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John Branch
New York, NY, USA
Copy editor & aspiring playwright in NYC, USA.
Interests: theater, film, photography, fiction, science, science fiction, classical music, popular music, bicycling
Recent Activity
Hard to figure what accounts for the apparent low interest in the Oculus Rift. One possibility: until gamers can get a Rift or a Vive in their hands and use it with a game that exploits it well, they aren't going to be very excited. And non-gamers have even less reason to be excited at this point: we can't yet try a VR headset at a store, many of us have computers that can't drive the headset, and if we did there's still not much we could do with it.
This situation reminds me of the dilemma around advanced televisions in the 90s: they had few buyers because there was little programming, and the programming wasn't likely to come until there were more HDTV owners. Obviously that didn't last. Wait two and a half to five years and the VR headset situation will pretty certainly look different—it's just hard to tell how.
Even Most Core Gamers Don't Seem Very Interested in VR
Hardcore gamers will be virtual reality's first main market -- that's an underlying assumption shared by just about everyone in the VR industry. (Which would explain the countless VR talks and VR demos happening right now at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.) They take it as a g...
The Times's move seems precipitous to me too. One thing I wonder is how many of the Times's subscribers are looking for "a unique sense of empathic connection" to people in "dire humanitarian crises." In years past, claims were made that television would advance our understanding of each other; I think something similar was said about telephone service and/or the telegraph. That you might find it easier to empathize with someone if you're talking to them by phone, seeing them on TV, or seeing them in VR doesn't mean you'll choose to pay them any attention at all.
New York Times Joins Virtual Reality Hype Wave, Because That Worked Out So Well for Reuters
The New York Times is jumping into the virtual reality hype wave, not as a dispassionate reporter, but a participant and an advocate: The New York Times announced on Tuesday a virtual reality project in collaboration with Google, which will include the distribution of more than a million cardb...
I'd love to see that. I'm a dance fan, and I'm always curious to see how performance works in SL (though I admit I haven't visited in a while). But I'm not going to be home at the right time, and I probably don't have the needed computing resources anyway. I hope the performance will be documented in some way. Real dancers do that!
Who Wants a Sneak Preview of SkyDance V in SL Tomorrow?
SkyDance V, the latest iteration of a live virtual dance/multimedia art performance in Second Life that is one of the most ambitious and impressive uses of SL as an artistic medium, is opening very soon. The brainchild of San Francisco artist DC "DanCoyote Antonelli" Spensley, there's a sneak p...
Sure, we'll all be 3-D printing in our homes in a few years. And then we'll get Star-Trek-style replicators to synthesize our food, and transporters will take us where we want to go.
Probably the most overused word in Wired, and among other techno-utopians, is "will." As in "soon we will all be 3-D printing." I respect the magazine for other reasons, but we should remember this, a Yogi-Berra-ism: prediction is tough, especially about the future.
3D Printing: If Chris Anderson and Wired Can’t Convince Me It’ll Be Big, Who Can?
I just read Chris Anderson's new Wired Magazine cover story on how 3D printing "Might Just Change Your World", and while I'm already skeptical that the technology is going to be as revolutionary as its supporters say it will, this article made me even more so. No doubt, it's going to be an imp...
Also: This is verging on the landscape depicted in Ray Bradbury's story "The Veldt," in which a future family has a VR room for the kids.
Microsoft's Patent on a VR Room Reminds Us The Future of 3D Virtual Worlds Won't Be on PCs or Tablets
Microsoft has patented a kind of immersive virtual room, the BBC reports, in which a console device will "beam images all over the room so that the gamer's peripheral vision does not conflict with what they seen on the main screen." In other words, rather than just displaying 3D on a flat scre...
I'm ready to see and play in a VR room, but not where _I_ live. Goggles are a lot easier to fit into a small New York apartment than an extra room would be. Or maybe I can convert my existing main room?
Microsoft's Patent on a VR Room Reminds Us The Future of 3D Virtual Worlds Won't Be on PCs or Tablets
Microsoft has patented a kind of immersive virtual room, the BBC reports, in which a console device will "beam images all over the room so that the gamer's peripheral vision does not conflict with what they seen on the main screen." In other words, rather than just displaying 3D on a flat scre...
Your older reviews are just as useful as current ones. I just looked up this one for a reminder of how "Dust" feels, since I saw it back in the 80s at the American Dance Festival. Thanks again!
