Linden Funding Mixed Reality at Media Lab; Sheep Developing New Toys

Forbes has a great article up today about work that the MIT Media Lab is doing on mixed reality. Joe Paradiso, a professor in the Lab, is working on what he calls X-Reality or Cross reality and what I'd call Mixed Reality. With funding from Linden Lab, Paradiso is developing a system of sensors to merge the real world (or at least parts of the Media Lab) and Second Life. Paradiso and his team have installed 45 PDA-sized devices around the Media Lab. Each comes loaded with Second Life, cameras, and an array of sensors. People in the lab can peer into Second Life through the devices as virtual world users look through floating windows back into the real world.

The goal is to have a phyiscal building that users can use for virtual meetings from anywhere in the world, interacting through Second Life and sensors.

"These devices are designed to be like wormholes that let you tunnel through to a second reality,"  Paradiso told Forbes. "Second Life is detached. We're tying it into the real world."

Also of note in the Forbes story is the fact that one of Paradiso's former students, Josh Lifton, is also working as a researcher for The Electric Sheep Company and "a major toy company" to develop a mixed-reality product. The Sheep have been talking about a kids world for a while, but it sounds like this product is integrated with the adult-skewing Second Life.

"Lifton won't offer details of the toy but compares it loosely to a robot that 'remembers' its experiences in Second Life," reports Forbes. "Win a game in the virtual world, for instance, and the toy gains a new functionality in the real world."

[via Forbes]

Comments

[Opensource Obscure]

Details and hardware porn at http://www.media.mit.edu/resenv/portals

[Giff (ESC)]

Just a clarification, while we have been researching mixed reality products for a while, those efforts are primarily oriented around custom, Web-based virtual worlds, not Second Life.

On a separate note, I do think there is a lot of interesting activity where real-world telemetry data is brought into virtual world environments. I think it is one of the more interesting use cases for enterprise VW's.

[Chaz Longstaff]

Xcite! is way ahead of you boys... they've already released a RL dildo that you hook up to your Xcite! toys.

[Virtual Dreamworld]

A lot of funding went into this project last year but we never heard anything about it since then. I wonder how this work in the virtual world developed since then.