How does one create virtual worlds? I guess one extreme is to have developers consciously building worlds, planning and organizing everything in advance, allowing no content generated by the players themselves except maybe for the text chats and adventures they experience. The other extreme could be worlds which are almost… Continue reading
Such sadness. GigaOM, universally described as a ‘iconic tech blog’, shut down. They ‘recently became unable to pay its creditors in full at this time’. The blog, founded by Om Malik, tried to find a suitable business model. They organized expensive conferences and offered expert analysis. It proved to be… Continue reading
Some rather important news about virtual reality developments: it seems Oculus is getting some serious competition. -Playstation 4 VR Headset Project Morpheus could come to market in the second half of 2016. (Roadtovr) – Valve and HTC unveiled a very impressive system at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona. This… Continue reading
Bruce Sterling is a tremendously inspiring science fiction author, futurist, design thinker and cultural critic. Menno Grootveld and Koert van Mensvoort had a great interview on nextnature.net with him about Artificial Intelligence, the Technological Singularity and all things convergence of humans and machines. In this interview, Sterling explains in very… Continue reading
Imagine that you don’t have to search for each individual app, select it, then use it according to its own little system. Instead you would speak to your device (smart phone, watch, headset, whatever) using natural language, and the thing would do whatever you instructed it to do. You could… Continue reading
Lots of Second Life-people don’t like Minecraft. They consider it too primitive, too childish or whatever. I disagree, I think it’s a fantastic game helping young and not-so-young people all kinds of digital literacies. Joseph Flaherty Wired made me discover another game with Minecraft-like aesthetics, but with themed worlds which… Continue reading
Crazy times for virtual reality, or so it seems. ‘It’s the future’, people at Facebook say. Users will not only be able to experience immersive Facebook-experiences, but will also create them, Eric David posts on SiliconAngle. ‘Users’ means not just developer-types, but the average user. However, it is totally unclear… Continue reading
Don’t miss the latest episode of The Coode Street Podcast as it features author William Gibson. One of the topics is of course his latest book, The Peripheral, a story set in multiple futures. I guess ‘multiple futures’ sounds complex and the first part of the book is indeed bewildering…. Continue reading
These latest weeks have been quiet on MixedRealities. I had some holidays end of last year, and the new year was one hectic rush of news about terrorism, the war in Ukraine and the elections in Greece. I continued online studying, however I did not participate in any Massive Open… Continue reading
Dieter Bohn and Tom Warren at The Verge had an amazing mixed realities experience at Microsoft. They tried out the HoloLens, a headset that projects holograms into real space. They report about having Minecraft on a coffee table and about an amazing experience during which an engineer who was communicating… Continue reading