More Paul Taylor @ City Center
Saturday February 25, 2011 evening - DUST, set to Francis Poulenc's Concert Champetre. opened the evening at City Center as Paul Taylor Dance Company continued their exciting season there. In the collage-photo above by Tom Caravaglia, the dancers are Laura Halzack, Jeffrey Smith, Michelle Flee...
Are you kidding me about that shoe: Tory Burch? I know I should be eager to see Ms. Part in that role, but I already know I should be eager to see her do just about anything, whereas Tory Burch's hidden steampunk bad girl is news.
Anyway, thanks for the post. (Was directed here by James Wolcott, FYI.)
ABT – Giselle 5/15
After much serious thought, Haglund bailed out of the Facebook IPO today. He wasn't going to buy many shares anyway, so the FB deal will probably still go through without him, in case anyone is worried. He bailed out because this whole Hoodiegate thing with Zuckerberg has really gotten under th...
I can see that some commenters here are eager to have a giant avie, but I'm not. Abandoning the human scale would seem like a loss to me.
Meet SLer Ceri Quixote, Whose Avatar Stands at 200 Feet
I heard whisperings that Ms. Ceri Quixote had a tall SL avatar, but I didn't quite get how tall she was, until she stopped by my office in Waterhead. Or maybe stepped on my office is the better thing to say. For look, Ms. Quixote is frigging tall: "About 62 meters or 200 feet," she tells me, ...
I notice no one has yet mentioned Snow Crash. Neal Stephenson cleverly sidestepped, for the most part, the question of how the interface for his Metaverse worked (unless I've forgotten). I always figured it would've required something like what the Kinect has turned out to offer.
Tokyo University Developing Real Time, Open Source Kinect-to-Second Life Software
SLKinect 2 is a pretty cool open source project being developed by folks at Network System Laboratory of Tokyo University to connect real world motion captured by a Kinect to avatar movement in Second Life and OpenSim. Watch: Fumi Iseki, a developer with NSL, recently told me more about the pro...
I hate to be a grouse about something done with so much care, but the picture just seems problematic to me. My first question (and the only one I'll bother with): Why would a man in a light rain stop in the middle of a puddle and stand there?
How to Photograph Photoshop-Free SL Water Reflections
Yes, this puddle-filled picture above by Graphic Dix was made in Second Life, and no, the final image hasn't been post-processed in Photoshop or suchlike. Click here for the embiggenized version. Now that you're duly impressed, click here for a detailed, illustrated, step-by-step tutorial on h...
Good grief.
Is Virtual Faux Fox Fur Fashion Still Not Faux Enough?
Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of virtual world and MMO fashion While real fur fashion items have become politically controversial in the past few decades, faux fur is still popular, especially in Winter. All the better when that faux fur is extra-faux, existing only as a virtual fashion object...
It's almost funny that despite Hamlet's declarations such as "I know all the technical reasons why Second Life takes so long to fully display" and others, many of the responses take him to task as if he had said no such thing. I haven't even been in SL lately, but I still like it, and I still have hopes for its future. Surely that future does depend to some degree on what Pathfinder said:
"People forget details and explanations. But they never forget how an experience makes them *feel*.
"Especially a *first impression* experience."
So I applaud this post.
On the other hand, I'm glad for some of the technical discussion in the comments. I'm about to venture back into SL to look around a bit, see how the current viewer looks and works, etc., and the reference to the bandwidth setting, at the very least, should be helpful. I'm also glad for the mention from Pussycat Catnap of how to locate an alternate avatar. I've never been that pleased with mine and used to daydream about commissioning one from one of the notable early builders.
One Big Way Skyrim is Not Like Second Life
I just started playing Skyrim, which has many similarities to Second Life, but I now know one profound way the two worlds are not alike at all. This is what the latest version of Skyrim looks like on my Alienware M11x gaming notebook, four minutes after launching the game on Steam: And this is...
The Azul promo is very good looking all right. But it's also so slow to develop, if it does develop, that halfway in I didn't care whether I saw more and paused it. Still, a good testament to what can be done in SL machinima. Some of the camera moves surprised me; one would be easy enough to do with a crane and a dolly in RL, but in SL there aren't any (are there?).
Beautiful SL Fashion Montage Machinima Ft. Chouchou
Let's start the week off with some gorgeous machinima I've been meaning to blog for the last several month: Shot by Takakuma Kuma and directed by Akira Balog, who also created this acclaimed sci-fi machinima last year, if you saw this without any context, you might think it was just a melanchol...
