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.

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!

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.

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.