The talk mentioned is below:

Now the new explanation includes not only the level of realism of the visual elements, but also the relation to the narrative, and with all due respect, I don’t think that’s helpful either. Thing is: I wasn’t creeped out by The Polar Express, or any other animated movie ever, and I really don’t think Polar Express (or the newly featured Tintin movie) look particularly realistic either. I recently played L.A. Noire, which looks and feels much more realistic than any animated movie I’ve ever watched (or many other recent 3D titles, such as GTA 4, The Witcher 2, Skyrim, etc.) and that’s not because I’m controlling the action, but because they are more realistic. Heck, Tintin or Polar Express don’t even aim at being super-realistic, they’re fictional fantasy stories, one even based on a comic book series. If anything, they aim to be modern comic book movies.

In a talk that we recently featured here, Prof. Jeremy Bailenson discusses the uncanny valley shortly (at ca. 1 hours 7 minutes in) and describes it as a “mismatch between how realistic it looks, and how realistic it behaves”, which, in my book, is a much better explanation than “narrative” or just “magic”. As long as we don’t expect things to be realistic, there’s really nothing uncanny about them; or rather: As long as The Polar Express is a fictional story about a kid riding to the north pole in search of Santa, and acts like a kid in a fictional story riding to the north pole in search of Santa, and on top of that looks like a fictional character in a 3d animated movie, there’s really no mismatch there.

And while I was at it, I finally played a little more with Viewer 3 and took a look at what all that fuzz with Mesh is about, and fell down a rabbit hole and haven’t found my way back yet. I knew before that mesh would be a game changer. That is, I knew it conceptually, like you know that a federated network of interconnected grids (the hypergrid) will be a game changer. But after I uploaded my first mesh, it already changed the game for me:

Not only are meshes much more detailed and diverse than anything you could do with sculpts and prims, they are also much more ubiquitous, since we can start drawing from the non-SL 3D-community as well. There’s tons of resources of free 3D meshes on the web, which can easily converted to collada for use in OpenSim, and in addition to that, meshes can also be created more easily once you get the hang of some basic 3D software. So really, the metaverse of the coming years will look very different from the metaverse we know today.

The original speech can be found here:

I love Thirza’s blogs. Not because I’ve been featured on them at times, but because I really enjoy reading them. You don’t subscribe to someone’s RSS feed just because you’re curious if you’ll get featured, after all. Well, I don’t; maybe you do. Have a video.

STYLE NOTES

*Dress: ::VMC:: -  Sibelle – Blue
Shoes: [ glow ] studio -  Nite Nite Pumps silver
*Nails:  +:+WTG+:+  - **French** nail
*Hair: A&A - Melrosa Hair Blackberry
*Jewelry: Addiction – Rejoice Diamond Bracelet, Earrings, Necklace
Eyelashes: *REDGRAVE* -31- ExtraLong
Skin: Style by Kira - Emma Skin 01J
*Eyes: FASHISM -  ‘Sunrise’ Eyes – Azure (L)
*Poses: Purple Poses

We buried you in tiredness
Within the glassy water hall
Where you, forever yesterday
Shall wave at our daily stress.

We soldier on, from time to time
For nothing more, and even less
You dwell within our mind enshrined
While we, eternally, progress.

And rest, and what we’ll never find
We all have long since left behind
And all we see is from afar
How long you’ve been, how tired we are.

Slightly lower resolution on youtube:

This video is licensed under a creative commons non-commercial share-alike license. (Download)

Credits, as promised:

Years of Rice and Salt (cc-by-sa)
Yunus (cc-by-sa)
ТЕЛЬНЮК: Сестри (cc-by-nc-sa)
trustno1 (cc-by-nc-sa)

OpenSim
Linden Lab
Creative Commons
Hypergrid Business
AM Radio
Ina Centaur

Silk Dreams
WTG
Style by Kira
Purrfect 10
Fashism
Calico Ingman Creations
Alli & Ali
aDiva Couture
Finesmith Designs
Rockberry
siss boom
Logo & Kin
Earthstones
Vero Modero
Purple Moon
R.icielli
Essences
YS&YS
Fallen Gods
Barerose
Redgrave’s
Akeruka
Kalnins Footwear
Somnia
Addiction

