Chapter & Metaverse

Streaming Video into Second Life/Opensim - The Easy Way

2011-04-05T21:26:00.003+02:00

If you are considering streaming video into Second Life/Opensim (SLOS), either from a dynamic video source such as a webcam, or from pre-recorded video files (and for the purpose of this article I will concentrate on pre-recorded video files), then you have several choices. First the Prerequisites:

Prerequisites

You must either be the owner or estate manager, or a member of a group that owns the property you plan to stream into (unless you are just streaming to others who are)
Your video source must be in the QuickTime format, or in a format that QuickTime supports

Note: The two most common Quicktime formats are *.mov and *.mp4, but there are other supported formats and these are listed on the QuickTime wiki page. If the video you are attempting to stream does not play in QuickTime Player then it will not play in Opensim, so it is a good idea to download and install the QuickTime Player, and check that your video source plays OK. Details on the specific format used for SLOS are available here.

Choices
The choices available to would-be streamers are as follows:

Set up a video streaming server on a dedicated server or Virtual Private Server (VPS)
Lease a video streaming service
Do it the easy and zero-cost way

Setting up a video streaming server is not for the faint-hearted, and the streaming software can be quite expensive. There are open-source alternatives available, but can prove very daunting for the non-tech savvy, as they often need compiling from source and usually are command-line driven.

Leasing a video streaming service, such as Streamhoster or StreamUK, can likewise prove costly, depending on the number of users who simultaneously connect to the stream. There are some low-cost or free video streaming sites, such as Ustream, but where you have much less control, and compatibility with the QuickTime format is not always assured.

The whole point of streaming is that you do not need to wait for a video file to download completely before you can start viewing that video, you can start watching almost instantly. True streaming is one-to-many. If you are watching a stream and another user joins you, they will start watching the stream at the same point as yourself.

Youtube is the best known example of video streaming, but they use the Flash flv format which cannot be used in SLOS. It is possible to access an mp4 version of Youtube videos using any of a number of add-ons for browsers, particularly Firefox, that create a 'Download mp4' option on the Youtube page, and then rather than downloading the mp4 you could right-click and use the Copy Link Location option to get the URL link which you can paste directly into the About Land, Media tab, Media URL in SLOS. However, this often breaks as Google keeps changing the code for the mp4 streams on Youtube, and the URL links are now extremely long.

Do it the Easy Way
Until recently, I used the easiest method of all, and simply uploaded my mp4 files to a file hosting site, and linked directly to them. This works, but it is not streaming. I have to wait a minute or two for the video to download before it starts playing, and others who join me must do the same, so we are all watching the same video but at different points. If you leave the parcel while the video is playing, then return, the video will start again from the beginning, no matter how briefly you left the parcel.

The good news is that there is a middle way, and is easy, and has zero cost.

You can employ something called pseudo http streaming, but rather than one-to-many it is many one-to-ones. What this means is that I can watch a stream, but when another avatar joins me, the video will stream from the beginning for him, rather than at the same point as my video stream, but we both enjoy the advantages of streaming and do not need to wait for any files to completely download before watching the feed.

How do you set up pseudo http streaming?
Both mp4 and flv files are capable of being streamed using pseudo http streaming, and of course it is the mp4 format that we are interested in. Servers do not stream mp4 files by default, and require a server side module to enable it. If you have your own server and wish to do this yourself, look here.

Fortunately, several free file hosting sites appear to be streaming module enabled. So I will explain the workflow for employing one of these sites.

Prepare your Files
You will need to first get your video files into the mp4 format. A good, free, and malware-free converter is Super (c) available from here (download link near bottom of page) and another is H.264, available here.

Super (c) Video Converter

As you can see, there are a number of parameters that can be set within the mp4 format. Some must be kept as standard, such as the Frame/sec of 29.97, and a sampling frequency of 44100 for the audio. The others can be experimented with. As I do not need excellent quality video within my Opensim I have gone for low settings: 320:240 video scale size; and video and audio bitrates of 160kbps and 32kbps respectively. This translates to a typical 3 minute music video file size of just under 20MB. This keeps well within the limits imposed by free file hosting sites, and ensures a fast start when played. Even better would be to select the typical 3G video scale size of 176:144, which gets the file size down to 10MB, and the difference in quality is almost imperceptible in SLOS.

Now, there is a trick to all this: many video studio software suites, and video encoders / converters, produce mp4 files with their metadata located at the end of each file, and most do not inform you about this, or give you any option to change it. This means that the entire file must be downloaded first before playback can begin. However, by moving the metadata to the front of the file the video can be streamed and watched almost instantly. A handy, free converter is available to do just this, simply called MetaData Mover. This great utility works on a folder of videos, rather than just on a single file. So create a new empty folder on your desktop and copy the files you want processing into it. Point MetaData Mover to the folder and it will process every file in the folder, moving the metadata from the back to the front of the file. One file typically takes 10 seconds to process.

You are now ready to upload your files.

File Hosting
The first file hosting site I tried did the job perfectly, so I am sure there are many more that are streaming module enabled. I used Fileden, which is a file hosting site, just requiring the registering of a free account. Once you have uploaded a file you are given the direct URL to the file. Not all file hosting sites provide this facility, so do shop around for one that suits you.

Once you have the URL to your mp4 file, just paste it into the media box of About land and the video should start playing almost instantly. If you are using some kind of video jukebox then just load the jukebox with the URLs of your uploaded video files. Needless to say, ensure that you avoid copyright infringement.

Playing your Video Streams
To set up a land parcel for playing video in SLOS, as mentioned previously, requires that you either be a land owner, estate manager, or member of a group that has the privileges to set the Media for streaming video. This option can be accessed by either clicking the address in the title bar of the viewer, or by right clicking the ground and selecting the About Land option, then go to the Media Tab.

There are two main settings here for video. The first is the texture that will be replaced by the video when it plays, and the second is the URL for the video file. The texture can be any picture texture you like, but the same texture must be on the video screen that you intend to use. So don't use a common texture, like brick, or every house in your sim will turn into a video screen! You will also need to set up your Audio and Video settings in Preferences to enable streaming media. See Torley's video here on how to do all of this.

Have fun,

Rock

Kinect and SL/Opensim Animations: An Update

2011-04-03T00:12:00.006+02:00

Following the previous article outlining my experiments with using the Kinect for creating animation files for Second Life and Opensim, I thought an update might be in order to summarise some of the lessons learnt, both by myself and other experimenters.

Since the last article on the 24th February, two of the key software applications used in the workflow, Brekel Kinect 3D Scanner, and Bvhacker have had further development. So what's new in the latest releases?

Brekel Kinect 3D Scanner
Two further releases have been issued since the last article:

v. 0.39
The most important changes in this release for SL and Opensim users is that now BVH positions are now OFF by default. Some experimenters were creating bvh files with Brekel, importing them in bvhacker, and in there they played OK, but when optimised by bvhacker, and then uploaded into Second Life, all kinds of problems were seen. As Deepgreenseas reported:

When I brought into SL, my avatar kind of floated oddly in the air, with arms straight out to the sides doing weird leg and abdomen contortions having nothing to do with what I saw in bvhacker. So, I'm at a total loss what I'm doing wrong. Any ideas?

The problem was that in the BVH Capture section of the Brekel window, there is a check box for "Write
Positions." This check box was set ON by default, and so the resulting bvh file had both translation and rotation data recorded, while bvhacker and SL/Opensim require only rotation data. In v.039 this setting is now OFF by default, so only rotation data is present in the bvh files now.

Other improvements included easier installation, a more compact GUI, a warning when running below 30fps (and thus dropping frames), more tooltips, and other improvements and the squashing of some bugs.

v.0.40
New features/improvements include:

knees/feet should be better now when turning around

Second Life format for bvh export option added *

hand rotations are now supported using some custom calculations

```
added motor/LED support
```

you can tilt the Kinect up and down (see slider in the CPU/FPS dock)

the LED color will be set according to the skeleton calibration phase

please see the How To under the Help menu on how to update the driver

This last improvement, the ability to control the Kinect movement, is a big benefit, and will save me from all those fiddly adjustments to my tripod settings.

* I have not yet tried the Second Life option when saving bvh files. I would be interested if it now solves Twisted Pharoah's problem below.

Bvhacker
The latest release is now v.1.8, and the new features and changes are as follows:

Added three new video tutorials to the help section
Now possible to merge joints with their parent - useful for converting skeletons with roll bones
Now possible to delete descendants - useful for removing multiple finger or toe joints
Now possible to zero out descendants - see new video tutorial for use
Added preferences dialog (Ctrl P)
Now possible to set the default file view for open and save dialogs
Now possbile to show or hide the head mesh display
Added Zoom In and Zoom Out buttons to the view shortcuts
Removed 'Show first frame' view option

There is also a note on the file properties pane saying that the joint count includes End Sites. This had confused me at first as earlier research had shown that SL/Opensim typically uses 24 joints, yet when I counted them in bvhacker I could only see 19. This is because the 5 End Sites (one for the head and two each for the hands and feet) should also be added. End Sites can also be manipulated, to make the feet point backwards, for example, but I will leave it to the more imaginative experimenters how they use these End Sites.

I will now provide some further info about joints/bones and some of the problems faced by differing naming conventions used in various applications.

Joints/Bones
Some sources refer to the constituent parts of a bvh file as being composed of bones. This also had me confused at first, but Dave (the author of bvhacker) explained it well:

Although the terms 'bone' and 'joint' can be used interchangeably, I
prefer 'joint', as the position, rotation and translation apply to the
point in space where the joint actually is. Mathematically, the 'bone'
is actually just the space in-between two joints, so I personally find
it easier to think in terms of joints instead of bones.

Unfortunately, SL/Opensim mainly uses the bones naming convention, so rForearm is the bone between the wrist and elbow in the right arrm.

The Nite tracking software for the Kinect and Brekel use joint names, so they do use RightWrist and RightElbow. The list of joints they use are:

Hips
Chest
Neck
Head
End Site

LeftCollar
LeftShoulder
LeftElbow
LeftWrist
End Site

RightCollar
RightShoulder
RightElbow
RightWrist
End Site

LeftHip
LeftKnee
LeftAnkle
End Site

RightHIp
RightKnee
RightAnkle
EndSite

The list of bones/joints used in SL/Opensim are:

hip
abdomen
chest
neck
head
End Site

lCollar
lShldr
lForeArm
lHand
End Site

rCollar
rShldr
rForeArm
rHand
End Site

lThigh
lShin
lFoot
End Site

rThigh
rShin
rFoot
EndSite

As you can see, the NITE tracking software for the Kinect does not use both joints in the torso (chest and abdomen), just the chest, and explains the difference in the number of joints/bones, i.e. 23 and 24.

Bvhacker is designed to do the conversions between standard bvh files in joint-naming format and the SL format using bone-naming format. However, it has been noted that the bone names in NITE/Brekel was causing some problems in Bvhacker, which renamed two joints to the same bone name. This was found by Twisted Pharaoh in the SLuniverse forum:

BVHacker renames 2 joints lShldr and 2 others rShldr.

What you should do is rename LeftShoulder into lCollar manually, RightShoulder in rCollar then do the Attempt SL Joint naming.

To manually rename joints in Bvhacker just load the bvh file, then in the joints pane on the left, select the joint and right click, and select Rename Joint.

Other Tips
Sarah Kline:

I discovered assuming a T pose before recording starts helped the shoulder rotation problems I had when bringing in to bvhacker.

If you have any other Tips or suggestions for improving the current workflow, (if you find a cure for slight jitter, for example), then please add your comments to the article and I will provide a further update later.

Rock

Moving Objects between Opensims

2011-03-15T11:05:00.009+01:00

To move/copy your objects from your Opensim into another Opensim or Opensim-based world (where it is permitted) you need to do the following:

Install libomv and use its TestClient to login to your Opensim

1. Download a copy of libopenmetaverse (libomv). The download page can be found here:
http://lib.openmetaverse.org/wiki/Download

2. Once you have downloaded and installed libomv you might want to create a shortcut on the desktop to the most frequently used tool in the toolbox, the TestClient, located in the bin folder.

3. A full list of all the TestClient commands can be found below, but for now the simple logging in to a grid procedure will be explained:

Start the TestClient, a DOS-like window will open. Use the login command, which has the format: login firstname lastname password [simname] [loginuri]. For example,

login Fred Flinstone yabadabadoo http://myopensim.dyndns.org:9000

If you wanted to log into a grid, but into a particular sim or region, then use:

login Fred Flinstone yabadabadoo Bedrock http://myopensim.dyndns.org:9000

Notes:
i) If you do not specify a loginuri then TestClient will use the default address for SL.
ii) Be patient, it usually takes a few seconds for commands to complete, and you often have no indication that the command is working in the background until it completes.
3. Although the TestClient says 'Type help for a command list' it will not work, until after you have logged in an avatar.

4. If the login was successful, then you should see a window like the one below, and you are now ready to start issuing commands.

TestClient Login

Exporting and Importing Objects between Opensims

To export (backup) objects in xml format to your hard-drive follow these steps:

1. Login to your Opensim using a regular client (Hippo, Phoenix, Imprudence, etc), and rezz on the ground all the objects you wish to export. You can now either logout, or stay logged in, but in that case you will need to login to your Opensim using libomv using a different account.

2. Login to your Opensim with TestClient using the procedure above. Make sure you log into the same sim or region where the objects are rezzed. If this is not the case then you can teleport there, by using the goto command:

goto Bedrock/100/100/30

3. Perform a scan for the rezzed objects using the findobjects [radius] command:

findobjects 20
(that will find all rezzed objects within a 20m radius, and provide a list of all objects, with their UUIDs).

4. Copy the list of objects and Paste the results into Notepad (just so you can copy/paste the UUIDs easier, but see Note below).

5. Objects can now be exported by using the export [UUID] [filename] command, eg:

export 50680f90-4e1d-11e0-b8af-0800200c9a66 barstool.xml

Notes:
a) To Copy/Paste in the DOS-like cmd window see this How-to:
b) The barstool.xml file will saved in the bin folder.

6. To import your barstool in another Opensim, login using the TestClient, then issue the command, import [filename], eg

import barstool.xml

Note:
a) For complex objects it can take some time for the object to be recreated. You should NOT interrupt the TestClient during this process until it informs you that it has either completed the import, or has issued an error.

Done.

All Test Client Commands

http://lib.openmetaverse.org/wiki/TestClient_0.7.0_commands

Creating SL Animations using the Kinect

2011-02-24T20:48:00.007+01:00

I have been experimenting of late with the Xbox Kinect as a cheap Mocap source to generate BioVision Hierarchy (BVH) files for upload into Second Life, and the results are pretty encouraging.

What you Need

Hardware
A standalone Kinect, with power supply (this comes as standard when purchased as a standalone), if you buy it as part of an Xbox bundle you will need to buy an additional cable sold separately to connect it to the PC. I bought my Kinect from a local gaming store for Euro139.


Kinect, showing its USB connector and power adaptor

Software
Brekel Kinect 3D Scanner
OpenNI
SensorKinect Drivers
NITE User Tracking Module
Bvhacker

Procedure
For my procedure I used a laptop running 32 bit Windows XP , although Brekel Kinect is confirmed to work also with win7 x86 & x64 as well as XP x64 & x86, but no Mac/Linux version of Brekel Kinect planned.

1. Once you have unpacked your Kinect you need to place it on a table or a tripod (which is what I did), at around 0.6m - 1.8m from the ground. You can plug it into a power socket at this stage, but do not connect the USB connector to your PC/laptop just yet.


Kinect mounted on an inexpensive camera tripod

2. Download and install the following software in this order:

Brekel Kinect 3D Scanner v0.36

OpenNI Alpha Build for Windows v1.0.0.23

PrimeSensor v5.0.0 (Modules for OpenNI)
Click the Downloads button and choose the zip file. After downloading extract the avin2-SensorKinect folder, and within this go to the bin subfolder, and run SensorKinect-Win32-5.0.0.exe


PrimeSensor v5.0.0 with correct options selected

PrimeSense NITE Beta Build for Windows v1.3.0.17
Use this key during installation: 0KOIk2JeIBYClPWVnMoRKn5cdY4=
(This is NOT a pirate key)


NITE Installation Wizard

Copy and paste the License Key from above

Now download and install Bvhacker

3. Once the software is installed you can connect the Kinect USB lead. The Found New Hardware dialog should appear.


No need to connect to Windows Update

When it asks if it can connect to Windows Update, choose No, not his time. On the next dialog screen choose to Install the software automatically.

The hardware that will be detected are the Kinect Motor, Xbox NUI Audio and Kinect Camera. The drivers for the Xbox NUI Audio will not be found and will fail, but ignore this, they are not needed.


Device Manager showing the new device, PrimeSensor

When the drivers have been installed you can check that the hardware and its drivers are ready to be used by Windows by going to Device Manager (Start, Settings, Control Panel, System, Hardware, Device Manager) and you should now see a new entry, PrimeSensor, and under that will be the Kinect Camera and Motor.

4.You can now launch Brekel Kinect.

Brekel Kinect GUI

Brekel may launch with a Dark skin. You can change this by unchecking it under the Window menu item. I found I had to do this as some of the check boxes did not show too well with this almost black skin.

The only setting you now have to change is to enable NITE User Tracking at the centre bottom of the window.

The only setting to change, make sure NITE User Tracking is enabled

Once NITE User Tracking is enabled you should get a message in red on the central image that says: User1 [Looking for Psi pose]. Ensure that your full body is visible in the video windows, then adopt the Psi pose (like you are a trident, or surrendering). Once the pose is recognised it will take just a few seconds for tracking to commence (be patient, and KEEP STILL!), and the message should now go green.

Psi Pose

As soon as you are being tracked (indicated by white dots covering your body) you can start recording animations. Start with simple ones like the ubiquitous salute, or hand clap. To start recording to BVH click the Start Capture BVH button (near the top right). If you are on your own you may find that tracking is lost if you go out of the field of view of the Kinect, in this case either try to have the PC/laptop within reach, or have a friend start the capture. There is a four second delay (useful if you are on your own) before recording starts. When done, click the Stop Capture to BVH button.

For full details on the capture procedure, and what can go wrong, go to the main menu, Help, How To - Capture motion to a BVH file. Additional resources may also be found on the main Brekel website.

Brekel can save BVH in two main formats, HumanIK (used by MotionBuilder and others) and Biped (used by 3DSMax). Neither of these can be imported directly into Second Life, as the naming convention for Root, joints and bones are slightly different, this is where Bvhacker comes in.

To prepare the BVH file for Second Life, start Bvhacker then File, Open, and load the BVH file. Once loaded you can play it to see what it looks like using the Start button at the bottom of the window. If all is well go back to the menu, Hack, and choose Attempt SL joint naming. This should go without a hitch, and you can now save it out ready for importing into Second life.

Have fun,

Rock

Is Linden Labs in Self-Destruct Mode?

2010-10-05T14:38:00.013+02:00

Following Linden Lab's internal restructuring which saw it lose 30% of its staff, and the recent decision to close the Teen Grid, with little or no consultation, they are now about to abandon discounts for Educational and Non-Profit (EDNP) organisations from the 1st January, 2011.

Will there be an exodus of a large number of EDNP organisations after the 1st January? I think so.

Currently EDNPs pay US$147.50 per month for their Maintenance Fee. All renewals after the 1st January will be invoiced at the standard rate for Private Regions, i.e. at US$295, or double their current rate. Here are a selection of some of the responses to this news:

Oh dear, this is very bad news. Budgets for educators are often set well in advance and in some cases very fixed even looking across a grant period of some years. In our case I have just negotiated funds to renew some of our regions from 12 months from now, so changes on a short time scale that double prices are quite a shock. In one case I have funding fixed for 2years out too.
Ai Austin

As one of your Educational customers I am furious! Fiscal Year Budget planning and approval happens in Aug-Sept for most Universities then you make an announcement like this in Oct!! I just had my budget approved 2 weeks ago and now I gotta go beg my superiors to approve an increase to the budget despite budgets being cut on every level of the University due to the economy. All of our sims exceed the maxium capabilities of Homesteads and OpenSpaces so there's no way we could use them.
Ron Ghostaltar

Doubling the price of regions for nonprofit and educational use strikes me as a really bad idea. Do we really need a mass exodus of these important members of the Second Life community at this time?
Shirley Marquez

I'd say that about 75% of all educational or non-profit organizations will leave next year.
Yuukie Onmura

Ah well Linden you have finally made the decision that tips the balance for us. I have been hanging on in SL as I still truly believe in the value of the educational community that has been built here but over the last few months it has become increasingly difficult to justify not moving to OpenSim. This however will be the final straw as I see no way that my institution will be able to justify paying double the price for our two islands. Fortunately we still have until Aug 2011 but I suspect we will be long gone by then!
Arwenna Stardust

Of course, some may abandon their Virtual campuses altogether rather than face a doubling of their invoices, but if there is to be an exodus there has to be somewhere for them to move to. So just where is the Promised Land for EDNPs?

The obvious alternative is any of the worlds built using Opensim, the Second Life open-source clone, which will give them the same look and feel as their current regions, and allow them to use the same viewer. However, one of the prime considerations for EDNPs is to avoid having to live cheek by jowl with some of the more 'adult' activities that go on in these virtual worlds.

Fortunately, several Opensim-based grids have sprung up that cater exclusively for the EDNP communities.

Cybergrid
Cybergrid is a German language grid for young people of 12-17, and consists of 5 regions with over 500 registered uers. It is the Homeland of Cyberland-Jugendcommunity, netzcheckers, and netbridge. Regions cost €120 setup fee, and €40/month maintenance fee.

JokaydiaGrid

The jokaydiaGrid Project has a number of aims including:

Exploring ways to ‘multi-grid’ – eg. creating strategies, techniques and best practices for creating presence across a range of virtual worlds, and learning how to best use each environment for and to its best advantage
Engaging kids in our virtual worlds adventures – the jokaydiaGrid gives us the freedom to create a PG environment which is much more viable for k-12 educational use
Learning about Opensimulator – we are excited to be joining the opensource virtual worlds community and look forward to both learning about and contributing to the development of opensource virtual worlds options for education
Developing new 3D educational resources – Leveraging off the flexibility available to us on the opensim platform for public and private delivery (without the scary pricetag!)
… and most importantly t0 Play! We aim to continue to create a community that learns, inspires, explores and shares.

Regions on the ojokadiaGrid cost $50.00au setup fee + $25.00au per month.

