5 posts tagged “virtual worlds”

From Ozma Malibu and the Transitions team creating powerful new web tools:
Ok. Let's rock the vote!

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   Take a quick tour of the LEGEND in our Voter Guide.pdf.
   
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N2y3mashupchallenge

So why vote?

With as little as 100 votes we can be in the running for $100,000 in development assistance and grants from the nonprofit technology community to build out A PLACE FOR DREAMS, a bridgebuilding search resource on the web for the displaced and homeless worldwide.

Susan Tenby wrote a great blog post today supporting our unique TRANSITIONS team for the Netsquared mashup challenge.

You can read more about Transitions here, but I'd like to ask you one favor as you read.

Please take a moment to register as a Netsquared participant and vote for our team!  Go on right now, sign up (takes just a second) then stop back by and vote for Transitions before Monday!

aplacefordreamsmap.jpg

At some level are we all synthetic processes, an electronic text file? 
What within us is created and what can be created?  Synthetic organisms?  Symbiotic viruses?  Is the cure for our cancer wrapped in a virulent form we are just now beginning to connect with?

"Biology is moving...digitally.  Comprehension has changed a lot in the last 15 years"

I watch an obscene amount of sci/tech videos online.  Some of my favorites lately have been the Google sessions, especially Pimp My Genome with my friend Andrew Hessel.  Andrew's an open source biology advocate, geneticist and entrepreneur/researcher who has done tremendous work in the matching of genes and medicine in the last two decades. 

From his video I learn amazing things about base-level reproduction.  My eggs are not necessary: DNA itself will produce.  We have learned through the processes of genetic science to take the DNA of simple creatures and create new forms with that structure.  This work is being done now and will grow as we learn to create our own medicines and cures uniquely coded for our genetic code.

Imagine medicine perfectly sculpted to your DNA.  Is it possible now?  Perhaps.  Will it be possible in our lifetimes?  If we want it to be.  Digital genomics has a long way to go along with open information architecture.

"The more we look, the more complexity we see"

Genes are plastic and dynamic.  What is the logic?  "We're going to have to build it" Andrew says to the Google crowd.  This is one of the challenges now.  "These circuits, if you were doing it with electronics, they are toys, and yet this is leading edge genetic engineering....Trying to put together complex circuits... we are starting from the ground up, simple circuits and have them work reliably.  Hopefully we can grow complexity step by step over time and keep control." 

I suspect like most things in our chaotic lives, the connection and control will be hard to maintain.  Thankfully we have insightful leaders like Andrew showing us what can be done, what should be offered as opportunities for long and lasting healthy lives.   These things are always in flux, as Andrew notes in genetic reproduction "There is no guarantee that it will stay stable; the cell will mutate and change."

Open source genetic research has taken on a life of its own in the last few years with Open Wetware available by wiki and the iGem international Genetically Engineered Machine competition.  The comic book Adventures in Synthetic Biology reminded me that we have young kids who are making these tough ethical decisions on how to bring new life into being.  Where does the virulent avatar life end and humanity begin?

We can create many types of immersions, large projections with touch screens and sensory equipment that allows us to feel and sense virtual worlds in five and more senses.  Within our lifetime created companions will become more lifelike and realistic like Hanson Robotics and Kurzweilian AI emerging from virtual worlds.  In Futurama we make friends in aliens, viruses and robots; why not now?

With current technology we can have low cost, global desemination of cures, quickly.  We do not know how....yet.  We have to learn to work with our machines, tools and technologies as our friends and colleagues.

There are risks and uncertainties; "the ability to synthesize DNA also opens up the possibilities to create things like advanced bioweapons, generate viruses that normally would be under strict government control.  There are some concerns moving forward with this, rightly so." mentions Andrew to the quiet Google crowd.  Wimmer synthesized polio in 2002; what other toxins wait in our labs?
Next generation biotechnology industry?
People designing cures for cancer in their garages?
Cellular repair engineering will require new constructs and researchers are now building foundations and systems to understand this whole new way of being and creating.

WE NEED MAJOR SHIFTS IN HOW WE UNDERSTAND OURSELVES AND EACH OTHER TO MAKE THESE LEAPS.

Our world has evolved tremendously in my lifetime and I feel the accelerating change in my bones.  Information is passing us by so quickly that we've come to develop highly advanced folksonomies and searches to keep our data from overtaking our minds.

The changes we've seen in the digital world are fantastic.  Virtual worlds and other immersive technologies are just the beginning; military leaders want GenGineers working on metamaterial Invisibility Cloaks.  Do you want this?

Integrating vast amounts of information takes incredible wisdom, so at the end of the day I often refer back to Beth Kanter.  Beth and I have come to work together on a handful of occasions within the blogosphere, nonprofits, educational media and virtual worlds.  She recently helped me understand Google Analytics and web traffic comprehension tools by simplifing our cultural information quests to four questions:

How many people are coming?
Where are they coming from?
What do you want them to do?
What are they actually doing?

Open Wetware is moving forward fast in our garages and labs; iGem is growing, especially among young scientists hungry to create new opportunities and solutions for a shifting planet.   We understand genetic engineering and its risks as we explore them in sci-fi movies and virtual worlds.  We have a long way to go, but the information architecture in every cell of our bodies now feels connected in a way it never has before. 

I feel a bit like the Six-Fingererd Man from Princess Bride as I ask you......How does that make you feel?

Hollywoodgamessummit 036

Those of you who know our work know that we've stopped producing machinima over the last few months.  There's a handful of reasons why we've put our machinima releases on hold for 2007:

1)  Overheating laptops!
2)  Waiting for Windlight
3)  Hoping for a Machinima Camera for true broadcast-quality captures (see the pic at right from Hollywood Games Summit for the Gamecaster machinima camera)
4)  Unreliable access to platforms and sims

You can help us take on at least one of these challenges by voting for Amoration in the Blackbird/Wikia challenge to win a new HP desktop with a water cooling system that claims to be up to the virtual world overheating challenge.  Help us out and vote today, leave us comments and let's move this media forward!