Though I haven't listened to the video excerpt yet, I can suggest an analogy that implies a different future from Hamlet's prediction based on present-day usage. Back in the early 80s, I built an 8-bit microcomputer; my father was amused, since he'd been involved with electronics himself for some time, but didn't see why anyone would ever want one or what they'd use it for (this despite the fact that the startup weekly newspaper I was working for already did its accounting on one). The obvious lesson: a lot of people eventually found uses for computers; it just wasn't clear in the early days how or whether that would happen. Something similar happened with the Internet. To put that part of the story in personal terms too (and to brag, I admit): I mentioned ARPAnet in print back in 1984, routinely visited CBBSs (computerized bulletin board systems) for some years after that, and was using the Internet in the early 90s for work purposes. Again, in the early years it wasn't clear what this set of technologies would lead to. One thing that IS pretty clear is that the later, widespread adoption of computers and of the Internet wasn't predicted by early usage patterns. The same might well prove true for virtual worlds. Let's check again in 15 years.
How Can Ray Kurzweil be Right About the Singularity When He Seems So Wrong About Second Life?
Thanks to a new documentary about his work which just came out on DVD, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has been in the news a lot lately. Here he is on Colbert, confidently predicting that by 2045, we'll start uploading our consciousnesses into online worlds like Second Life, when they'll be ...
I had often thought that it may be a bit indulgent for a writer to want to go away somewhere to write--if you can't do it at home, you're going to have trouble, I figured. And I still sort of think that way, but now I can see a very good reason for wanting to go to a place that can stimulate the imagination, particularly one that pertains to one's subject.
And I can only say "Yes!" to the line "The chamber that most wants to be haunted ... is the writer’s imagination."
#NewPlay Writing and Haunted Houses
posted by Amy Freed, Resident Playwright Emily Dickinson wrote, “Art is a house that tries to be haunted.” Undertones and overtones exist in margins of decay, in places where beauty meets erosion. Hauntings occur in ruins that once housed thwarted aspirations or broken dreams. Dickens write...
Ah, very nice. What a wonderful series of concerts. I feel privileged in having gotten to attend one of them (thanks again for that). May have been the best night, though judging from your descriptions of the other performances it'd be hard to judge.
Big space, big ideas
The Tune-In Festival at the Park Avenue Armory. MusicWeb International, March 9, 2011
How about that Friday-night Tune-In Festival performance at the Armory? Have you found a way to describe it yet?
The intrepid sextet
eighth blackbird at Zankel Hall. MusicWeb International, February 25, 2011. More comments to come, on eighth blackbird's mightily impressive work during last week's Tune-In Festival at the Armory.
Amy Freed has the literacy of an English major and the cultural and historical sensitivity of an American Studies major, but she's also thoroughly grounded in the theater (not surprising considering her own training and her family background--her mother taught voice in the SMU theater program I attended). My somewhat limited experience may have left me ignorant of someone else, but in my view Freed's combination of qualities makes her virtually unique among contemporary American playwrights. I'm very glad to hear she's workshopping a new play, and I can only say I hope I get to see it someday.
Incidentally, the Metropolitan Opera is currently performing Nixon in China, with music by John Adams to a libretto by Alice Goodman, that has some similarities to the kind of thing Freed is able to accomplish in the theater: it takes a multifaceted approach--public, personal, even internal--to an important historical event, Nixon's 1972 visit to China. Probably she'll have no time to see it, but I hope she realizes she's not alone in trying to dramatize for a live audience events and characters of cultural significance.
I look forward to learning more about Right to the Top via this blog. Thanks for this account and the later one.
Workshop to the top! A #NewPlay Adventure with Arena Resident Playwright Amy Freed
posted by Melanie Farmer, New Play Producing Fellow For the next couple of weeks Amy Freed and I are on an adventure in New York City and beyond working on combination rehearsal, design retreat, and research extravaganza surrounding her in-process play Right to the Top. The workshop is design...
Regarding Andi, I wondered how she had managed to be at home just about every time Will or anyone else went to her apartment (was there an exception? I don't recall), yet when Katharine went to the safe address on Mott Street to which her husband sent her via his DVD message, Andi managed to be there. This questions something the episode simply expects us to accept, but I couldn't help thinking it curious.
Glad to see the gunshot mentioned in the original post just got corrected. I was afraid the occasional sound dropouts of my cable service had cost me something important.
The man who bumped Katharine was shown, very quickly, dumping a syringe into a trash can a few steps away from her, so yes it must've been one of those fast-acting lethal drugs you surmised.
I find much to anticipate in a future season, so I certainly hope there is one.
