Imagine this- a full immersive 3D world where people from remote locations can share and collaborate ideas… and they can blow each other up. I am not a vidoe gamer but can very much appreciate the novelty, originality, and sheer sarcastic fun of This Spartan Life, or how it is billed, “A Talk Show in Game Space”.
Your host, Damian Lacedaemion, sporting a camouflage full body armor and range of high powered weapons, is using a commercial multiplayer game to invite special guests in for discussions of life, music, art, society as the characters leap about the typical post apacolyptic environment of machinery and blown up buildings, and of course, shooting.
The guests thus appear in this environment, walk, fly, jump, shoot around, and have conversations, which are all recorded and made available in a series of episodes in QuickTime and Windows Media formats.
Now before you go and dismiss this as fluff, listed to module 3, an interview with Bob Stein, the visionary behind Voyager Multimedia, as Bob and “Damian” talk about the future of the book (see module 3). Bob is wearing the magenta shiny metal armor.
One subtle note is in the comments early on:
One difficulty with trying to transfer these places into communal space is just the number of weapons around… they’re hard to avoid!
So the question is, can people follow along and pay attention to the interesting dialogue here and not be distracted because all of the things going on in this world are not directly related to the main topic? Later Bob talks about the future of books:
I’ve been thinking about how books will evolve over time– and when I use the word book, I am using iot metaphorically, not the objects, but the vehicle humans use to move heavy ideas around. And that vehicle is shifting from page to screen…
The book of the future will be networked and it will not be frozen. They’ll change over time rather rapdily… The problem becomes how does an editor make navigating among such a large data space useful?…
But I’m sitting here watching this and seeing there is a third component= one is rich media, another is that it is networked and not frozen, and the third is… how to navigate in 3 dimensional data space…
To be able to walk around inside a “book” this way will be brilliant.
Even if you do not like games, cannot see their appeal, you cannot help but be taken back by the originality of using a networked 3D game space for “community activity” (sans the shooting). What other ways other than talk shows can this format be exploited? Play this, open your mind, and think.
A tip of the blog hat to hip cool faculty Shelley Rodrigo at Mesa Community College for sending me the link (Shelley, you need a blog!)
well, if they take out the guns, at least leave the students with spitballs or something…
3d spaces, complete with voice, have been around for a while. Unforturnately the VRML community implementations tend to center around PC platforms. The Blaxxun community is pretty rich — and their servers are pretty expensive — but you can still find some floating about .. http://www.oddessey.org is one of the free ones where you can create a free account and log into a 3d world.
No guns. Some possibilities for shared-object perceptions … but again .. the downside is the plugin ONLY works on PC’s (and only in IE or IE-clones — the twerps).