Tuesday 16 October 2007

Thought Controlled Avatar

New World Notes: The Second Life of the Mind: The story behind the brain-to-SL interface

Great stuff!


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SL to USB Interfacing

Started playing around with the Velleman Components K8055/VM110 USB interface board. It gives you a variety of analog and digital inputs and outputs, and a .dll file so you can access the whole things very simply from C#. Built a first test rig and got SL to RL control going, next stop is RL to SL control - and then start finding some neat applications - possibly in the arts.

I'm posting videos of the progress on this to our YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/dadenmedia.


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Saturday 13 October 2007

Wikipedia API - still not there?

» Wikipedia API?

Like this blog muses, why isn't there a nice neat API to wikipedia. Will have to get one written.


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Friday 12 October 2007

Practice Based PhDs , or "So should Picasso get a PhD?"

Art res event reports: Exchange 2000

So should Picasso get a PhD?

"My practice based PhD training and subsequent work on practice based research proposals and projects followed the approach described by Douglas and Durling as outlined above. Therefore, I do not believe that Picasso should have been awarded a PhD, simply because he did not do one. Picasso was a high level practitioner and benefited greatly from the rewards of this.

In relation to Cubism for example, if Picasso registered for a PhD, articulated a research question or problem, described and analysed his methods, set his work in a wider context, identified and communicated his original contribution to knowledge, identified areas for further research, and successfully defended all of this at a viva voce examination then, yes give him a PhD. As he didn't, then don't. An honorary doctorate in recognition of services to the field is of course different and would be relevant in Picasso's case.

As During states the high level practitioner is not obliged do the above but the researcher is. The PhD is a training in how to do research therefore the research student should do all of the above to qualify for the award."

Interesting.


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SmartLab

::: SMARTlab Digital Media Institute :::


Going here a week Monday to do a Second Life demo. May even end up doing a PhD with them.


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Second Life hits 10m Registrations

Today in Second Life - Thursday 11 October, 2007 - Second Life Insider

We knew it was going to happen this week, so why did Linden Lab switching off the "# or registrations" status line on the log-on screen?


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Thursday 4 October 2007

Artificial General Intelligence

Artificial General Intelligence - Artificial Intelligence (incl. Robotics) Journals, Books & Online Media | Springer

Not a bad looking book from the contents. Even got a chapter by Pei Wang on NARS. Might pick it up - after waiting to see what comment is like on Robitron.


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Topincs Topic Map Editor

Topincs - Topic Maps Authoring and Storing

"My site is basically a Topic Map, so when I write articles, blog posts
and so forth, I'm also talking about stuff, pulling things together ;
http://shelter.nu/ I use my old xSiteable
(http://xsiteable.sourceforge.net/index.html) tool for this, but that
tool is getting hopelessly out of date (and I indeed have a modern
version or two somewhere on my machine somewhere).

Oh, in this article (http://shelter.nu/art-007.html) I have a
graphical representation (graph) of a kind of world-view that I
created through Topic Maps, although it's not integrated into the rest
of the site. Which I should, shouldn't I?"

- from Topic Map List


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OpenSim

Main Page - OpenSim

An open source/C#/Mono project to create an virtual worlds server. Currently at 0.4alpha!


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Two thin client SL browsers

New World Notes: Movable Metaverse: Japanese company creates 2nd Web-based Second Life browser

I've been playing with Katharine Berry's AjaxLife, but now a Japanese company has come up with Movable Life. And someone else is showing me an RL-SL messaging system tomorrow in SL. At least it means we can concentrate on the AI!


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Wednesday 3 October 2007

EU Framework 7 vs DARPA Grand Challenges

Biologically Inspired Intelligent Navigation System (BINSYS) %u2014 Ideal-ist

This is the sort of FP7 project that annoys me:

All of us are aware of the increasing rate of road accidents occurring everyday. Major advances in automobile engineering have provided us with good performance vehicles, but there is a lack of devices/systems that can reduce driver stress. We do have the provision of “Auto-Pilot” in airplanes to help reduce the stress of Pilot but, there has been no step towards providing the same or similar in motor vehicles run on road, where the rate of accidents are much more as compared to accidents in air.
So we propose to develop an Intelligent system that can help in navigation, reduce the driver stress and contribute to safer and more efficient driving."

In the US DARPA just puts up $2m in prize money and waits for someone from the private sector to achieve it!


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Tuesday 2 October 2007

Web in SL

Media on a parcel - Second Life Wiki

Just sitting in on the SLDEV meeting on web in SL. Looks like we'll get one HTML page per parcel by Christmas, and then mutiple media feeds, incl HTML per parcel in 2008 or so. No simple text-on-a-prim solution yet though :-(


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