Sorry to delay the rolling out of new content in Second Life - just finishing up an unexpected project. It has put me behind about 2 weeks but onward we roll. I was hoping to have a little sample ready at least but I am still in the process of over-engineering it. Will release this sample content properly in the next couple of days.

Also, as part of this change, I am going to rename the HatHead business side of the, well, business to more accurately reflect the company’s service and market offerings. (If that language doesn’t scare you, it may be too late for you.) That will mean a new website and other related stuff.

Lastly, got an email from the Google Lively team today and am now a Lively content developer - very exciting! Models are imported from 3D Studio Max or Maya currently (no Sketch-Up yet) and interactive objects are made using Google’s desktop gadget development kit.

Every week it seems a new virtual world is being released. Often they are really virtual rooms, connected through portals. Just Leap In is of this approach, letting you embed your world/room into your webpage

So I have opened the HatHead Dojo in this world. Just Leap In is super easy to install and use. Although it is first-person shooter perspective, you can still see other avatars. Performance off the top is excellent and my Dojo world is pretty large in comparison to other room-based virtual spaces.

Some snaps:

A confluence of both creative philosophy and emerging technologies have really inspired me over the past few months, marking a real shift in how I design and produce. Enough of a shift that stopping for a moment to frame this approach will help me to hopefully crystallize the new HatHead version 3.0 (version 1.0 being the first music web presence; v2.0 being the founding of HatHead Incubators).

In essence, the philosophy is that the experience of your audience - whether film, virtual worlds, music, web - has the most primacy. As an example, in Second Life there is something known as “lag“: essentially the bandwidth, graphics and CPU resources decrease the frame rate of display (FPS) of the virtual world, sometimes lower than 1 FPS. In contrast, video is around 30 FPS. While the digital pioneers in Second Life suffer through it, this quality of experience is very low, making it difficult to often perform even basic user operations.

While issues such as performance can always be improved, HatHead 3.0 is not about craftsmanship for any skilled craftsman best understands the strengths and limits of their craft, hopefully with some style. Rather, more and more I see that many of the projects I have wanted to do but did not because the were too expensive or impractical are now possible. This includes virtual installations, machinima and multimedia performances. While there will be more on individual projects in later posts, the underlying theme is the primacy of the user experience.

To leave you with a sense of scale of this shift, the content on both the 2 HatHead Second Life islands will totally change on Sept. 1/08.

Also, a HUGE shout-out to John Martin and Jason Lin at Reallusion for their mind-blowing release of iClone 3.0. I have been kicking the tires of the early release for a week or so and this product deserves its own post so stay tuned!

HatHead in Google’s slick, easy-to-use, new Lively 3D virtual world!

If you have downloaded the Lively plugin, please visit!

Lessons Learned
A couple of months ago I produced around 20 minutes or so of animation for a client. A little on the project experience later as the most striking aspect of this project was, to me, in this seemingly ubiquitous age of the internet, the near impossibility of getting high quality images of First Nations peoples - Canada’s indigenous population - for use in creating 3D facial models.

Of course I could find some images but they were mostly antique frontier photographs from the turn of the previous century. My search went on for several weeks until, at one point, a First Nations production team member volunteered to provide some portraits but these too ended up being sepia prints from the turn of the previous century.

The Government of Canada recently apologized to the First Nations for its blatant policies of cultural genocide (”assimilation”) that created our country’s forgotten generations. However, my internet image searches were not constrained by geography and the global results always tragically empty - a seeming Social Darwinist style trend.

(With hindsight - and budget - we could hired some real life models/actors but we did not suspect for moment how little image documentation of First Nations peoples there is…or isn’t.)

Video Production Notes
Firstly, there is no such thing as “final approval” and revisions to creative previously approved were requested right up to the last possible moment. Par for the course when dealing with clients and a fixed budget. As a result though production and post-production time got super squeezed and I was basically left with a month to film and edit it all (script written by client).

Here is a video of some early concept footage to show some of the traditional designs I created for the project as well as my animation style. I shot this in Second Life as this was the quickest way to gather content and express my ideas. Except for one shot, the production animations were then done in iClone as iClone uses a timeline and I knew there would be client revisions so the ability to exactly recreate a shot and only change one thing about it (face, prop, hair, etc) was essential.

Burning the final files to DVD for the client with literally 5 minutes to spare, I managed to deliver my final animations as part of a larger online educational and training manual. The concept behind using machinima here is to provide engaging case studies for people to consider in the larger context of the training manual.

Here is a direct link to the 3 ‘web plays’.
1. Introduction
2. John’s Story
3. Mary’s Story

Discovered on YouTube: rare live footage of HatHead Rickenbacker performing live on Hammond organ with his most favorite band ever!

Talk To Me (Like You Talk To Your Brother)

Reefer Smoking Blues

*Breezin’

* it is true, the entire place was full of almost entirely women that night, which is of course awesome! So come on down every Wednesday night from 9pm-1am!!

The second annual Online Machinima Film Festival awards were held yesterday and it all went off quite well with some machinimators even performing some live music this year. The stand-out award winner this year was Faith, Hope and Charity by Wingman Productions. Joe90 picked up the awards for the film as well as documenting the experience which gives a great represtentation of attending the event in Second Life - not the standard style machinima, this really captures the user experience well I think.

Got my first plot of land, planted a tree and made my HatHead hat in the Chinese virtual world of Hipihi today. Hipihi just entered public beta yesterday.

Feel free to give it a try: sign up here, download here.

The interface is a little confusing since some of it is still in Mandarin. You can hack the client to display a mostly English GUI by changing the following entry in the following file:

…your install directory/UIData/LocalSetting/LocalSetting.xml -> change the ‘0′ to a ‘1′.

An outdated English version pdf to help translate various GUI elements can be found here. While the screens have changed quite a bit, you can still match up the Mandarin labels to the new GUI.

Hipihi resident openid has also translated some of the screens - JurinJuran has posted them here.

The english hipihi forums are here.

This is a video of a real-time blues performance taking place in Second Life featuring Komuso Tokugawa on vocals, guitar, harmonica and intelligent back tracks (which follow him) from Tokyo, Japan and myself on piano, excited yelps and groaning from Toronto, Canada. This is a regular weekly show so keep your eye on the event listings. The video was filmed and edited by Osprey Therian.

In a world where a mobile phone ring costs more than a real song, I am convinced that virtual music performances are the future for musicians.