Category Archives: Content

Fashion Research Institute Oversees a Third Round of the Science Sim Land Grant Program with Intel Labs

Posted on August 8, 2011 by | Comments Off

New York, NY August 8, 2011 – Fashion Research Institute Oversees a Third Round of the Science Sim Land Grant Program with Intel Labs

Fashion Research Institute is pleased to announce the third round of OpenSim region grants in the ScienceSim grid. We will administrate the land program through our research collaboration with Intel Labs.

We’ve been provided with a set of regions running on hardware that can support 45,000-100,000  primitive objects with up to 1,000 concurrent users per region.  The regions will be awarded for a nine-month period beginning September 1, 2011 and running to June 30, 2012 to educators, scientists, and researchers who wish to bring their programs into an immersive collaborative environment.

There are no hidden charges or costs to this program other than what a selected organization is expected to need for the transfer and development of their programs, and which they negotiate with their service providers.  There is no financial assistance available for this process.  We can accept and transfer existing OAR files into ScienceSim.

Commercial organizations and consultants are not eligible to apply for these regions. Recipients must sign a formal legal agreement with Fashion Research Institute for use of these OpenSim regions. This agreement includes clauses stating that the recipient organization will respect the  existing Term of Service, End User licensing Agreement, Region Covenant, and Content Licenses of the ScienceSim grid.

The Fine Print

Each accepted organization will receive a 4-region, 2×2 ‘campus’ from September 1, 2011-June 30, 2012. Organizations must appoint a single user, who will receive estate manager privileges on this campus.

Campus assignees have full land right privileges.  Regions must remain open to common access to enable visitors to freely move around and visit.

Assigned campuses must be built on within three weeks of assignment.  Land which is not improved within four weeks of assignment will be reclaimed, and any objects placed in the region will be returned to the land assignee.

A content library of premium content is provided to all participants on ScienceSim.  Additional content is provided as well.  This content may not be removed from ScienceSim. Suspect pirated content brought into ScienceSim will be removed immediately. All content provided for ScienceSim users is PG-rated.

A complete OpenSim orientation gateway which has been successfully used with more than 65,000 new users is provided for the use of land grant recipients and their program users. A scripting lab is provided for recipients to learn how to develop OS scripts. Additionally, there are meeting, classroom, and sandbox spaces provided throughout the common space of the grid in the physics and math plazas which land grant recipients may freely use.

Expected Code of Behavior:

ScienceSim serves a population of educators, researchers and scientists.  Land grant recipients are expected to register with their real names and to manage their programs appropriately.

All users are expected to behave with decorum and respect to others to support this collaborative, interdisciplinary working environment.  Services are provided in English only.  All users who enter and use this grid are expected to behave and dress in a manner appropriate to a corporate or academic setting.  All users are expected to respect others’ beliefs; no solicitation, proselytization, foul language or harassment of any sort is allowed here.  Clothing is mandatory – this means at minimum, shirt and trousers that meets typical community decency standards.

Land grants are provided with an expectation that users will have sufficient expertise to develop their own regions.  There are weekly user meetings at which user experiences can and should be reported, as well as a mailing list where feedback is encouraged.  Lastly, there is a weekly governance meeting at which any conflicts will be arbitrated.

Participation

To participate in this land grant program, please send e-mail to admin@fashionresearchinstitute.com with your name, your organization, and 2-3 sentence description of the project you’d like to explore in this collaborative environment.  The program has rolling admissions and we will accept applications until we have assigned all campuses.

Past Awardees

Previous awardees are eligible to apply for this program.  Previous recipients have included the Abyss Observatory, the IDIA Lab, ScienceCircle, Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics, and Utah State University.

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About Fashion Research Institute, Inc.: FRI is at the forefront of developing innovative design & merchandising solutions for the apparel industry.  They research and develop products and systems for the fashion industry that sweepingly address wasteful business and production practices.

Science Sim is part of an evolution toward online 3D experiences that look, act and feel real. Sometimes dubbed the “3D internet,” Intel Labs refers to this technology trend as immersive connected experiences, or ICE. ScienceSim is differentiated from most virtual world environments by its open source architecture. ScienceSim leverages open source building blocks (installation utilities, management tools, client viewers, etc.) based on OpenSimulator (OpenSim) software.

