The Metaverse Journal - Virtual World News

The third annual Serious Games Conference was held last in week in Singapore and it was a real pleasure to speak at the event. The event was well attended by a variety of speakers and industry representatives from across the globe and local Singapore developers.

Designers, developers and domain experts shared their experience, current developments and where they believe serious games are heading. Presentations were made by representatives from companies such as Crytek (South Korea), Digitalmill (US), Eduwealth (Singapore), Littleloud Studios (UK), MOH Holdings (Singapore), National Institute Education (Singapore), Playware Studios (Singapore), Ranj Serious Games (Netherlands), Rockmoon Pte Ltd (Singapore), Serious Games International (UK) and yours truly from Hummingbird Interactive.

See on e27.sg

Running through the end of July are Audience Participation Events for the UWA Centenary 3D Art Challenge, with 90 artworks from around the globe and MachinimUWA V: Seek Wisdom, with a sublime collection of 51 short animated film.

Both of these events are set up such that the viewers or the audience experiencing the artworks or the film, can submit a top10 list in the order they think will be the ultimate juried order. The 3 viewers or audience members who come closest in both art & machinima events can win for themselves up to L$10,000. To take part, click the link for the 3D Art or for the Machinima and everything is explained!

All this will culminate at 6am SLT Sunday 5th August where the Grand Finale announcement will be held for both events.

See on uwainsl.blogspot.com.au

With over 20,000 regions currently active on the grid, it is sometimes hard to picture just how big Second Life is, much less under how all the various component parts – continents, famous regional groups, places like the Blake Sea and Bay City – look and fit together. Harder still is to picture exactly how SL grew over the years.

So, if you do have an interest in the physical growth and development of Second Life, or are curious about SL cartography, Maps of Second Life is well worth a visit.

Brought together and curated by Juliana Lethdetter, the exhibition features maps charting the history of Second Life from 2002 onwards, and features maps supplied by groups such as the Historical Society of Second Life, the SL Coast Guard, and individuals such as Carl Metropolitan and Marianne McCann.

See on modemworld.wordpress.com

A nice piece from Sarah Lacy:

As anyone who has ever been near a startup knows, none of it is ever that simple, whether the startup succeeds or fails. And it certainly wasn’t for SecondLife — a company that seemed crazy initially, lauded as the next best thing a few years later, and was then dismissed as overhyped and mostly forgotten as the Web 2.0 wave gained steam.

SecondLife never went public or sold. There were chaotic transitions in management and pretty sizable layoffs. But far worse in the eyes of many, its audience just failed to grow. And in the Valley, many consider anything that’s not growth or an exit as a death. The hype cycle moved on, and even people in the back of the room were asking whatever happened to SecondLife, as Rosedale spoke.

 

“Did it ever sell?”

 

“I don’t know… Hey, did SecondLife ever sell?”

 

“I can’t remember…”

 

But Rosedale argued hard — and pretty convincingly — that SecondLife was a success. SecondLife has 1 million active users. That’s almost the exact same number it had at the peak when everyone was going ape-shit about it — when it was on the cover of BusinessWeek as the next big thing, when staid companies like IBM were building out SecondLife presences, when politicians were holding press releases inside of SecondLife, when Duran Duran and Depeche Mode were holding concerts there.

 

That number never fell, Rosedale says. If that was an amazing accomplishment then, it should still be an amazing accomplishment now that they’ve sustained it in a world where websites are fads that quickly come and go. More impressive, there are $700 million a year in virtual goods transacted inside of SecondLife every year. That’s more than enough to make the company very profitable.

See on pandodaily.com

Cloud Party.

Two simple words. I found out about it a few days before it got blogged on New World Notes and as I have a commercial Facebook set up took a look. My old Mac that cannot support Second Life worked perfectly well for Cloud Party. It’s embedded in Facebook or you can use just on a normal browser. And inspiration struck me. The piece of music I am using for this post was on my Spotify as I logged on and it really made me smile.

- Mesh Content (so yay for those who have learnt it for SL)
- Access to a potential huge market via Facebook
- Easy Interface (if you can use an iPhone you can use this)
- Marketplace and ability to cash out for creators coming soon

And it was well – pretty neat.

It’s not a replacement for Second Life. It’s a different animal but it has the sparks that Second Life first created for me albeit it with a now more skilled background. For a content creator who has learnt mesh and photoshop etc this is an amazing opportunity. Key is for Cloud Party to now get heir pricing point and commercial model right. Then the second key is to continue to engage the Facebook set whilst not getting too distracted by the SL set. And I mean that in the nicest way as I am one of those. They have a small but perfectly formed team, CEO Sam Thompson and his team with advisors Cory Ondrejka (he co-founded SL) and Bruce Rogers from Cryptic Studios.

See on scarletcreative.com

For most people, NPCs — non-player characters — are the princesses you need to save in video games, dragons you need to defeat, and shopkeepers who give advice about how to proceed in your quests.

But for David Prior, CTO at Simudyne , NPCs are a way to model emergency evacuation plans for amusement parks, hotels, banks and other large venues — even entire cities.

One customer using the technology is the European Union’s SAVE ME project, the goal of which is to develop a system that detects disasters and offers mass evacuation guidance in order to save public lives and the lives of the rescuers. The first two pilot sites will be Italy’s Colle Capretto tunnel and England’s Monument Metro station.

See on www.hypergridbusiness.com