IDM grad student Mary Ann Benedetto has got together a working version of her thesis, which is a loosely narrative game built with the Torque game engine. It's a loosely narrative, chaotic landscape, populated with fragments of identity. From what I gather. What's amazing is the relatively short time it's taken from concept to demo. Torque does the heavy lifting for you so you can concentrate on creating a world. More screenshots from Mary Ann's game after the jump.

One very interesting branch* of the growing Internet of Things follows the potential for virtual representations of places and buildings to closely model and project forward their real life counterparts. Take the blueprints for, say, a new building on the Polytechnic campus, pull them into a 3d modelling program like Digital Project and pump the resulting model full of details about the building materials -- right down to the wattage of the bulbs in the bathrooms. Have the contractors specify the delivery dates for the supplies. Pipe the model to an open source game engine and you have a remarkably helpful visualization tool for the critical path of your construction. When the building is done and open, keep the model around and use it for maintenance (when are those bulbs estimated to burn out? Let's buy more). Open it up to the students and faculty: rather than hand out URLs on paper (paper! sheesh), just dip into the virtual campus and get the class readings from the professor's avatar. Peter Robertson, an IDM graduate student, is on his way to doing just that. Starting with the historic Wunsch building (once a church and station on the Underground Railroad), Peter is modeling the campus's buildings in Digital Project** and readying them for the Internet of Things. There are some screenshots of the Wunsch building in DP after the jump. * Or perhaps more accurately, group of cells in the blastocyst. ** One bit of interesting trivia about Digital Project is that it's based on CATIA, which was originally a program for modelling curved things like the wings of fighter jets. The first person to use it for architecture was Frank Gehry, whose wavy organo-metallic structures tend to look like, well, the wings of fighter jets.

We are very pleased to announce that Kids Connect, a joint project of Zoomlab and the Waag Society, will be hosted at Polytechnic this summer through the auspices of the Promise Fund and IDMI. KidsConnect is

a series of summer workshops culminating in an original performance between youth in New York, NY, and Amsterdam, Netherlands. Kids from each city will be taught theatrical and technological skills in a workshop, facilitated by media and theater artists, in order to create a performance that will occur both live in the theaters and online. The entire process of the show will be collaboratively created by the youth involved, from storyboarding and concept creation to performing and online stream mixing.

Details have yet to be elaborated. On a personal note, I'm very pleased that I was in the right place at the right time to connect Zoomlab and the Waag to Polytechnic. I will probably be teaching some workshops on visual manipulation, improvisational performance and Second Life skills. You can read more about Kids Connect on the dev wiki.

IDMI is pleased to announce that we'll be hosting a DrupalCamp on May 13th and 14th. Drupal, if you don't know, is a powerful open source content management system with a large and enthusiastic user/developer community. DrupalCamp @ IDMI will be a place for Drupal users and developers to put their heads together and make some great code and sites. Goals include:

• Drupal Users - two days masticating on drupal (tracks: new users, theme dev, module conversion/creation, civicrm best practices, massmailing, etc.)
• Barn Raising - take a .org that needs a new website and build it
• Political Bloggers - a forum for NYC political bloggers to connect and discuss issues/business issues

The Barn Raising is a great idea: throw your hat in the ring now if you're part of a deserving community that's crying out for a web presence. The DrupalCamp will be free and open to the public. More info:

• Upcoming event listing
• and DrupalCamp central