ReactionGrid

ReactionGrid Inc. is a 3D world development company with offices in Orlando FL and Boston MA. Their focus is educational, business and entertainment use of 3D environments. Similar to a modern video game but oriented towards return on investment whether that is time saved, data visualized, or collaboration sessions for training or communications.

Their clients range from Fortune 100 firms like Microsoft, IBM, Raytheon, Siemens, to government entities like the Veterans Administration to institutions like Boston College, Future University Japan, Hong Kong Polytechnic, University Autonomous Mexico and more.

ReactionGrid Inc. hosts and develops virtual worlds, and provides products that enable you to express your 3D ideas and share them with your colleagues, peers, and community. We deliver our systems virtualized on a platform we call Harmony.

They are able to deliver templated virtual worlds for specific industry and use cases both in the cloud on their hosted servers and firewalled. They make sure your system is setup quickly and support your project needs as you grow.

Because of ReactionGrid's firewalled solutions, all the grids they host (and an example is the jokaydiaGrid above) can enjoy security and privacy, and is thus ideal for hosting Educational Projects.

ReactionGrid has a range of prices for Regions, starting from just $75, full details here.

ScienceSim

The goal of ScienceSim is to enable new usages in education and visualization through the construction of persistent 3D spaces build and deployed by a federation of organizations and users.

To accomplish the goal, they propose to create a foundation with three objectives:

Maintain a stable distribution of the OpenSim 3D application platform
Document best practices for the use of OpenSim in science and education
Provide content and applications to support those best practices

They propose to establish the foundation in two stages. The first is an interim stage focused on developing a stable release of the OpenSim code base. The second stage creates the full foundation structure.

ScienceSim is primarily a grid, i.e. it is mainly used by EDNPs that have their own Opensim-based world on their own PC or server, and would like it to be connected to a grid of other like-minded worlds. Currently, ScienceSim provide their grid services free of charge.

Getting Help

For EDNPs who need help in migrating from Second Life to another grid they may wish to consider the services of Firesabre a company that specialises in this type of work.

Rock

Haptics: The Next Big Thing for Virtual Worlds?

2010-07-16T16:27:00.001+02:00

Some recent advances give us a clue what might next be in store for Virtual World and 3D Virtual gaming development in the not too-distant future, and they all centre around Haptics, the tactile feedback technology that applies forces, vibrations, mild electric shocks, and/or motions to the user, to simulate the sense of touch. Here are some examples of the direction Haptic Technology has gone in recently.

The Holodeck
Fans of Star Trek will be quite familiar with the holodeck, depicted as an enclosed room in which objects and people are simulated by a combination of replicated matter, tractor beams, and shaped force fields onto which holographic images are projected, so the user appears to be in a nightclub, an alien world, their home planet, etc. Now, replicated matter, tractor beams and shaped force fields may be definitely science fiction, for now, but holographic images that can be touched are no longer in that realm, as of now, they are science fact.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo demonstrated the principles of Touchable Holography at the SIGGRAPH2009 exhibition in New Orleans last August. As they said at the time:

Recently, mid-air displays are attracting a lot of attention in the fields of digital signage and home TV, and many types of holographic displays have been proposed and developed. Although we can "see" holograhpic images as if they are really floating in front of us, we cannot "touch" them, because they are nothing but light.

This project adds tactile feedback to the hovering image in 3D free space. Tactile sensation requires contact with objects, but including a stimulator in the work space dilutes the appearance of holographic images. The Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display solves this problem by producing tactile sensation on a user's hand without any direct contact and without diluting the quality of the holographic projection.

By using a non-linear property of ultrasound, called acoustic radiation pressure, the researchers were able to replicate the sensation of touch when a user placed his hand beneath a holographic ball, and even produced the sensation of splashes when a hand was placed beneath holographic raindrops. They really did feel like they were splashing onto the user's hand.

I think I know where this technology will head to. How long before the first holographic boyfriend or girlfriend makes its debut, 1 year, 2 years?

Transparent Touch Screens
Remember those amazing touchable computer graphics on glass screens in the hit movie Avatar last year? Science fact caught up with that science fiction with indecent haste. Before the end of the year Intel were demonstrating such a screen at CES 2009. This amazing screen, powered by the i7 processor, was capable of rendering almost 1 million polygons in real time.

I want one! Make that 2!

Touch Screens that Touch Back
One of the leading pioneers of haptics is the Russian scientist Dr Ivan Poupyrev, currently senior researcher at Disney Research Labs. In an article carried by the BBC last week he explained that:

The basic goal of the technology we are developing at Disney is to create a perception of texture - to let people 'feel' objects on screen by stroking them with their fingers.

We do this by applying a high voltage to a transparent electrode on the glass plate - in this case people will feel a texture on the glass. By varying the frequency and amplitude of the signal we can create different sensations.

The results can recreate the feeling of paper or a textile, simulate the smoothness of glass and even the roughness of sand paper.

While the aim of the current research is more focussed on handheld mobile devices, the scope for this technology in larger PC screens has not gone un-noticed.

Another leading light in this field is Esterline Technologies that are already offering vibration feedback technology to the medical, defense, and gaming industries, enabling display screens to give the sensation of touching back when pressed.

The advances in this industry never cease to amaze me.

Rock

IllFonic Licenses CryEngine3 for Futuristic Arena First-Person Shooter

2010-07-13T11:39:00.000+02:00

Denver, CO USA / Frankfurt, Germany – July 13th, 2010: Crytek GmbH (“Crytek”) and IllFonic, LLC announced today that IllFonic has licensed CryENGINE 3 for Nexuiz, their upcoming XBLA and PSN cult futuristic Arena First-Person Shooter dropping this Winter. CryENGINE®3 has allowed the IllFonic development team to achieve their vision for Nexuiz that will push the limits of what gamers can expect from an AAA digital downloadable title.

“IllFonic firmly believes in bringing the consumer the highest quality games at an affordable price through downloadable distribution channels”, said Charles Brungardt, President of IllFonic. “Switching to CryENGINE 3 has helped us stay true to our vision and build the Nexuiz arenas the way we see it without any limitations. We are incredibly proud that Nexuiz will be the first downloadable title developed on CryENGINE 3.”

"We’re delighted to have Illfonic join our community of licensees”, said Carl Jones, Director of CryENGINE Global Business Development. “It’s exciting to see a passionate group like Kedhrin and Charles’ team working with CryENGINE 3 on such a cool title. Nexuiz is going to deliver a game style that will be a blast for the console audience, matched with the best graphics possible on the consoles. We’re delighted to offer our engine to teams for XBLA and PSN titles so that gamers can enjoy the quality that CryENGINE 3 can provide, as soon as possible. Our real-time multiplatform pipeline, Live Create, is highly suited to prototyping and delivering quality for games with shorter development cycles; and you get all the benefits of the AAA features of the engine. Nexuiz is going to be a lot of fun and we’re glad Illfonic have chosen CryENGINE 3 to deliver it in style.”

"When we were strolling around GDC 2010's floor we stopped by the Crytek booth. I watched someone show off a few features of CryENGINE 3. Right then and there, I knew I had to have it. It's powerful, fast and easy to use,” said Kedhrin Gonzalez, Creative Director of IllFonic. “Crytek has been awesome to work with providing excellent support in a relationship that has really benefited us."

Nexuiz is a fast paced Arena first-person shooter with competitive game play built specifically for consoles. Featuring the innovative mutator system, players progress through the ranks opening up new mutators that allow players to alter the rules for each match. On launch, Nexuiz will feature multiplayer modes including Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag complete with full competitive leader boards designed for social networking. New games modes, models, and maps will be available as downloadable content post launch.

Nexuiz is set in a galactic war fueled for centuries by the Kavussari and Forsellians. Over time the two races entered into treaties with the Herald Accord, a union between different cultures in the galaxy. Even though peace settled across their planets, the seething hatred between the races kept the fire of war simmering under the fragile truce. Sensing their newest members could spread war throughout the galaxy; the Herald Accord gave the Kavussari and Forsellians a choice. Pit their warriors against each other in the arena rather than on the fields of war, or face total annihilation. The Nexuiz was formed, a series of battle arenas on the home planets of the Kavussari, Forsellian and the desolate planet of Atavirta.

IllFonic will be showcasing Nexuiz using CryENGINE 3 at this year’s PAX Prime in Seattle, WA, on September 3-5.

For more information on Nexuiz, go to www.nexuiz.com or www.illfonic.com.

About IllFonic:

IllFonic, LLC, was founded in 2007 by musician Raphael Saadiq, engineer Chuck Brungardt, and game designer Kedhrin Gonzalez. IllFonic is committed to delivering AAA games digitally to consoles and PC at an affordable price. IllFonic utilizes many avenues in pop culture to cross brand its products in film, television, sports, music, and clothing. With offices in Los Angeles and Denver, IllFonic has built a team of artists, developers, producers, and musicians that believe providing fun game-play means conveying the highest level of visual awe, an immersive environment and a sick soundtrack. For more information on the company, go to www.illfonic.com.

About Crytek:

Crytek GmbH ("Crytek") is one of the world’s leading independent development studios for interactive entertainment. It is based in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) and has additional studios in Kiev (Ukraine), Budapest (Hungary), Sofia (Bulgaria), Seoul (South Korea) and Nottingham (UK). Crytek is dedicated to creating exceptionally high-quality video games for next-generation consoles and PC, powered by their proprietary cutting-edge 3D-Game-Technology, CryENGINE®. Since its foundation in 1999, Crytek has created the multi-award winning PC titles Far Cry®, Crysis® (awarded best PC Game of E3 2007 and Best Technology at the 2008 Game Developers Choice Awards) and Crysis Warhead® (awarded Best Graphics Technology at IGN Best of 2008 Awards).

Media Contact:
North and South Americas/ Asia
Tricia Gray
415-531-5704
tricia@freeformcommunications.com

Europe/Australia/New Zealand
Chris Clarke
Tel: 00 44 208 6708425
Mobile: 00 44 7590 509278
chris@freeformcommunications.com

Rock

Virtual Shopping

2010-05-09T20:09:00.003+02:00

An article by Guest Contributor, Miidasu

The real life economy may be undergoing a slow, torturous recovery, but virtual world economies are thriving. Well, that’s not entirely true. Many worlds died in the last few months: There.com, Vivaty, and Metaplace. Still, Second Life announced that their virtual economy hit a high in the first quarter of 2010. IMVU is also looking at the new year optimistically, according to Tech Crunch. Even social games like Farmville are hitting the big bucks.

Virtual worlds reflect the real world in many aspects (they don't call them virtual "worlds" for no reason). In particular, user-generated virtual economies are similar to the globalized capitalist system. They rely on creative entrepreneurs to run businesses, for creators to supply and buyers to demand.

The question I have is why is there demand? Granted I am not in college anymore; don't mistake this as some sort of academic inquiry. I am just an intrigued metaverse lover. I understand the desire to create items, but purchasing items with money I can use for a real material object? What's the reason for it?

What is the appeal of virtual goods? Understandably, there are functional goods that increase performance, give more features and such. However, what entices people to purchase the aesthetic goods, like clothing, furniture, or even poses, with money they can use for real world items.

There are plenty of academic studies on why people purchase virtual goods, features, performance enhancements. Maybe I am way behind on my academic reading, but I am surprised that I have not seen the subject of accessibility included in some articles.

The Information Age is known for accessibility. I can get information in seconds, download musics and movies in minutes, in short, get what I want when I want it. We are a generation that craves instant gratification--we want to achieve goals now, and for short-term satisfaction. Case and point: instant tea versus a fresh brew, microwaves versus cooking, movies versus books, and so on. In the same way, virtual goods are easily accessible. A massive dose of instant-gratification at the tip of your fingers.

Getting around a few worlds can be difficult, but shopping for clothes and other items is increasingly easy. IMVU and Frenzoo have shops that are easy to navigate. Trying on items is available without demos, the details are listed in one place, and there is no transferring of products.

Shopping in Second Life is more difficult, especially for those who don't know how the world works. Still, Second life is fun because it is the most interactive shopping I have experienced, at least in the three worlds I am apart of. I used to have Friday night shopping sprees with a friend across the country. We would explore shops with our avatars, try on items, and ask each other what we thought. It's almost like a real world shopping experience. That's not to say other worlds aren't interactive. IMVU shop owners are getting creative and making boutique rooms: rooms where they display their items. Standing on a node next to that item opens options to purchase or try on. Of course, you have to find the correct boutique by searching through an endless list of rooms.

The point is that shopping in virtual worlds is more accessible than shopping in real life. I don't have to fight my way through traffic. In fact, I don't have to get up at all, and I am still achieving a goal (the goal being a sense of satisfaction). Not to mention, virtual worlds are almost always open. Even when there is little money in your wallet, virtual worlds are there for a leisurely escape, a social chit chat, or a good old exploration.

They are almost always open, 24/7, for your entertainment. Instant-gratification fix at your pleasure.

Enjoy, shopaholics.

Miidasu
Copy-Editor of Frenzy, a Frenzoo.com magazine

Virtual Farming: Where there's muck there's money!

2010-05-06T13:04:00.001+02:00

Although I am taking a sabbatical from writing for a while, I just could not resist this one.

Business Insider reports that Zynga, the company behind Farmville, the popular game in Facebook has been provisionally valued at US$4 billion! When did lost kittens, lonely cows and manure get so popular?

Rock

Diary: 25th April, 2010

2010-04-25T21:37:00.002+02:00

I am taking a break from writing and updating my blog for a little while, while I work on finishing a book. I hope to continue the blog at the end of May, or early June.

Have fun, and if in the meantime any of you would like to submit an article, on any aspect of Virtual Worlds, from whatever angle you like, then feel free to contact me via a Comment to this post, and I will be happy to publish it on Chapter & Metaverse.

Best Regards

Rock

The Birth and Adolescence of Web.Alive and the 3D Web

2010-04-11T14:30:00.000+02:00

For some time Nortel had been pondering what the 'connectedness' of the Internet, broadband access, camera phones, voice-over-IP, instant messaging, social networking, video uploading, etc., all meant for businesses and organizations, and how this connectedness could be turned into a competitive advantage.

To answer this question Nortel commissioned IDC, the global market intelligence firm, to conduct a global study of almost 2,400 working adults in 17 countries. The study focused on quantifying the state of today's connectedness, tracking its acceptance and use across devices and applications as well as determining the pace of its growth and impact on the enterprise. The report was released in May 2008, under the title: "The Hyperconnected: Here They Come", in which they stated that 16 percent of business users were already hyperconnected, and predicted that that number would increase to 40% over the next 5 years.

The following month, in June 2008, Nortel released a demo of its virtual world in a browser, web.alive, that it had been working on for years, under the codename, Project Chainsaw. This was a step-change from the hardware-focused telecommunications giant, into the realms of software and services.

Things then began to move quite rapidly. In August 2008 Nortel acquired Diamondware in order to provide integrated 3D voice to its platform, and in January 2009 they licensed the Unreal Engine 2.5 to replace the existing engine. They hoped that talented creators of content for Epic's Unreal Engine-based games, would bring their skills to web.alive.

At the same time, Lenovo, the laptop maker, announced that they would be launching an e-commerce application, an eLounge named the Lenovo Virtual Showroom, using web.alive. This was an expansion of Nortel's original marketing view of web.alive, which was focused on enterprise level collaboration and training applications. A very nice tour of the Lenovo eLounge then appeared on Dennis Shiao's It's All Virtual, blogsite.

Not all was well though in Nortel, the parent company. Despite the strength of their web.alive team, Nortel filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2009. Nortel then went into finacial meltdown and over the course of 2009 went into massive sell everything but the kitchen sink mode. However, keen interest had been displayed in the Enterprise Solutions unit, which included web.alive, by various suitors, so an auction was organised. The eventual winner was Avaya, and by the end of 2009 the sale of Nortel Enterprise Solutions to Avaya had been completed, and with it web.alive and the entire web.alive team. The reported price being $915 million.

During the meltdown, Nortel continued to develop web.alive, which was still in beta. It was a great platform, it was web-based, so no huge downloads were required, and it would be available to anyone who had a browser, regardless of the Operating System. In November 2009 web.alive beta 2 was released, which had an impressive array of features, including the ability to drag and drop documents into web.alive to make presentations.

Now that the future of web.alive has been secured, what about the future of the product itself?

Since the acquisition of its first customer, Lenovo, web.alive has acquired a few more, and the following have been identified (with the help of user wa 723, in the web.alive community forum):

My first impressions were not so good. By the time it took to load the browser plug-in, and for the avatar to be ready to start moving around, I had started to lose interest. I could have explored the first three or four products in a regular 2D store by the time the 3D store was ready to explore. I then found that wandering around a virtual store was nowhere near as focused as a 2D store. In a 2D store I could do a search for all laptops under $500, get a list and start to examine their looks and specs, something I could not do in the 3D store.

Clicking links in a 2D store is also a whole lot quicker than walking around a store (virtual or real). Of couse, it is also claimed that one of the benefits of a 3D virtual store over the regular 2D website, is that you can interact with salesfolk and other customers, and get great feedback. However, in every store I visited (and I visited over 80 in total, not just the web.alive-based stores) I never saw another soul. It was as much a ghost-town experience as I usually encounter in my visits to Second Life or the OS Grid. Could it be that sales staff only keep US office hours?

I also found, unlike 2D websites, I could not have more than one instance of web.alive open at the same time, for comparisons. When I tried, I got this:

Only one instance is permitted

Judging by the activity on the web.alive forum, where there are just 20 posts across all the topics to date (and the earliest post I found was dated December 16th, 2008) it does appear that web.alive is not generating the kind of interest its designers had hoped for.

If the 3D Web is ever going to supplant the 2D Web, it needs to address some key issues:

3D web pages need to load as quickly as 2D web pages
3D web pages must be capable of being multi-instanced
The ability to search across products in a 3D store must be at least as easy as in a 2D store
The ability to teleport instantly to any product in the search results is a must
Companies must think about manning their virtual stores 24/7 to cater for all all time zones

I am still not convinced by the 3D web, and my lonely journey across it seems to confirm that I am not the only sceptic out there.

Rock

Vivaty: RIP

2010-04-08T12:02:00.003+02:00

Continuing the recent trend of failing Virtual Worlds (e.g. Metaplace, Legend City Online, There.com), yet another company has bitten the virtual dust.

Vivaty have recently announced that they are closing their doors with a Shutdown Party on the 16th April.

Vivaty was yet another 3D Virtual Space that was spawned during the golden age of 2007-2008, who firmly believed in the 3D space concept, where people could inhabit 3D virtual rooms they could decorate, and invite friends in to join them for chat and other activities. Unlike the market leader, Second Life, Vivaty was web-based, and its scenes could be embedded in Facebook, blogs and other websites. They hoped that it could make money by selling Vivabux, the virtual currency that users could use to buy clothes for their avatars, furniture for their virtual homes, and other virtual goods and services. However, in a very frank statement, Jay Weber, Co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Vivaty said:

Our business model was to earn money through Vivabux sales, but that has never come close to covering our costs. We tried for months to find a bigger partner that would support the site, but that didn’t work out.

Whether this is simply a consolidation of an over-populated market place, where just a few key players will survive, or indicative of a general decline in the market itself, is still to be seen.

Rock

Blue Mars Roadmap: Second Stop

2010-04-07T01:38:00.003+02:00

Today saw the launch of another significant Blue Mars release, with important updates to the Client, MyPage, and the SDK, although I will confine this article to just the Client and MyPage.

Client
As there were so many changes to the Client the new release was a full release, Version 0.0.8237.0, rather than a patch. So, what's new?

Well, there are no new cities in this release, but there are some changes to existing cities. The Welcome Area gets better Time of Day, so it is not as dark now (but cloud shadows still drift across the land, when there are no clouds anywhere near the sun), plus some bug fixes; and Beach City has a "recent golf games" board in the Golf shop.

The main changes are these:

Private Messaging:

Click on a friend's name in your Friends list to open a private chat with them.
Currently has full logging enabled for PM. Your chat text will be saved in the window even when you exit the Blue Mars client.
Handles multiple tabs of private messages which can be closed separately.
Click the minimize button on chat window to close window.
Note: The Friends list will be scrollable in the next release of the Client.

There is an immediate bug with this new functionality. If someone sends you a PM you get no notification that they have, in order for you to respond. A little like having a phone with no ring function (how do you answer it if iit does not ring?). I then checked MyPage to see if some test PMs sent by Friends inworld showed up in the Message Inbox. They didn't.

Unfortunately, the Friends Lists still has the bug that if you have a lot of friends, only around 22 of them can be displayed, as this next image shows:

so if you wanted to PM someone, and their name is not in the first 22 displayed names, you cannot (except through your MyPage). This needs fixing asap.

Camera:

Mouse wheel can now be used to control the camera distance.
The Camera View Change button in the Menu Tray has changed.
Screenshot facility (undocumented, see note, two paragraphs below))

It did seem to me that the mouse wheel did not change the camera distance smoothly. Previously if you kept clicking on the Camera icon you cycled from 10m behind the avatar to 5m behind, to 1m behind, to First Person View. It now seems to me that the mouse wheel just replicates these 4 settings, with no interpolation between the settings, giving a jerky feel to the 'zoom'. I hope this is remedied in the future, and the range is extended to much further than 10m behind the avatar. In other Virtual Worlds, such as Second Life, you can zoom the camera over the Draw Distance, which can be set quite high. I usually have mine set at 512m, so zooming out gives a broad perspective of a region or City. It should be even higher for Blue Mars, given the huge sizes of Cities compared with the regions of Second Life. At least 1Km I would recommend.

I also do not like the use of a movie camera icon now for the camera (the previous camera icon now being reserved for a future Screenshot facility. But I have found that the Screenshot facility is already working. Just press F12 while the main window has the focus, then navigate to the My Documents\My Games\BlueMars\Screenshots folder, and your screenshot will be there). I would recommend the standard magnifying glass icons for the camera zoom functions, and the camera icon for screenshots.

Preferences:
The Preferences (brought up by clicking the Spanner icon, or by pressing Escape when the main window has the focus) has a new look, and more settings:

Screen Resolution:	Change window size. Default is 1280 x 720.
Rendering Quality:	Change render quality. Set to High for better quality, set to Low for better performance.
Display Name:	On: Display your avatar's name overhead. Off: Hide your avatar's name overhead (but others will still see it).


Pointer Click Sound:	On: Play a sound when you click the ground. Off: Do not play a sound when you click the ground.

