Sinds April I am working now at the Media Art Academy in Cologne as a teacher and researcher in 3D animation and games. It´s a great place to work and to get inspired by all the people and cool projects, that going on here.
Two weeks ago we did a very cool workshop, the Ludotronic workshop together with Tilman Reiff and Volker Morawe from Fursr. During the workshop we played with Wiimotes, Arduino boards and Electronics. In the end we developed paper puppets controlled by Wiimotes (MaxMsp, Arduino boards and Servos):
Currently I am focusing on learning the open source software Blender, to integrate it in animation and game design classes.
“Blender is a very flexible, rapid mesh-modelling, animation and audio-visual studio. It also includes its own small game-engine, perfect for use as a prototyping tool or for exporting 3D projects as a ‘Blender Web Plugin’ to share with others.” selecteparks
I also started again to work with Second Life. There is a competition going on to build spatially interesting and aesthetically independent pieces of architecture in Second Life. The best projects will be presented at the Ars Electronica festival 2007 and published in a book (http://www.sl-award.com). So I hope I will find enough time to participate!
I bought a small peace of virtual land, where I am going to build:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/culturegion/124/21/68/
If you are into SL, a place you should really pay a visit is the graduation exhibition of Florian Kuhlmann ‘MY multiple hybridSPACEs’.
http://slurl.com/secondlife/culturegion/189/54/111/
http://www.myspace.com/floriankuhlmann