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Posted in 3D, Avatar, Blogroll, Content, education, Fashion Research Institute, Intel, Open Sim, OpenSim, research, science, ScienceSim, Shenlei, virtual content, Virtual World

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Content, Copyright, and Fashionably Dressed (?) Cartoon Animals

Posted on April 15, 2011 by | Comments Off

This article in the NY Times was a nice segue into editing what we hope is the last draft of the Legal Primer for Content Creators in Virtual Worlds.

Google has an interesting approach to copyright offenders: they make them ‘go to school’.  We would question, though, whether a 4 1/2 minute video and 4-question multiple choice (guess) quiz will really deter offenders.  We appreciate the fact that it may, perhaps, be possible that someone somewhere may not realize that if they didn’t make the cool content they want to share they are probably infringing someone’s copyright. But that seems unlikely in today’s interconnected world of sophisticated content consumers.

It is interesting that Google has decided to soft pedal their enforcement efforts by giving offenders what amounts to a one-time wrist slap for the ignorant.

When we were drafting, and then reviewing, the Legal Primer, we had a fair bit of discussion about how to deliver the information at the right level.  We’re still discussing whether or not it is as accessible as it should be for an audience of visual thinkers.  The term accessible, for uninitiated, can often mean dumbed down.

Since we’re writing about what is inherently a complicated topic, and a topic which is usually discussed in a great deal of dry, boring, legal jargon, we’ve been challenged to somehow deliver this information in a way that we hope won’t make our readership bleed from the ears, but without diluting the value of the information by dumbing it down.

As the primary drafter of this document, we are taking the approach that our audience deserves a more intelligent document than YouTube’s Copyright School, because we think our audience is smart enough to manage to read a document that is short on cute cartoon animals and long on words and weighty concepts.  There isn’t a video (and no plans for one) and the text is a heck of a lot longer than a single above-the-fold web questionnaire.

Of course, given that the focus is content in OpenSim and SecondLife, perhaps we could illustrate it with an adorable tiny avatar.

Thinks for a minute…

Nah.

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Posted in 3D, 3D content creators, Content, education, OpenSim, Second Life, secondlife, Shenlei

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Something Completely Visionary: Fashion, Tech, Innovation, Part 7

Posted on April 8, 2011 by | Comments Off

Armed with our initial vision of a base garment that could essentially play videos or images on its surface, let’s explore some of the challenges that need to be addressed before this could become reality.

Last time we looked at some of the considerations for circuitry for such a garment, e.g., the links for power and for the actual data.  This time, let’s look at how a video playback garment might be powered.

Perhaps the largest challenge for any sort of wearable computing is providing the device with enough juice to make it work.  Short of plugging it into the wall, how would a garment such as we propose be powered? We would have to say that at this point in the development of portable power supply, there is no good or easy solution. What we have seen coming up, may eventually provide enough power to enable such a garment, but at the moment, the technology is not yet well enough developed to make a video playback garment functional.

The most obvious portable power source is a battery of some sort, but as any owner of a cell phone or lap top will tell you, the battery is disproportionately heavy in comparison to its size.  Plugging in enough batteries to power a full garment would require a backpack worth of today’s batteries, and that’s just not very stylish.

There are some interesting developments in creating battery textiles that generate power through the interaction of the body within the textile – some generate power as a result of the static (electricity) that develops from the body’s friction against the garment while others generate power from the body’s movements manipulating and folding the garment to generate power.  (Static electricity develops when two unlike materials rub against one another.)

These textiles are very interesting, since it would seem that you could have a base textile that not only had the ability to play back imagery, but it could also generate its own power supply.

Other things we have thought about for possible power supplies is converting the power of the garment wearer’s foot strike into an energy source.  A woman wearing a high heel carries her full weight concentrated onto a tiny surface area.  When walking, that force is concentrated by her momentum and other physical forces.  It would be entirely possible to convert her entire high heel into a small power manufactory, but that power would need to be moved from the shoe heel to her garment.  Perhaps seamed hosiery would become popular, as you could run an electrical line up the back of the hosiery in the seam, and connect the garment to the hosiery with a small conductive snap.

And what a great project for the physicists, electronic engineers, and material scientists out there to work on!

The issue of power supply is a big hurdle to get past, but luckily with the increased use of mobile devices, there’s increased focus in developing lighter weight, longer life-span battery supplies.  Eventually this question will be answered in a way that enables wearable computing, or even wearable information storage devices, to become more fashionably useful.

Next time: how to get it there, and why we should care about avatars in the wearable computing mix!

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Posted in 3D, Black Dress Technology, Content, Fashion Research Institute, Shenlei

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