Show Bubbles:	On: Show chat bubbles. Off: Turn off chat bubbles.
Text Size:	small: 50%, medium: Default, large: 200%
Max Distance:	Distance that the other avatars' chat bubbles will be visible. 0m: Only your avatar's chat bubbles are visible.

One bug already found with switching chat bubbles off, is that it also switches off the display of avatar names above the heads of nearby avatars. The QA team are aware of this and are working on a fix.

MyPage

All Pages

Added proper labels to each page on browser header and tabs
Loading icon now appears center.

Message Management (Message Page)

Fixed issue when adding a large amount of friends when composing a message. Should now be contained in a scrollable text area.
Added counter for each message folder (inbox, sent, trash).

Friend Management (Friends Page)

Added background coloring
Added search filtering when searching for a friend on Blue Mars
Able to compose a message through the Friend's list
Scrolling through the friend's list is now smoother (only when using mouse).

I found that searching for Friends had several bugs. When I searched for the AR staffer, Summer Studios, using 'Summer' in the avatar firstname box, I got several hits with avatars using 'Summer' as their firstname, or part of their firstname, but I also got several hits of avatars with no sign of 'Summer' anywhere in their names. I also searched for Zoomer, who is on my Friends List, but a search for 'Zoomer' produced zero results!

But hey, it is still in beta, so these bugs are what they are expecting us to report on.

Rock

Diary: 30th March 2010

2010-03-30T12:22:00.001+02:00

OpenSim preparing Version 0.7
The core developers at OpenSim are busy preparing Release 0.7 of their opensource virtual world framework.

Release 0.7 will be the first one featuring the recent major refactoring and rearchitecting work that replaced the resource services and servers previously known as UGAIM, with one single server shell called ROBUST which can now run any combination of services within it.

The planning for Release 0.7 has been posted on the OpenSim wiki site. Speaking of sites, Opensim have also given us a sneek peek at their new redesigned website, which is a huge improvement, in my opinion.

More SL Creators are Testing the Blue Mars Waters
I see that Mako Magellan that "Purveyor of apparel for princes and paupers, princesses and premises, poseurs and parcels" of Second Life fame, is to open a store in Desmond Shang's Caledonia in Blue Mars, after trialling some of his creations in Beach City. The problem of where to get my tux for some of those more formal Blue Mars occasions is now solved :)

News from Myst Online
Myst Online: Uru Live is a massive multiplayer online game (MMOG) unlike anything else. Instead of repetitive kill/take/buy gameplay of other MMOGs, the very essence of Myst Online is to explore vast, fantastic worlds; savoring and uncovering new areas and new information at every turn. It is an amazing hybrid of MMOG and Virtual World.

MO:ULagain is the currently available reincarnation of everything in MO:UL in a free, donation-supported, server run by Cyan. It is the first step in “opening” MO:UL. Cyan is planning that the client, servers and tools of MO:UL will soon become open source, allowing fans to continue developing the game and its universe.

Rock

The Ups and Downs of vSide

2010-03-27T18:20:00.003+01:00

As far as Virtual Worlds go, I don't think any have had such a roller-coaster ride as vSide. When you think vSide, think Habbo Hotel, IMVU, and Club Penguin, and you are not too far off the mark.

vSide was created by Doppelganger Studios of San Francisco, founded in July 2004 by Andrew Littlefield and James Lee, and with Tim Stevens as its CEO. Interestingly, Littlefield and several others holding high management positions at that time had all come from BAE Systems.

vSide started life back in May 2006 as the PCD Music Lounge (or the Music Lounge, or just the Lounge for short), a hangout for teens, which one blog described as 1 part MySpace and 1 part World of Warcraft. Doppelganger said at that time that the big selling point for the PSD Lounge was the fact that any questionable content or sexual innuendos would be left at the door, as they wanted good clean fun for all teens to enjoy.

Gen Digital questioned this business plan:

How a nightclub can portray good clean teen fun, when most of the time you have to be 21 just to get in one, kinda goes over my head. What kid doesn't thinking about alcohol and meeting the opposite sex when they go clubbing?

That observation became somewhat prophetic, as we shall see.

In August 2007 The Music Lounge evolved into vSide, following a major redesign. Two new districts were added, RaiJuku and LaGenoaAires, to the existing New Venezia (where have I heard that name before?), and several suppliers of virtual goods were strategic partners, including Kitson and Rocawear. There was no user-created content in vSide then. All creating had to be done by Doppelganger.

Built on a modified Torque 1.3 game engine using Java and MySQL for the backend, vSide reportedly raised a further $11m in 2007, bringing the total of its investment to over $25. It described itself then as the New 3D Facebook.

In April 2008, Doppleganger formed another partnership, with Degrassi: The Next Generation, a very popular TV show. The press release said:

A virtual version of The DOT Grill -- so familiar to our show's viewers -- will serve as the hub for all Degrassi-related activity in vSide," Chris Jackson, Director of Digital Media and Merchandising, Epitome Pictures, said in a statement. "The notion that our fans will be able to interact with each other (and with our cast!) in vSide, while enjoying Degrassi video and music content makes vSide the perfect complement to Degrassi's existing on-screen and online presence.

Despite a lively community vSide generated insufficient income, and the following year Doppleganger announced that vSide was shutting down on July 16th, 2009. The assets of vSide were put up for sale, and Virtual World News reported the following:

A source has told VirtualWorldsNews that by the time bidding closed on vSide assets -- which included art assets, the code set, animations, characters, and modifications to the Torque Engine (TGE 1.3.4 codebase) on which the teen virtual world was built -- were sold at "fire sale" prices.

Following the sale of the vSide assets, Doppelganger was acquired by Canadian company Hip Digital Media in August 2008 for a rumored $40 million, with Doppelganger having spent in excess of $26m on the development of vSide, and having successfully attracted brands such as Kitson, Rocawear, Pussy Cat Dolls, Tyra Banks and MTV.

ExitReality is an Australian company headed by Danny Stephanic, with offices in San Fancisco, London and Melbourne, and made a name for itself in creating 3D virtual worlds out of 2D web pages, by using a browser plug-in.

vSide and its forums were only down for a short time, and during that time its Facebook page said:

We know you all can't wait for vSide to come back online. That's why we're working late nights and weekends to make sure it happens asap. We don't have an exact date yet, but the vSide Forums will be up next week. More updates coming soon.

vSide opened its doors again in late September 2009.

So, where to now for vSide?

It still caters for a rather narrow demographic, and it is primarily aimed at the early teenager, who do not have the spending power needed to generate the kinds of income that Virtual Worlds need to survive.

It also severely limits user-created content, which will discourage many others from making vSide their virtual home. At present, user-created content is limited to creating clothing in the built-in editor, accessible via the My Design tab after hitting F5 to get into your wardrobe. Textures for new clothing items are created offworld, in programs such as Paint, Photoshop or Gimp. Once an item has been created, it needs to be submitted to vSide for approval, who will then pay you 100vBux, and your work is then theirs forever.

With a limited demographic, restrictive creation, and with established competitors such as IMVU, Habbo, and newcomers such as Frenzoo (backed by the formidable Anshe Chung), it is difficult to see how vSide can make a real go of this.

Time will tell.

Rock

Avatar Reality Raises $4.2 Million in Additional Capital

2010-03-24T15:51:00.000+01:00

Trent Ward, Games Industry Veteran, Joins Management Team as VP of Design

HONOLULU and SAN FRANCISCO — March 23, 2010 — Avatar Reality, creator of the massively multiplayer online virtual world platform Blue Mars, announced today that it has raised an additional $4.2 million from investors including Henk Rogers and Kolohala Ventures. To date, more than $13 million has been invested in Avatar Reality.

“We are extremely pleased by the progress the Avatar Reality team has made with Blue Mars,” said Henk Rogers, co-founder of Avatar Reality. “Blue Mars is the inevitable next step in immersive 3D virtual worlds.”

“For the past three years, we’ve been laying the foundation for Blue Mars so developers can create extraordinary 3D experiences and share them in their own personalized virtual world that is scalable and secure. This investment is a strong endorsement of the progress we’ve made towards providing the next generation in virtual world platforms,” said Jim Sink, CEO of Avatar Reality. “With that goal in mind, I’m thrilled to announce that Trent Ward has joined Avatar Reality as our new vice president of Design. Trent has a track record for creating amazing user experiences and he is leading our efforts to make Blue Mars a more intuitive, effective, and fun destination for participants at every level.”

“This is really the culmination of a dream for me. Blue Mars makes it possible for anyone to bring their own high definition 3D worlds to life and occupy them together with thousands of others from everywhere in the globe simultaneously. Using Blue Mars, anyone can create games, meeting places, and social media experiences that reward users, encourage community and really push what’s possible online,” said Trent. Prior to his work with Avatar Reality, Trent served as creative director for Foundation9, Ubisoft, and Electronic Arts. Last year he was named by Edge Magazine as one of the Hot 100 Game Developers of 2009.

About Blue Mars and Avatar Reality
Developed and launched by Avatar Reality in 2009, Blue Mars is a premium 3D virtual world platform featuring unparalleled fidelity, scalability, security and connectivity. Blue Mars enables artists, game, and application developers to create and distribute amazing 3D games and applications for a global audience. Blue Mars launched in Open Beta in October 2009 and began selling virtual land to third party developers in January of 2010.

Avatar Reality was founded in 2006 by interactive entertainment visionaries Henk Rogers - best known for introducing Tetris to the world - and Kazuyuki Hashimoto, former CTO of Squaresoft and Vice President at Electronic Arts. The Avatar Reality team includes world-class experts in casual games, PC games, console games, virtual worlds, and virtual economies with leadership experience at Microsoft, Sony, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Linden Lab, and Foundation9. Privately held, Avatar Reality is led by CEO Jim Sink, and has more than 30 employees in Honolulu and San Francisco. For more information, visit http://www.bluemars.com.

Avatar Reality and Blue Mars are trademarks or registered trademarks of Avatar Reality, Inc.

Press Contact:
Glenn Sanders
press@avatar-reality.com
Tel: 415-729-5775

Heritage Key VX - A New Historical Virtual World

2010-03-21T14:03:00.008+01:00

Introduction
Heritage Key is a content-orientated online community aimed at those with an interest in history and culture. It features both media resources and an interactive experience. The company behind Heritage Key is Rezzable Productions Ltd, a London-based company, headed up by CEO, Jonathan Himoff, and Director John Griffin, Chairman of Addison Lee, a large transport company, also based in London.

Available content includes podcasts, streaming videos, news articles, interviews, discussion groups and blogs. The content is often created in conjunction with archaeologists and historians, such as the Egyptologist Dr Zahi Hawass and John Julius Norwich. Heritage Key combines this content with an online 3D virtual experience, or virtual world, that recreates artefacts and archaeological sites.

The Heritage Key VX provides access to a 3D Virtual World filled with accurate representations of many of the Ancient World's treasures and sites, and the collection is growing.

Built on the OpenSimulator platform, and using an adaptation of the Imprudence 1.2 Viewer, this is one of the best Opensim grids I have ever visited.

Let's start the Tour
Before entering HK you first need to create an account, you do this on the HK website. You then download their Viewer, and you are ready to login.

On arrival you will find yourself in Welcome Alpha, about 50m from the main teleport hub. The reason for this short walk is that I often found staff members on this walkway, only too keen to help out and provide guidance.

Arrival in Heritage Key

The Main Teleport Hub in Welcome Alpha

Even when no-one is on duty the place is filled with helpful notices

Teleporters

The currently available destinations from the teleport hub are:

The Skills Centre
The Avatar Outfitting Area
The Travel Hub
King Tut's Treasures

The teleporters are collision devices, so just walk straight into one or left-click it, and you will be teleported automatically.

The Skills Centre

The Skills Centre

This centre provides all you need to know about using and exploring Heritage Key. It uses a series of tutorials covering

How to Use the Information (and hidden details) provided
How to Interact, and use your camera and activate media
How to Navigave around the HK World
How to Communicate with others (explorers and staff members) add friends, and take snapshots
How to manage your Inventory

Once you have brushed up on your skills there is a handy teleporter to take you to the The Avatar Outfitting Area.

The Avatar Outfitting Area

Avatar Outfitting Area

Choose your ready-made outfit here

In addition to several ready-made avatars (with shape, skin, hair, and explorer's clothes), you can customise your avatar further by taking (for free) a range of hair styles, pants, shirts, jackets, boots, belts, glasses, and other accessories, with more coming soon. Changing rooms are also provided, the Mens' up at 425m and the Ladies' up at 600m.

The Mens' Changing Room, up at 425m, with pose stand

Once you have got the look that suits you best it is time to do some serious exploring. Fortunately, at the end of the The Avatar Outfitting Area there is another convenient teleporter to take you to the Travel Hub.

Travel Hub

Travel Hub

As its name implies, this is the main portal to all that Heritage Key has to offer. Intriguingly, it does not ask you where will you go, but rather when will you go.

Currently, the following are available:

Virtual King Tutankhamun
The Valley of the Kings
Stonehenge
Life on the Nile
Collectors Gallery

Coming soon are:

The Xian (Terracotta) Warriors
The British Museum

Travel Hub Teleporters

King Tut's Treasures
This telepoter takes you to the Valley of the Kings, and the digs of the famous Howard Carter.

Valley of the Kings and the Delightful Winged Heron

It was here that I met an explorer from Second Life, named Winged Heron. She told me that Heritage Key was not just about exploring, she also told me about the Quests. This is what she had to say:

Winged Heron, Freelance Reporter, Angelic Explorer and Celestial Poet, reporting for Rock Vacirca and others on HK:

Currently you find me exploring Heritage Key. I met Rock while on tour of the Valley of the Kings. Introduced to Heritage Key, by some friends, I am slowly becoming hooked. As a long time citizen of SL, I am on an exciting quest in the Valley of the Kings located in HK.

Rock caught me searching for the six elusive pages from the diary of Howard Carter, which have been deposited around the Valley of the Kings and in the tomb. He met me as I was looking for the first page, having found the other five. This quest commences at either the first tent to the Valley of the Kings or in Howard Carter's tent. A small hint, once you have located the pages, if you haven't collected these in order, go back and do them in order. The reward is a something wearable and seen in many old movies which were set in Egypt, Morocco and other North African countries. No don't think Lawrence of Arabia, more like the guys in Casablanca but not worn by Humphrey Bogart.

After some successful tips from Rock on alternate viewers, we parted company and I completed the first quest, ten minutes later, finding that damn elusive last page. Finding the Scarlet Pimpernel would have been easier. Only joking, but if a quest was easy it would be an Easter Egg Hunt. In the tomb of young King Tut you will find there is a further quest. This too, like all good quests, must be completed in correct order. Once completed your reward is well worth it.

Quests can also be found at Stonehenge, the first place I explored. I like to do things in historical order. It is much more tidy that way. Next stop will be the actual Tut exhibit in HK.

So what do I like in HK that I can't find in SL? Well I like the fact that historical accuracy is aimed for, especially since the offending potatoes and tomatoes have been removed from the menu at Stonehenge, another quest or set of tasks to be completed. The visual recreations of the sites and artefacts is amazing. The factsheets are also presented in a novel way. And finally, for people who have no chance to travel for various reasons in real life, they can virtually experience the wonders of archaeology and anthropology. I suspect even the world-renowned archaeologist Dr. Zahi Hawass, Egypt's answer to Indian Jones, would be pleased with the exhibits, if he had time away from the real thing.

I look foreward to more contributions from Winged Heron in the future.

I also liked the fact that you could take an aerial tour over the Valley of the Kings by Hot-Air Balloon, complete with audio commentary on what you were passing over.

Hot-Air Balloon Tours of the Valley of the Kings

Again conveniently, as I am now starting to take as given in Heritage Key, so well thought out is their design, is a teleporter to take you to the Collections Gallery. Be prepared to be amazed, I mean, really amazed.

Collections Gallery
Dark, moody, and full of Ancient Egyptian atmosphere, the Collections gallery showcase the great treasures uncovered in the tomb of the boy-king, Tutankhamun.

Every piece in the collection can be made full size by clicking on the Enlarge helper, and full audio commentaries are available for each piece too, explaining what the relic is, and its function, and much more besides.

This Gallery has to be seen to be believed

The Famous Mask of the King

Was there really a curse on this Mask?

At the end of the Collections Gallery is a Quick Teleports board, to take you to various destinations, but one which had me intrigued was the Cosmic Gallery, so I headed there next.

Cosmic Gallery

Cosmic Gallery

Boy was I glad that I checked the Cosmic Gallery out! I will not describe this Gallery any further, you have got to travel this path yourself. I have been to a lot of Virtual Worlds in my time, but never anything remotely like this. Quick tip, do not use the quick teleport helpers to get around the Cosmic Gallery, walk the path instead!

There is so much more to see in Heritage Key. I did not have time to visit Stonehenge, and the Life by the Nile region, and with all the various Quests, and new Ancient World destinations to look forward to, this is not a World I am going to tire of anytime soon.

If you missed the Tutankhamun Exhibition when it toured the world, then head over to Heritage Key right now. It awaits.

Rock

The Clouds are Gathering

2010-03-13T18:42:00.003+01:00

This past week in the Games Developer Conference (GDC 2010) in San Francisco has seen three major announcements concerning rendering in the cloud services.

First up, on the 10th March, was the GamesBeat keynote speech by OnLive's CEO Steve Perlman, who showcased the company’s game streaming technology, which allows high quality 3D games to be played without a console, by doing all the graphic-rich rendering in the cloud, then streaming it to a lightweight client.

OnLive also put pressure in their competitors by announcing finally a firm release date, of June 17, 2010. At launch, the service will be available in all Continental US States, but look out for international announcements later in the year.

The service will cost $14.95 per month for the base service, although this can be reduced by purchasing multiple months at a time, and then additionally users need to purchase games and rentals from a menu of titles.

For early adopters, OnLive will waive the service fee for three months for the first 25,000 users to pre-register here.

Perlman provided a remarkable demo, playing games like Crysis on a large screen TV, then continuing the game on his iPhone. Other features included streaming movies and what looked like Xbox Live community features.

OnLive will be available for the PC and Mac only at launch.

On the same day, AMD, OTOY and Super Micro announced that they plan to bring Fusion Render Cloud Servers to market in the second quarter of 2010.

Announced by AMD CEO Dirk Meyer at CES 2009, the AMD Fusion Render Cloud (FRC) is AMD's next generation breakthrough CPU/GPU server platform. Built on top of OTOY's cloud streaming technology, FRC is designed to deliver thousands of concurrent HD games, remote desktops, and live HD video streams to any internet enabled device with virtually no latency.

These servers will permit content providers to deliver video games, PC applications and other graphically-intensive applications through the Internet “cloud” to virtually any type of mobile device with a web browser in a manner designed to help maximize battery life and to efficiently process the content. The AMD Fusion Render Cloud will transform movie and gaming experiences through server-side rendering – which involves storing visually rich content in a compute cloud, compressing it, and streaming it in real-time over a wireless or broadband connection to a variety of devices such as smart phones, set-top boxes and ultra-thin notebooks. By delivering remotely rendered content to devices that are unable to store and process HD content due to such constraints as device size, battery capacity, and processing power, HD cloud computing represents the capability to bring HD entertainment to mobile users virtually anywhere.

The AMD Fusion Render Cloud will also allow remote real-time rendering of film and visual effects graphics on an unprecedented scale. Gaming companies can use the AMD Fusion Render Cloud for developing and deploying next-generation game content, to serve up virtual world games with unlimited photo-realistic detail, and to take advantage of new delivery channels as open and diverse as the web itself.

"Supermicro brings its long standing experience in the design and production of high-performance, high-efficiency server solutions, and its strengths in GPU-optimized platforms, to this exciting new breakthrough technology," said Don Clegg, VP of Marketing and Business Development at Supermicro. "With the multi-core CPU and graphics processing power of AMD and next-generation cloud development software OTOY, Supermicro CPU/GPU supercomputer server solutions now empower developers to create HD video and gaming environments delivered over the web in real time, for the first time."

"In 2003 AMD changed the server market with the launch of the AMD Opteron™ processor, ending the sole source enterprise technology barrier. The industry embraced this change as there are now more than 2 million AMD Opteron processors driving Cloud Computing today," said Charlie Boswell, Director of Digital Media and Entertainment, AMD. The AMD Fusion Render Cloud is poised to help ignite the next evolution in cloud computing by enabling server side rendering of fully interactive HD content.

"The launch of the Fusion Render Cloud platform through Supermicro’s product line marks a major milestone for cloud computing, “said Jules Urbach. “Streaming high performance games and graphics remotely is an indisputably disruptive technical achievement. The very idea has invited both excitement and skepticism during the 14 months since AMD and OTOY announced their plans to enter into this space. With the addition of a major OEM supplying servers to datacenters next quarter, this technology will be commoditized by an eco system of partners as diverse as the web itself. The future of graphics in the cloud has never been brighter."

OTOY’s software fully leverages AMD’s CPU core density and graphics leadership to create an open streaming platform for cloud delivery. OTOY software, hosted on the AMD Fusion Render Cloud is designed to achieve a scalable solution, lowering the average power footprint per user. This is first order requirement of economic viability for any Cloud solution. AMD’s Fusion Render Cloud specification, now productized by Supermicro, is designed to scales to thousand of users per rack. Together, this consortium of technology partners is enabling the massive deployment of Cloud rendering technology in 2010.

FRC Hardware Specifications:

125 1U rackmount servers - available pre-racked in Super Rack configuration
500 ATI ‘Cypruss’ based GPUs
250 AMD Opteron™ 6100 series processors
<100 Kw, 40 sqft of space per 1 PetaFLOPS of computing power

FRC Technical Specifications:

Up to 3,000 concurrent HD streams (720p/1080p or higher @ 60hz) for streaming AAA video games, high end CAD programs and full virtual desktops for all major Operating Systems
Up to 12,000 concurrent SD streams @ 120 hz
Ultra fast HD encoding < 1ms per megapixel
Token based metering system built into driver stack for easy cost analysis and resource provisioning

About Super Micro Computer, Inc. (NASDAQ: SMCI)
Supermicro, the leader in server technology innovation and green computing, provides customers around the world with application-optimized server, workstation, blade, storage and GPU systems. Based on its advanced Server Building Block Solutions, Supermicro offers the most optimized selection for IT, datacenter and HPC deployments. The company's system architecture innovations include the Twin server, double-sided storage and SuperBlade(R) product families. Offering the most comprehensive product lines in the industry, Supermicro provides businesses of all sizes with energy-efficient, earth-friendly solutions that deliver unmatched performance and value. Founded in 1993, Supermicro is headquartered in Silicon Valley with worldwide operations and manufacturing centers in Europe and Asia. For more information, visit www.supermicro.com.

