playful vr

This is a note I wrote to the group Boston Tech Poetics (formerly Boston Creative Coders)

Thanks to Adam and everyone who helped set up some great talks the other week!

I was so glad I shook off an urge to lose myself in my kindle until the "real" talks began - we have a nugget of this great little community doing really cool work here, and I'd love to see more - both what people are doing (like in the other thread) and also stuff, obscure or well-known, old or recent, that they think other Tech Poets should be aware of.

Zach Lieberman's work reminded me of two other artists I wish more people knew of: Some of his overhead projector / shadow stuff reminded me of Myron Krueger - he was working on amazing interactive stuff, most often w/ realtime silhouette / shadow data, and he started doing that when, like, "Pong" was the new hotness - but with a fervent dedication to keeping things real time. You can see a decent overview of some of his stuff here:
(Zach showing us Chris Sugrue's "Delicate Boundaries" was such a lovely extension of some of those ideas)

I like to see where ideas like these, either descendents or parallel thoughts, get commercialized. Way back in the PS2 era, "EyeToy" had some elements of that, of using simple webcam data to let you, say, fight off a big group of tiny ninjas leaping on you Maybe too this is all on my mind because I just got one of those PS4 VR setups, and some of the mini worlds play with some similar ideas...

At some point Zach was showing clips from software where people would draw something in a space, and that drawing would take on some kind of life - this reminded me of Takeo Igarashi's work.
He came up with this concept he called T.E.D.D.Y for making 2D sculptures by extrapolating from simple 2D doodles -
This got put into AMAZING commercial life with a game called "Magic Pengel". This was a PS2 joint project with Studio Ghibli (!!) and you didn't just draw static things, but fighting critters - as you drew, you indicated if this was a leg, or a wing, or a tail, or what, and then some super clever code animated what you drew and put it dancing and weaving in 3D space. Quite amazing! Unfortunately, the combat was just Pokemon-like Rock/Scissors/Papers turn-based battles. (A sequel, "Graffiti Kingdom", tried to make the creation system less loose and more engineer-y, I don't think it was an improvement.) Here is a Lets Play:

And while that video has loose, clay-lump drawings, apparently the sky was the limit in the hands of a skillful, determined artist:
I'm just blown away by this stuff. Going back to 2D, there was that "Crayon Physics" type games, and I see some more recent "2D physics from doodles" - but this 3D stuff was totally next level, and I'd love to see it in more applications - T.E.D.D.Y really bridged a gap from 2D inputs to 3D sculpture, and I don't even know what kind of black magic and animation genius about joints and physics Magic Pengel employed - I'd love to see a "Smash Bros" type physical combat with this idea (but I'm nowhere near smart enough to make it)

So what have you seen, either in the artists studio or gallery or on the store shelf (virtual or otherwise) that inspires you? What stuff based on Ollllld technology still inspires that "damn, how'd they do THAT?" And where would you like to try and put it in your own work?