The seven-minute tour: fifty virtual worlds
August 6, 2008
Gary Hayes has completed a fascinating walk-through of fifty virtual worlds. It’s well worth spending the time having a look:
Montages like this emphasise the growth and potential of the virtual worlds sphere. It also emphasises the challenges around interoperability, determining appropriate levels of governance and the role of business in the mix. The only sure thing is that a significant number of the fifty featured won’t gain the critical mass or niche for longer term survival.
Over to you: how many of the fifty worlds have you participated in? I can count a dozen I’ve spent more than 10-12 hours in, and another dozen I attempted to sign up for but didn’t progress because of restrictive computer requirements. More on that later this week.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Berlin - live in Twinity
July 13, 2008
Berlin’s Hackescher Markt is the latest addition to the mirror world Twinity.
According to Metaversum, this is the first time that Berlin has been mirrored within a virtual world - the
Hackescher Markt district comes in at over six square kilometers of area in the real world. Twinity’s version has shops, galleries, bars, and clubs that all exist in the real Berlin.
You can still register for the current private beta phase.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Lively – not a rival; still a challenge.
July 9, 2008
Will Lively supplant Second Life? Is it a rival, a match for, or a strong competitor to Second Life? Will we all someday have left Second Life and made the transition to Lively instead?
Not likely.
Is this an issue?
Not really.
Lively is a pretty-looking mashup – it has taken multiple ideas and technologies from various places and smushed them together into something reasonably useable and useful. Sure, the camera controls are hard to handle, even if you come direct from Second Life, or from Blender, the open source animation package. Similarly, the avatars are difficult to move. Moving also requires that you have some control over the camera. Putting these considerations aside, I found the thing that worked extremely well – the TV, one of the furniture options in Lively, allowed me to seamlessly and effortlessly display YouTube material.
It was an awesome experience to be able to view a YouTube video with a room full of friends who could not be physically present. I wished that I could view the screen of the TV better, but the viewing quality was adequate. As I watched and chatted with the folks who had joined in for the Beta, my main thought was, “Hey, Linden Lab? See this? This is cool! I’d like some in Second Life!”
Second Life of course has various provisions for allowing video, but none are as sleek or as easy as Lively makes it.
I feel that Lively is a useful innovation for two reasons.
First, it brings people together in such a way that they can share web-browsing experiences (until now an activity made cumbersome by the restrictions of sharing links via instant messages or email), without getting weighed down by the choices that the ability to create content brings.
Second, it challenges existing and prototypical virtual worlds to keep pace and offer similar experiences to their residents. It is a challenge not in the sense that the whole concept of one world is challenging to the very existance of another, but in the sense that it sparks new ideas and desires in the minds of all virtual world users. I think all extant virtual worlds could learn from the slick way that Lively presents YouTube material.
The background information for Lively suggests that there is a lot more to come, particularly in regard to mashups with existing technologies. There is excellent potential for those mashups to be done extremely well. To my mind though, there isn’t even a question of whether Lively will rival Second Life, no matter how far it changes or evolves. I don’t believe it was designed to and I strongly feel that during their lifetimes, Lively and Second Life can co-exist happily, feeding ideas into each other.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Google Lively - be excited?
July 9, 2008
I try to avoid hyperbole with new product announcements but it’s hard to avoid at least some excitement over today’s Google announcement of Lively, its virtual worlds product.
A Second Life killer it’s not, but at the very least Lively is likely to be a key driving force towards mainstreaming virtual worlds. You can view the demo here:
Is it original? No - there’s dozens of similar worlds out there. Does it have a superior feature set? Not likely. All that said, its key value proposition will be its integration with web pages, the overwhelming market dominance of Google itself (chances of a Lively demo on Google’s home page anyone?) and the likely blitz of mainstream media coverage not seen since Second Life’s golden media era of late 2006.
Dynamo colleague Feldspar Epstein will have a more detailed walk through Lively in the next 24 hours. In the meantime, what are your thoughts? Will Lively break some ground or be yet another cartoon teen hangout?
Popularity: 3% [?]
