7 Billion Friends

Detroit Ice House Is Up! (And Introducing Detroit Ice Potato)

Well, the awesome crazies did it. The Detroit Ice House has been frozen and it looks beautiful. Read about it on the artists’ blog and visit it at the corner of McCllelan and Mack if you’re in Detroit (while it’s still froze). These are just a couple of my dinky pics:

I had the pleasure of meeting and becoming friends with one of the artists, the photographer Greg Holm, randomly, on a Craigslist rideshare from Detroit to New York months back when this was but a glimmer in his and his collaborator Matt Radune’s eyes. As such I got to follow along some on the process and poke around the site as they froze over the course of a week and lit it for their photo (in development). It was an inspiring thing to see and I’m super proud of them.

In fact, as art has a way of doing, I was inspired enough by the ice house to try my own hand at Detroit Ice [blank]. My mind raced: Detroit Ice Shoe? Detroit Ice Tooth brush? Ah! Ladies and gentlemen, if you head to the corner of Bagley and Brooklyn streets off Michigan Avenue in Corktown, next to the fire hydrant you will see the [drum roll… drum roll… wait for it… wait for it…] Detroit Ice Potato:

lol Greg and Matt, serious congratulations on a job well done, and for forcing me to meme-ify you. Detroit Ice Everything! :D

Ze Pickles Are In Ze Mail! Thanks, McClure's!

The 18 inchvestors in LOVELAND Round 9: The Case of The Pickled Inches are about to receive the unprecedented 1-2 punch of LOVELAND Detroit micro real estate and tasty tasty McClure’s Pickles.

Yesterday I packed up a bag of addresses, square inch golden deeds, magnifying glasses, and inchies:

And I just got back from McClure’s Pickles HQ where I personally handed them to a very happy Joe McClure for safe shipping along with delicious pickled goodness:

I got another jar for myself as well, which is now basking in the ethereal winter light of my window sill:

All hail McClure’s Pickles. The official pickle of LOVELAND. Accept no pickley imitations.

Playing Towards A Unified Theory of Alternate Reality Entertainment Fundraising Whilst Blowing Up Stuffed Poodles

Here’s a little glimpse into the LOVELAND studio as we prototype some ideas for season 2. I’ve started creating a tiny environment on the floor so we can do some Augmented Reality camera tests. Basically that means a web cam in the corner of the room looking down where a streaming video image like this:

Can become a graphically layered image like this:

While I was setting things up I couldn’t help but imagine a little story taking place on the map. I started brainstorming with studiomate Joe Kraus about a sort of choose your own adventure game driven by micro-payments. The concept we came up with was that Inchy and (new character) Inchette are driving from Detroit to Canada. The first leg of their trip is 101 inches long, from one wall to another down the taped path in the pic above. It costs $1 to move them each inch, every 20 inches there’s a planned encounter (or “story point”), and there’s a menu of actions that people can choose from ($5 bottle rocket, $6 cat attack, $10 earth quake, etc etc). As people purchase actions, they’re acted out, recorded, and posted as quickly as possible, and credited to the buyer right in the video.

While we were all brainstorming I drew out these sketches:

And from them the next day I very very quickly made this video as a down and dirty illustration (with, yes, an exploding evil killer poodle):

Oh Canada! A LOVELAND mixed-reality choose your own adventure game prototype from Jerry Paffendorf on Vimeo.

Now what gets me really excited about this is that I can see the bones of something I’ve started calling Entertainment Fundraising. Say you have a sales goal or something you need to raise money for. Let’s use a LOVELAND example and say you need to raise $5,000 to build out an awesome community garden farm thinger in the city (technical term). Through an entertainment fundraising lens, you could chop that goal into subsections and wrap it in an entertaining narrative and online visualization. Every dollar coming in drives something in the story (so even a small amount has an immediate impact — you put a quarter in the machine, something cool happens, and you clearly leave your mark), and there are epical story points along the way where significant things happen (say, every 1,000 unlocks an engaging cut-scene that really makes you want to get to the next one to see what happens). So something like a video game that’s part real and part unreal, that makes the thing you’re raising money for more interesting to a wider audience with collectively wider pockets that will fuel the development of a project, and make it that much more magical.

We’ve already been stumbling around this idea with Plymouth. Expect to see more of it coming out of the LOVELAND factory…

Project Pico Mover Update: Making Robots Is Like Making Sausage

Mike Mayfield writes to check in on the status of Project Pico Mover, the LOVELAND robot that can zoom around and manipulate a grid or tiny landscape:

Hey DUDE,

Just wanted to give you an update on the pico mover… 

This weekend I was able to fully assemble the first drive system and was a little underwhelmed with the performance. My current design requires the rotation of a 6’ threaded rod at least 100 times a second in order for the robot to reasonable speeds (1-5 inches per second). I am finding that the cheapo threaded rods from Home Depot generate way to much vibration at those speeds, so I am rethinking my design. 

The hardest part, as always, is trying to keep costs down… 

Also, I am a little concerned about the design working well in the vertical or outdoors. So lets chat when you have a sec! 

word,
mike

Wishing Mike good robot luck as the edumacation continues. Here’s a Japanese character set I will take to mean just that: 

＼| ￣ヘ￣|／＿＿＿＿＿＿＿θ☆( *o*)/ 

Perhaps a proper Kickstarting of old Pic-y is in order soon to fund non-cheapy rods and such. Stay tuned…

Motherboard Interview

The other day I did an interview with Motherboard.TV, Vice Magazine’s technology and culture site. Check it out: “Loveland is Rebuilding Detroit Through the Internet, One Square Inch at a Time”.