About OTOY
OTOY is a leading software and content developer and provider of convergence technologies and special effects for the video game and film industries. OTOY works with a wide range of studios, game developers and visualization companies to create leading-edge visual and entertainment experiences. In 2008, Variety magazine listed OTOY CEO Jules Urbach as one of Hollywood’s top 10 innovators to watch in the next 12 months.

About AMD
Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) is an innovative technology company dedicated to collaborating with customers and partners to ignite the next generation of computing and graphics solutions at work, home and play. For more information, visit http://www.amd.com.

For more information
Marie Sheehy
310.859.4011
msheehy@wmeentertainment.com

Finally, David Perry, chief creative officer at Acclaim said he has a new company, Gaikai, that will do the same thing as OnLive but without some of its drawbacks. Gaikai only requires broadband, a browser, and the leatest Adobe Flash Player [note this, folk with iPhones, or those with iPad ambitions, Apple does not support Flash on either of those devices].

“I was going to reveal it at the E3 trade show, but the OnLive news has forced my hand,” said Perry. Gaikai is nowhere near as developed as OnLive or the AMD/OTOY offerings, but it was interesting to see that other companies are also thinking hard about rendering in the cloud.

But what ARE the drawbacks of rendering in the cloud to which Perry referred?

By far the biggest obstacle to overcome is latency. In Role Playing Games and Virtual Worlds, this is not so much of a problem, but in fast-paced high-action games, where life and death is measured in millisecond reaction times, the latency involved in you pressing the trigger, and that information being relayed back to the servers, then the stream being sent back to your (and other's) client, so that action is reflected on-screen is maybe just too long for serious gamers to bear. Most of that latency is also not under the control of the Cloud companies, in it mainly in the hands of the Internet Service Provider between the gamer and the Cloud. One figure I heard mentioned, was that users must be no further away than 1000 miles from the Cloud servers. If that is a partial solution to latency, then that in itself introduces another problem, of geolocation. Will the Cloud companies install large server centres in places such as Alaska, or Iceland, or other remote locations, to serve the gaming communities there?

We'll see.

Rock

A Tourist's Guide to Blue Mars - Part 1: New Venice

2010-03-06T19:02:00.001+01:00

So, you have arrived in Blue Mars, you have checked out the Welcome Area, met some people there, and now you are ready to do some serious exploring, but where to first? My favourite City in Blue Mars is New Venice, or Venezia (they made an announcement a few months ago that the name was changed from New Venice to Venezia, but I have seen no evidence of the name change elsewhere as yet). I would recommend going here first.

Places Browser
To get up the Places Browser you can either login to Blue Mars, and you will arrive there immediately, or if you are already inside Blue Mars just click the House icon on the toolbar.

Places Browser

Select New Venice, and then click the Download text in the top-right of the browser. Once it has finished downloading click Refresh to add it to the browser. To visit, just click its image, and then Go.

Arriving in New Venice
On arrival in New Venice you will be in a lovely garden. Behind you is a small gazebo, but don't go inside, as this is a teleporter to the Condo (more on that later).

Arrival Point in New Venice

From here get onto the path, and move away from the gazebo, at the far end of the garden is an archway, and this is the exit point. As you pass under the arch you will see some information terminals.

Arrival Area Gardens

Information Terminal (News and Maps)

If you click on the activation orb (and you will see these all over New Venice) the map will open for you.

Map

As you click a portion of the map, then hover your mouse over the selected portion of the map, it reveals places of interest to visit.

Circular Garden

For the time being, I just left this area, and continued out and was faced by a huge circular garden. I could hear soft music at this point. These gardens in New Venice are spectacular and lush. You may have also seen small spherical bots flying about. These have no function, as yet.

Inside the Circular Garden (bot and butterfly in foreground)

Teleporting in New Venice
One of the nice functions that the creators of New Venice (VSE) have included, is the ability to teleport anywhere inside the City. This is really useful, as at 4km x 4km, New Venice is one of the larger Cities, and 16sq Km is approximately the size of 256 SL regions, so is more like a mini-continent than a City. Another useful feature, is that it is not actually you that teleports, it is your camera, so you can have a look around a destination before deciding to teleport there in person (by pressing 'Q' on your keyboard).

To teleport ensure that the main Blue Mars window has the focus (not the chat window) by clicking on the top blue title bar. Now press F3 and the teleport menu will apppear.

Teleport Menu (Click blue Title Bar at top of window, then press F3)

The teleport menu gives you a choice of 9 destinations, by pressing any of the numbers 1-9 on your numeric keypad to the right of your keyboard (NOT the numbers 1-9 at the top of your keyboard).

Teleport Destination #1
This is the RC Boat Racing venue. Currently the racing is not activated, but it is still a great area to explore. The croquet greens are nearby.

RC Boat Racing Arena

Corresponding Place on the Map

Teleport Destination #2
This is the Bocce Ball Court destination. Again, not functional at present, but well worth the visit.

Bocce Court

Bocce Ball Court on the Map (the large grey circle on the bottom island)

Teleport Destination #3
This will take you to the Sail Boats. These do work, after a fashion :)

Don't blame me for what happens though. Taking a scuba kit with you might be advisable!

Sailboats (that broken bot needs fixing!)

As is normal in New Venice, use the activation orbs to use them

Teleport Destination #4
This destination just takes you back to the orginal landing point. Useful to get you to the Condo.

Teleport Destination #5
Now I am not sure about this destination. It is actually a little circular garden with an old knarled tree in the middle. However, there is an activation orb, and when clicked the entire garden become an elevator, and delivers you (sometimes) to a lower level, as these two pics show.

Garden Elevator (upper level)

Garden Elevator (lower level)

Be careful on this thing! The script is not perfect, and on one occasion I ended up in orbit over New Venice. Here is the proof!

Unintentional Orbit Mode

Teleport Destination #6
A regular destination this time. At this location are water taxis, a telescope (with a game inside), and stairs leading up to The Floating House.

Telescopes (each has a find objects game inside)

This destination is just above the Boat Taxi 4 location on the Map:

Boat Taxi Stop 4 (that square corner near the top-right of the island)

Clicking on the telescope brings up a menu which allows you to use the telescope in the regular way, or to search for objects for points.

Telescope Menu

Find Objects Game

Teleport Destination #7
This takes you to halfway up the staircase to The Floating House

The Midway Point up to The Floating House

There is a regular elevator ( to take you back down to the lower level only), and a staircase to take you up to The Floating House. Take these stairs!

When you get to the top of the stairs the beautiful Floating House, with its majestic waterfall is before you.

The Floating House

Entrance to The Floating House

Carry on through the archway, and straight ahea to the back of the house. There is a curious activation orb here. Click it, and stand back and wait to be amazed!

The Flying Elevator

The orb calls the amazing Flying Elevator. A gazebo-like device that flies you back down to the lower level near to the water taxi area. An incredible ride (but again, is temperamental, so you could end up anywahere!).

Teleport Destination #8
This is an odd one. Mostly it does not work, but on one occasion I was sent into orbit again, only even higher this time. Sometimes I have arived at the activation orb for the Flying Elevator.

The Chat Speaks for itself!

Teleport Destination #9
Back to earth again (or back to Mariner Firma), and this is Boat Taxi Stop 4, below Teleport Destination #6.

Flying in New Venice
You can fly in New Venice! Or at least the sensation of flying (actually it is your camera that flies). To do this, press F3 again to bring up the teleport menu, but do NOT press any number. Instead, aim your camera upwards by holding down the right mouse button and dragging the mouse to tilt the camera upwards, then press your Up Arrow.

When your camera arrives at a location you like, just press 'Q' on your keyboard and you will teleport to that destination instantly.

Condo
The sample Condo in New Venice is gorgeous! To get there you can use the Teleport Travel Gazebos in either the arrival garden (Teleport Destination #4) or the other beside The Floating House.

Condo Interior

There are TV screens inside the Condo, music, and a hidden teleporter that will take you to a bar! Walk to the circular door and it will open magically, leading the way to a patio area with spectacular views.

Condo Exterior

Other Oddities
One other strange thing I found, was if I pressed the number 1 on my numeric keypad, without having the teleport menu up. It spawned a blue sphere, that only I could see. Continued pressing spawned more, and they do not seem to do much except jump up and down at times.

Strange Blue Spheres

I was able to stack some vertically, before they fell and bounced around. These spheres are one of several mysteries in New Venice. I will leave you to find the rest.

Rock

Blue Mars Welcomes Therians

2010-03-05T17:20:00.004+01:00

Since the announced imminent demise of There.com there has been a substantial number of Therians who have decided to either make Blue Mars their new home, or at least to check it out, and the Blue Mars staff and volunteers have been on hand to welcome them and arrange special meetings for them. To aid those meetings I have produced this short guide, which is aimed not only for them, but for all others who are thinking of checking out Blue Mars and are wondering where they should start.

First though, a couple of caveats:

Blue Mars is still in beta/development
This is a strategy that is quite different to what many people think of as a beta. In Blue Mars the beta testers were not given a full set of functionalities to test, they were given a small subset, in order to focus the feedback on improvements to the existing functionalities and bug fixing. Once that subset had been fixed, another release of the client software was then issued, with more functionality (and improvements to the functions in the previous release), and so on.

Currently Blue Mars is still under this beta/development, and is likely to remain that way for some months yet, so visitors should not expect that it is currently the full package.

For an idea of what functions are currently being worked on, please see these articles on the current roadmap, in this order:

Hardware Requirements
Blue Mars will be a little tougher on hardware requirements than There.com, and a little more demanding for folks coming from Second Life. A full list of the hardware requirements for Blue Mars is here. You can see what Frames Per Second (fps) you are getting in Blue Mars without any third-party tools, it is built-in. To get your fps and other info up on the screen read this how-to.

In order to improve your fps there are a couple of things you can try:

If you have Skype running at the same time as Blue Mars, shut it down (you will also see some smaller improvements if you close down anything else that uses the Internet, such as browsers.
Change your Rendering Quality down from High to Low. To do this, click on the Blue Mars main window title bar (just to move the focus from the chat window to the main window), and then hit the Esc key. Alternatively, you can click the right-hand icon that looks like four points, which expands the toolbar, then click on the options (spanner) icon.

Toolbar-Collapsed

Toolbar-Expanded

Change Rendering Quality from High to Low

OK, now that the caveats are out of the way, some good news. The Welcome area in Blue Mars is a place where you can meet up with actual Blue Mars (Avatar Reality) staffers. Look out for Glenn Goodliffe (aka Glenn Sanders, Community Director of Avatar Reality), and Summer Studio (aka Tiffany Nahinu, Community Assistant), and various volunteers, who will help you get your feet wet.

You can always provide feedback to Glenn and his team, and they are very much in listening mode, so don't be afraid to let them know (politely) what improvements you would like to see (but check the roadmap links above so you do not repeat what they have already got in hand).

Now the housekeeping is out of the way, I will start a series of articles providing a Tourist's Guide to the various Blue Mars Cities.

Look out for tomorrow's article: A Tourist's Guide to New Venice

Rock

There.com to Close Down!

2010-03-02T22:47:00.002+01:00

There.com

Founded in 1998 by Will Harvey and Jeffrey Ventrella, and having suffered a major restructuring in 2004 that resulted in huge layoffs, There.com has finally succumbed and announced it is to close its doors forever on the 9th March.

There.com was always a bit too cartoony for me, but I know a lot of peoople enjoyed it, and it had over 1 million members.

In addition to customizing their avatars, members could create their own objects, such as clothing, vehicles, buildings and furniture, and sell them to others for use in the world, and was a direct competitor to Second Life.

There.com took copyright very seriously and every object created went through a rigorous submission procedure to insure its accuracy as well as compliance with international copyright laws.

The official announcement was as follows:

There.com is closing on March 9th, 2010

In 2003, There.com was launched as a 3D Immersive Virtual World for everyone.

Unlike other products, There was designed from the beginning to be a welcoming and comfortable place for everyone - not just gamers, not just people over 18, not just people with high end computers, and not just people on broadband. This principle extended far beyond just the technology: for example it led to our submissions review system, which ensured that user generated content didn't infringe on existing brands, or even other member's content. To that, we added socialization tools including 3D avatar chat, clubs, events, activity flags, card games, quests, virtual commerce, kinetic games such as paintball, buggies, and, of course, hoverboards. While many of these things sound commonplace today, in 2003 we were arguably one of the first places to "put it all together" in one package.

But all of that was just a big stack of technology and hardware. It was when we added people - our members - to There.com that it actually came to life. Through you, There has been known as a vibrant, welcoming place for people to come and meet other people, have fun, create, or just hang out. Over the years, millions of folks have passed through our doors, each of you bringing something new and different to There.com, and, hopefully, taking a little bit of the fun with you back into your "real life".

By adding developers to There, we made it possible for the world to becomes millions of time more interesting and creative than it possibly could have been otherwise. Of course, the talented artists and modelers at There created an amazing world to start with, but it was your content - clothes, vehicles, accessories, buildings, lawn furniture, gnomes, snowmen, etc, etc, etc - which really helped bring the world to life, and make There the special place it is today.

Finally, to this mix, we added brands, which had a lasting and important impact on There.com. We can't list them all here, but names like Coca-Cola, CosmoGirl, Bebe, K-SWISS, and SPIN all brought their own products and influence to the world, which in turn made it an even more interesting place for people to be.

We believe that all of this together made a world which was, well, like "real life", with just the right level of unreality thrown in. Standards for speech, interaction, avatar dress, and even the amount of "blood and gore" were pretty much what you'd expect in the real world, and we believe that it's one of the many things which made There special, accessible, and attractive to people from all over the United States and the world -- not just the privileged with high-end machines and broadband connections.

Unfortunately, this also meant that There.com's customers were hardest hit by the recession, and, so was There. While our membership numbers and the number of people in the world have continued to grow, there has been a marked decrease in revenue, which, in these economic times, is no surprise.

Throughout the last year and this quarter, we have fought the good fight by churning out new features and revisions as fast as we possibly could. Our hats have to go off to the team, which have in a very short time introduced a whole new suite of casual games, a completely new foundation for our user interface, improved internal efficiencies for the product, real estate, a whole new level of Community Involvement, etc, etc. On top of that, we've revised our first user experience several times, making the whole process for registering and getting into the world (and continued to be amused when the same features appeared in other worlds).

But, at the end of the day, we can't cure the recession, and at some point we have to stop writing checks to keep the world open. There's nothing more we would like to avoid this, but There is a business, and a business that can't support itself doesn't work. Before the recession hit, we were incredibly confident and all indicators were "directionally correct" and we had every reason to believe growth would continue. But, as many of you know personally, the downturn has been prolonged and severe, and ultimately pervasive.

We're very sorry to announce that There.com will be closing to the public at 11:59 PM on March 9th, 2010.

We'll be closing registration, billing, and member program upgrades immediately.

Developer submissions are closed effectively immediately.

Rental processing will be stopped, so no more rent will be collected for neighborhoods, lots, or There homes.

Paintgun refills will be free.

Portazone refills will either be free, or we'll "stop the clock" on Portazone minutes. We'll sort that out in the next day or so.

All purchases of Therebucks and member program updates made between midnight Pacific Standard Time February 1, 2010 and 11:00 AM Pacific Standard Time on March 2, 2010 will be refunded in full. Purchases made via PayPal or Credit Card will be refunded automatically. Purchases made via PayByCash or the Ultimate Game Card will need to follow the procedure outlined in the F.A.Q. to get your refund.

We will attempt to continue a Therebucks buyback for developers as we have been. If you are a There Developer, and have Therebucks you'd like us to buy back, please follow the procedure in the F.A.Q. to request a buyback.

It's been our privilege to play a small part in making the place that was There.com, and for that we thank you. We know that There will continue to live in our hearts and minds, and hope it does in yours, too.

Michael Wilson
CEO, There.com

A sad day indeed.

Rock

Crytek shows CryENGINE®3 in stereoscopic 3D

2010-03-02T01:09:00.004+01:00

Latest all-in-one multi-platform
development solution to be shown in stereoscopic 3D at GDC 2010

Frankfurt am Main (Germany), 1 March 2010 – Crytek GmbH (“Crytek”) are proud to announce the presentation of CryENGINE®3 in stereoscopic 3D (S-3D) at this year’s GDC expo in San Francisco (11–13 March). For the very first time, developers can experience the highly topical S-3D trend built with Crytek’s latest development solution.

One of the key features of the third-generation CryENGINE® is the “LiveCreate™” feature, which will also be showcased at GDC. CryENGINE®3 LiveCreate™ allows designers to work with a single editor, but see and play the results in real-time on the PC, PlayStation® 3 and Xbox 360™. With CryENGINE®3, scalability across multiple platforms is a revolutionary development to enable the creation of truly great-looking games – regardless of the target platform.

“After the successful introduction of CryENGINE®3 at last year’s GDC, we are really excited to show the latest version of our all-in-one game development solution this year in stereoscopic 3D. Over the past few years, S-3D technology has emerged as one of the key trends both in movies and games. With CryENGINE®3, developers will have the ability to create their content in 3D on all platforms. There are basically no longer any limits to a designer’s creativity. CryENGINE®3 features many innovations to accelerate development, cut production costs and ensure teams are able to maximize their own creativity without delays,” says Carl Jones, Director of Global Business Development CryENGINE.

CryENGINE®3 is the fastest and most robust high-end renderer in the world, with new features specifically designed for console platforms. Benchmark-setting graphical performance, near-photorealism rendering of indoor and wide-open outdoor environments as well as extraordinary real-time special effects are just some of the hallmarks of CryENGINE® technology. It was the underlying technology for Crytek’s critically acclaimed games Crysis® and Crysis® Warhead, and is used today not only throughout the video game industry and but also for many serious applications in fields from architecture, training and simulation to learning and development.

Crytek's Engine Business Team will be available during GDC for meetings and to discuss licensing details with prospective clients. In addition, Crytek will be hosting a series of public presentations at their booth, #1414. Crytek’s recruiters will also be at the show to answer questions about the company and accept resumes of interested applicants. Their booth is located at South Hall #2320 (Career Pavilion).

About Crytek GmbH

Crytek GmbH ("Crytek") is one of the world’s leading independent development studios for interactive entertainment. It is based in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) and has additional studios in Kiev (Ukraine), Budapest (Hungary), Sofia (Bulgaria), Seoul (South Korea) and Nottingham (UK). Crytek is dedicated to creating exceptionally high-quality video games for the PC and next-generation consoles, powered by their proprietary cutting-edge 3D-Game-Technology, CryENGINE®.

Since its foundation in 1999, Crytek has created the multi-award winning PC titles Far Cry®, Crysis® (awarded best PC Game of E3 2007 and Best Technology at the 2008 Game Developers Choice Awards) and Crysis Warhead® (awarded Best Graphics Technology at IGN Best of 2008 Awards).

Crytek, Crysis, Crysis Warhead and CryENGINE are registered trademarks or trademarks of Crytek GmbH in the USA, Germany and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Blue Mars and the Fusion Render Cloud

2010-02-26T19:18:00.026+01:00

Fusion Render Cloud

Rewind back to
just over a year ago AMD President and Chief Executive Officer Dirk Meyer and OTOY Chief Executive Officer Jules Urbach unveiled a plan to revolutionize the deployment, development and delivery of HD content through the “AMD Fusion Render Cloud”, a massively-parallel supercomputer. The announcement took place during AMD’s Industry Insider Series keynote at the Las Vegas Hilton Theater, where AMD was joined on stage by industry luminaries such as Lucasfilm, Dell, HP and Electronic Arts.

AMD has a long track record in the supercomputing world. Seven out of 10 of the world’s fastest machines, including the fastest two computers on the planet, are powered by AMD hardware

said Meyer.

Today, AMD is pleased to announce a new kind of supercomputer unlike any other ever built. It is being designed to break the one petaFLOPS barrier, and to process a million compute threads across more than 1,000 graphics processors. We anticipate it to be the fastest graphics supercomputer ever. And it will be powered by OTOY’s software for a singular purpose: to make HD cloud computing a reality. We plan to have this system ready by the second half of 2009.

The system is being designed to enable content providers to deliver video games, PC applications and other graphically-intensive applications through the Internet “cloud” to virtually any type of mobile device with a web browser without making the device rapidly deplete battery life or struggle to process the content. The AMD Fusion Render Cloud will transform movie and gaming experiences through server-side rendering – which stores visually rich content in a compute cloud, compresses it, and streams it in real-time over a wireless or broadband connection to a variety of devices such as smart phones, set-top boxes and ultra-thin notebooks. By delivering remotely rendered content to devices that are unable to store and process HD content due to such constraints as device size, battery capacity, and processing power, HD cloud computing represents the capability to bring HD entertainment to mobile users virtually anywhere.

The AMD Fusion Render Cloud will also enable remote real-time rendering of film and visual effects graphics on an unprecedented scale. Gaming companies can use the AMD Fusion Render Cloud for developing and deploying next-generation game content, to serve up virtual world games with unlimited photo-realistic detail, and take advantage of new delivery channels as open and diverse as the web itself.

Hosted on AMD’s powerful new AMD Fusion Render platform, OTOY’s revolutionary software has given birth to the world’s first practical, scalable graphics supercomputer capable of true server-side HD cloud rendering. The AMD Fusion Render Cloud will allow directors like Robert Rodriguez of Troublemaker Studios to break through existing CPU-only and graphics processor-only render bottlenecks which have imposed limitations on the creation of true eye-definition assets,

said Charlie Boswell, Director of Digital Media and Entertainment, AMD.

Imagine playing the most visually intensive first person shooter game at the highest image quality settings on your cell phone without ever having to download and install the software, or use up valuable storage space or battery life with compute-intensive tasks. Those are just some of the experiences that AMD and OTOY plan to make possible with HD cloud computing of visually rich entertainment content.
By fusing industry-leading CPU technology with computationally dense, massively parallel graphics processors, the AMD Fusion Render Cloud can rival the world’s most powerful industrial computing devices, but require just a fraction of the floor space, power envelope and cost associated with many of today’s leading supercomputers,” said Jules Urbach, Chief Executive Officer, OTOY. “Combined with the power of OTOY’s revolutionary and flexible software platform, the AMD Fusion Render Cloud can transform the entertainment industry and remove the technical barriers between consumers and first-rate content experiences.

