There's a Map for that.
December 5, 2015 5:21 AM   Subscribe

Redstone genius SethBling has teamed up with Verizon to bring cellular coverage into MineCraft. Video calling, from the outside world into Minecraft, is now a reality. [SLYT]
posted by dmd (16 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
[Skip back to the beginning of the video for context; I linked the money-shot.]
posted by dmd at 5:22 AM on December 5, 2015


Ha! Reminds me of this other recent thing where someone set up a switch in Minecraft so that it controls a lamp in his actual (not made of blocks) house.
posted by oulipian at 5:46 AM on December 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


WHAT

HOW

Between this and the word processor I'm starting to wonder if there are some significant life-changing technologies that could be executed in and powered by Minecraft in ways that may not have been possible IRL. Better research tools? More processing power? Some sort of new machine or robot tech? So many possible applications!

(also this is making me more and more want to play Minecraft, but the one time I tried I couldn't quite figure out what was going on and now I can't afford it anyway)
posted by divabat at 5:59 AM on December 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


The documentation, if you're interested.

So I'm guessing this is kind of a VOIP-like situation? Or like how Skype would work, just via Verizon servers? Or am I waaaaaaay off base?
posted by divabat at 6:08 AM on December 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


WHAT

HOW


There's a kind of zen understanding that comes from understanding that this stuff is all just software.
posted by mhoye at 6:46 AM on December 5, 2015 [6 favorites]


I don't know why this messes with my mind so much, but it does. Some sort of internal categorisation has been breached. Will Microsoft now produce in-game phones and call plans?

I presume you could hook any sort of emulator up to this sort of thing - and not just phones. Or real hardware virtualised.

Urk. Turtles, all the way down.
posted by Devonian at 6:49 AM on December 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


The heavy lifting is done outside Minecraft, with a server written in Python, a bunch of JavaScript, and a custom MineCraft plugin for streaming. Not entirely clear, but it looks like most of it was built by Wieden+Kennedy folks (using many existing pieces -- looks like it's an old library of mine that does the palette reduction, for example. Small world :-)
posted by effbot at 7:37 AM on December 5, 2015 [7 favorites]


Oh god, I can just imagine a future in which all of our computing and social interaction relies upon the jankiest Java codebase you can ever imagine (e.g. - Minecraft), and I shudder.
posted by Inkoate at 8:01 AM on December 5, 2015


Serious question--from a technical standpoint, how different is this from what's been done in Second Life for a long time? I kind of fell out of that, but I remember that it was possible to watch a live video stream broadcast in the real world from inside SL 7+ years ago.
posted by Pryde at 8:08 AM on December 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


I was desperately scrubbing around looking for where they show the 7200 square miles of redstone where they built a cellphone os from the lowest levels... but I guess it's just a mod.

Sort of kills the buzz to know this is just corporate branding for 13yos.
posted by Reyturner at 9:37 AM on December 5, 2015 [5 favorites]


divabat, if you want one, I will buy you a Minecraft account.
posted by Solomon at 10:30 AM on December 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


Buzz is totally alive for me; this is pretty damned cool.
posted by DingoMutt at 12:04 PM on December 5, 2015


Since Verizon is involved, I presume the roaming rates from The Nether are exorbitant, no?
posted by zachlipton at 12:21 PM on December 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


Some time back I frequented an IRC meetup which mostly moved to Second Life, and at one point we had a meeting where I was still on IRC and all the SL folks were watching my messages appear on a wall and everything they "said" was being relayed to me on the IRC channel. It was kind of cool except for the not working very well thing.
posted by Bringer Tom at 12:38 PM on December 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


"Permutation City"

And as I recall, Greg Egan's simulated intelligences within that story ran incredibly slowly, probably because of the "janky" codebases. Egan's so far ahead, it hurts.

Kudos to Verizon getting so many people to propagate its corporate branding. Oculus/Gear VR is full of this kind of branding malarky as well, though rarely done as well
posted by meehawl at 2:20 PM on December 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


The key to understanding this is to realize that it's not being done with redstone. This is a modification, not a contraption built with existing Minecraft components. This is only "inside" Minecraft in the same way that voice chat is "inside" DOTA 2 or Counterstrike.

This is just a gimmick, a publicity stunt.
posted by a mirror and an encyclopedia at 11:43 PM on December 5, 2015


« Older A flock of crows   |   On Human Gene Editing, seizing control of human... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments