NYC: Erector Set – Rockefeller Center
Mise en ligne par skyliner72

For those of you coming to LeWeb 08 in Paris, there is a “Before” party on monday evening organized by the Paris OpenCoffe Club and Frenchweb.org you *must* attend. As I write this post there are already 135 participants confirmed amongst the most handsome entrepreneurs, VCs and bloggers.
About 1000 people are expected in a fantastic place, save the date and get registered asap !
Amiando Registration Link

This is the most amazing arcade machine I’ve ever seen – hemispherical immersive display, touch sensitive screen, rfid card to store player’s achievements… can’t wait to try it ! (only available in Japan yet unfortunately). Feels like going to Japan just to experience that ! Thanks Theodore for showing me this during this morning’s design session !

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo

Although I really find Augmented Reality to be amazingly impressive as a technology, I’m still not convinced by the use cases around this technology. Of course having a “terminator”-like view of your environment can be usefull in finding Sarah Connor when she’s hiding in a crowd – but let’s face it augmented reality remains useless imho if you cannot interact seamlessly with the system to let it know precisely what data you’re interested in.
Here’s another example of “Arisu” (Japanese’s Alice) your augmented reality maid… nice and kawai but useless…

Erica Driver, which used to work at Forrester and wrote an amazing report called “Web3D the Next Major Internet Wave” moved as an independent analyst a few months ago and created Thinkbalm, an industry analyst firm / think-tank obsessed with helping businesses get advantage of Virtual Worlds.
Today, Thinkbalm published its first report “The Immersive Internet: Make Tactical Moves Today For Strategic Advantage Tomorrow” and which can be downloaded for free on Thinkbalm’s blog.
There are great ideas and visions in there which totally match what we are aiming at through VR-WEAR, this is definitely a must read !

Update: rotfl, my avatar can be seen in the picture p5, yellow one on the back – funny !

I just watched a nice video about the fall and return of arcade games and this had me think a bit about what kind of experience gamers are really seeking now and will be seeking n the next couple of years.

First, what’s an arcade ? It’s:

• a venue: a place where people come to gather and watch other people’s perform – obviously the Internet killed the need of gathering to share a gaming experience
• hardware : a big machine that need coins to start and with a dedicated and specific input device
• a gamestyle: very energetic, intense and fast – ideally a game should last 3mins in order for the arcade store to be able to actually earn money – thus in order to get value for money you had to deliver an awesome burst of adrenaline and fun in those few minutes

Yet, while the first point will be tough to monetize outside of a dedicated world-size event (like world gaming championships), the second is still reasonable just as the third points which makes actually a lots of sense and is often what drive people to “casual” gaming : the ability to have a short burst of fun whenever they want.

For instance Ikaruga is imho the best shoot’em’up ever, and has recently been released on the XBOX Live Marketplace for 800 MS Points. The full game, just like the original DreamCast version can be finished in under 25 mins – but you got to be really highly skilled to do that, and such mastery can only come after hours of play.

While longer games can produce deep emotional involvement and draw the gamer into a complete new world, I think there is a huge market opportunity for smaller yet highly intense and challenging games (as opposed to casual games as we know them), and as such new online distribution models makes a lot of sense. Indeed the actual physical retail system including the huge royalties asked bu the console hardware makers have pushed most of game studios into a “1€ = 1hrs gameplay” scheme, and most of the people buying those games actually only play a third of it on average.
I think it’s time to get into some creative thinking to get out of this scheme and focus more into what customers expect.

Can I lease that on 20 Generations ?

Congrats to PO Carles and his RIL Shopping launch, first experiment of real goods shopping in SL, I attended today the yummy Bagatelle sale and it’s really fun to see all those virtual basket getting filled with real goods.

It’s out, and got mine !
Welcome to “Zogzog” my Tauren Death Knight who just regained his soul and reverted from the influence of the Lich King!