Then came the iPhone. And rich (HTML) email entered the picture for mobile devices. And richer and longer in-game responses from players. (SMS is only 160 characters, while email doesn’t have this limit, and thus is so much more fun.)

Well, over time that changed. Sometimes text messages are delayed for a substantial time (can tale hours), and our games are real-time so any delay beyond say one minute is a catastrophe. And then more and more phones became capable of sending text messages to email addresses – it had only been T-Mobile at first, and now it’s most phones. Today, at least 50% of phones in the US are capable of sending/receiving email, even thru the SMS mechanisms (there is an SMS-to-email interface on all systems).

So we’ve made a number of improvements in our games that permit play from regular email as well as mobile email-capable devices like phones, PDAs and smartphones.

And it looks like 2008 may be the year that we’ll develop more of these new, rich street games based on HTML email, and still played from mobile devices like the iPhone.

Yesterday (July 31st) we sat down and planned the trajectory for the next few such experience for YBCA – this is going to be fun. Watch for more on this as we announce the next YBCA game (October).

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You play using email and your digital photos. We suggest that you play from a mobile phone, but you can use regular email if your phone doesn’t do photos.

Visit Faces of Happiness to play.

Or just go take a look at the photo mosaic.

See also the Project Happiness blog.

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I had met Joel Barraquiel Tan, the Director of Community Engagement for YBCA, about two years ago, so he already knew about my technologies and games – one of which is played at Yerba Buena Gardens, right outside his front door. In one quick conversation, however, we took a huge jump forward…

The jump was that we decided to co-author an experience that could be “played ” out anywhere (not just at YBCA), which would solicit and include input from anyone, and would accumulate and display its “output” in a community co-created online mosaic that could also be displayed at YBCA as a piece of art. Joel took the lead on the conceptual development, which he based on ideas he was developing for the Big Ideas program at YBCA, and I put on my programming hat and built some new online capabilities so that we could make our artistic ideas real.

In the first video clip (below), Joel and I discuss the community engagement program at YBCA.

The game is called Making Peace, and it’s integrated with the Community Engagement program at YBCA. It has evolved quite a bit over the couple of months it has been in place. I asked Joel to give us his view on how the Making Peace experience was created.

What’s the Big Idea Day, February 9th, 2008, was an opportunity for the community to come to the Room for Big Ideas and participate in several related projects. Creating small rice-paper flags, having their photo taken by Derick Ion, an artist in the Making Peace/Big Ideas program, and having their photos added to the Making Peace mosaic.

The post Co-Creating Art (Making Peace) for The Missing Peace appeared first on Sky's Blog.

So when Cory Doctorow blogged this event (which took place in October-November 2007) it immediately captured my attention. It’s an interactive light painting on the face of a cathedral where the color and patterns of light projected on the face of the building react to sound input from the spectators. “Usman Haque has created responsive environments, interactive installations, digital interface devices and mass-participation performances.” I hope you get as much of a kick from viewing the video as I did.

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In fact, it’s probably also a great “reminder” or those who’ve visited the show and forgotten the details of what they’ve seen.

Here’s a part of Darlene Markovich’s description of the opening in New York – The event began at 6:30. As we approached the museum just before 6:00, we were amazed to see a long line of people waiting in the cold and rain outside the doors to get in! The museum stopped counting at over 1,000 people so we don’t have the exact count of attendees. It was a big hit!

The event was very well organized and beautifully arranged – the food was excellent. Just for a moment, I wondered if their events always had such a draw, but museum staff told me that this crowd even exceeded their very large and well-attended anniversary event!

To us, since just over 50% of the exhibition was shown (4th and 5th floors and lower level) , it appeared to be a much smaller show; however, the installation is absolutely beautiful and the juxtaposition of ancient Himalayan art with TMP art is outstanding. To a person unfamiliar with the full exhibition, it was a major (sized) show. Most people commented that it was wonderful to see contemporary art at the RMA. The energy level was Himalayan-high. So much so, strangers would comment about the artworks to each other.

Sixteen TMP artists attended, and, as well, art critic and advisory board member Lilly Wei and art critic Kay Larson. It was a lot of fun to receive Christo and Jeanne-Claude as they raised quite a bit of excitement in the crowd.
What lies behind this online tour?

