The Blu - a new oceanic platform for social media

Imagine a virtual ocean that is participatory in that you can create a fish, and if your creation is purchased by another participant, you earn money. Strange but true....

Wemo Media and the Los Angeles Chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH held a special behind the scenes look at “The Blu”, a new on-line social media experience in collaboration with Hollywood and Academia on Oct. 11, 2011.

screen capture of user interface published on Deep Sea News

The invite announced:
     "The Wemo Media team is comprised of Academy award winning artists, technology innovators and execs from film, games and the web, including: Andy Jones (Academy award winner, Avatar), Kevin Mack (Academy award winner, What Dreams May Come), Louie Psihoyos (Academy award winner, The Cove) and Joichi Ito (Director, MIT Media lab). 
    Currently in private beta, “The Blu” is the first experience using the Maker Media Platform from Wemo Media. “The Blu” brings the ocean to life on the web. “The Blu” is a beautiful interactive online geosocial web application where people connect across the Internet and explore a vast ocean on the web. Every species and habitat is a unique work of art created by digital artists and developers around the world. Picture hundreds of thousands of aquatic species and tens of thousands of underwater habitats, beautiful works of art created by artists and developers all over the world, spread across the canvas of the World Wide Web as a globally shared art gallery.
     Wemo Media is passionate about enabling artists and developers to co-create globally shared media experiences and storytelling. At the core of Wemo Studios is the Maker Media Platform, a disruptive online creative collaboration platform enabling digital artists and developers around the world to peer-produce innovative digital media."


I asked Neville Spiteri, creator of the project, whether this space would be available for rent, and he thought I meant the studio. I clarified and said 'the virtual space' which is now an asset.  Filmmakers could conceivably use this in production... not sure whether that idea occurred to him before that, but seems like a 'no-brainer' especially since the plan is to create a realistic ocean environment that can be used in part for education and research.

LA Times:  INTO THE BLU

Deep Sea News- Interesting article from a marine biologist:
http://deepseanews.com/2011/11/into-theblu-virtually/
TheBlu website: http://theblu.com The pictures included in this post can be found on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/intheblu