Reposting an article I wrote on Bard’s Birthday 2009 on SLSC Blog:

As announced, the Blackfriars Museum (a.k.a. the Blackfriars Theatre Museum) grand opens TODAY on the Bard’s Birthday 2009! The museum is a humble shack adjacent to the north end of the Blackfriars Theatre, as such it’s more of a mini-exhibit, but should give you a good overview of the historic elements behind the construction of the world’s only complete replica of Shakespeare’s indoor playhouse, the Blackfriars Theatre in Shakespeare, Second Life.

While creating this exhibit (the sketches are modified from Irwin Smith and the Public Domain; the text is mine), I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between a cathedral floorplan and that of a theatre, and so here’s my sort of “pet paradigm”:

The above, in context, is displayed on a wall in the Blackfriars Museum, unedited SL photos as shown below. (Clicking on the “Cathedral in a Theatre” panel inworld also gives you a free inworld info HUD so that you can take these three panels home–or anywhere on SL–with you!)

The Museum illuminates the historical basis for the construction of the Blackfriars Theatre, which was actually built within a building inside a lavishly *rich* Dominican Monastery (hence the name Black Friars — the Dominicans wore a black cloak over their habits). Conjectural diagrams of the monastery are shown, although only the building segment housing the Blackfriars is built (due to funding shortages — I can’t afford to buy another sim for my pet projects anymore but, if you’re crazy enough to fund a sim dedicated to a build of the *complete* Dominican priory that the Blackfriars Theatre was set in, give me a poke!). In addition to… yet more diagrams… the museum also shows a scaled-down version of the roof structure, explaining for its historical basis. Faux-original documents, such as Piers Plowman and diagrams/photos from archaeological digs are also displayed in context (emphasis on faux-original — admittedly, they’re made to look da-Vinci-Code-esque, i.e., Hollywood style imitations of ori doc’s).

For the detail-pious, just a note of excitement to look forward to in the next few months: The Blackfriars Theatre will have both rushes and candlelight installed for our summer staged reading series in preparation for our 2010 production of Henry VIII (and stage stools!). We’ll also make use of the rear-stage, and trap-doors as well even though it’s a staged reading series! Last year, we tried a costumed staged reading series, but this year, we’ll try a staged reading series with (perhaps?) some basic blocking. For sure, we will be going for an Tudor-accurate production of Henry VIII, when we start showing the full ensemble performances in 2010!

As future Challenge Productions, we also hope to try out a couple (at least?) of the many historic play manuscripts with explicit blocking for the Blackfriars!

But, for now, I bid thee check out the Blackfriars Museum! And, happy birthday Shakespeare!

I guess I just found this TechVirtual project at the right time. I guess I get to tap into this component of my dark past. Hey, and look I passed their word challenge on first try! ;-P

(FW is a programmer. The nanoimpossibility is due to FW. See here for more stuff from earlier.)

To facilitate a variety of possible shapes and sizes, another implementation could feature a latex ’skin’, with internal balloons filled with oxygen, that create a replica of the person’s shape. Limbs could be facilitated with telescoping cylinders and hydraulics that extend or shrink to produce the proper length in the extremeties.

RGB projectors surrounding the robot would project the face and proper skin tones, and the appearance of clothes.
A second implementation might involve the use of currently available technology, transparent and flexible LCD screens. Once the person is scanned, the screens can display the image of the clothing and skin around the robot’s shape.

An extreme implementation, leveraging not-yet-developed but previously conceived technology, would be to use many small nano-scale robots to combine together into one larger one. The nano-scale robots would have the ability to alter their external coloring and thus each would appear to be the ‘pixels’ of the person. This methodology, demonstrated in true Hollywood style in the motion picture ‘Virtuosity’, would represent a significant undertaking, but is not necessarily unlikely as technology and our understanding progress.

The booth looks significantly different now:

FW and I finally finished setting up my SL version of a fuzzy logic viz exhibit:

The snapshot below features the first guy who dropped by our exhibit. (Not FW btw - he passed out! :-O)

(Here is an early draft of the infoCard for my VizClone exhibit at the tech.)

VizClone is a visual artificial intelligence experiment where a robot uses fuzzy logic to “focus” on an individual in the crowd and clone their image in real time 3D. Robot sees. Robot becomes. You shall see!

The Second Life implementation uses libsecondlife to scan avatars in the vicinity, a fuzzy logic algorithm to choose an avatar to focus on, and libsecondlife to grab their baked textures onto the “robot”.

The Real Life implementation may occur with either an array of cameras capturing the nearby people, and then a multimedia projector projecting on a blank 3d statue, or perhaps a hologram to create the clone.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/The%20Tech/57/140/37