Using game technology to explore the "unreality" of virtual landscapes

Scalable City - a project by Sheldon Brown and Experimental Game Lab - creates environments, from urban to rural, via a data visualization pipeline.

Now Scalable City has opened at one of my favorite museums in the whole wide world, The Exploratorium in San Francisco. As you move through the interactive exhibit, you literally "paint" the flying landscape with highways, buildings, and automobiles. According to Sheldon's website, "Each step in this pipeline builds upon the previous, amplifying exaggerations, artifacts and the patterns of algorithmic process. The results of this are experiences such as prints, video installations and interactive multi-user games and virtual environments."

Here is the trailer...



In addition to exploring artistic opportunities arising from computer technology, Sheldon is Director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) where he is a Professor of Visual Arts and the head of New Media Arts for the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technologies (Cal-(IT)2).

Many thanks to Tezcatlipoca Bisiani for bringing this to my attention.

Jaymin Carthage gets the boot from Linden Lab for his "branch"

11:25am update: Per Jaymin Carthage himself (see third comment to this post), he just got his account back.

Via Tezcatlipoca Bisiani, I've just learned that Jaymin Carthage's Second Life account has been suspended for two weeks because of his "branch."



You may recall this story I ran on February 17, 2008: Jaymin Carthage's fast-propagating "Branch" - Scripting in the service of bodacious virtual nature, where I demonstrated Jaymin's "branch" that, once rezzed, self-replicates into a fractal - or tree - via some handy scripting.

Per Jaymin to Tezcatlipoca in an email, "Second Life upgraded their server code last night and it decided, in it's infinite wisdom, that something I was doing constituted a "Global Attack" and my account has been suspended for two weeks."

Tezcatlipoca commented, "Besides making interesting things, Jaymin used to run twice weekly script workshop classes. He's the complete opposite of someone you would want to ban. It makes me cranky they would do this. There are other people who are working on getting him reinstated, but in general it's a big question: I think we're all in Second Life to push the boundaries of the medium. If we can't do this without getting killed, it's not a lot of fun anymore... also, unless I'm wrong, the trees he built never existed on the mainland or in public areas, just the private sandboxes, so in short, it's possible to write code using the LL supplied tools, run it on your own land and get banned for it? I would dearly love to hear the official explanation."

Me, too.