The AMD Fusion Render Cloud will be powered by AMD-optimized hardware including the AMD Phenom™ II processors, AMD 790 chipsets and ATI Radeon™ HD 4870 graphics processors, for unprecedented compute density and power efficiency. The AMD Fusion Render Cloud is an excellent example of AMD’s Fusion strategy, combining its partners’ dreams with AMD innovation, to bring powerful technologies to mainstream markets through the combined power of graphics processors and CPUs in a single platform.

So, is the Fusion Render Cloud ready for production? I took a look at the OTOY website, but there is currently only one word there at the moment ... Soon.

Just one tantalising word on the OTOY Website

Fast Forward to
this past week, when Jim Sink of Avatar Reality, the creators of the Blue Mars Virtual World platform, addressed the Virtual Edge 2010 conference at the Santa Clara Convention Center.
Jim said

The problem people have with deploying virtual world applications, particularly in business and education environments, is that they have a choice - between capability and compatibility. Games such as Crysis or World of Warcraft, look good, but require high-end hardware, and up-to-date drivers. Or they could make something really simple that is Flash-based for example. In Blue Mars we wanted to create something that was as flexible as possible, so if you wanted it in an application or you wanted to run it in a browser, that is not the compromise that you needed to make… So we wanted to create something to lower the barrier to entry and allow people to create things that are very beautiful, graphically, beyond anything you would see on an XBox 360 or Playstation 3, and put it on ANY device and make it really easy to use.
Blue Mars currently has two ways in which you can bring your current web-based content directly into a Virtual World. We have native renderers for flash and web content and so if it runs in a web browser it runs in Blue Mars.
Fortunately AMD and a software company called OTOY have partnered together to create something called the Fusion Cloud Server. And what this allows us to do is to take a high-end 3d application like Blue Mars, render it in the cloud, and deliver it to any device that is capable of web-based video, the quality scales with the amount of bandwidth that you have. So, just like Youtube when you click on 'Play' and it plays, that is how it works for a HD 3D environment.

Jim also mentioned that they may have a production version of the web renderer on their April 1st release.

All this is amazing news indeed. But just how good is this new Fusion Render Cloud? Maybe this Jules World customer video will give us a clue:

Many naysayers have complained that Blue Mars will only run on high-end equipment, and if they struggle to run Second Life on their rig how can they be expected to run Blue Mars?

Others have said they are Mac or Linux users, and to wake them up when Blue Mars is available on their platforms.

Well guys, get ready for a wake-up call.

Rock

A Closer Look at Unity

2010-02-26T00:11:00.003+01:00

Back in early November 2009 I reported on the free version of Unity that had been launched, and renamed from the Indie version to simply Unity. Today I will take a closer look at both versions and what they can do.

Before deciding whether to purchase Unity Pro you can download the free Unity which comes with a 30 day trial of Unity Pro included (after the 30 day period is up the software simply reverts to the free level of functionality). The main differences between Unity and Unity Pro are that with Unity you do not have real-time shadows, and with Unity Pro you do not have any splashscreens or watermarks. A detailed comparison of the differences between the two versions is on the Unity License page. Unity, with the 30 day trial of Unity Pro can be downloaded from the Unity download page.

Companies that have a turnover in excess of US$100,000 per annum must use Unity Pro. When using either Unity or Unity Pro no permissions are necessary to launch commercial products built with the software. However, they would take a dim view if someone took all the included asset bundles and resold them with a new name on them as if they were their own. No royalties are payable with either version.

Editor

Unity Editor

Unity features a fully integrated editor, which is tightly integrated with the game engine.At any time the game under development (and for 'game' also read 'virtual world' development) can be Played, paused or Stopped from within the Editor. Customisation is very flexible through the use of Editor-specific scripts, and layout arrangements. All assets and objects within the Editor use visual drag-and-drop, so it is a breeze to get your scenes up and running very quickly. Complex game objects can be designated as 'Prefabs' allowing them to be easily deployed throughout the game or at runtime. Any changes to the original Prefab is then propagated to all its clones.

Graphics
Unity currently uses Nvidia's PhysX for its physics engine, and this is included in Unity.

Amazing Graphics

The graphics pipeline in Unity is highly optimised, so that both DirectX and OpenGL will run blazingly fast. Rendering is sorted to minimize state changes, taking lights and shadows into account. On good hardware, Unity can render millions of polygons/sec.

Assets
Unity can import 3D models, textures, bones, and animations from almost all 3D applications, including 3dsMax, Maya, 3D Studio Max, Cheetah 3D, Cinema 4D, Blender, Carrara, Lightwave, XSI 5.x, and meshes and textures from Sketchup Pro and Wings 3D. For images, Photoshop .psd and .tiff formats are imported with layers automatically flattened. Non-layered JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TGA, IFF, PICT and many other image formats are also supported. Ogg video and audio are natively supported, but MOV, AVI, ASF, MPG, MPEG, and MP4 video files can also be used, and are recoded by Unity with a configurable bitrate. Audio formats such as AIFF, WAV and MP3 are also supported, and are stored uncompressed (great for high-quality sound effects).

Deployment
Unity supports one-click deployment to either MAC OSX or Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7. All Unity games can be played using a standard web-browser including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and most Mozilla-based browsers, after installing a Unity Web Player Plug-in. The plug-in is small at around 3 MB, and auto-installs without a browser restart.

Terrains
Unity provides great terrain tools to create all terrain types. An impressive range of foliage types can be painted directly into the scene, and with lightmaps showing the effects of all directional lights a realistic feel to a scene can be easily achieved.

Beautiful Terrains Can be easily Created

Scripting
Unity supports JavaScript, C#, and a version of Python called Boo. All three can use the underlying .NET libraries which support databases, regular expressions, XML, file access and networking, and the logic runs on the Open Source Mono platform.

Networking
Unity has full network support via it's built in Raknet-based multiplayer networking system as well as c# socket support with which Unity can talk to any back-end software you want.

The most popular being Smartfox Server and Exitgames Neutron/Photon services. Smartfox Server already has an existing Unity based API, meaning you can actually get up and running in a networked, multiplayer environment. The API is right here:

Asset Bundles and other Resources

Dressing Room

Unity has a unique Locomotion System which allows avatars to move realistically, for example, walking up stairs intelligently. Keyframed and MOCAP animations can be imported, but then Unity adjusts the bones in the legs to ensure that walking on uneven ground looks natural.
Examples projects are available to use on the Resource pages, including one nice Character Customisation project, called Dressing Room, that comes in one zip file, and includes all the source code! Have a look at the demo here to see it in action.

Unity comes complete with a tropical island demo, but other projects can be downloaded from the Resources page, including: 3rd Person Shooter, Shadow demo, Character Animation, and Networking capabilities.

What are you waiting for? Go get it!

Rock

First Impressions of the SL Viewer 2

2010-02-24T15:07:00.000+01:00

The first thing I noticed was that after launching the new Viewer it took a full 5 minutes before anything happened! Just a black window. It did eventually load.

On logging in I found myself where I had logged out from, and I was now a cloud, and it took around 15 minutes for me to rezz as my avatar. The other scenery took around 10-15 minutes to rezz, and sculpties took another 5 minutes oin top of that. It appears it was completely redoing the cache. Pity it could not use the Viewer 1.23 cache.

BM Toolbar

Viewer 2 Side-toolbar icons

One of the first things I noticed was the similarity in the side-toolbar icons with those used in Blue Mars. Do these look similar to you?

A couple of things I did like were the new tattoo layer, separate from the skin, and the Alpha Masks, which mean no more wearing invisiprims to hide body parts (to create aliens, dragons, furries etc).

You also do not have to tpe 'Worn' in the Inventory search box to display everything you wearing, there is now a simple Current Outfit folder in your Inventory to show everything you are wearing.

The navigation bar is nice, and you can go back to where you teleported from at a click, and also get up your teleport history (not so much of an innovation this one, as MystiTool users have had this functionality for years).

I was not happy to see the new location for the World Map and the MiniMap, as these are now accessed via the top menu, World > Mini-Map or World > World Map. Which puts them a further click away, and I feel this is a mistake, given that these are two of the most commonly used functions in the UI. Similarly, File Upload is commonly used, but now is several clicks away, hidden in the Inventory menu bar.

HTML on a prim is excellent. A real competitor for the Blue Mars flash on a prim. Glad to see the competition DO watch now what each other is doing!

I found a bug with streaming audio. The sim I was on had streaming audio, and I wanted it off so i could concentrate. In the audio options I unchecked the allow Streaming Audio checkbox, but it continued to play. Only by setting the Streaming Audio volume control to minimum could I get rid of the sound.

The new ratings (previously PG, Mature and Adult) are now General, Moderate and Adult. I did chuckle at some of the suggestions from the SL Forum, where SuezanneC Baskerville suggested Mild and Spicy, while Veritable Quandrykerville suggested something akin to the Chinese Restaurant ratings, but using 1 raised eyebrow up to 5 raised eyebrows!!

All in all, I approve of Viewer 2, I like its style and modern look. As for functionality it is certainly improved, though with a few bugs, but hey, it is in beta don't forget, so LL will be looking for plenty of feedback from the user community, and set up a forum just for this topic.

Give it a spin.

Rock

New Browser for Second Life

2010-02-23T19:48:00.001+01:00

Robert Scoble of Building43 released today a very interesting interview with Mark Kingdon of Second Life with a look at the new Second Life viewer.

In addition Second Life issued the following blog post detailing this new release:

Viewer 2 Beta Has Arrived
Today, we're excited to announce the launch of Viewer 2 Beta, the next generation of Second Life viewers -- combining an easy browser-like experience with shared media capabilities -- providing what we believe is the best experience yet for accessing Second Life, and a new option to choose from among Viewer 1.23 and other Third Party Viewers. We looked carefully at the experience design of other successful social media and technology platforms--such as the web browser, Facebook, the iPhone, Twitter, etc.--and the key elements that enabled them to reach mass adoption. You'll see much of that thinking baked into new Viewer 2 experience design. Our primary goal was to create a more consumer-friendly viewer--an imperative to bring in a new wave of Second Life Residents. After all, more people in Second Life means that there will be more amazing content, more customers to purchase virtual goods, a thriving economy, more friends and communities, and we can do even more to improve the experience. All very good things for all of us.

Viewer 2 Introduces a More Intuitive User Experience
Viewer 2 has all of the capabilities of Viewer 1.23 and more; it has just been reorganized into a more intuitive user experience. In fact, it's chock full of cool features. Once you learn your way around, you'll definitely appreciate:
A browser-like navigation bar with forward and back buttons. You can even save favorites and review your teleport history.
A sliding right-hand panel that surfaces the most frequently-used features and makes managing your profile, contacts, groups, landmarks, inventory, and appearance easy.
Improved Search, powered by Google Search Appliance technology , makes it easier to find friends, places, and cool stuff to buy.
A superior alternative to invisiprims for non-human avatars. In Viewer 2, a new wearable type, called Alpha Masks, allow you to "mask out" parts of your base avatar to make entire body parts disappear.
And, you'll enjoy the new contextual help to help you acclimate to the new viewer experience.
Those are just a few highlights. There's much more! We'll be going into more depth on many of these features in future blog posts.
Viewer 2 Brings the Web Into Second Life
Yes, you heard that right. Shared Media™, a standard capability in Viewer 2, makes sharing standard Web-based media and content in Second Life easy, and enables content creators to make more compelling, interactive experiences. Content creators can now place Web pages, video, Flash content, and other web media, onto any surface in Second Life. We expect that Shared Media will inspire a creative renaissance in Second Life as Residents explore more immersive and integrated inworld experiences and business opportunities such as gaming or theaters. And, for enterprises using Second Life as a work environment, Shared Media allows everyone to more effectively collaborate and share documents. We'll be publishing a blog post tomorrow focused on Shared Media--so keep your eyes peeled for that.

It's the Little Things, TooWhile much of the focus on the new viewer will be on the design and marquee features like Shared Media and Search, there are lots of little improvements that should be sources of delight. Customization. Favorites. Inspectors. The right-hand panel. The notifications tray. The clickable names and SLurls in notifications. Icons for Residents. Outfits. Recent conversations. The notifications well. Clickable URLs. Selecting SLurls in the navigation tool bar. Global audio controls. Quick access to your audio preferences. Improved performance on the map. And, view controls with presets for over the shoulder and "What am I wearing?"

And a Lot Under the Hood Search and the Home panel are web content. That means that we can continue to make updates to the content, design and interactions without forcing you to download a new version of the viewer. We believe that this will make a big difference for new users, because the content in that panel will help users discover the richness and depth of Second Life. Since it's web content, some of our recent acquisitions in the web space may soon be making an appearance--watch this space. We also focused on performance and stability. In fact, we believe this the most stable beta that we've ever released.

But, it's Still BetaAnd that's why we're putting it into your hands now. So, put it through its paces, stress test it, and give us your feedback in the Viewer 2 Forum.

Getting StartedViewer 2 is different enough from Viewer 1.23 and a few minutes perusing the Quickstart Guide will save you the frustration of "How do I do this?" or "Where is that?" Contextual support also available now within the viewer itself. If you're chomping at the bit to get going, then here are a few "high nails" that can help you get up-and-running quickly in Viewer 2.
A couple of features you may be looking for:

Camera Controls: Located on the Bottom Bar, labeled "View."
Voice Controls: The "Speak" button is now located right next to the nearby text chat entry field. Sound preferences can be set by clicking Me > Preferences in the menus at the top, then clicking the Sound tab.
Moving Around: Located on the Bottom Bar, labeled "Move."
Teleporting: You can teleport a number of ways:
Double-click a Landmark in the Places Panel in the Side Bar.
Type a Region or Landmark name in the location field in the Top Bar and hit enter.
Paste a SLurl into the location field and hit enter.

A few handy tasks:
Sharing Inventory: To share Inventory, start a Conversation (IM) with the person you to share an item. Click the "Share" button in the Conversation window which pops open the Inventory side panel. Then, drag the Inventory item over to the Conversation.
Pay L$ to Someone: There are two quick ways to do this: A) Right click on the person, then select "Pay" from the context menu. B) Click "Pay" in the Conversation window. The "Pay Resident" floater will appear. Choose the amount you wish to pay and then click "Pay."

But Where is My ?
We tried to balance the needs of existing Residents with the general consumer, and made some dfficult choices like replacing pie menus with context list menus -- a broadly used design feature in most consumer software. If some of these changes are important to you, then the good news is that you still have choice.

The Choice is YoursWe celebrate and encourage viewer choice. When it ships in its final form, Viewer 2 will become the primary viewer, included in the registration flow for all new Second Life Residents, but there are many other third-party viewers based on Snowglobe, our open source viewer, that are designed for Residents that have specialized needs and requirements. Viewer 1.23 will continue to be available for the foreseeable future and we will continue to support it as long as it makes sense.
A Word about Third-Party ViewersWe're also announcing the Viewer Directory and the Policy on Third-Party Viewers. The Viewer Directory is a list of third-party viewers for Residents with specialized interests or viewing needs, such as languages that we do not support or additional navigation and accessibility features. To apply to add a viewer to the Viewer Directory, the software developer must be a Resident in good standing, and self-certify that the viewer complies with the Policy on Third-Party Viewers, which prohibits griefing, fraud, theft of passwords, and infringement of intellectual property. It is important to note that we will not tolerate malicious viewers that violate our policies. Enough said on that topic. To learn more about our announcement, read today's blog post on the new directory and policy.

Snowglobe, our open source viewer program, will release later today. Snowglobe 2 is based on the Viewer 2 Beta code base. If you're a third-party developer interested in Snowglobe 2, visit our wiki page where you will find information and the downloads.

Resources to Help You Learn Viewer 2
Quickstart Guide (SL Wiki)
Frequently Asked Questions (PDF)
Release Notes (SL Wiki)
Video Demos (YouTube)
SL Answers (SL Answers)
And, if something breaks or you're really stuck, then contact Support and we're happy to help.
This is Only the Beginning and We Want Your Feedback
We're excited about what you'll experience today and we're only at the beginning. There's so much more that we'll be adding to Viewer 2 in the coming months. And, one of the most exciting things for folks at Linden, is that the Viewer 2 code base will enable us to improve the product at a much faster pace than ever before. So, that's where you come in. We need to hear from you! Participate in the Viewer 2 Forum and share your experience and suggest future enhancements. And, if you find a bug, then please log it in PJIRA. Then, go tell your friends! If you Twitter, then use the #SLViewer2 hash tag.

So, go download Viewer 2 here and try it out. We hope you like it.

Rock

Making Money out of Virtual Worlds

2010-02-22T16:21:00.004+01:00

Introduction
Virtual Worlds with an inworld economy, and an inworld currency that can be converted in and out of real world dollars, such as Second Life, have proved very popular with their residents, as they allow the budding entrepreneur to make a modest real life income, and in a few cases quite a substantial income, from the leasing of virtual land, and the creation and selling of virtual goods, textures, animations, and scripts, etc. Even more opportunities are on the horizon with newer, more exciting worlds, such as Blue Mars, due to come online later in 2010.

Some people have taken the OpenSim platform and used it to create their own commercial Virtual World, such as OpenLife, Meta7, and Inworldz, etc, and are able to compete strongly on price for virtual land with Second Life. Others have taken to designing and creating regions for corporate customers within an existing Virtual World, or use OpenSim to create a ring-fenced solution.

Virtual World Contracts
In addition to the above there also exists even more lucrative opportunities. Various institutions, larger corporations, local government and national government departments and the military have started issuing RFQs and RFPs (Requests for Quotations/Proposals) for Virtual World solutions.

Here are some examples of such RFQs and RFPs, issued over the last 18 months:

NATO, HQ Supreme Allied Commander Transformation
RFP-ACT-SACT-010-09, Aug 06, 2009
Allied Command Transformation is investigating technologies that could be used to augment or replace existing technologies for education and training of NATO staff. One of the investigative streams is in virtual worlds. This statement of work seeks contractor support for building and maintaining a virtual world to carry out this investigation.

US Department of the Air Force
Office: Air Education and Training Command
FA3002-08-R-004, Sep 03, 2008
The AETC Contracting Squadron at Randolph AFB intends to award a contract for the purchase of 3D on-line environment software (including all necessary plug-ins to field Mybase) and user training as described in the Statement of Need (SON).

Department of Agriculture
Office: Office of Procurement and Property Management
AG-3142-S-10-0012, Nov 25, 2009
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Office of the Chief Information Officer (USDA OCIO) plans to issue a solicitation to procure virtual world (VW) software technology. While there are Government organizations currently utilizing virtual worlds (VW) technology, significant challenges remain related to cross-agency accessibility, security, scalability, and interoperability.

For virtual worlds to be a viable option for widespread government use, the Government is seeking offerors who can demonstrate that the virtual worlds solution(s) can satisfactorily resolve these and other cross-agency issues.

Alliance Library System
Request for Qualifications, May 6, 2009
Project Coordinator for HIV/Aids Project (Karuna)

The Alliance Library System is requesting RFQs from qualified firms or individuals with Masters of Library Science Degrees, experience with medical/consumer health information, an up-to-date awareness of consumer health resources, and experience in the virtual world of Second Life managing events and creating displays to coordinate the HIV/AIDS Grant Project (Karuna).

Many more opportunities exist, from the use of Virtual Worlds for simulators, for training and educational puposes, for virtual meeting venues for companies wishing to reduce their travel budget and their carbon footprint, and various other uses.

How do you find these opportunities? Well, Google is your friend. I use the Advanced Search option, and set the fields as follows:

All these words: Virtual
One or More of these Words: RFQ OR RFP OR quotation OR proposal
Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more: Date - set to past week or past month, and check weekly/monthly as required

Good luck

Rock

Blue Mars Roadmap: First Stop

2010-02-19T10:19:00.007+01:00

Just barely ten days after announcing their roadmap for the future of Blue Mars, Avatar Reality have come good with several of their promised improvements and new features for the SDK, Website and Client. Here is a run-down on the latest release:

DEVELOPER UPDATES

Websites:

Updated Developer MyPage ( https://dev.bluemars.com/MyPage/ ) features (COMING MARCH 1, 2010)

The entire site has been optimized to open and run significantly faster.
Properties > City > Leased Cities > [Add Block] command: Instead of manually entering Block Name, uses the Current attribute in level_editor.xml as Block name to be added to database.
Properties > City > Blocks > [Re-Upload .BLD file] command added: Allows re-uploading of .BLD file for selected Block, as long as it is NOT leased out or being used by yourself.
"Allow Sublease" checkbox added to the following tabs:

City > Properties > Leased Cities: [Add Block] dialogue
City > Properties > Blocks: [Edit Properties] dialogue
When the box is checked, the selected Block becomes subleaseable--meaning the Block owner can lease out Shops and Residences on this Block to other developers/users. If the box is not checked, the Block is not subleaseable, meaning the Block Owner can only build Shops and Residences on this Block for their own use (note: There is no "Use By Myself" command for leased Residences yet--that will be coming soon). This sublease permission can be set when adding Blocks to your City ("Add Block"), or it can be changed after you've created a Block ("Edit Properties") ONLY if there are no existing 3rd party tenants in your Block. If you have tenants (other than yourself) in your Block, you would need to run the "Evict Tenant" command first before changing the "Allow Sublease" status.

If you don't have any leased Blocks, the Properties > Block tab will not be active.
Change in itemdata.zip file size check: When uploading an itemdata.zip file, the current file size limit is 512KB. EXCEPTION: When uploading Shop or Residence interior files (Category: Interior), the itemdata.zip size limit is 2MB.
Home > Account Info now shows "Company Code" under "Name". If you bought a City, it will show your company code (the code you chose when you signed up for a city to uniquely identify yourself or company - up to 6 capital letters).
Home > Account Info > [Edit Account Info]: "Edit Company Logo" feature added. You can now upload thumbnail images of your company logo (NOTE: Change will be reflected immediately if you upload an image file with a different filename, but if you re-upload an image file with the same filename, it may take a few minutes before the change is reflected.)
Administer > Company Members > [Add New Member]: Address, Phone, OS, Graphic Card, and CG Tool fields have been deleted from the [Add New Member] dialogue.
Administer > Company Members > [Add New Member]: Displays an error message if you try to register an email address that is already registered as a Blue Mars Developer.
Administer > Billing History: Displays various financial activity information.
[Vendor] menu no longer appears in the [Upload Content] window except for City Developers who have multiple vendor codes.

