The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for bikes, rockets, R/C vehicles, toys and other diversions.
Very soon, credit card companies and game makers will reward their customers who spend money in the real world using private label “rewards” credit cards. They will use gifts of virtual currency such as Blizzard’s World of Warcraft gold and Second Life’s Linden dollars. A special “News from the Future” from MAKE:Virtual. We’re a nation […]
Here are some photos and articles (so far) about Saturday’s “Mixed Reality” event. The low cost VR system(s) I built were there, used and demoed a lot. I’m pretty sure this was the first time a real world location was reproduced completely and then explored in the virtual world and the real world at the […]
uBrowser is an simple Web Browser that illustrates one way of embedding the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine into a standalone application using LibXUL. In this case, the contents of the page is grabbed as it’s being rendered and displayed as a texture on some geometry using OpenGL. You are able to interact with the page (mostly) normally and visit (almost) any site that works correctly with Firefox 1.5. Translation: Expect to see browser like Firefox in every virtual world really soon. [via] Link. I took a few screenshots, check’em out!
Alan Martin reports from last night’s virtual world event – “On January 18, 2006, Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, known for his work on Creative Commons and intellectual property rights in general, joined Lindens and residents alike in the world of Second Life for a discussion on what turned out to be a very wide range of topics. Professor Lessig talked about the future of SL, and how we must be careful not to take the path of overly restrictive IP rights. He even offered to consult with Linden Lab in the future on these matters, and said he would look into getting some members of congress to speak in SL as well. The event proceeded into a long string of questions from the audience, during which many interesting topics were brought up, many relating to SL and RL IP rights (and what distinction we can make between the two). Finally, the event ended with a Free Culture book signing featuring lines of patient residents waiting to get their autographed copies from virtual Lessig himself.”
James from RetroBlast writes “I am submitting three items all featured at RetroBlast in one way or another and all having to do with custom-built arcade cabinets. The three represent the best to the worst in arcade cabinet building.” James outlines the good, bad and ugly of making your own arcade cabinets – regardless of how these turned out, there are lot of things to learn from the approach many of the Makers took. I actually like some of the “ugly ones”…
“Chrysler in the Movies: Virtual Film Competition, a contest set to be launched Jan. 20. Entrants will create their own short film using capabilities built into Activision and Lionhead Studios’ “The Movies,” – [via] Link. They also report that 35,000 people have uploaded their films to Activision’s site since their launch. This is great: tons of user created content flowing out there with cool 3Ds. I’m tempted to try this out, but there seems to be a snag – any movie you make that has anything other 100% user-created content (which appears to be impossible according to the site Clickable Culture) is all owned by Activision and Lionhead films…
Brian has a great review of the Hasbro Zoombox! “When someone asked me recently about cool gadgets for holiday gifts, the Hasbro Zoombox was one of the items I mentioned. I didn’t think I’d buy one this year, though, but that was before I took a closer look. Ever since editing Retro Gaming Hacks, I’ve been on a big retro gaming kick. Lately, I’ve been focusing on collecting cartridges for my Atari 130XE, and big screen Donkey Kong and Miner 2049er have been taking up some of my gaming time….”