The day before The Missing Peace opened at the Fowler Museum at UCLA in June 2006, I was given two hours by myself in the galleries (with a guard), to take photos. I had gone to the trouble of bringing special lighting, but after some experimentation, I decided to take available-light photos – to get a more realistic color balance – with my camera on a tripod. Even this picture of me taking a picture of myself was taken with available light (in a mirror). It was a real rush to shoot 10,000 sq. ft. of exhibit space in two hours, getting photos from a hundred different angles, and getting them all sharp and clean.

The virtual tour is constructed in Macromedia (Adobe) Flash. The Flash piece itself contains floor maps, and there are red buttons, blue squares and a few surprise mouse-overs. As you move the cursor over the red dots, the photos I took within the exhibit space fade in or fade out. Since just seeing the works in small photos gives you context but lacks detail, I did a second pass thru, adding the blue squares and for each blue square popping up an information panel that shows a single piece of art along with the artist’s description of that work.

This first screen shot below shows a floorplan with red dots and blue squares. This is only one of the two galleries in the Fowler venue:

The screen shot below shows a single in-gallery photos popped up as the cursor passes over one of the red dots:

This last screen shot shows a detail panel with a photo of the work of art and the artist’s description. These are stored on a server and are not within the Flash piece itself. Thus, they’re changeable without having to re-work the Flash object. When a particular artist has a web site, there’s a special button that appears on this panel and the site visitor can go off and learn more about the artist’s life and work.

[posted with ecto]

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In an article entitled IRS taxation of online game virtual assets inevitable CNet news’ Daniel Terdiman suggests that publishers of online games like World of Warcraft and SecondLife may soon be forced to report in-game (“fake money”) transfers of value to the IRS so they can be taxed. All of this discussion triggered by talks at the State of Play/Terra Nova Symposium taking place at the New York Law School.
You know, in Civilization III the tax man is not well-liked. How unlike real life, eh? (Heh heh.)

My take, of course, is “it’ll never happen” but I wonder what you think about it all. The premise is that wherever there is an exchange of value, be it real dollars or fantasy dollars, the taxman could be there.

By the way, the Terra Nova portion of the symposium name comes from the Terra Nova blog, where there’s a lot of thinking going on about online gaming. It might be worth an RSS subscription to you.

But, of course, if you watch a movie there’s an exchange of value, and the tax man only taxes you once when you buy the DVD, not every time you watch it. And if you like one movie better than another movie, you don’t pay more for it the second time you watch it – you just pay once when you buy the DVD. And computer programs where you play on your own computer and build up assets, are creating huge “virtual value” for you, but you’re not taxed (at least not taxed by the IRS).

What they’re thinking about here is that based on the value of in-game currency that you exchange, the real-world IRS might tax you at the end of the year.

It does seem likely to me that transactions that involve real-world dollars could be taxed – for instance, you pay someone real money to design you an avatar (or to design virtual-world clothing for your avatar) and they then make that available to you in-world. This type of transaction looks totally taxable to me – sales tax, of course. But in-world transactions involving virtual money are another issue, aren’t they?

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This sculpture attracts hundreds of adults and kids at a time. As you approch the bean it is so reflective that at first you don’t realize that it’s even there – it looks like the concrete pavement just extends up into the air. As you get closer it’s clear that the bean is reflecting images from around the plaza. Then, you wonder “where am I?” And I will tell you that’s not so easy to figure out. You see people standing across the plaza waving at the bean – what they’re doing, of course, is looking for the waving reflection to they can spot themselves.

Not only can folks walk around the bean, they can walk under the bean, where there’s an even more complex set of reflections that have your mirror-image moving around at right angles to the floor.

It’s a fascinating piece of optical art.

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The Missing Peace

The idea is to explore the Dalai Lama’s conception of peace, as seen thru the eyes of these artists.

I thought it might be fun for those who are unable to physically get to the exhibit to be able to explore it online. So, I toured the exhibit with a digital camera and built a “virtual tour” that anyone with a computer can explore online.

The museum gave me two hours alone in the two galleries, and I shot 380 photos, intending to give you an idea what the works of art look like from various vantage points.

I then combined those photos with the artists’ own photos and descriptions of their work and process, and voila we have an online tour that anyone can take. Regardless of whether they can get to the museum or not.

The exhibit next goes to Chicago, opening there in October, 2006.

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