Being a Vice production, I was not surprised to see American Apparel ads gracing the margins. However I was surprised to see the model:

Thanks to Michael Byrne for a great interview. I like the style. We basically just talked for 45 minutes and he edited the transcript down to a very representative free-flowing conversation about the project. Cool beans.

A New Wheel To Build On

Daniel Terdiman at CNET just published a piece called “How ‘Avatar’ may predict the future of virtual worlds”. We chatted over IM yesterday and there are some quotes from me in there (nothing about LOVELAND, just riffing general ideas).

The piece toggles between speculation on the high falootin’ future of virtual worlds that seamlessly mix with the real world, versus the down and dirty present where Facebook has become the hub for super lightweight social virtual interaction (Kelly wants you to kiss her virtual koala, snitches!), the first simple Augmented Reality applications that layer graphics on top of the world are coming out and getting some buzz, and stand-alone virtual worlds and massively multi-player games are currently in an attention trough with not so much exciting happening at the moment.

For those that don’t know, in a not so previous life I worked on the Metaverse Roadmap project with the Acceleration Studies Foundation. Long story short, I’ve been working on and thinking about near and long-term connections between the internets, video games, virtual reality, maps, social networks, and how they spill out into the real world for a while now, both as a researcher and a creative. Pretty much everything I work on including LOVELAND gets run through the metaverse region of my brain that says, hmm, how do we virtualize this real stuff and realize this virtual stuff in a way that’s newly meaningful.

Sample high falootin’ passage from the article:

“The world will eventually be totally cloaked in real-time graphical overlays,” Paffendorf said. “In general, you can already see that trend that people like ‘real things’ in their virtual worlds. They want that connection, so it at least seems obvious that the real world is the real ultimate stage for virtual worlds.”

Like [Bruce] Damer, Paffendorf sees the beginnings of this complex future virtual world in the recent preponderance of augmented reality apps “that let you look through the camera to see things that aren’t physically there: Either data overlays like directions or where tweets are coming from or a digital doggy prancing on your kitchen counter.”

Despite their limited utility, Paffendorf suggested, those kinds of apps are far more compelling to a lot of people than existing virtual worlds like Second Life.

“You can see the signs that that’s a very compelling experience for people,” he said. “I think on a deep level, that’s irresistible for people. The feeling of putting imagination on the outside of your body, or seeing the world in new ways that (are) either more informative or more satisfying emotionally or conceptually.”

In fact, Paffendorf has a term for this: the “gravity of reality.” [all digital roads lead back to real shiz]

And a down and dirty passage:

Paffendorf said that there’s little doubt that the Second Lifes of the world missed an opportunity to give mass numbers of people the kind of personal connection they really wanted, and that the key is to find a way to mix the virtual and the real. Only a few minutes of Facebook can help people satisfy that need. But they will want more down the line, and that’s something that fully immersive experiences will have to offer.

“Facebook’s got the mojo going,” Paffendorf said. “But the future’s not going to be all text and Flash windows. The fact that it is right now speaks to the deep human desire for real life connections and instantaneousness that new types of virtual worlds have to learn from. But I can’t see it stopping there…I see social networks like Facebook that put everyone in the real world one click away as the foundational piece that was missing from a lot of last generation virtual worlds. Now there’s a new wheel to build on.”

OK. Back to the peep hole of the present. Time to make more donuts and figure out new things the old fashioned way: sloppily, intuitively, and one inch at a time.

Steve Jobs <3 Inchy

Anyone catch Inchy up on stage with Steve Jobs yesterday (or was it vice verse?)? The i-Inch, debuting immediately for only $1. ;D

Thanks to Joe for slapping up Stevers on the the TV and then slapping up the Inchy cut-outs through the magic of static electricity.

Oh. And one more thing:

LOVELAND Round 12...ish: The Last Inch Is The Longest (The End of Season 1)

So here it is, the last Kickstarter round in which to get inches in the first LOVELAND property: GET UR INCH ON.

Here’s the deal. There are only 1,000 inches left on the first property. When we hit that mark the LOVELAND site and this blog are going into freezy freaky mode for a while and then re-hatching anew for LOVELAND Season 2. We’re psyched, and as Alan Watts said way before Michael Jackson: This is it. Inch now or forever not have participated in fun-ding the first 10,000 square inch Plymouth colony in Detroit and the start of a beautiful inchventure.

Here’s the video accompaniment for the round, made from a ridiculous and ridiculously long tutorial on how to measure inches using a ruler mixed with pockets of Inchy activity. I dare you to stick it out, but more importantly, inchvest:

Video for LOVELAND Round 11: The Last Inch Is The Longest (The End of Season 1) from Jerry Paffendorf on Vimeo.

Here’s the current view of the inchvestor map which Larry is working on updating as it bursts at its seems:

PS Found in the related videos is Super Mario theme played on a ruler:

Alan's Trailer For Our House

Check it out, Alan made a trailer for our new house mixing DIY bullet time and cartoon overlays. Our house is called the Bumble Bee House not because it’s yellow and black, oh no, but because it shoots venomous bees at intruders, so don’t even think of messin:

Ferrets Can Has Inches In Detroit

This is pretty darn awesome. My roommate Matt is a three-ferret-owning veterinarian and he just bought each of his ferrets 9 inches in the first LOVELAND property.

YES.

YES.

And YES YES YES.

If you’re an inchvestor, perhaps one of these guys will be your new neighbor. :)