My first shot at rotoscoping video created in Second Life

For best viewing, download the 1280 X 720 Quicktime file here by right-clicking and saving to your hard drive.

More Games Our Brains Play

Here's another video from Ted Talks related to the mental construction of reality. This one is a lecture by Philosopher Philosopher Dan Dennett. It starts off a bit slow, but eventually presents some compelling evidence that "not only don't we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us."

Why Seeing Shouldn't Be Believing

Yesterday's images crudely demonstrated how just a little resolution enhancement can ruin one's enjoyment of erotica. Magnification can break down our typical experience of a virtual world by revealing the underlying absence of detail and complexity. Magnification can cut through our normal perception of the physical world by revealing almost infinite levels of detail and complexity.

This fun video by neuroscientist Al Seckel demonstrates some of the ways the mind interprets and misinterprets visual imagery.

Q. What Does Hi-Def Video Teach About Porn and Second Life?

A. Too much detail can ruin a fantasy.

And the HD Hosting Winner is Blip.tv

The last post linked to versions of an HD test video uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo. Video hosting services don't stream your original video, but re-encode to fit their particular display formats. So quality can vary quite bit depending upon the specifications of the original video you upload and the particular way a service renders into their final format.

Vimeo produced the best image of the two services I tried yesterday and was the least picky about image format. Today, I uploaded to blip.tv, and in my opinion it's the all around best choice. The image quality is as good as Vimeo, plus it's the only option that supports embeddable HD video (although I don't have the width available here for the full resolution.)

My First HD Video: Persona

I put a very short video together to test YouTube's new HD capability. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to export a format that works well. The video either doesn't register as HD or the encoding is very choppy.

YouTube HD is working now and can be viewed here. The settings that finally worked were:

• .mp4
• H.264
• 5000 kps data rate
• 30 fps
  
• optimized for streaming
• 1466 byte maximum packet size

The embedded Vimeo clip below is low res. Here's the link to the vimeo HD version.


Persona from Botgirl Questi on Vimeo.

This is Your Brain on Virtuality

Iconoclast is a fascinating book on the neuroscience of innovative thinking. Although it doesn't address virtual worlds directly, I've run out of post-it flags marking relevant passages that shed light on our digital experience.

One of the main themes of the book (supported by a slew of research) is that the best way to break out of mental ruts is to confront your brain with stimuli it has not seen before. It seems to me that the experience of being an avatar within a virtual world is one of the most radical shifts in self-perception one can experience. The explosion of creativity many people experience through virtual worlds has a neurological basis. Pretty cool.