First Alan Levine from the Horizon Project Advisory Board (last years) this note:
“3D Mailbox delivers a fantastic, smarter e-mail experience. Immerse yourself in 3-D as you read and write your mail. Relax to the sounds of the ocean, seagulls, and cool tunes. Hang with your mail poolside, or feed your spam to the sharks! Deleting spam is so much fun, you may wish you had more!”
Check out the trailer
http://www.3dmailbox.com/trailer/index.html
I watch the trailer and am simultaneously awed, amused, and disgusted.
The visual message is “Good email” is like the beautiful people on beaches. The kind who don’t get horrified looks from their depilatorists when they ask for Brazilian waxes. And “Spam”, why spam is like big, fat sumo wrestlers. The beautiful email can enjoy the pool while the big fat people (the spam) are fed to the sharks.
I do a little online research (okay i was bored) and turn up this response to the product (there’s bad language in it, my apologies)
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/3d-mailbox/
July 25 this news story hits the wire encouraging all you trim beach folk to stay away from us big spam people.
http://news.independent.co.uk/health/article2802621.ece
I’m not normally a humorless person. I do have a sense of humor about all of this except when I think about it in conjunction with my first adventures in Second Life (http://musematic.net/?p=39) wherein I achieved my perfect body without much effort. In Second Life I am embarassed not to look like how I really look because it feels like lying.
In real life I am embarassed to look like I really look because I am neither trim, nor young. And now, according to new medical reports, I am a proven danger to those of my friends who are trim and young. I am, in fact, Spam.
Just throw me to the sharks, folks. Technology was supposed to make life easier. This is too hard.
July 27th, 2007 03:17
Holy Bad Metaphors Batman!
Ummm… exactly on what basis did Alan think this was a good idea? Has someone created a new April fools holiday for the summer season?
I feel sorry for people who’s e-mail is so boring that this is what’s needed to make it exciting. But everyone isn’t as lucky as I am to be getting e-mail from Holly.
July 27th, 2007 05:54
Wow. Friends should not let friends play with Poser while drunk.
In the meantime, let’s swim with the sharks, Holly. Or be the sharks. Can we be the sharks instead? And eat the poorly-rendered humans?
July 27th, 2007 05:59
Actually, I have to chuckle here. I was looking through the FAQ on the website and found the following gem (responses from the creator here):
I also raised the envy hackles of some women by depicting good mail as “Bond Girls”. Although there are 18 male bimbos as counterparts, they are ignored. One female blogger wrote: “For a start my email appears to have a better body than me, a better tan than me and even my junk mail gets to go to the beach more than I do”. The title of her post is: “Does This Email Make Me Look Fat?” She didn’t realize that there’s an option to view men only, which solves the dilemma.
No. no it doesn’t.
July 28th, 2007 09:35
I have to admit that when Richard showed me the video I thought that it was a parody, a fake product. And then he told me that it was real. And then I got really disgusted and annoyed. Is there an option where we can make the sharks eat all the fake, plastic-filled people instead? Can I adjust the avatar hip/waist/chest ratio to something actually in the normal human range? What about those of us who appreciate juicy women? Humpf.
July 30th, 2007 08:32
I’ve got to jump in here and say I’m not really offended at 3D Mail. For me, it’s like junk food, it was cool to look at and think about the concept for a few minutes, but it isn’t something I have time nor am particularly interested in using. My blogs are (as my husband complains) mostly stream of consciousness essays about a few ideas that interest me and are somehow connected to technology, museums, or the history of ideas. I think the developer’s idea, taken on its own, is amusing–like an elaborately conceived one-liner. For me, the sinister connection was purely subjective and occured when I was introduced to 3D Mail and the science article on the effects of obesity, and my continuing obsession with the range of philosophical and ethical issues in Second Life, in a relatively brief timespan.
August 1st, 2007 11:56
Here – this seems like a more fun visualization of my e-mail.
http://carohorn.de/anymails/
http://carohorn.de/anymails/img/movie2.mov (movie)
via Information Aethestics (http://infosthetics.com/)