Survival Research Labs at Fringe Exhibitions, LA…
New SLR! Saturday, January 21, from 6 – 8 PM in LA. “This exhibition will feature the newest addition to the SRL machine family- the Sneaky Soldiers- near life sized, remote controlled army of revolutionaries. Also included in the exhibition will be large-scale documentary images, and the premier of the video from SRL’s recent show in Downtown Los Angeles. This video features the first invasion of the Sneaky Soldiers. The SRL commentary on the art of war debued a Sneaky Soldier emerging from an 18-foot tall wooden Trojan horse to face danger from large-scale destructive robots enduring the pain of flame and damage through a hail of sparks and projectiles.” [via] Link.
Derek writes “The gumbrix came about because so many of my robot projects required the kind of rapid prototyping that Lego really excels at, yet required more in the way of control electronics than Lego was capable of. With a maximum of 3 motors and 3 sensors, the Mindstorms kit was not really capable of the more complicated control strategies that I was interested in.” [
Fanjita writes – “Just a small thing, really, but I’ve ported my Tetris game to the GTA exploit, and have it running on a v2.50 PSP. There’s a small technical glitch that means it doesn’t run yet on v2.60, I hope to sort that out ASAP, before I release a version that will run on any firmware that can run GTA. So – no release yet, but it’s imminent. As well as being the first homebrew game for v2.5 and v2.6, it will also be a good test of the improved GTA loader that will be used to launch the EBOOT loader. Sadly at the moment this is still for US and EU versions of GTA only, my attempts so far with the German version haven’t worked correctly, but I hope to change that soon.” [
Amazing video of an RCX robot using vision command (or a derrivative) to play pong on a real screen. Jmarco writes: “I have designed a Mindstorm Robot who plays Pong game. It have a Webcam, and it’s controled through Infrared with the laptop computer. There is not trick. It truely plays itself!” [
The BBC has an excellent video (I could only get the Real Player version to work however) of virtual worlds, what people are making and how they’re making -real- money – “When it comes down to it, avatars – online characters – project your ideals and fantasies before you’ve had time to think of them. Which is what’s making online virtual worlds one of the hottest business propositions of dotcom boom Mark II.” 
Bonlebon writes in about the arcade cabinet he built – “My Mame cabinet, the Procrastination Station. Time from deciding to do it until finished project: about 6 months. Money spent: way too much. It was a lot of fun though. I still have a few things to finish up, but it’s definately playable.” Nice work! 
Wow, great news – now I can keep track of the stuff I want to do in the virtual world – “Web-based event-management service Eventful has opened a public portal to the strange goings-on inside virtual world Second Life. The Second Life Event calendar, formerly hidden from non-residents, is now indexed regularly by Eventful, which listed over 1600 searchable virtual happenings last month alone and expects to index about 400 events daily. Virtual-world residents can travel directly to event locations via Eventful by clicking an embedded link in each entry containing exact coordinates. Event-listings, which are updated regularly, can be subscribed to in iCal and RSS format.” [