Players around the world can trade the virtual currency to other players, who can use it to buy better armor, amulets, magic spells and other accoutrements to climb to higher levels or create more powerful characters.

The Internet is now filled with classified advertisements from small companies auctioning for real money their powerful avatars.

By some estimates, there are well over 100,000 young people working in China as full-time gamers. They have strict quotas and are supervised by bosses who equip them with computers, software and Internet connections.

"We prefer to hire young migrant workers rather than college students. The pay is not good for students, but it is quite attractive to the young migrants from the countryside," said Wei Xiaoliang who focuses his business on wholesaling Warcraft gold to overseas brokers.

Via International Herald Tribune.

Related: Virtual club to rock game culture. A different take in Cri.english.

Pac-Lan enables players to keep track of one another’s position through images on their mobile phones as they chase one another round campus.

Each phone has been programmed with a maze, which is based on a map of the University Campus. Players have to collect points from RFID tags, which have been attached to yellow disks on lampposts around the University.

When a player collects their points by holding their mobile phone against the disc the virtual reality maze on each mobile phone is updated with the player’s position. Each player shows up as an animated character (Pac-Lan or Ghost) moving round the screen. This enables a team of "ghosts" to track the player down and catch them.

I do hope that wearing the gown is compulsory for players.

More in LU News, The Engineer.

More pacman in the streets games: Pac-Manhattan, Human Pacman.
List of Location-based mobile phone games.

They have a mind-blowing Light Art from Artificial Light exhibition that offers the classical highlights of light art. The show includes Marie Sester's Access and works by Vito Acconci, John M Armleder, Jonathan Borowsky, Olafur Eliasson, Bruce Nauman, Tracey Emin, etc.

I've been totally mesmerized by Zaha Hadid (tho' i'm definitely NOT a fan of her architectural works) and Patrik Schumacher's Chandelier Vortexx. The double-helix design of the fiberglass piece uses a programmable LED strip that provides both direct and indirect light and smoothly changes colour.

There were several disco-inspired pieces and Bernhard Martin's Single Disco (Whisper Club) was a good laugh: inside a tiny wardrobe, there's a disco club for one person (with no arms as there's not enough space to dance).

I've uplaoded tons of pictures on flickr.
Light Art from Artificial Light runs through 05/01/2006.

Through user research and testing with members of the blind community in Manhattan, Spencer Kiser, Michael Jefferson and David Yates have designed a series of surround sound representations of common calendar information that lets users score the composition of their daily lives.

The prototype can run on mobile devices. Users navigate their calendars with a combination of simple voice commands, gestures and the universal keypad (up, down, left and right arrows plus an enter key). Calendar information is represented through a spatialized soundscape that uses a variety of audio icons (sounds that represent kinds of calendar items), human speech that is a navigable 3D model of a user’s calendar. Users are able to navigate to different "views" of their calendar from a month to a week to a day to an individual calendar item.

Listening to the demo makes it clearer: to her left a blind person could hear her appointments on Monday and an evening training session in the middle on Wednesday but she did not hear anything on her far right signaling that her weekend is free. Then through a combination of voice and keypad arrow clicks, books a Lincoln Center concert and dinner with her friend Amy. When she completes the entry, the event is played back in its iconic sound of applause and a clinking glass. The next time she plays back the week she will hear those off to her right in the spatial placement reserved for Saturday.

Part of the itp Spring Show, on December 18 and 19.

The battery can support tens of thousands of signal transmissions on a single charge and can be recharged in less than 30 seconds.

It "will be used extensively in the future to power all kinds" of gadgets ranging from electronic paper to tags that trace retail goods in real-time, said the Japanese company. It will also "open the way for small wearable computers, such as ticket cards that can be attached to a person's clothes."

Via BakuToday. Kyodo news has another picture.

Oscar Narud concieved a three-dimensional labyrinth game in which there's a tunnel inside a toy figure. You drop in a steel ball through its mouth and have to get it out of the eye. Yota Kakuda made a hyperelastic mesh and Tithirut Kutchamuch designed a set of "virgin" rings that come, since everything is produced in one go, in sealed cases that you have to break first. David Sutton applied a generative software normally used for simulating the growth of roots while Joe Wentworth created a gorgeous snap-off calendar. And, finally, Tim Stolzenberg designed a gun that came out of the printer - working. I've tried it.

Btw, great that in the male-dominated gadget-dom, Sony and Marc have selected a girl to blog about the robot.

Not only does the lawn take a tremendous amount of water to keep it green, but the two-stroke engine used by lawnmowers produces some of the worst carbon-dioxide emissions for a motor of its size, contributing to global warming and other air pollution. Add to the picture the pesticides and herbicides used to keep front lawns green. "We're stuck with this idea that plants that produce food are ugly, and lawns that you have to pour chemicals on and mow are beautiful," says Haeg, who hopes his lawns can reverse that thinking.

