The Playful World

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As you read these words, architects of the new virtual reality are inventing a world you never call it the playful world. This interactive realm collapses the gulf between wish and existence, space and time, animate and inanimate. The material world becomes manipulable and programmable, emerging at the crossroads of high technology and popular culture, evolving rapidly through electronic creativity. Are you ready for it? Your kids are. In this captivating exploration, Mark Pesce, a pioneer of the technological revolution, examines how a new kind of knowing and creating is reshaping our culture. It began with Furbys, the first toys capable of interacting intelligently with their environment, signaling a new human endeavor: embedding our intelligence into the physical world. Pesce reveals that engineers have ventured far beyond Furbys into stranger virtual realms. He takes us inside cutting-edge research facilities where the distinction between bits and atoms is fading. We meet creators of LEGO Mindstorms, which controls motors and processes data from sensors, and observe visionaries like Marvin Minsky and Eric Drexler turning Nobel laureate Richard Feynman's theories into "nanites"—tiny ultra-high-speed computers that replicate intelligent life. The launch of the Sony Playstation 2 promises to bring synthetic worlds into our homes, creating a gateway to a living planet. Web-based toys are just the beginning of a new reality