking about ‘mixed realities’, 3D printing fascinates me as it seems to make it so easy to translate digital constructs into physical ones, or physical ones (through scanning) into digital ones and than back into… Continue reading
There is a new kid in the town of the virtual environments: Cloud Party. I visited the place regularly since Wagner James Au posted about it a few weeks ago on New World Notes. He explains: Cloud Party is a new 3D virtual world on Facebook now in open Beta… Continue reading
I just finished reading William Gibson’s Distrust that Particular Flavor. Gibson is the man who gave us the notion of ‘cyberspace’ in his 1982 story “Burning Chrome” and popularized by his 1984 novel Neuromancer. Here is his formulation of “cyberspace” in Neuromancer: Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate… Continue reading
Professor Henry Jenkins published the second part of his interview with his colleague Beth Coleman about avatars and the x-reality (the thing we live in when we constantly switch back and forth from digital space to what we used to call the ‘real world’). I also read Coleman’s book Hello… Continue reading
Over at the Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) A Virtual Worlds, Games and Education Tour people seem to have a really great time. I’m just lurking at their P2PU site, but go there too and have a look at pictures about the game EVE Online which is a a player-driven,… Continue reading
These last few days were very rich in eye-opening news events and posts – enabling us to get a better view on fundamental changes in media and technology. An overview: [<a href=”http://storify.com/mixed_realities/where-is-your-avatar-anyway” target=”_blank”>View the story “Where is your avatar, anyway? ” on Storify</a>]
There is a true explosion going on in open online learning. I don’t know whether it’s always “massive” as in Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), but anyway, there is a lot happening out there. I don’t have statistics about how many projects there are, nor about the total number of… Continue reading
There is something strange going on with virtual worlds. MixedRealities used to focus heavily on worlds such as Second Life, but these days less so as I no longer think that Second Life is “the future of the internet”. It’s an interesting niche product, but not about to go mainstream,… Continue reading
I just bought the Kindle edition of Net Smart, Howard Rheingold‘s new book, published by the MIT Press. I participated in various of Howard’s courses: one about literacies of cooperation, another one about mind-amplifying tools, and now I’m involved in a collaborative project facilitated by Howard aimed at creating a… Continue reading
Welcome to another episode in which I post about my strange journey through the Wonderland of online courses. Last week I had a most wonderful session of the Digital Awakening course in Second Life: we discussed professor Sherry Turkle’s fascinating text Video Games and Computer Holding Power, and we also had… Continue reading