The next regional prototype in the Edible Estates series will be established in Los Angeles in spring 2006. Haeg is looking for L.A. citizens brave enough to break this toxic uniformity, by having their entire front lawn removed and replaced by an edible landscape. Haeg will work in collaboration to create the layout, design and plant specifications.

Via archinect and Salon.

Via 20 minutos.

Knife City was designed by Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy to resemble a game complete with computer-generated characters, blood-curdling logo and onscreen play icons. The action follows a youth as he encounters a gang on the street, a fight starts and, as he is stabbed, animation gives way to live action.

Documentary-style footage then takes over as bystanders watch in horror. The attacker is then taken to a police station where his computer generated self fades to live action as the reality of his situation becomes clear.

The commercial is the centrepiece of a two-part communications strategy for the Met. During two weeks infomercials are aired on London radio stations Kiss 100 and Choice FM to capitalise on the relationship the stations' top DJs have with their listeners. For the second part of the campaign, street sampling teams will distribute copies of the spoof game on DVD to young men across the capital.

"We're targeting 13- to 17-year-olds who we are only too aware are highly sceptical of and potentially resistant to official campaigns such as this. Our message is clear: get involved with knives and you risk becoming a victim or ending up in prison," a Met spokesperson explained.

Wonder (doubt?) how effective it will be.

Via The Guardian.

The exhibition features new rubbish drawings by Ian, works by 3D, Banksy, Solo One, David Shrigley, Jamie Hewlett, Gee Vaucher, Stanley Donwood, Sickboy, Kelsey Brooks, Faile, Luke Egan (purveyor of inflatable sculptures and novel uses of the traffic cone), Chris Cunningham, Anthony Micallef, Space Invader, Mode 2, Paul Insect, Eine, D*Face, Simon Munnery, Jo Rush, Polly Morgan, Cable Street Collective, and Zeus.

Open daily from 10am - 8pm. (9pm on Thursdays, 5pm on Sundays)
1st December - 24th December, 9 Berwick St, Soho, London W1. Wish i could go :-(

Thanks Ian.

The skin is then visibly sealed into an object to be worn on the body. The process in creating these pieces includes mammalian tissue culturing as well as computer generated form on which the cells are cultured and then transplanted into adaptive jewelry.

Part of the ITP spring show, December 18-19, ITP, TSOA.

Related: bioJewelry and Manipulated tattoo.

The kit behaves as a digital content self-service station. It is a local database for mp3 and text that makes automatic the process of selection and burning of files. With the motto "taking the Internet to the streets" platoniq tries to make visible the ways in which the Web is produced showing its very modes of independent diffusion and distribution based on open licenses.

By platoniq, activists of the copyleft movement.

The work has been nominated for the Transmediale 2006 award.
Via networked_performance.

In Négone, created by Differend Games, each player has a wrist console displaying your score, your character's health and tools obtained in the game. You select your mission (they range from "inoculate the virus" to "steal the secret weapon") and difficulty level. Security guards then escort you to your cell.

Each of the more than 20 rooms has its own theme, and the adrenaline pumps hard as you explore the space - shooting down slides, climbing ladders or diving into a pit of small plastic balls. Every time you see a screen, you place your wrist console beneath it. This activates your helper, one of four pre-recorded characters from a hackers' group. On the screen, they set you a challenge - a memory challenge or logic puzzle answered using the buttons on your wrist console, or something more physical. Correct answers mean a score boost, and a tool that will help you complete your mission; incorrect ones soon add up to you being condemned to a punishment cell - and expelled from the game.

As you play, the screens send you to different doors throughout the building, unlocked by your wrist console.

Each person plays a unique game, and is sent on a different route. An RFID tag with a unique ID number is used to locate and identify each player during the game. Only 5% of players make it to the end on their first go - and they still won't have seen all the rooms. The database remembers players through their unique nicknames. Every time you return, at least 60% of the puzzles and the maze are new.

At the end of 2006, a Negone will open in New York City and 60 locations have been planned over the next 10 years, all over the world. By 2007, according to Differend Games, a version of Négone will contain robots.

Via the Techwear weblog. More information in The Guardian, in RFID Journal and in Baquia.

When the robot is plugged into a wall outlet, one can activate it using a remote controller. Then the robot moves away from the wall and plugs itself out. It is simple but conveys a powerful message.

[Silence after the liberation.]

Murata says its about Robots, which can not function without electricity, unplugging itself by its own will. But the silence after that moment and what we think about the silence can be relevant to any kinds of freedom we desire -- including the desire to be free from WiFi ;-p

via Digital Stadium