Virtual Girlfriend

“The International Herald Tribune writes about Vivienne, the new 3G girlfriend created by Artificial Life, a software house in Hong Kong. It’a a virtual application with a computerized synthetic voice who likes to receive flowers and chocolates, translates six languages and can converse on 35,000 topics. The service is already available in Malaysia and Singapore, and will arrive in Europe later this spring.

At the moment V-Girl is basically considered a game (it won the global Best Mobile Game Award by Ericsson). Apart from this use for lonely hearts, the application developed by Artificial Life might become very interesting, especially for companies that want to enhance the management of the relationship with their customers.” [blogged on making money out of mobile]

Social Collaboration as Collective Performance

MSN has launched a stealth “search opera” to help promote their new search engine. According to Sean Stewart (author behind the Alternate Reality Games The Beast and I Love Bees): “…a search opera is a story treated as a scavenger hunt and a jigsaw puzzle rolled into one. What’s particularly nice about the search opera is that for a decade now people have been looking for a way to use the internet as an artistic medium. The net wants to be interactive, and it wants to be social. A search opera allows a collective audience to have an artistic experience while searching and gossiping and decoding and speculating: in short, while doing the things that the net was really born to do.”

The MSN Search Opera (ARG) centers around a guy named Cy and his conspiracy website. Following the links on Cy’s site and clues garnered by entering specific keywords into the MSN search engine yields videos (some of which are pretty funny), more characters, their journals, and a story that will develop over upcoming weeks.

reblogged from Alternate Reality Gaming Network