SDK Editors

Body Editor NEW!

Import custom shapes.
Import custom skins.
Test custom shapes, skin, clothing, and animations.
No upload functionality (coming soon).

Shop Editor

Clone instances of decorations.
Control for camera speed.
Enable saving of work in progress.

BLUE MARS CLIENT

Websites:

Updated User MyPage ( https://member.bluemars.com/MyPage/ ) features:
MESSAGE tab is now enabled: Exchange messages between your Blue Mars friends.
FRIENDS tab update

"SEARCH MEMBERS" button: Search for people on Blue Mars by their Avatar Names or User ID, and send them Friend requests (which will show up on their User MyPage).
"REMOVE" command in the Friends List will remove the selected User from your Friends List.
"Waiting List" shows pending Friend requests that you have sent to other Users.
"Request List" shows pending Friend requests you have received from other Users.

New Cities and City Updates:

Shade City by eFrontier now has a Shop! Purchasable T-shirts will be available on the second floor of Shade City.
Welcome Area 2010 has been added. (The old welcome area has been retired).
AR_Shelter has been added. This is a minimalist level to be used as a meeting area in case there are problems with the new welcome area.
VSE_TERC has been added.

New Places Browser

New Features and Feature Updates:

Avatar names are now displayed above the avatar instead of the avatar ID.

If you change your Avatar Name display option in the User MyPage, it will now be reflected in the overhead avatar name display as well as the chat box.

New and updated City data can now be downloaded directly from the Places Browser--no need to install City patches.
User interface update

New look for the Place Browser!
Refresh button in the Places Browser allows you to enter your downloaded City (except New Venice) without having to close and reopen Blue Mars.
The Camera icon has now menu tray. The clothes, face, animation and settings icons are displayed by clicking on the arrow icon.

The ? icon now opens the Blue Mars tutorial Website.
Right-clicking avatar profile in the Client shows the Avatar Name as well as User ID.

User Name above Head, Right-Click to get User ID

Settings update

New Click Sound option in the Settings menu will let you turn the pointer sound on or off (default: Off).

Walking Sound On/Off

New Display Name option will let you hide the overhead Avatar Name display of the avatars around you (to hide your avatar's overhead name from others, use the Edit Avatar window in your User MyPage).

Avatar Names On/Off

Bug Fixes:

Bowling matchmaking fixed
Golf matchmaking fixed
Non-ASCII avatar names should now be displayed correctly regardless of the locale setting.

What would you like to see in the next release?

Rock

Interactive Whiteboards and Virtual Worlds

2010-02-15T20:35:00.002+01:00

Touch-screens
Touch-screen PCs have been around for over 30 years now! I used a Hewlett Packard 150 touch-screen PC, based on the 8088, back in the mid 1980s. However, things have moved on rapidly since then, and with the advent of Microsoft's multitouch Surface, Apple's iPad, and various Interactive Whiteboards, it would not be long before the direct manipulation of 3D objects in 3D Virtual Worlds was a possibility.

Microsoft Surface

Edusim
Moves to combine Interactive Whiteboards with the manipulation of 3D objects in 3D Virtual Worlds were actually started back in 2007. It was then that the Edusim project was started at the Greenbush Education Service Center in Southeast Kansas, as an effort to bring an engaging 3D experience to the classroom interactive whiteboard.

Based on a slimmed-down version of Open Cobalt Edusim is a 3D multi-user virtual world platform and authoring toolkit, and coupled with the latest developments in interactive whiteboards the project aims to:

engage student through "immersive touch" by leveraging 3D virtual environments on the interactive surface or classroom interactive whiteboard.

The results are amazing. Take a look at this video showing Edusim in action.

Edusim running on a Smartboard

Interactive Whiteboards
Edusim has been successfully tested on the following Interactive Whiteboards:

Smartboard

Activeboard

Interwrite


Polyvision

Mimio


eBeam

Kids have never had it so good!

Rock

Diary: 15th February 2010

2010-02-15T12:18:00.002+01:00

Arggghhh!.

After working all weekend getting my blog template exactly how I wanted it, and really liking the result once I applied it, I then found that virtually every post and article I have written would have to be reformatted for the new template.

This is because all the graphics do not resize themselves to the change in width of the new template, so text now flows around them, and headings, image captions, bulleted lists etc, are now all out of alignment.

The lesson to be learnt from this, is that you can change the 'look' of a template with new colours, new header and background images etc., but if you want to change the dimensions, particularly the width of a template, then be prepared for a lot of re-editing.

I have now reverted to the original template, and I will now wait until the Easter break, when I have more time for editing, before having a go at my new template again.

So, back to normal service. Look out for an imminent exciting new article on Interactive Whiteboards and Virtual Worlds!

Rock

Diary: 13th February 2010

2010-02-13T13:58:00.009+01:00

Blog Maintenance
I have been spending the last couple of days creating a custom template for Chapter & Metaverse. The free templates you get with Blogger are not very awe-inspiring, and other 3rd party templates did not do what I wanted either.

I always found that Blogger templates were quite narrow, and with the standard configuration being 2 or 3 column layouts, with things such as My Profile, Links, Archives etc in the side columns, leaving the main column even narrower still for blog posts, and left looking something like a newspaper column.

There are single column templates available, and I tried all these, but the problem then occurs of where to put My Profile, Links, Archives etc. If you place them at the end then it can be a long scroll to get to these frequently used gadgets. I thought the answer would be simple, just have a header with a menu bar or tabs underneath, and place the My Profile, Links, Archives etc. behind menu buttons or tabbed pages. Alas, Blogger does not permit this directly, so some clever workarounds are necessary.

Another problem with Blogger is that if you use a custom header image, with the name of your blog in that image Blogger still insists on overlaying the image with the name of the blog. It will not allow you to have a blank field in the Blog Title when in Header Edit mode. Again, a neat workaround enables the Blog Title to be hidden.

So I invested in some commercial software to design my own Blogger template, Artisteer, and I am just getting to the stage where the termplate is looking, and behaving, as I want it. Just a few more tweaks...

I hope to have the new suit of clothes for Chapter & Metaverse ready by tomorrow, Sunday 14th February, so please bear with me.

New Blue Mars SDK, 2010-2-12
Avatar Reality announced another updated SDK yesterday. Full details in the Forum post.

Happy Valentines to all,

Rock

Role Play Worlds

2010-02-10T10:37:00.008+01:00

I like to see myself as a hitch hiker travelling in the free Metaverse looking for grids to visit and things to see. Well, I spoke to Rock and we both agreed that I should set off and take a look at some role play worlds since that is the back ground I come from. So I hitched a ride on a passing metabeam and materialized in the world of Gor.

I arrived at the Gor Grid only to find it is now called Role Play Worlds. I landed in the reception region that was apparently still under construction and, with no links available, I resorted to using the map to try to find some life. I teleported to another sim and found it also under construction and at this point I was beginning to feel I might be wasting my time but I am glad I decided to barge in on two avatars way off in the distance because this was going to turn out to be better than my first impressions were having me believe. One of the two ladies I accosted turned out to be a builder busily doing her work, I had come across Breezy Kanto who welcomed me and gave me an LM to the Gor reception building on the same sim. Seems I had chosen the right place quite accidentally since I could have gone to any of the 100+ regions on the grid which, surprisingly, did show more life than you might expect from a large OpenSim grid.

I found myself in a gothic chamber and I followed the circular walls to a door and entered another chamber. This one had Gorean information notices informing me of the castes I could chose from to begin my role play. There was a free combat meter available too which I was obliged to wear if I intended to continue. The RPX meter controls what happens to you in world, your health and such and in the next chamber I came to I found the walls lined with assorted weaponry that could be taken free and used to interact with the meter. In other words, these weapons could be used to kill or capture me!

Finally, I left the building and found myself in a market offering both freebies and paid items. There was plenty on offer too but I couldn't buy anything of course. I no local currency. I saw some notices though that said you can pay for your goods in Second Life and have them delivered in RPW. When finally, I got to meet the owner I would learn that RPW is laid out as a number of role play worlds as the name states and the world of Gor is the main one. There is a main reception area and another for each world. You will get all the help you need at the receptions as I did and on leaving the reception you are treated to a themed market where you can prepare and clothe your avatar with plenty of freebies.

Now, I confess, I had already been to the Gor grid once before some while back and had skinned up and dressed in freebies so I was respectable which is just as well because the one thing I hate is landing as a Ruthed avatar. I can't find the freebies quick enough. Yeah, I am vain.

Well, I was wandering about pretty aimlessly until I came full circle back to the reception building to find Breezy and the other woman, Tessa Mureaux. I decided to question Breezy about the grid and she called the leader and had him TP in to talk to me. This was Aramil Ewing. one time leader and founder of the Askari Mercenaries in SL Gor. He told me that this all started out as a hobby when he and friends decided to setup their own Opensim grid. They chose to run a role play based on Gor because that is what they all enjoyed in Second Life but in Opensim they felt they could manage it better and more by the book so to speak which loosely means they make rules and laws based on common events found in the Gorean novels - all 27 of them. Aramil explained, "All of us, well the 90% of the users here has been on SL. I was a role play gamer even before I joined SL, when D&D was done in pen and paper, as well a deoria. Our aim is to develop a planned world, thinking of a true MMORPG."

Aramil called me over to a large map of Gor which is taken from the web and most Goreans accept as a true representation of their world. The map was overlaid by a numbered grid and Aramil said, "We choose that one because the names of the cities are on it and kind of more by books. Still there are some SL add-ons like Midgard, but was a good one to start with. Each rectangle you see there is a sim location so we use it as guide to know where and how to terraform and build the sim located in a defined spot.

I replied, asking, "That is a lot of sims. Do you really believe you can create them all?"

"Yes," he answered, "we already have several ones. Of course is something that will not be filled in the short term."

I fired back, "It will take a lot of people to populate such a vast area. Do you think you can get that many people to come here?"

"We have a group there (in SL)," he said, "The Gor Grid, and recently Role Play Worlds, mostly to keep informed the interested users about the progress but the same community spread the word and invite users to RPW."

So, my understanding from the conversation was that there is considerable inter-grid travel between RPW and SL and, while I noticed there were about 14 people actually on the grid at the time of my visit, it was clear that the numbers fluctuate considerably at the moment but there are times the numbers rise sharply so this is due in no small part, I think, to their maintaining strong links and contacts in SL. It also accrued to me that this may well be the pattern for RPG and other gaming ideas, people will maintain strong links with SL while they build their grids. In deed, I can imagine a gradual exodus of Second lifers finding their way to the free Metaverse via role playing connections. Some may chose to grid-hop and play in both worlds while the numbers who stay permanently will depend on how Opensim develops and the advantages to be gained. Certainly, there seemed no lack of enthusiasm on the part of Aramil to create a world that would give the Gorean community, at least, what they might be looking for and not finding in Second Life.

Aramil offered me a tour and with three others in tow we set off and on a walkabout crossing sim borders, climbing hills and visiting camps and outposts. Along the way I asked, "tell me. Are people role playing?"

He answered, "lot of them are building but always there is time for rp."

"Building has taken up much energy..." said Jet Racer, who had been tagging along with us, "but there has certainly been roleplay."

At this point I asked about the slaves, whom Goreans call Kajira, "Do you get many Kajira coming over from SL?"

Aramil laughed and said, "Yes, the major population are Kajira and you can see this by the polls on the web site."

Next we came to a port with a dock and several ships moored up. "Ok, this is another thing in our grid," said Armail in his slightly broken English as he stepped onto the dock. "Some (of these) ships that tp you to exclusive points on mainland like one to the north, the other to the vosk region, the other to the south and from there you need to travel. What we plan is to block intersim teleports once the grid is more filled so in rp you actually need to travel and that encourage rp. People will travel by foot, (fly) tarns and (sail)ships, once vehicles work properly on opensim, etc."

"Will that confuse people first time they arrive?" I asked.

"When people arrive, they will land in a General Welcome Area that is on the build and they will find the info needed there and from there to each world welcome area so before they reach mainland (the rp continent) they will have all the info and tools."

"Try to board the ship." he told me, "and choose mainland in the menu. Each one of them take you to a far away area of the continent. The idea is in time have ships drived by users to transport them along the world."

He turned now and headed off up a path with the rest of us following and after a long trek uphill we arrived at Black Stone town and here Aramil informed me that a major aspect of their RP would involve taking and holding locations such as this one.

Aramil explained, "One feature of rpw are the fight to keep sims. This town is one of them so any group can take over the place and keep it while they are able to defend it. Imagine yourself as a free woman of this town and the admin and the guards are defeated by another group, so you will be now under a new admin, and it is up to you how to rp that scenario. This is the way to encourage more realistic role play."

We set off again and Aramil pointed, saying, "ok if we follow that path. You will cross all the northern lands to the west and will find a path through the forest to the south we going west to the crossroad but to walk the mainland will take a lot (of time) and one thing we are tying to keep is to make the terraform the most natural and realistic possible so we are going down a mountain and you will be actually going down, and you will experience that all grid wide."

We had arrived at Tovaldsland and I was informed this is another sim to keep if you fight for it. Armail then said we can go on to the city of Ar now and to get the picture of Ar in the mind I recalled reading the book, Tarnsman of Gor in which Ar is described as the leading city of Gor and famed for it's many cylindrical towers.

And sure enough I beheld the towering cylinders rising above the city. Breezy proudly explained the amount of work going into the city's construction.

"It covers 9 sims," she said, "It will be most glorious."

I could certainly tell heart and soul were going into this work as I took to the air and flew over the city. I landed on a platform and took a look at the designs on huge post prims. On the ground stood a large model of the city too and I looked around at the city and couldn't help being just a little awe struck.

I loved the city yet I found myself regretting I had not come to the Gor Grid sooner. I would have seen the old city of Ar and the pictures Breezy gave me reminded me of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. It had suspended walkways high up in the mist spanning between the towers and the colours were not so bright. It had the feel of Steam punk, slightly Victorian yet modern and I could imagine the great Tarn war birds flying over and landing on the tower perches.

I have posted more images of old Ar here.

Shortly after I arrived at the arena and was treated to a show of arms by Aramil, Jet and Tessa. This prompted me to ask about their combat meter, the RPX system. Aramil filled me in...

"ok, when we start, we was thinking on use some of the meters that users was used to, so Qapla offer himself to bring it to RPW and develop with us a system we has been working on paper since the beginning. But his schedule is kind of busy, and was delaying us, so we decide to give priority to it and develop it in our own (time). So BlueWall Slade, start to code what we had on plans and create a starting meter, and that is what RPX is atm."

He continued, "now Rpx is not going to be like the meters the users are used on SL, given the fact that we can manipulate the servers and merge it with the platform itself. Lot of things will be managed by the meter, not just combat."

I now asked if they supported the basic idea of a hypergrid with connecting worlds. "aye we do, that's the future of the virtual worlds" he replied, and went on, "We have plans for some Sims to be HG so people can come to rp from any grid they reside. You should see how we are building the continent, so you can have a better idea of the concept we are managing for Gor, and the future worlds. Several good things are on develop and will be release soon, and we know for sure, the community will love it."

Gor in Second Life is noted for it's inter-sim raids, stealing of slaves and trading. I though how fantastic it would be if there was raiding from one grid to another and I'm sure it will happen because I already know that there are start-up Gorean sims elsewhere across the hypergrid.

At this point I wondered if they might be developing some special features. I was thinking of RLV which is Retrained Life Viewer used with Open Collar LSL code in SL and the fact there are slaves here I thought about the restraining collar they might wear. so I asked, "Do you plan to promote a particular viewer with special features. I am thinking perhaps RLV and Open Collar?"

Aramil answered, "Yes Open Collar is on Role play worlds, Tessa can give you more details about it, as she has been with the developer of the collar testing it but so far i can remember, some RLV features work and others still don't. (But) we recommend the Hippo viewer cause is pretty light, don't have prims size restriction, etc."

Tessa Mureaux explained it all to me, "We're still modifying the scripts to get them all working and for now, we need the girls to put them on here, first in the non-script area, for attachment and adjusting.... then to a full script area to recompile the scripts and sync the database. From there, they can go on about their business as normal. As we do more upgrades of both sims and servers, the grid itself, and the collars... then it will be a whole lot simpler. It's matching the right code to the LSL grid for a better sync and communication. For now, the couple animations in the collars do not work but as most of the owners were primarily wanting the leashing option to work, and some RLV functions, so we went ahead and released this rough version."

I smiled and then decided to ask about Role Play Worlds and I put it to Aramil as almost a challenge, "I see you recently branched out to cover role play in general. Is this because Gor is not working out so well?"

Aramil had no doubts that their Gorean venture would succeed and said, "aye, in fact we start to plan and build the vampire and fantasy world. Mostly cause the environment help us to build it quick but our goal is to manage several themes and build them planned and organized."

"But then the question I have to ask is, with all the work involved running the grid, new releases of OpenSim and trying to manage many themes, will the Gorean part suffer?"

"oh not at all," he insisted. "Our baby is the Gor world."

See Role Play Worlds home page here

Sim Pricing:

Slave Sim (3750 prims) =30$ setup fee + 30$ monthly tier
Master Sim (15000 prims) = 30$ setup fee + 100$ monthly tier
Slave Package (2 slave sims) = 30 $ setup fee + 50$ monthly tier
Peasant Package (4 slave sims) = 60$ setup + 90$ monthly tier
Homestone Package (1 Master sim + 8 slave sims) = 100$ setup + 300$ monthly tier
Merchant Package (2 Master sim + 7 slave sims) = 100$ setup + 350$ monthly tier

As I took my leave I couldn't help feeling a fondness already for these intrepid builders of Gor. I wasn't sure about the other role play worlds they had in mind to create. I figured it was best left to another time when they had got a new theme going but none the less I was convinced they would make the best of Gor. In Second Life Gor is big but fragmented with many Sim owners imposing their own interpretation of the books which is a constant source of dissent and drama. Here in RPW there is but one rule book and one meter and, moreover, the world is laid out according the map of Gor. There is no duplication of Sims either as found in SL. You can rent one of the cities here or, if you can't afford to, then there is nothing to stop you getting together with friends and forming a clan of Panthers, Outlaws or Mercenaries and using your RP and combat skills to capture and hold a Sim for free. That, in itself is a unique concept.

I really believed in what they are doing and given that Linden Labs have in the past snuffed out this kind of creativity with their erratic pricing policy it was good to see people building like this, and knowing they have the chance to do it better and bigger than can be done in SL.

I was invited back to role play and you know what? I am tempted. I think Aramil and his team are here on the free Metaverse to stay.

Gaga Gracious

Blue Mars - New Features on the Horizon

2010-02-08T23:11:00.003+01:00

Today the Avatar Reality Community Director, Glenn Sanders announced the current roadmap for Blue Mars. He said:

Many of our community members have requested new features and improvements to Blue Mars. We listen closely to your concrete suggestions. Then we incorporate as many of your ideas as possible and feasible in our roadmap strategy. In addition to suggestions from the community, we are planning a multitude of other enhancements to Blue Mars. Here's a sneak preview of a few of the items we are planning.

UI Improvements:

Expanded Preferences for chat,
Enhanced camera movement and controls
Improved avatar movement
Avatar name will be displayed above the avatar head.
Right-click shows Avatar Name and UserID.
Move the camera control icon out to the menu tray

Communications:

Clickable hyperlinks in the Chat box
Select and copiable text in the Chat box
IM - instant messaging

Avatar Customization:

New, improved avatar meshes
Avatar Masks (new face shape and face skin for your avatar)
Avatar Physiques (new body and face shape and skin for your avatar)
Cloth editor: edit and upload Hair as an item for sale.
Avatar tongue model/setup
Mask and Physique editor
Avatar attachments and animation rigs
Animation workflow documentation
More sliders for the Face Customization UI

Development Tools:

Avatar Editor:

Import custom avatar shapes and skins
Test the imported mesh with standard animations and clothing
Create displacement morphs (compared to the original mesh shape)Create normals for your custom mesh
Export your mesh and skin as an item for upload and for sale.

Allow JPG to be used for a texture to create items (the editors automatically convert it for you)

Places Browser, Downloads:

Crash management for the Places Browser
Download Manager for the Places Browser
Download Manager with background download, notification, and City version checker
Improved download and streaming of some items.

Developer MyPage:

Expanded Real Estate Page
Expanded dev MyPage with:

Billing history
Remember login email
Commands to manage tenants

Expanded Real Estate page:

Check files

Improved dev SDK installer with AR and NEWCO becoming optional installs
Upload Block, shop, and items for sale.

Expanded User Mypage

user MyPage with:

BLU balance display
Enhanced Friends List
Messaging

Content, Residences:

New City updates with a shops where you can purchase items.
Residences, and residence management

Things are looking very good indeed.

Rock

Diary: 8th February 2010

2010-02-08T11:36:00.005+01:00

Second Life to Close their Forums Today
Linden Labs have announced that their forums are due to be discontinued after the 8th February, despite howls of protest from the forum regulars.

The announcement was as follows:

On Tuesday, February 9th we're transitioning our forums, from the vBulletin software we've been running for years to the integrated Clearspace software which can currently be found at http://blogs.secondlife.com. This transition will mean that new forum channels will be opened on Clearspace and the vBulletin forums will be closed and archived. We understand that the forum community might feel some angst during this transition, but hope that you will understand the necessity and advantages of such a move

The most active part of the forums, Resident Answers, has been replaced by a section of the Linden Blog, Second Life Answers. However, this is no substitute for Resident Answers as the Linden Blog makes it clear:

Second Life Answers is a basic question and answer style area. If your topic is really a discussion or conversation please feel free to go to the Second Life Forums and start a thread so the community can join in!

So, no discussions or conversation allowed in the replacement. Hmmm, and this after Linden Labs appointed their new Communications Manager, Wallace Linden, on the 14th January (although Wallace admitted my job is actually in the marketing department, not the community department). Of course, pointing people to Resident Answers will need to be amended, as after today there will be no Second Life Forums. Blue Linden made it even clearer:

We realise that some people just want the old forum software back. Unfortunately, that's not an option. We're not looking to replicate the old forum experience; we're looking to make something better, something that suits both existing community members and new ones, and we hope you'll join us in this effort by reporting bugs and making feature suggestions.

