Whoa! Marvel and Aurasma Show Off New Line Of Augmented Reality Comics at SXSW| TechCrunch

By Josh Constine:

Excerpt:

"Today at SXSW, Marvel announced a partnership with Autonomy’s Aurasma platform to lets users watch video trailers of books they see in stores, as well as 3D animation, recaps, and other augmented reality extras by holding their phones up to comics. That means 3D super heroes will soon be stepping out of your print books. Marvel will release free iOS and Android apps to power the augmented reality experiences as part of its Marvel ReEvolution revamp.

New lines of “Marvel Infinite Comics” written especially for digital are also on the way.

read the full post with more pics here:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/11/marvel-augmented-reality/

Awesome! Meet Quantic Dream's Kara: The Next Generation Of Video Game Development | Co.Create: Creativity \ Culture \ Commerce

Excerpt:

Quantic Dream’s stunning tech demo Kara showcases the future of full-performance capturing through the eyes of a life-seeking robot.

"In what could easily pass as a scene from a Philip K. Dick adaptation, Kara is a postulation of where the line between mankind and machine blurs in a technologically advanced world imagined countless times in sci-fi fiction and film.

But during the seven minutes that depict the eponymous robot being assembled, only to face termination for believing she’s real, viewers aren’t witnessing standard CG or animation techniques--they’re getting a glimpse of the future of full-performance capturing. French video game developer Quantic Dream released the demo for Kara not as a trailer for a possible game, but as a PlayStation 3-run prototype to showcase how far the technology behind it has advanced.

While motion capture has been used in the video game industry for years,..."

read the full article on fastcocreate.com here:

http://www.fastcocreate.com/1680106/meet-kara-the-next-generation-of-video-ga...

Super Cool! Khan Academy Enters Next Era With iPad App | Fast Company

Khan Academy Enters Next Era With iPad App

BY Gregory Ferenstein | 03-10-2012 | 4:31 PM
Offline learning is the latest tool for the unorthodox education organization. Here's how that and other new features will power Khan Academy's new app.

Khan Academy, the wildly popular YouTube lecture series, is slated to launch its iPad app any minute now in Apple's store. The enhanced version of Khan Academy will include time-syncing between devices--no Internet connection required--an interactive transcript of the lectures for easy searching, and a handy scrubber for moving between parts of the lectures. Perhaps more importantly, now that more schools have begun adopting Khan's lectures for their own classrooms, the free iPad app could possibly replace or supplement textbooks, saving cash-strapped schools and students a lot of money.

read the full article here:

http://www.fastcompany.com/1823819/khan-academy-ipad

Bang, bang, you're dead: how Grand Theft Auto stole Hollywood's thunder (Excerpt via The Guardian UK)

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, set among drug and prostitution gangs in LA, became the most notorious game yet of the series. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

"The fastest-selling cultural product in history was created by people you've probably never heard of. While this year's Oscars honoured films in which the movie business sweetly congratulates itself on its own birth – The ArtistHugo – the most dollar-hoovering entertainment release ever is not a film, still less an album; it's a video game. Coming out last autumn, Modern Warfare 3 – a blockbuster military shooter made by a Californian game studio called Infinity Ward – took just 16 days to gross $1bn, beating by one day the previous record set by a film about blue people in space. And it wasn't a freak accident. Global annual sales of video games now dwarf cinema box-office and recorded music: in 2010, games grossed $56bn, film tickets $32bn and music $23bn. (The film industry as a whole still made more, at $87bn.) Even social games on Facebook are enormous business: Zynga, the firm behind Farmville andWords With Friends, is responsible for 12% of Facebook's revenue. Hollywood is old-school now. And one company in particular has played a pivotal role in this media revolution over the past decade: Rockstar Games.

  1. Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames
  2. by Steven Poole
  3. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop
  1. Tell us what you think:Star-rate and review this book

Rockstar's banner Grand Theft Auto series has sold a total of 117m copies. And it's a cute irony of cultural globalisation that the most convincing digital simulation of New York yet made was built by a gang of Scots. In 2008, the $1bn-grossing video game Grand Theft Auto IV recreated in spectacular fidelity Manhattan and its environs as the setting for the adventures of Niko Bellic, an eastern European migrant intent on upward social mobility in the criminal underworld. Later this year, Grand Theft Auto V – whose recently released teaser trailer has, like that for a hotly anticipated film, already attracted millions of views and countless pages of badly spelled fan speculation on the internet – will move the action to a virtual Los Angeles. Yet all the main episodes in this monster fun franchise are created in the UK by Rockstar North, an Edinburgh-based studio that began as a plucky startup in the bedroom-coding home-computer revolution of the 1980s...."

 

Read the full article here: 

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/mar/09/grand-theft-auto-bang-bang-y...

 

Lance Ulanoff reports from SXSW: KONY 2012 Achieved Its Goal, Say Documentarians at SXSW

KONY 2012Even at SXSW in Austin, Texas, KONY 2012 is the topic of conversation. It was the elephant in the room during a panel on social documentary filmmaking and social media. Fortunately, the panelists addressed the elephant — more than once.

KONY 2012 is the massively viral YouTube video, directed and narrated by director Jason Russell who founded Invisible Children, that shines the spotlight on Joseph Kony, a Ugandan warlord who has been abducting children and turning them into soldiers and sex slaves. In the space of a few days, the video has become an international sensation, garnering almost 70 million views on YouTube and even triggering a response from the Ugandan government, which now plans to capture Kony. It has also drawn some criticism for potentially oversimplifying the issues, possibly encouraging “slacktivism” and turning Kony into a celebrity.