'Rubicon' recap: A strategic retreat, to live and fight another day [Updated]
We didn't get startling revelations Sunday night in the season finale (series finale?) of AMC's "Rubicon" so much as confirmation of what has been sparingly parsed in the last few episodes. My big question after seeing how the writers tied things up was exactly how the arrival of a four-lea...
There are also those eternal options available at home: a well-made drink, a DVD, then time with a book. Which is probably what I'll do, after a play reading this afternoon and an early-evening cocktail for three July birthdays including myself. (Yes, still celebrating my birthday!)
Another night in New York with nothing to do
On Friday night, some tough choices present themselves. An intriguing new vocal ensemble, Ekmeles, directed by Jeffrey Gavett, will present the U.S. premiere of Mauricio Kagel's The Tower of Babel (2002), plus works by Giacinto Scelsi (the rare Litanie from 1975), Kaija Saariaho, Kenneth Gaburo...
Now that Hamlet mentions it, drawing from Mitch Wagner, I can see one or two points of comparison. The scene in which Cobb meets Ariadne in a dream--which she doesn't realize is a dream until he tells her--depicts first him, then her (if I recall right), altering the originally real-looking streets of Paris in fantastic ways. The results resemble some things I've heard about people building in SL. (I don't think I'm giving away anything with that description; parts of the scene have been shown in ads.) There's another moment, involving a walk on an Escher-like staircase, that reminds me of something Escher-like in SL (Relativity House, which I think Hamlet blogged about). That's the most obvious resemblance for me.
But this didn't occur to me while watching the film. Unlike Mitch Wagner, I see nothing very dreamlike about the movie, with the possible exception of the train barging through city traffic (which has also been shown in ads). Sooner or later, dreams usually involve something surreal, oddly out of place; I just awoke from a nap in which I dreamed something peculiar. As the _New Yorker_ magazine review observed, Luis Buñual employed dreams to fantastic effect in some of his films, but Christopher Nolan seems a literalist, despite his fondness for grand or momentarily mind-bending vistas. His script bends over backwards to ground everything that happens in some kind of explanation; even when it looks dreamlike (the suspended-gravity sequence) it's never surreal but instead rational. By the way, apart from that suspended sequence, I don't recall anything to justify Mitch Wagner's statement that people can fly in _Inception_, and in that scene no one really had the power to fly--it was explained rationally.
Nonetheless, I think _Inception_ must be seen, because otherwise you won't know what other people are talking about. No doubt takeoffs and parodies are even now in the works, if not already out there on YouTube or in a TV skit.
Nolan's reference to _The Thirteenth Floor_ touches on the movie that I think best compares to _Inception_, in at least one sense: multiple levels of reality.
New World Cinema: Does Inception Remind You of Second Life?
Mitch Wagner loves Inception, and being journalist who's written about Second Life for quite awhile, he makes an interesting parallel in his review on the TOR blog: The experience of Cobb and his team reminded me of Second Life. I know in some ways it’s laughable to compare the crude graphic...
Thursday night? As in Thursday, June 10? Guess I missed it. Would love to have heard the eight pitched car horns, the overture for doorbells, and everything else. Was out of town when it was performed, else I'm pretty sure I would've been there.
"Macabre" redux
On Thursday night at 9:00 P.M., WQXR-FM will broadcast the New York Philharmonic's recent production of György Ligeti's 1978 opera, Le Grand Macabre. Alan Gilbert, clearly inspired, led three triumphant evenings in Avery Fisher Hall, transformed by Douglas Fitch and his design crew into a hotbe...
Stimulating as usual. Thanks to Mr. Berlin.
I still haven't read the Booth School of Business study that David Brooks cited, and I may be misunderstanding even the summary that Brooks and Berlin have provided. That said, it still seems possible to me that the Internet is, on the whole, relatively neutral, i.e., that it neither encourages nor discourages the echo chamber, just as, on the whole, bookstores are neutral, and books and magazines themselves are neutral, and TV is neutral, and a world wired with telephones is neutral. I seem to recall predictions that TV would make it possible for diverse peoples to understand one another better; I believe the same prediction was made (unlikely as it sounds now) for telephones. Cass Sunstein's inversion of that prediction for the Internet, as well as the Internet-optimist predictions by SBJ and others, may all be canards. But I can see that this isn't SBJ's main point.
The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book
The following is a transcript of the Hearst New Media lecture I gave last night at Columbia University, subtitled "Two Paths For The Future of Text." Thanks to everyone who came out, and to the Journalism school for the invitation. I want to start with a page out of history—the handwriting of...
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