Second Life 3d Printers and ARGs all in one post

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At last a business is emerging to combine second life and 3d printing

A few people may have heard me harp on about 3d printers over the last couple of years, yes even before blogs 🙂

We have seen a few ideas and hacks that let you get opengl renderings out to a 3d printer. I had talked about buying one anyway and running it in my garage.

Things being what they were I ended up in investing time and money in a Second Life which has had much more impact amongst my community.

Now though, things are merging, maybe it is time to start going RL to SL and back to RL all as a service. RL drives the creation of SL space and objects, those objects can now be recreated as RL objects.

Also as the TV show Lost seems to have started creeeping its way out Alternate Reality Game style (see post on perpexcity.com) with its http://www.thehansofoundation.org/ then maybe we have three trends merging? ARG in SL and RL but requring actual physical objects to be printed in 3d

Just for completeness. The Alternate Reality Game is a specific type of media experience. Notable for its weaving of various types of technology to deliver a message or story. The ‘story’ is usually not planned in advance , but the authors watch the fans as they start up wikis and blogs and websites and adjust their path and involvement based on that activity.

Unlike a lot of marketing, it seems to be based on not having much in the way of advertising to start off with. There is a reliance on a small clue (referred to as a rabbit hole) that the writers are relying on an observant and inquisitive person to pick up on. This then acts as a seed of viral enthusiasm. With the original finders feeling a sense of one upmanship or leaders of a community. Whilst still allowing the later adopters to pick up on the whole story.

4 thoughts on “Second Life 3d Printers and ARGs all in one post”

  1. We talked about the ARG impact on TV the other day and once Ian had mentioned it, I started noticing it all over the place. The new Big Brother title sequence looks to have all kinds of stuff in it.

    I wonder if there’ll be another trend to simplyfy things again. When people first say Google it looked really clean and fresh compared to the everything on one page look of Yahoo!. I wonder how long it’ll be till people pine for something simple again.

    Its probably my simple brain, but for all the clever programming, I’m still much happier with comfort TV. The OC, Big Brother, MTV and Sports. I’m the same with food. I always go back to Cornflakes, Soup and a cup of tea.

  2. Agreed, sometimes you just want to be a consumer. Though as life gets more complicated and the little slices of time get smaller, then media and entertainment has to weave itself into the rest of the things we do. Like a major extension of product placement in movies.

    It is also about the drive for user created content. The Wiki and blog culture, where people want to be part of the creative process. Equally providers want to tap into the free resource and provide tools and middleware. ARG’s are an example of that, as is Secondlife, and Will Wrights Spore (which both actually got a mention on the BBC’s Click online this morning)

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