Myrsine Island now open

In the nearly couple of month since my last post a lot of tasks of my professional life have reached their place in the cosmical karma.

One of these is the release of the Myrsine Island on Second Life: a perfect replica made by Electric Sheep Company of a residence Gabetti is building on the Island of Sardinia (and that will be ready in 2010).
You can take a look at the product site or take the whole tour at the buildings in Second Life. The choice is yours.

This is a complete new experiment in SL for the Gabetti Group: we’re starting using the metavers not for metaverse’s sake but for RL business stuff; Myrsine island will be used by the Group agencies devoted to its commercialization as a tool to showcase the apartments to potential clients and - at the same time - it’s going to be a tool for foreigners to take a visit to the apartments, before buying, before leaving their countries.

On the island you’ll find a Manfrotto (who’s one of the top tripod producers all over the world) where you can get for free a machinima-o-maker hud to create videos in SL; machinema making has never been so easy! (see a video made with the machinima HUD on YouTube)

Just a bit of info for the moment. And I still owe Leeander a post about his latest innovation disruptive project: Open Spime.

30 seconds of celebrity

It’s been a while I haven’t blogged, most of all because of working times expanding widely fagocitating my spare time. But now I’m sick at home and have some time to spend writing. So here we go.

I had my first 30 seconds of celebrity last Wednesday, 18 when a troup of the main Italian TV news entered my office to interview me about the Gabetti/Second Life project and then aired it BOTH on the lunchtime AND primetime show.

Unfortunately I hadn’t the chance to see me “live” but, if you hold a PC - since the video seems not to be working on Macs - you can take a look at the digital version on the TG1 website.

I just have a creepy quality AVI video so won’t post anything at the moment. I’m waiting for a hi-res DVD containing the interview.

Oh… and by the way: I really need my diet objectives to be pursued!

Workstiff

I’m at home recaping from a bad flu and spending a lot of time reading my (too trascurated due to my daily job) Bloglines feeds and watching movies. The longer the flu the tougher the job for my DVD/DiVX library: I’m not yet so frustrated to switch to (yeeeck!) afternoon TV programs so I looked around for some nice online video to watch and, via Sanbaldo blog, I found “Working Stiff“: a low-budget indipendent movie available for free on the web.

Here’s the synopsis:

Gene is a beleaguered corporate filmmaker who directs training videos for a large corporation. Facing a financial crunch that could cost him his home, he decides to use the company studio at night to produce an ”adult” version of the anti-sexual harassment training video he’s shooting during the day. Comedy, 94 minutes.

If you love comedies and know a little bit of big-corp life this movie is for you!

I also really enjoied the whole Brightcove experience (Brightcove is the platform the movie is distributed on): I followed the Allaire’s company first betas before joining Gabetti for an IPTV related RnD project for a big Italian company and I’m really amused of how brughtly great the product is now.

Wired Mag interviews me on Eyetracking

It’s been an incredible (and tough I’d say) starting of week: I had a lot of works at home to make it a little bit more secure against intrusions (and I’m not speaking about hackers ).

But I also have been so lucky to have a long chat with Frank Rose, contributing editor at Wired Magazine about the Eye Tracking research projects I’m currenlty working on, stressing those on remote control for Television/Video content: they’re both based on a remote usage of eyetracker in order to interact with the content on the video. In one of those the user can unconsciously rotate the real 3d scene selecting the character/object she preferes.

My opinion is that existing TV remote controls are unusable when the user needs a deeper interaction with the filmed scenes since she has to look down at the remote to find the buttons that need to be presses, while - using eye tracking technology - she could easily watch at the screen and select what she likes/needs without looking somewhere else.

It was a deep 40mins chat that I won’t be able to summarize here, I’ll just wait for Frank’s piece being published.