IBM and Linden Lab take the next big step for (virtual) mankind
July 8, 2008
As announced on the Linden Lab blog today, IBM and Linden Lab have successfully teleported avatars from the Second Life preview grid to an OpenSim virtual world.
Some video of the event below or read the FAQ for future plans:
It’s another noteworthy step toward the holy grail of virtual world interoperability. Linden Lab state they’ll have their own Open Grid beta this month. It’s all very cutting edge for most of us but an echo of a very interesting future in virtual worlds.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Aqros: virtual worlds on your mobile phone
July 2, 2008
I received a note today from Dr. Yesha Sivan, founder of Metaverse Labs. He pointed me to some progress made on a mobile client for virtual worlds - Aqros (across). Second Life is the focus of the initial development, with Aqros up to its first beta version.
This slideshow summarises how it works nicely:
Dr Sivan blogs further on the development here. Although there’s no graphic representation of the virtual world experience, this or one of the other applications under development is likely to be a must-have for some virtual world residents. I’m counting down the days until I land an iPhone and this application will be one of the first installed.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Twinity – what is it good for?
June 30, 2008
“Twinity – the virtual world that mashes up the real with the virtual world”, proclaims their website. However, Twinity is no more of a mashup of the real and virtual worlds than any other virtual world. It’s a world of real people meeting other real people, filled with real digital content, all set against a backdrop of digital representations of real places and places that could exist in real life. What’s new here, if anything, and where might Twinity fit in the greater scheme of things?
Like many mashups, the main justification for their existence is convenience: bringing together multiple ideas, and associating them in a useful and time-saving manner. Twinity takes pre-existing concepts, makes a light, fluffy interface to access them, and uses what is currently a slow and buggy system to serve up the result. It doesn’t sound too good so far, but to be fair the whole system is still in Beta. However, only the flakiness of the system looks set to change, as the feature-set does not seem to be destined to change radically.
So what would make a potential user pick Twinity over another virtual world, or choose to use it despite the mass of more accessible options available for entertainment purposes?
1. Lightweight interface: there’s less to learn about interacting with the world than in other virtual worlds. However, this means that the Users’ options are limited when it comes to interacting with the world (where “User” is Twinity jargon term referring to the real person at the keyboard).
2. Convenience: it puts a whole bunch of people together with some digital diversions, in a place where they can interact with other people who have an interest in the same digital material. The entertainment types are quite limited at this point and it does not look as though that is going to change substantively in the near future.
How does Twinity overlap other virtual worlds?
1. Virtual physical presence: unlike text-based solutions, Twinity gives Users visual cues from the people around them, from simply knowing who is in the room to being able to get some measure of personality from appearance.
2. Eclectic encounter-based mechanic: Users can bump into other Users and interact with them. Interactions which might never have occurred in the real world are common-place and informal in a virtual world.
3. Virtual physical proximity: Users have something immediate to talk about that they can share. Proximity to objects and entertainment sources gives Users a shared experience that can form the basis of their interactions.
4. User-created items: This is common to many virtual worlds, to a greater or lesser extent. This capacity has not yet been added to Twinity, but is expected in the near future, certainly before the product exits the Beta phase.
In which ways does Twinity not compare well with other virtual worlds?
1. Broad cross-section of User backgrounds: Users are attracted to virtual worlds for a variety of reasons, and these differing reasons ensures that Users will be different from each other in some ways. However, a world with as many restrictions as Twinity is likely to filter out a number of potential Users because of the limitations on experiences and expression.
2. In-world creation tools: No in-world tools for content have been announced.
3. Limited movement and camera control options: This may be seen as a benefit by some, and a lack by others. Movement is orthogonal and diagonal only and camera controls are heavily simplified.
4. No geography: Twinity is essentially a set of rooms linked by teleportation. Outdoor spaces provide a semblance of geography, but really they are no more extensive than sound stages.
5. Windows-only client: Mac and Linux users are simply not catered for.
The lightweight simplicity of the interface may be sufficient to attract a large contingent of Users to the platform, however that very simplicity is likely to turn off users of people who have used other, more sophisticated worlds previously. In short, the platform is appropriate for people looking specifically for a lightweight chatting and entertainment solution – but don’t expect more than that.
Popularity: 5% [?]