Oglaf

STYLING NOTES

Gown: Elemiah Design – Moon – bodice, skirt, handbag
*Hair: A&A -  Mae Hair Lightbrown
Eyelashes: *REDGRAVE* -39- Luscious
*Jewelry and nails (including rings): FINESMITH – Isabella earrings, Necklace, Finesmith Metallic Nails
*Skin: Akeruka -  Kia 16 Tan
*Eyes: FASHISM – ‘Sunrise’ Eyes – Egyptian Blue (L)
*Poses: Purple Poses

(Background images for the pictures provided by: ecathe and Cybrea respectively…courtesy of Deviant Art.)

I recently got a tablet, or rather, what they nowadays call a tablet. It’s actually a portable computer which, other than a laptop, mainly consists of a touchscreen, which is both output and input device. I guess this description fits any tablet computer.

It’s a WeTab, marketed in other parts of the world as the ExoPC Slate. The first thing I did was, of course, play with it, and see what it can do. I’m lying, that’s of course not the first thing I did, but it makes for a better narrative. Truth be told, the first thing I did was research, looking into a lot of different tablets, what they can do, how they function, and which might be closest to what I really want to do with it. That’s the kind of process I go through with every major purchase (major being “more than 100 €”) I’m doing, and it’s surprisingly hard most of the time. I grew up in an era when computers were measured in MHz of CPU, and MB of RAM, and screen sizes of inches, and it was pretty easy to determine that your 486 DX2 66 was faster than someone’s 486 DX 40, and way faster than someone elses’s 386 33. Today, that’s not quite clear, as computers come in a myriad of configurations, and you’d need to look into every single one of them and weigh them against one another. What’s better, an ATI Radeon 5770 or an NVidia GeForce 340? Does the i3 really have that much more performance that it will justify to switch there from a core 2 duo? Would I even need it?

It gets worse when different OSs are involved, as these in themselves have up- and downsides as well. The iPad is cool, but there’s some really snappy Android tablets out there. What’s with that buss about the Samsung Galaxy tablets? It doesn’t help that clever marketing departments decided to treat new devices no longer as “computers”, but as if they’re some kind of species on their own. And I admit, I would’ve fallen for it, if I wouldn’t have heard about the WeTab early this year, when the iPad was all the rage, and the WeTab was announced as the “iPad killer” (just because it was one of the few products that was actually advanced enough to come out on the tablet market in time to rival the iPad). What the WeTab promised, was something different. It’s as if the manufacturer’s understood that there was no way they could compete with the iPad by offering just a tablet that was “like the iPad”, they sought to differentiate themselves from it by designing the WeTab diametrically opposite of the iPad. Instead of a closed system it could be tinkered with. Instead of offering little options for peripherals, it came with a standard SD slot, 2 USB ports and an HDMI port. And instead of running closed software, the WeTab OS was a Linux distro.

Now, I liked that, concept-wise, and when the WeTabs sold for around 300€ used on Amazon, I got one. This is where the playing around part started. I found that, since it was running Linux, I could indeed install any Linux application I wanted, which was some break from the marketplace/app store lock-in I’m used from other tablets and phones. But it was only when I changed the Operating System to Windows 7 that I understood that this tablet was in fact nothing special, or new, but just another computer, with a touchscreen. That, indeed, all tablets, smartphones, eBook readers, etc. are just computers.

So why aren’t we treating them as such? Why aren’t we using a smartphone the way we want to? Why can’t we just remove things like Carrier IQ by deleting them? Why can’t we install regular OSX applications on an iPad. Indeed, why does an iPad need its own OS at all? (The iOS is based on OSX anyway.)

It turns out, the answer is not technical, but the jumbled mess of politics/economics/marketing which dominates most of today’s inventions, but I’ll leave it to Mr. Doctorow to provide an answer here. Suffice to say that it made me determined to try to use devices which let me treat them as a general computational device and allow me to run and change the software and hardware I want to, on my own risk, of course. Sadly, that limits the options of devices severely. But then, at least there are options.