Alter Ego – SBS covers Second Life (again)
Over the past nine months or so, writer / director Shelley Matulick has been making a documentary about Second Life. Its working title was CyberStars but the final product has a much improved title of Alter Ego. SBS and Matulick have previously released Our Brilliant Second Life, but the latest production is a significant step [...]
Virtual Worlds: 2009 industry forecast
US-based Virtual Worlds Management have released their Virtual Worlds Management Industry Forecast 2009 . It features commentary from more than 60 executives across the virtual worlds industry, including Australia’s Santosh Kulkarni (NICTA), Danny Stefanic (ExitReality), Bruce Joy (VastPark), and Bob Quodling (Mycosm).
Condensing a report of this size into a few paragraphs is always [...]
Emergency Maintenance – Second Life
At 12.30am Friday morning Australian time (AEDT), the SL grid will be down for more urgent maintenance. Read all the details here.
Second Life: a monopolistic marketplace?
Today, Linden Lab announced that they’ve acquired two third-party, web-based marketplaces, Xstreet SL and OnRez. On the face of it, such an acquisition is likely to appeal to current Second Life residents and provide a more intuitive virtual goods purchasing option for new users when they register. What caught my eye however, was this statement:
As [...]
Therapy and the metaverse
Mark Kizelshteyn (SL: Chronos Laval) is a virtual world researcher and one of two principals at virtual worlds developer Popcha!. As part of his recent university studies he completed a paper called Therapy and The Metaverse: Second Life and The Changing Conditions of Therapy For Convalescent and Chronically Ill Users, which will be published in [...]
Recession and virtual worlds: go real-world
Nic Mitham at Kzero has written a interesting piece on virtual worlds and the challenges they face in the current economic climate. He pays particular attention to ‘pure-play’ worlds, which are those that aren’t linked to a real-world brand.
Pure-play worlds don’t have the relative security of a more widely known brand to leverage from [...]
The Watch – virtual worlds in the news
1. CNET (USA) – American Idol shows how to extend brand with Habbo virtual world alliance. “As reported earlier on Webware, FremantleMedia, co-producer of American Idol, announced it has teamed up with Habbo to create an Idol-branded community within the Habbo virtual world.
Habbo claims 11.5 million unique users on a worldwide basis and more than [...]