So, where will the Resident Answers crowd move to? A recent poll gave these results:

The majority (apart from those who are having pie) appear to be headed to the SLU forum, run by Cristiano, with other sizeable chunks headed for slapt.me and secondcitizen. Although I think they will all eventually migrate to SLU, as slapt.me currently has only 26 topics in their Resident Answers section, and seems to be very lightly used, while secondcitizen has a horrible orange color scheme, which no-one in their right mind (and yes, I know, we are talking about the Resident Answers crowd here) could possibly put up with for more than a day or two.

Following the removal of all adult content to the Adult Continent, Zindra, and now the closure of the Forums, I think we can all see which direction Second Life is being steered in, and unfortunately the destination does not appear to include a large proportion of the current user base.

Rock

Digital DNA

2010-02-07T11:57:00.012+01:00

Beautiful rainbow over the falls

One of the new cities added to the Blue Mars portfolio last week was Digital DNA, created by Angela Talamasca. This is the first city in Blue Mars to use the Voxel-created cave system in the terrain, and the first to use rainbows.

Intrigued by both its beauty and its unusual name I managed to catch up with Angela using Avatars United, to find out more about her first offering.

Interview with Angela Talamasca

Q. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself, were you in other virtual worlds before Blue Mars?

I have worked in the technology industry for three decades and have been following the development of virtual worlds for years [Angela's background is in Electrical/Electronic engineering, chip design, and crime scene analysis!]. My passion is artifical intelligence. Some years ago, I wrote a conversational AI that was debuted in dot net, but I was unhappy with the outcome, because it wasn't really intelligent. So, I ended up returning to school to study psychology and how we learn. AI is still definitely my primary focus but I am having fun playing catch up where graphics are concerned.

Beach scene made more realistic by the use of natural birds

Q. Do you have any Crysis Sandbox experience, or did you learn the Blue Mars editors from scratch?

I have no experience with cryengine. In fact, the first time I had actually heard of Cryengine was from the Blue Mars announcement, as I am not an FPS gamer. The short answer? Yes, I am definitely learning the Blue Mars editors from scratch.

Q. Was it all trial and error, or did you get any help from any of the other devs in Blue Mars?

This build was a mix of trial and error, lots of Google searches, watching "how to" Youtube videos, and of course, lots of help from the other Blue Mars developers.

You never know what lies around the next bend

Q. What do you think about the current level of tools and documentation for the Blue Mars editors?

I have mixed feelings about the tools. However it is important to recall, my background is on the hardware / coding side, as opposed to graphics. That being said, the tools are not intuitive for beginners and the lack of documentation is horrendous. The latter would be, by far, my biggest gripe. In that I end up spending a huge amount of time that could be better used for the build.

Q. Where did you get your idea from for Digital DNA? And how did you arrive at the name?

I would love to give you a catchy reason but in honesty, I chose it due to the real life crime scene recreations I was doing in SL, and it sort of stuck. [And the fireflies?] I created the fireflies because I kept getting lost. [What? In your own city?] Sad to say, yes. The fireflies were like a sort of Hansel and Gretel crumb idea so I wouldn't get lost so often. But don't pass on that tip! [Yeah, right :)]

There must be more to this toadstool than meets the eye...

Q. How long did the work take you from starting out with Digital DNA to get it ready for upload?

About a month. I downloaded the tools on the 18th of December and submitted the build on the 18th of January.

Q. Have you been surprised by all the positive feedback you have received?

In a way, yes. Simply because there's not really much to do. Nothing interactive, etcetera. And, in a way, no. While it is far from perfect at this point, I am very pleased with the way it is shaping up.

Q. What are the three most important things you would like to see introduced into the Blue Mars client?

Only three? [chuckle].

Okay, I would say avatar modification would be at the top of the list. Or at the very least, more choices. The very first thing people want to do when they enter a virtual world is to change their appearance.

The scale of this development is breathtaking

Second in line would be search. I have friends who are using Blue Mars but unless I am here at the same time they are, there is no way to friend them, or to find them, much less keep in contact with them via this platform.

Which brings up the third thing. Communication. Open, friend, and group chats that extend beyond a single city. As well as logging and instant messaging. Voice would be great too, at some point.

Q. And the three most important things missing from the SDK?

Definitely a TOD trigger for the flowgraph editor, which comes standard with the Crysis cryengine.

There are also a number of items they provide in the basic sandbox that are missing textures. So, I would say they should either get rid of them, or provide the textures.

And finally, but certainly not least, is documentation. In fact, the lack documentation is by far the biggest frustration I have with respect to learning these tools. And while the Crymod portal has a variety of documents, tips, and even tutorial videos, those do not always apply to the Blue Mars implementation of that product.

Amazingly realistic cave system created with Voxels

Q. What are your future plans for Digital DNA?

I am really not sure yet, though it will have something to do with solving puzzles. Currently you really need to be able to fly to take in all of Digital DNA, but I am not just going to give that ability away, it will have to be earned! [can't wait!]

Thanks very much Angela

You're welcome : )

VAT Raises Its Ugly Head Again

2010-02-06T15:33:00.024+01:00

For those of you who have managed to read back to my very first blog post back in April 2008, you will know that the beginning of the end for me (commercially) in SL was when Linden Labs imposed VAT on its European customers, and although this was not the fault of Linden Labs, in the first instance, they did not handle the VAT issue, or their announcements, very well at all.

Background
It all started back in 2002 when the EU issued Council Directive 2002/38/EC, whose summary states:

The objective of this Directive is to create a level playing field for European Union (EU) businesses with regard to the indirect taxation of electronic commerce.

This Directive was later amended by Council Directive 2006/138/EC of the 19th December 2006.

Basically a complaint had made by a European ISP that competing companies from the US, such as AOL, were not charging VAT to European customers for their electronically-supplied services, while European-based companies were having to charge VAT, and they wanted a level-playing field. The response from the EU was, via the above Directives, to require all companies based outside of the EU to gather VAT from their European-based customers, and remit the collected VAT back to Europe.

Linden Labs and the VAT Fiasco
The main problem with Linden Labs was not so much the Council Directive, which they had no control over, but rather their handling of it.

On the 27th Septemember 2007 Linden Labs informed their European customers by email that VAT would assessed from that date onwards, and would apply to:

Premium account registration
Purchases from the Land Store
Land use fees (tier)
Private Region fees
Land auctions
LindeX transaction fees

However, in an amazing gaff, a Linden admitted in an interview that up to the point of the VAT announcement by Linden Labs, the Labs had been absorbing the VAT costs, and not passing them on to their European customers, in order to maintain a commercial level-playing field for residents of Second Life. More suspicions were raised when it was revealed that Anshe Chung had started charging in L$ and had cancelled all Paypal subscriptions 6 weeks earlier (did Anshe anticipate this VAT thing, or had she been tipped by the Labs earlier than anyone else that this was coming?).

So basically Linden Labs were aware of these EU regulations, had decided to absorb the VAT cost for their European customers to maintain a level-playing field for all residents engaged in commerce within SL, then one morning decided not to absorb them anymore. Of course, all the European residents who had been purchasing regions prior to this email announcement felt justly aggrieved, and many expressed sentiments in the SL forums that they would not have made these purchases had they known that Linden Labs had been absorbing VAT and might, at any time, rescind that policy and pass the costs onto their European customers.

Linden Labs should have informed their European customers as soon as Linden Labs was aware that VAT charges needed to be applied, and VAT payments from Linden Labs back to Europe needed to be paid, and should have made clear to residents THEN what their policy was going to be.

Aftermath and Sad Stories
Many Europeans pulled out of the Second Life land market. It was just too much to pay 19% more than a competing US-based land baron and compete on rental prices to prospective tenants.

Others formed partnerships and agreements with US-based friends, and transferred their land holdings to them, as they did not need to levy the VAT. This was good news for Linden Labs, as they received $100 for all transfers of land ownership, and there was less VAT accounting to be done.

However, horror stories began to emerge, and a particular one caught my eye today in the SLU forum.

Basically, Ciprian_Newall claims that he lost US$20,000 by transferring regions to a chap called Darwin Tomsen, (for the purpose of mitigating the VAT exposure) only for Darwin to sell 'Ciprian's' regions and not pay over any of the money! (However, see the Comments for a counter-statement).

The thread makes for quite interesting reading.

So what now for Blue Mars and other US Virtual Worlds?
The question now is what will be the policy of Avatar Reality (Blue Mars) and other Virtual Worlds run by companies outside of the EU regarding VAT charges on their European customers? Should they absorb it as LL did initially, or charge it from the outset and risk losing European customers who just cannot compete commercially within their virtual economies?

Currently, the Blue Mars Terms of Service state, in Section 7.1, Fees:

You agree to pay all fees or charges incurred by your Account, including applicable taxes, in accordance with these Terms of Service and the billing terms that are in effect at the time that the fee or charge becomes payable.

'applicable taxes' = VAT?

I hope Avatar Reality handles this issue in a more open and pragmatic way than Linden Labs, and see if they are able to absorb the VAT charges, when setting the post-pioneer prices, and enable all Blue Mars residents to compete equally within the virtual economy.

Rock

Free Metaverse vs Patented Monopoly

2010-02-04T11:43:00.006+01:00

I have been reading a recent article from Deva Canto, an Opensim dev, on her blog in which she makes a plea to developers who build on top of the Opensim platform not to patent their code or it will hinder the continued development of Opensim. She gives a warning too to those who take the open source code which a dedicated core of developers have been working on for a long time and use it for their own business ends and, while contributing nothing back, actually threaten the prospect of a free Metaverse.

She goes on to say,

one of two things will happen: either (1) what you patent is so important that it will be critically missing from the common infrastructure because of your patent, therefore the infrastructure will never happen; or (2) what you patent can be done in a different way, in which case that other way will make it to the common infrastructure, and your patent-based business will miss the point.

We are seeing a growing number of grids based on Opensim who's developers take full advantage of the freely available source code. The core developers of Opensim have from the beginning had the goal of building the infrastructure of a free Metaverse for the benefit of private, educational and business interests alike. Everyone owns it. It is the virtual air we breath and just like polluters, there are people that would strangle the baby at birth for the sake of personal gain.

The dream is very clear; a Metaverse of immersive interconnected virtual worlds. Not walled-up monopolies like Second Life or the twenty or so other contenders for the virtual market. The aim is to have lots of small and large grids sharing a common resource on which to build a rich and diverse virtual super grid. Users will be able to grid-hop as easy as teleporting from one sim to another. The hope is for Common standards and methods to arise for names registering, search, money and copyright protection. The users will be able to hold their own property and wear it and use it where ever they go. All this is threatened by those who are effectively stealing and damaging what belongs to everyone.

Deva warns,

you won't gain any friends among some of us core developers (me, at least). You're putting the whole effort in jeopardy. I can guarantee you that if something you patent is critical, I won't stop until I find another way of doing it that doesn't step over your patent.

Not withstanding all this however, Opensim enjoys substantial, and growing support, and there are many new grids emerging built by people that heard the message given long ago by Linden Labs; A virtual world built by the residents and for the residents. OpenSim is not a walled garden. It is open and free and it will cost the individual a lot less to build and express their creativity. Those wannabe Grid Barons will only ever make it more restrictive and expensive for everyone and that's the author's opinion.

Gaga Gracious

Latest Blue Mars Updates

2010-02-03T18:54:00.003+01:00

Software Development Kit
The Blue Mars SDK has been updated,

Developer Blue Mars Client

Places Browser features have been brought up to date to synchronize with the current release of the non-developer Blue Mars client.
Several changes and additions to the UI, avatar name display, and preferences are in place. These changes may be integrated into the non-developer Blue Mars client in a future update.
Stability fixes.

All Editors

Bottom toolbar layout has been fixed for 32bit version of Windows 7. Other versions of Windows (including the 64bit version of Windows 7) were unaffected by this bug so you would not notice any changes.
"Check Item/Cloth/City/etc in Blue Mars" menu item will now launch Blue Mars in a private mode. You will not be able to see other people logged into Blue Mars, nor will others be able to see you.
ItemData.zip now use an improved compression method for reduced file size, to deal with the new 512KB upload size limit.
Fixed a lighting bug which caused indoor light (Alt + 4) to survive the "File -> New" command
Various bug and stability fixes

Furniture Editor

Removed the geom path string from ARChair entity, in order to allow uploading of furniture items

Cloth Editor

Now allows you to fill in the "input.dae" field on loading of existing cloth, even if the
input.dae file does not exist. This makes it easier to load, test and modify existing
cloth items. Also, set the "Step-by-step" flag to true, for the same purpose - less
clicks to attach and test existing cloth.
Cloth Editor can now correctly recognize pre-made non-cloth items, such as shoes.

City Editor

When creating a new city, you now have the option of creating a city from a template, as opposed to creating one completely from scratch. Please see the Wiki for details about this feature.
Lua scripts now run inside a sandbox environment for security. This may have an effect on your current scripts. The complete description of the new restrictions in place can be found in the Wiki. Please contact us if you were relying on any of the removed functionality, so that we can come up with a way to make the feature available to you in a safe manner.

City Developer Sample Data

The number of errors and warning messages in the sample data has been reduced. Our plan is to bring the startup errors/warnings to zero, and keep it that way in the future.

The levels included in the Sample Data are:

Beach City
Small Islands
Taki (waterfall island)
Golf Course 1
Golf
Preview (the old welcome area)
Welcome Area (the new welcome area)
Face Customisation
Viewer (not sure about this, looks more like an item editor)

Blue Mars Client Update (0.0.6999)
A new update has been released for the Blue Mars Client, giving access to two new cities:

Digital DNA

Dragon City

and the following bug fixes:

'NoTexture' in the edge of the Welcome Area is fixed.
City installer recovers better from crashes and other unexpected terminations.
Blank screen when trying to log back in after a crash has been fixed.
Build information in the window title bar now says "client build" instead of "player build"
Various stability fixes, particularly with the Flash UI overlay

More updates to the SDK and the Client software are forthcoming, so keep your eyes peeled for further announcements.

Rock

Diary: 1st February 2010

2010-02-01T10:57:00.014+01:00

Blue Mars Introduces the Script Center
On the 29th January Blue Mars introduced the Script Center.

The Center includes (so far):

Introductory Concepts: such as basic script example, Flash Huds, and Action Maps
Complete Scripts: A Free camera example is provided
Code Snippets: Lots of useful snippets here to solve common problems

Developers and staff can now start adding their script solutions and build this into a really great resource.

Just Ignore and Let This one Die
Last week the the most incredible thread in the history of forum threads passed an unbelievable milestone. The eponymous and self-defeating thread, entitled 'Just Ignore and Let This one Die', passed the 100,000 posts mark in the Second Life Resident Answers forum. This thread covered every known aspect of Second Life, Real Life, Nostalgic Life, and every other type of Life imaginable.

The honour of the 100,000th post went to Gabriele Graves, with the inspiring "Lol, almost!" contribution. Our hearts should really go out to Maureen Boccaccio who thought she had it, and posted a nice graphic proclaiming the same, but was 1 early at the 99,999th position.

This thread has been viewed 911,239 times up to today, so there is another milestone coming with the 1,000,000th view. There should be a prize for that!

Correction
It has been pointed out by Maureen Boccaccio in the Comments to this Diary entry, that due to some posts in the thread being deleted the person that is currently at the 100,000th position was NOT the first to get there. That honour goes to Brann Georgia, and here is a screenshot capturing the event.

Avatars Disunited
Following the news earlier last week that Linden Labs had acquired the Facebook for Avatars, Avatars United, we were saddened to learn that within 24 hours of the announcement of the acquisition the new service began to break, with lost accounts, and people receiving emails intended for someone else. Didn't take The Lab long to break it, did it? :)

Sun withdraws Support from Project Wonderland
On January 27, 2010, Oracle announced that it had finalized its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Two days later the first casualty of this acquisition was revealed with news emerging that development resources are no longer being applied to Project Wonderland. A core group of the Wonderland team have vowed to keep the project going, but I am getting my black suit pressed, just in case.

Rock

Radegast and the A.L.I.C.E. bot

2010-01-31T01:21:00.010+01:00

After meeting Rock in Blue Mars he invited me to write something for his blog so I chose something that has been capturing my interest of late. Radegast.

Radegast is a light weight text client that can connect to Second Life and Opensim grids. I have tried out a number of these clients but this one grabbed my attention because it is rock solid stable, packed with features quite apart from chat handling, and something extra which has proved to be a very useful tool. It has a plugin for the A.L.I.C.E. bot.

I was able to turn an avatar into an AI bot very easily which I thought might be useful on my Second Life sim as a greeter. More especially I wanted to program my bot to help and inform new arrivals. To this end I have to find the AIML files in the Radegast directory on my hard drive and edit them with what I want my bot to say. AIML script is actually a derivative of XML and is not hard to learn. Basically, I need to edit the definitions in the file's paterns (what the user might say) and templates (how the bot might respond). For example:

{category}
{pattern}TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF{/pattern}
{template}{/template}
{/category}

I have read elsewhere that people have actually used the bot for other purposes and scripted LSL attachments to control the avatar which will be my next task. I would say the bot could do a lot more and certainly I would use it in my Opensim grid when I eventually set one up (maybe). In practice I found the bot can only respond to a visitor if they use the bot's name but if they IM the bot then it will engage in conversation without the name.

Given that Radegast is a light weight with no view of the 3D world, it certainly has more features than any others of this type I have seen. Here is a list:

Chat (local, IM, group, friends conference and voice in version 1.12)
Inventory (allows manipulation, deletion of the items, moving them around, sending to other people by dropping item on their profile)
Ability to wear/take off clothes and attachments from the inventory
Backup of all scripts and notecards from the inventory
World map (very fast implementation using Google maps)
Object finder - list objects nearby, sort them by distance, name, see details
List of all avatars in a region (radar), and those within 300m in nearby regions
Movement controls via arrow keys
Support for activating gestures from the inventory
Avatar appearance - others using 3D client will see you appear correctly, and will not be able to tell that you're using a text client
Streaming music

The fact it has a plugins button opens it up to more tools and features. One I suggested on the forums could be an AIML editor so the bot definitions could be worked on directly in the client and tested but I don't expect that to happen anytime soon. I did actually speak to Grant, the creator of MakeAiml, via his forum and he said he was interested in making a plugin and will look into it. MakeAiml can be downloaded from http://makeaiml.aihub.org/tutorials.php. Radegast can also run the Looking Glass viewer from the tools menu if you download it. The client actually provides the chat and all the other features while Looking Glass renders the 3D world using Orge (see review of Orge elsewhere in this blog). Looking Glass is in alpha state and personally I see no use for it. For me Radegast's strong point is the bot which really doesn't need a full view of the world but it is interesting and yet another example of open source creativity in the free Metaverse community.

Images of Looking Glass with Radegast

Gaga Gracious

New World Grid

2010-01-30T16:44:00.007+01:00

After visiting InWorldz and Meta7 I though I might make a habit of calling in on a new grid once a week from now on, and reporting on what I find.

This week, the wanderer arrived at the New World Grid (NWG).

The first thing that struck me when I visited their website was that the site is bilingual, English and French.

NWG is owned by the non-profit organisation, Virtus Association, and the general theme of the grid is artistic and educational. The Virtual University of Edinburgh , VUE, has a region here.

During registration you can choose your avatar's first and last names, and select from one of five pre-made male avatars, or one of six pre-made female avatars. The Hippo viewer is the recommended download, but as I have Hippo already I checked its Grid list and the New World Grid was there.

NWG has no in-world economy, but has terrific freebies available. All the signs and notecards in the Welcome area were bilingual, and had lots of help available. On the day of my visit, 30th January 2010, NWG had 349 regions, 5409 registered accounts, and 630 unique logins over the last 30 days (as reported on the Hippo screen).

The News of the Day was an announcement that they were working on introducing Voice, Hypergrid, and Groups functionality.

When it comes to land in NWG you basically have three choices:

You can join your own OpenSim regions or grid to the NWG, free of charge.
You can buy or rent land on the Mainland or centrally hosted Islands, for a fee and tier, but at around 25% of SL prices.
As much land as you need, centrally hosted, free, if the project fits within the charitable aims of Virtus, i.e. artistic or educational.

While roaming around NWG I came across Christi Maeterlinck, a retired psychologist, working on a major retirement project, a full reconstruction of the Mount Grace priory in North Yorkshire, covering 4 regions.

However, Christi had a real problem. He explained it thus:

The default avatar size, which most people have never calibrated against the grid, makes them used to having an oversized shape, and that, coupled with the camera distance behind the avatars head, means that its actually very difficult to walk round a realistically reproduced dwelling.

I could see what he Christi meant. Rooms in SL are typically 10m x 10m, which is wholely unrealistic. He had a height measuring device there, and when I tried it on it told me that my height was 2.22m or 7ft 3in tall!

Now, for a virtul architect like Christi this posed many problems. He was trying to build an actual replica of Mount Grace, scaled correctly. But when he invited me to see inside a monk's cell I couldn't get in. I was just way too tall. And it was near impossible to look around inside, due to the camera distance behind the avatar.

Of course, Christi could employ fixes, such as making the walls around doorways phantom, so that tall avatars could walk through, and advising all who come to visit to switch to mouselook (first person) mode, so they could view the inside of small rooms. However, to Christi, this is compromising the whole experience, as he wants normally sized avatars to experience the environment and space (or lack of it) that the monks endured.

He asked if it was possible for the grids (and I think he meant by implication, the developers of OpenSim) to provide a standard Ruth height of 5 foot 9 instead of 6 foot 5, or whatever it is.

This could be somewhat problematic, as avatar heights have been oversized for so long now, both in Second Life and in OpenSim-based grids. Buildings, clothes and animations have been created to suit these heights, and many buildings and clothes have been ported from Second Life to the OpenSim-based grids, that it is now too late to introduce a new standard.

I would be interested in hearing other's views on this.

Rock

Linden Labs buys Avatars United

2010-01-29T23:32:00.001+01:00

Today (29th January, 2010) M. Linden announced that Linden Labs had acquired Avatars United (AU) from Enemy Unknown AB of Stockholm, Sweden. And who is Avatars United, you might ask?

Think Facebook for inhabitants of 3D games and virtual worlds.

AU was the brainchild of three Swedish friends back in 2007, with Thor Olof Philogene as its CEO. It opened in Beta in early 2008, and two years on it is still in Beta.

Although primarily focussed on gamers AU caught the attention of Linden Labs who see synergy with their virtual world, Second Life.

