zZz is playing: Grip
I got sent this link to a live shoot of a one-take videoclip, part of the opening of 'Nederclips' at the Stedelijk Museum in Den Bosch. Brilliant:
YouTube and the U.S. presidential elections
Did you ever think you would read YouTube and the U.S. presidential elections in one sentence?
I was just planning to watch a little bit of the first CNN/YouTube Debate, which was replayed this morning. But just after the first minute I knew I was going to be hooked.
Any face-off among the Democrats’ presidential hopefuls would be interesting enough with all the issues hounding the Bush administration, but it wasn’t really the candidates that made me continue watching. It was the voters.
A new EvE in TV: Online game has it's own weekly show
As if the Online gaming universes weren't cutting far enough into TV time, one now has it's own TV show. EvE TV for the game EvE-Online records in a professional studio and then narrowcasts through the web using at 1000k using Flash.
Last week I was invited to appear on EvE-TV, as "Serenity Steele" (my Avatars name in the game). EvE TV uses Jalipo for pay-to-view, on demand, streaming video up to 1000k. Jalipo lets the content creator choose the fee, region restrictions etc. Content creators pay fees for hosting and earn revenue from viewers. Internet Narrowcasting has the added benefit of fast and convenient feedback and reviews in the same medium.
Fortunately, by registering your email address you get 200 J-Credits, which is about 40 minutes free;
- Visit the current episode 4
- Click on 500k (or something) for speed
- Sign-up + click on the link in your email for 40mins free. No credit card equired.
By using the slider bar, you can to skip to the 11 minutes of me *cough* I mean highlights (I guess not everyone gets 15!):
09:16 ISS Alliance in EvE-Online (Independent Public Share Offering etc.)
15:17 Alliance News (What goes on in the MMO)
18:30 EvE Maps and Statics (Why ranking statistics are important for online communities)
Why is EvE-Online interesting from a Web 2.0 perspective?
EvE-Online is unique as a virtual universe because it has a single universe of 200,000 players with typically 30,000 players online simultaneously. By comparison, World of Warcraft (WoW) has no more than 10,000 online at the same time in one universe of 40,000 players, despite having hundreds of such universes. EvE Online's large universe size leads to entirely different social dynamics (think city social dynamics versus the town social dynamics of WoW), including the possibility for the actions of 1 person to effect 200,000 - which is news worthy.
Emotional interfaces
There are some pretty interesting developments in human-computer interaction and interactivity concerning emotions.
One is the growing initiative in trying to measure the emotional impact of the web, one of the key topics in the CHI-Nederland organised conference that the EA (Experience Architecture Team) attended about a week ago. The speaker, Marco van Hout proposed that since Web 2.0 has shifted the focus from information to experience, companies should also start looking into measuring the emotional impact of Web 2.0 experiences. He presented the LEMTool (Layered Emotional Tool), which was developed for use on a company's website, product or environment. The LEMTool will enable organisations to gain more insights on the emotional experience and incoporate the results in the design process.
The second one - which I personally find more interesting and more relevant -- is about NPCs (non-player characters in games) as emotional interface.
I came across a presentation of Mark Meadows (a.k.a pighed – portrait artist, writer, engineer, developer, gamer, owner of an avatar company, 'leads designers into burning buildings and lead them out again'), wherein he talks about the role of non-playing characters (NPCs) in mediating and measuring emotions. His basic conclusion is:
“Because humans are emotional animals, we must interface with emotional machines.
The next step is to combine existing technologies and interweaving those into new stories and interface.”
Keywords: NPC,games,emotions,HCI,Web,2.0,interface,interactive,narrative,humans