The panel’s assembled documentarians, though, chose to address the effectiveness of KONY 2012 as social documentary.

Ontario community manager and panel moderator Meghan Warby said the documentary was stripping away the politics to get to the actual conflict in Uganda.

Dorothy Engelman, who currently runs GetINvolved.Ca in Canada, spent 20 years as a producer and documentary maker. She recognizes that KONY 2012 used celebrity because that’s how you reach everyday people.

 

Read Ulanoff's full story here:

http://mashable.com/2012/03/10/kony-2012-sxsw/

Love this: Introducing The Curator's Code: A Standard for Honoring Attribution of Discovery Across the Web | Brain Pickings

Introducing The Curator’s Code: A Standard for Honoring Attribution of Discovery Across the Web

by

Keeping the whimsical rabbit hole of the Internet open by honoring discovery.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.” ~ Ray Bradbury

You are a mashup of what you let into your life.” ~ Austin Kleon

Chance favors the connected mind.” ~ Steven Johnson

As both a consumer and curator of information, I spend a great deal of time thinking about the architecture of knowledge. Over the past year, I’ve grown increasingly concerned about a fundamental disconnect in the “information economy”: In an age of information overload, information discovery — the service of brining to the public’s attention that which is interesting, meaningful, important, and otherwise worthy of our time and thought — is a form of creative and intellectual labor, and one of increasing importance and urgency. A form of authorship, if you will. Yet we don’t have a standardized system for honoring discovery the way we honor other forms of authorship and other modalities of creative and intellectual investment, from literary citations to Creative Commons image rights.

Until today.

I’m thrilled to introduce The Curator’s Code — a movement to honor and standardize attribution of discovery across the web.

read Maria Popova's full post - I'm signing today

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/03/09/curators-code/

Blog post worth reading: Creative Commons- via Shared Story Worlds

Media_httpsharedstory_esjbh

Excerpt:

"SSWs present some very interesting opportunities (and challenges) from a copyright perspective. As soon as you allow the remixing of content in your SSW, whether it’s content you created or submitted content you published, you have to decide what kind of legal license framework you want. Ideally, this will be shaped by your goals for the SSW and the kind of experience you want to create for audiences. And, ideally, you’ll seek legal guidance from an attorney.

Some creatives want to maximize collaboration and remixing of content, so they construct legal frameworks that support this kind of SSW. Others prefer a more conservative approach (e.g., the SSW owner retains complete control over all content) with select invitations for audiences to contribute being issued in very managed and controlled ways.

Whatever you decide, default copyright is both country- and state/province-specific, so you’ll need to get appropriate legal advice on what applies to you and your SSW.

However, there is an increasingly popular, optional and additional legal license you can apply to your SSW if it makes sense for you: Creative Commons (CC).

CC is a non-profit providing a variety of free licenses that give the public additional rights above and beyond default copyright. Creative Commons has done the homework of crafting legal licenses tailored to work with the default copyright laws in many countries.

To be clear, a CC license does not replace default copyright. Rather, it grants additional rights above and beyond copyright, smoothing the road to collaboration. Many people erroneously think all CC content is free to use or conflicts with commercial endeavors. In reality, CC licenses can be used in a variety of ways, both commercially and non-commercially, and, depending on the CC license you choose, you can select just how many rights are granted to the public...."

L'Odyssée de Cartier: A Diamond-Encrusted Stab at Branded Storytelling | Sparrow Hall - Transmedia Storyteller, New Media Producer & Brand Director

L'Odyssee de Cartier - Branded Storytelling / Branded Entertainment

Here’s to Cartier for taking a bold step into the realm of branded storytelling.
Now all they need is a script.

A brief analysis:

Sparrow Hall gives a great breakdown of pros & cons on his site:

http://www.sparrowhall.com/blog/lodyssee-de-cartier-a-diamond-encrusted-stab-...

Jigar Mehta on When the documentary is not a film: Tales from launching a web-native collaborative project | i-docs

When the documentary is not a film: Tales from launching a web-native collaborative project

March 6, 2012

Activism, Collaboration

Guest post by Jigar Mehta, i-Docs 2012 keynote speaker on Thursday 22 March.

On January 25th 2012, the one-year anniversary of the start of the Egyptian revolution, we launched 18DaysinEgypt.com. No red carpet, no world premiere. It was a moment that we had spent many months building towards, but the site was not our final product. The launch was the beginning of our documentary about the revolution. Our audience is our collaborator.

18 Days in Egypt is an interactive documentary project that tells the story of the ongoing Egyptian uprising, using the personal media created by Egyptians in the crucible of the revolution. We want Egyptians to tell this story together, with their footage, their photos, their e-mails, their texts, even their Tweets and Facebook status updates, all created during the last year in Egypt, particularly but not limited to the first 18 days of the uprising, January 25th to February 11th, 2011.

Not a blank canvas

When we opened the project on January 25th, we did not want participants to see a blank website waiting for the first person to tell their story. We wanted them to see an active community that encouraged them to join in the conversation and contribute to the larger story. Our approach was to start with a small group of beta users two weeks before launch to populate the site. Not only were these users populating the site with content; they were helping to set the tone for the larger community.

One of the keys to the early success of pre-populating the site was our fellows program. We have used part of our funding to hire 6 young Egyptian journalists and students to work with us as field producers. They act as the bridge between the online platform we developed and the reality of Egypt, helping others use the site but also sourcing stories from those who don’t have access to the Internet. They help digitally divided Egyptians get their stories onto the site.

read the full post on the i-Docs site:

http://i-docs.org/2012/03/06/when-the-documentary-is-not-a-film-tales-from-la...

Can't wait for the conference!