M. Linden explained Linden labs wish to give Residents new and better ways to connect and share, through features like the following:

Searchable profiles
Friend and activity feeds
Widgets and viral content
Optional registration and sign-in using credentials from other properties (Facebook, Yahoo!, etc.)
APIs that enable developers to create widgets, tools, and sites pulling from selected SL data feeds

he went on:

Avatars United lets you make some of those connections that I'm talking about above. It's a great site. Check it out and add me, T Linden, and others to your friend list. As you do, you'll start to build an activity feed (similar to Facebook or Twitter) that keeps you in closer touch with the people you're connected to in Second Life. This is one of the most exciting things about the acquisition, this ability to reach my friends more easily, with more interesting information (and photos!), and in a more meaningful way. As we go, we'll be adding to these capabilities -- and because Avatars United provides developer APIs, anyone else can add to these capabilites as well.

What is not clear from this acquisition is what is going to happen to the existing members of AU that come from other games, such as World of Warcraft, and other virtual worlds, such as the Opensim-based grids, and Blue Mars.

Stay tuned...

Rock

Apple Launches the iPad

2010-01-28T00:36:00.003+01:00

Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive finally broke the silence over the long anticipated new product offering from Apple, the iPad.

The incredible new touchscreen device was unveiled at an event in San Francisco.

The new device will cost between $499 and $829 in the US, and fills the gap between smartphones and laptops.

The iPad weighs in at 1.5 pounds for the Wi-Fi model, and 1.6 pounds for the Wi-Fi + 3G model. The size is 242.8mm x 189.7mm and is only 13.4mm thick.

The display is an impressive 1024 x 768 pixels, full touchscreen, and under the hood is a 1GHz Apple A4 custom-designed, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chip. Memory comes in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB flash drives. The battery life is estimated at 10 hours while surfing the web on Wi-Fi, watching video, or listening to music.

To get an idea of what the iPad's all about, take a look at this video on the Apple Web site, introduced by product designer Jony Ive.

Rock

Commercial Virtual World Software: The Top 5

2010-01-26T23:50:00.141+01:00

Back in December I looked at opensource/free or nearly free virtual world platforms and software. Since then I have been looking at commercial virtual world software to see what they offer, and how much they cost.

After much experimentation with demo versions I finally came up with my Top 5. I was hard pressed to pick a clear winner, as the feature sets varied somewhat, so I will just list the Top 5, in no particular order.

3DVIA Virtools 5

3DVIA Virtools 5 includes five key components: the Graphical User Interface to develop sophisticated applications by visually assembling objects and behaviors; the Behavior Engine to run interactive applications; the Render Engine to render graphics in real-time; the Virtools Scripting Language to create low-level specific functions without any C++ line; and the SDK to create custom behaviors.

The open-ended architecture of 3DVIA Virtools 5 supports a wide variety of 3D formats. 3D Content Capture plugins support most commonly used DCC software formats (3ds Max®, Maya®, XSI®, Lightwave®, Collada®) for importing/exporting 3D XML files, making real-time 3D technology easily available.

3DVIA Virtools 5 allows users to imagine, share and experience highly interactive 3D content. 3DVIA Virtools 5 Platform enables easy development of virtual experiences such as driving, shopping, product use, maintenance and marketing tests.

3DVIA Virtools 5 also extends the range of target environments for deploying 3D experiences: MicrosoftTM Windows® and AppleTM MacOS® computers, Wii and Xbox 360 game consoles, Intranets via Office and XE Players, Internet via the 3DVIA player, as well as immersive environments via the VR Library.

This broad scope highlights the diversity of potential deployment options and provides a large range of communities with a powerful solution to create andexperience life content.

Pricing is not generally published, and is only available on request, however I read in a forum that the cost was somewhere around $9000 plus over $3000 per year for subscription, but a free trial was available.

Download the 3DVIA Virtools 5 datasheet here.

Vizard

Vizard Virtual Reality Toolkit is everything you need to build interactive 3D content. Designed for rapid prototyping, Vizard gets you creating fast and provides the resources to deploy even the most challenging applications. With Vizard, even someone with no programming experience can leap into the world of interactive 3D content.

Vizard is extremely feature-rich, a full detailed list of all of its features is here.

There are three editions of Vizard: the Vizard Lite Edition; the Vizard Development Edition; and the Vizard Enterprise Edition, ranging in price from $49 for the Lite version, up to $9,200 for a single commercial license.

Download the interactive demo here (10MB).

DX Studio

DX Studio is a complete integrated development environment for creating interactive 3D graphics. The system comprises of both a real-time 3D engine and a suite of editing tools.

Using DX Studio you can build complete real-time interactive applications, simulations or games, for standalone use or for embedding in other Microsoft Office/Visual Studio applications.

DX Studio comes with a Freeware Version (installer is the same for all the different licenses), a Standard Version, and a Pro Version, and with non-commercial and commercial licenses. Prices range from $0 for the Freeware Version, up to $800+ for the Pro Version with a commercial license. Here are just some of the features.

Visual3D

Don't let the small logo fool you. This suite is BIG on features.

Visual3D is a complete simulation and game development platform that integrates all of the necessary tools and technologies needed to build 3D applications into a single software product.

Visual3D's All-in-One Game Development Toolset enables rapid development of 3D interactive simulations, virtual worlds, and next generation games using C#, .NET and XNA.

With a powerful development API and comprehensive set of visual design tools that automate core design tasks, teams can complete their applications rapidly and cost effectively. With this power in hand, a growing list of leading professional game and simulation developers are using Visual3D.NET to get their applications done.

Visual3D has a Free Trial, available from here, while prices ranges from $175 per developer for the Indie Edition, to $495 per developer for the Pro Edition. Source code is also available, but are expensive.

More information on Visual3D's features are available here.

Real-time Scene Editing (Scene Design, Part 1) - Visual3D Game Engine from Visual3D Game Engine on Vimeo.

Quest3D

Last, but not least in my Top 5 comes Quest3D.

February 20 2008, Leiden, The Netherlands, version 4.0 of Quest3D® is now available from Quest3D resellers and the Quest3D website.

With the release of Quest3D 4.0, Act-3D™ B.V. lifts its flagship to an even higher quality level of real-time 3D application development. New functionality contains real-time support for COLLADA, Newton Game Dynamics, Advanced Weather Simulation, 3D GUI Support and a fully Object-Oriented development model.

Demo movie

The new release is a giant leap forward in real-time 3D software development. High-end 3D software projects, such as 3D architecture visualizations, product and design presentations games and training simulators benefit from the newly supported technologies in Quest3D.

There are three versions of Quest3D: the Creative Edition; the Power Edition; and the VR Edition. Pricing ranges from €1,249 to €9,999.

Quest3D has a demo version, available from here.

Rock

United Nations Citizen: Is this for real?

2010-01-24T13:30:00.005+01:00

Like many others I was intrigued when the first reports of a new virtual world, called United Nations Citizen (UNC), first appeared in mid January, especially when it appears to be built on the CryEngine2. Like many others I was dismayed to find it was more of a marketing tool than a virtual world after watching the promotional videos on their website.

However, the more I looked into UNC the more confused I became, then the more suspicious. Was this an elaborate hoax, or a scam, or was it for real?

The only official press release I could find was this, from Christy Wilson at the HeadsAndTails website. The release states that:

Cisco Systems and Equifax have partnered with Heads & Tails TV, Faithful Friends TV & Montage Systems, to create United Nations Citizens, a virtual living environment for consumers and businesses, unveiled today at the 99th Annual National Retailers Federation Expo in New York.

The webpage then gives three Links, to www.cisco.com, www.headsandtails.tv, and www.avatar2154.com (curiously, there was no link to the main UNC website). The above press release also gives the name of the new virtual world as United Nations Citizens (plural), while the official website of UNC gives their name as United Nations Citizen (singular).

On visiting the Cisco.com website I could find no mention of this collaboration with Equifax et al, nor any mention of United Nations Citizen. To be on the safe side, in case I missed something, I did a Google search on their entire website and this too failed to find any references whatsoever.

I then visited Avatar2154.com and found this to be a free parked webpage on GoDaddy.com. The whois for this site does not give a name for the registrant, but the address is stated to be Bonsall, California (UNC also state on their website that they are located in Bonsall).

Undeterred, I then visited the website of Equifax, the credit rating agency. Again, I could find no mention of this partnership with Cisco, and a Google search of their website confirmed what I had found, nothing. The UNC website gives this for the role of Equifax:

EquiFax provides the backend geo-targeting real-time data mining to ensure that content distributed matches the consumer demographics, psychographics and profiling opportunities only available in-world.

Data mining? Profiling opportunities?

I got the same result with Montage Systems, but I did have some luck with Faithful Friends TV. Their website did have a link back to the main United Nations Citizen website. However, the contact us link on their website brought up my Outlook Express with the To: field made out to christy@headsandtails.tv , yes, the same Christy Wilson at the source of the original press release at Heads and Tails TV. Full circle.

I then turned my attention to the 99th Annual National Retailers Federation Expo, after all, this is where UNC was unveiled. The Exhibitor list for this Expo does not list United Nations Citizen at all, nor does it list Faithful Friends, Heads and Tails TV, Montage Systems, nor Avatar2154. Cisco did have 5 booths at the Expo, but the notes did not mention United Nations Citizen, nor anything remotely connected with virtual worlds either.

UNC may be for real, but until I see an official press release from Cisco, I will continue to have my doubts.

Rock

Meta7: Interview and Preview

2010-01-23T19:19:00.010+01:00

Continuing my tour of Virtual Worlds based on the OpenSim platform and derivatives, and that have an in-world currency and an economic system in place, I had the pleasure to meet up with an old acquaintance from my early OpenSim days, Sacha Magne, who (unknown to me) had started his own grid and who is known there as Laurent Meta, when on duty.

Unlike some OpenSim-based Virtual Worlds that come and go, Meta7 has a real company behind it, Magne Metaverse Research, LLC (MMR) which was founded in 2008 by Laurent (Meta).

Meta7, formerly known as K-Grid (see this blog article for the story on the change of name), has a professional-looking website, at http://www.meta7.com/. From the site you can Register a new account and set up your avatar name. There is no restriction on the lastname, as in Second Life, where you can only select from a list of available lastnames. In Meta7 you can have what you like.

Meta7 uses its own viewer, a customised version of the popular Emerald Viewer, which allows it to implement some very cool new features, such as LightShare (more on this later).

The website also has a forum, a wiki, and a link to the Meta7 IRC channel, which is also available inworld, and automatically connected when arriving at Help Island, allowing staff to greet newcomers and assist them.

There is a Support Center to help with any bugs a resident may encounter, and there will soon be a Support Chat facility available for premium members.

Meta7 is not officially open for business yet, they wish to get the platform fully stable and feature rich before throwing their doors open, however they are open right now for preview, so I took the opportunity of going inworld and speaking to two of the proprietors, Laurent Meta and George Meta.

Interview with the Proprietors of Meta7

Q. Tell me something about the history of Meta7

Laurent Meta: I was looking to any alternative and found opensim, I had some freetime and gave opensim a hand. I made some small contributions and started testing that on my own PC. Then I asked friends to help me test things and discovered I needed to use a more powerfull system, so I rented a server for that and started a small development grid of just 2 or 3 regions. That was 2 years ago.

At that time, I had several sims in SL and was sad that I would not to be able to preserve them, so I decided to let other people backup / create their sims on my little grid, and it started slowly growing. During that time, we organised some events, like "The Milk and Cookies show", a radioshow in SL, but ported to our little grid, it was a good way to test it.

With time, the grid started to grow and eventually reached a size where I needed to make some decisions about stopping, or moving forward. I was alone to do all this at that time, but a few friends helped me and we took the road to Meta7.

Q. What are your goals and aims for Meta7?

George Meta: I think one of the things that continue to worry new residents of virtual worlds is sustainability. Can a Grid or virtual world continue to function on a day to day to basis and well as fund investments into their technology? We are fully sustainable now and stagger our growth responsibily.

Laurent Meta: we invested a lot of real money to buy our servers, to put them in a datacenter. It's not a few hundreds dollars a year. We also aim not to follow others either, we much prefer to lead.

Q. Meta7 is based on the Opensim platform. Are you happy with this choice of platform?

Laurent Meta: Opensim is the only working platform, with its qualities and its faults. We have a team of four developers working hard on that platform to customise it.

George Meta: We utilize our team in a way that is most effective to maintain stability for our residents. Voice is not currently enabled here but we will look at implementing that feature when the timing is right for us.

Laurent Meta: We don't follow SL, we innovate. This region is using our latest inovation, LightShare, as an example. This feature has been requested in SL for years, but we accomplished it. Unlike 99% of the independent grids, we are really doing things. The first physical vehicle in opensim was coded by us. Our team has got some physics specialists, some well-known developers too, all of that make us unique.

LightShare in action

[Rock: In SL you can customise all your sky and sea with those wonderful Windlight effects from the Environment Editor. However, only you see the changes you have made, everyone else does not. Wouldn't it be super cool if you could share your settings with everyone else who visits your region? Well folks, that is precisely what LightShare does! You can then do other cool stuff with this facility, such as slipping into a red haze when you get wounded in a fight, or even fading to grey or even black as your character dies. A very powerful feature]

Q. What is your stance on content theft, copybots, etc?

Laurent Meta: We have strict policies on that.

George Meta: We are a legal LLC in the USA with our own legal team who are constantly assisting us in clarifying DMCA laws within virtual worlds. Because of our ongoing communication with our attorneys and residents we are able to protect designers and our residents equally and fairly.

Q. I see you have your own viewer for Meta7. Will other viewers work, for example the Hippo Viewer?

Laurent Meta: All viewers work, but with some restriction. Only ours will allow Lightshare to work, for example. The source is availible for other viewers but we won't customised them.

George Meta: Our viewer is based on the Emerald viewer, but with modifications and special improvements made by our development team.

Q. What avatar choices are available to a new resident?

Laurent Meta: We will have premade avatars availble during account creation, with a choice of Male/female/furs.

George Meta: There are a male and female avatars currently available at Help Island for users to get started with until the premade avatar system is available during account creation.

Q. Meta7 has its own currency, the M$. Is this currency convertible out, as well as in?

Laurent Meta: Yes the currency is tradable. However, you can transfer $L here but you cannot do the opposite, it's against LL's TOS. We prefer paying back with PayPal, it's legal and risk-free.

George Meta: Our own currency system here was beta tested for a long time to ensure there would be no failures.

Q. How many Regions does Meta7 currently have? How many residents?

George Meta: There are 1369 residents and just under 180 regions, however what's more impressive is our recurring percentage. Most of our users continue to login every 30 days. In our case, people come in, stay and come back again, that model helps build confidence in our project.

Q. Who are the Proprietors of Meta7? Are their RL identities a secret?

Laurent Meta: Our IDs are not secret, MMR is a registered corporation.

George Meta: Legally speaking , there are two names on the corporation paperwork, however our entire team are our proprietors, with Trademarks and a legal team. We are fully identifiable and stand behind our project. Our selves and our corporation are fully accountable

Q. How many staff does Meta7 have, apart from the Proprietors? What are the hours of operation?
George Meta: We have a staff of 6 people who work full time on the project as well as some outside developers. We can be reached nearly 24 hours a day for live help thru our IRC help portal and ticketing system.

Laurent Meta: and most of our residents are in the help channel too.

George Meta: We will be rolling out live phone support in the future as well , as soon as the details are finalized.

Q. Is Meta7 funded solely by the proprietors, or do you have external sources of funding?

Laurent Meta: Our financial assets are solid, we invested more than US$30K on this project

George Meta: Financing is a non issue. We have very balanced books and continue to operate our grid in a responsible fiscal manner

Rock Vacirca: It is not so much the start-up costs I was referring to, it is the on-going costs. Do you think land sales and tier will cover your on-going costs, or will the proprietors have to supplement that, or will you look to external sourcs of revenue, advertising, for example?

George Meta: We aren't officially open yet, but we will allow the grid to grow at its own pace. We are fully confident our method of execution will allow the grid to achieve full fiscal balancing with land and tier.

Q. What specific features do you see that sets Meta7 apart from other opensim-based grids?

George Meta: Developing a stable platform is priority over profitability.

Laurent Meta: Keeping our innovative spririt, LightShare, near full vehicle implementations, efficient physics engine, and our little bomb ;)

Rock Vacirca: ??

Laurent Meta: A really new script engine. We have two developers working on it. We also have sitting on prims, ground sitting and sitting on complex linksets. These are unique to our grid.

George Meta: There are alot of opensim-based grids, each one with a different way of handling themselves. We continue to innovate and listen to our residents and offer them outstanding customer service and options as we continue to grow. I think one of our biggest features is stability and long term goals that do not rely on income alone to produce. We follow legal and corporate guidelines to boost consumer confidence.

Rock Vacirca: and IRC?

George Meta: IRC is one communication tool we effectively manage to communicate, another will be the launch of Metaverse Radio this spring. a Grid wide radio station that covers grid events, news, resident run podcasts, shows, and streaming radio. The community spirit is strong here.

Q. Is there anything else you would like to tell me that I have not already asked?

Laurent Meta: We are having a big live concert on the 30th January.

George Meta: Help Island Public will be welcoming some excellent live music performers starting at 8pm UTC and continuing until 1am UTC. These are well known Second Life performers who see the value in expanding their fanbase into a new virtual world.

Many thanks guys, and good luck with your project. I look forward to the official opening.

Rock

Diary: 22nd January, 2010

2010-01-22T22:04:00.002+01:00

Blue Mars Extends the MyPage Functionality
Both the developer and user MyPages have been recently updated.

The Developer MyPage now has the following additional features:

Properties > City > Leased Cities > [Add Block] command: Instead of manually entering Block Name, uses the Current attribute in level_editor.xml as Block name to be added to database.
Properties > City > Blocks > [Re-Upload .BLD file] command added: Allows re-uploading of .BLD file for selected Block, as long as it is NOT leased out or being used by yourself.
If you don't have any leased Blocks, the Properties > Block tab will not be active.
Home > Account Info now shows "Company Code" under "Name". If you bought a City, it will show your company code (up to 6 letters).
Administer > Company Members > [Add New Member]: Address, Phone, OS, Graphic Card, and CG Tool fields have been deleted from the [Add New Member] dialogue.
Administer > Company Members > [Add New Member]: Displays an error message if you try to register an email address that is already registered as a Blue Mars Developer.
Administer > Billing History: Displays various financial activity information.

The main improvements to the User Mypage are the functioning Friends tab, and the Inventory tab.

The Friends tab now shows which of your friends are currently online or offline. The Command button has yet to be implemented, but is likely to allow Instant Messaging and various other commands.

OSGrid Concurrency

The low concurrency on the OSGrid has me worried.

As I speak the number of avatars inworld is a paltry 74, spread over 4,023 regions. There were 14 in Lbsa Plaza, five more regions with just two avatars in them, and all the rest were a single avatar in a single region. Check the current distribution here.

This is not a particularly bad snapshot either, the daily published statistics show that the numbers of users online over the last 24 hours was between 40 and 85, i.e. between at worst 1 user per 100 regions, to at best 1 user per 47 regions, and I have seen this consistently over the last couple of weeks now.

That is sparse by any yardstick.

Rock

Developers and the Blue Mars Tech. Staff - 1st Meeting

2010-01-20T01:03:00.006+01:00

Recently the developers in Blue Mars got this invitation from the Avatar Reality Technical Staff:

The meeting was well attended and lasted well beyond the hour mentioned in the invitation. Also attending were the two mainstays of the Community Department, Glenn Sanders, Community Director for Avatar Reality, and Tiffany Nahinu, Community Development Associate. It was this team that organised the meeting, and they did an excellent job.

I had many questions concerning scripting, animations, and physics, but two answers stood out above all the others, and these were in response to questions concerning the chat-room concept, and the formation of a scripting library. These were the topics, and the answers:

Privacy

Two recent threads in the SL forum (thread 1) (thread 2) made me think about privacy in general in virtual worlds, and particularly how this would be addressed in Blue Mars. The threads in the SL forum were not the first on the subject of privacy, they are a recurring complaint in SL. Basically, in Second Life, anyone can detach their camera and by extending their draw distance can send their camera anywhere inside a region, and even into neighbouring regions, right into the homes and bedrooms of other residents, and watch whatever they are doing there, as if they were standing in the room, and there is nothing that can be done about this, other than to buy an expensive private island of your own, and close it to public access.

However, it has been noticed that when you detach your camera in Blue Mars and send it into a residence, it appears bare of furniture, and no-one in there, even though it is a fully furnished residence, and people are at home. So I asked Tim the technical designer and scriptor what was going on.

Tim replied that when residents and their friends (on an access list) are inside the residence it effectively becomes a separate chat-room. So all messages concerning the objects inside that room, the avatars inside, and what they are saying and doing ONLY goes to them, and no-one else, so a stranger passing by looking through the window, or a detached camera sent inside, just sees a bare room. In Blue Mars you have true privacy! For others to see what is inside, and see the avatars in there, they must be invited, in the same way as in real life. This platform just gets better and better :)

Script Library

Now that the Blue Mars scripting wiki is taking shape (Blue Mars uses the Lua scripting language) I thought it would be of great use to newcomers to Lua to get hold of simple, sample scripts, to get their Lua feet wet, and start modifying the code for their own purposes.

I spoke to Maggie (Blue Mars name - magnolia), the scripting guru at Blue Mars, and she thought it was a great idea, and promised to get onto it straight away. Here is the proof :)

All in all, a very productive evening.

Rock

InWorldz: An Interview with the Founders

2010-01-17T18:31:00.104+01:00

InWorldz is a user-created Virtual World, based on the OpenSim platform. Unlike other worlds based on OpenSim this world has an economy, and uses a currency called the I'z. Currently, US$1 buys you $500 I'z.

There are no membership fees for InWorldz, and all uploads are currently free, with no plans to change that in the future. Residents may create content (without the need to own or rent any land) by using the provided sandboxes.

Land is available to buy, and comes in two flavours, Mainland (named Sah'ra) and Private Isles. Mainland regions are a cheaper than Private Isles, are restricted to PG content only, do not have full Estate controls, with terraforming restricted to +/- 15m, and have a prim limit of 30,000. Private Islands are full regions that are not connected to the Mainland. Private Isles have far more functionality and management capabilities than a mainland region. Private Isles have no rating restrictions, allow estate managers, and have full use of the estate tools. Private Isles come with a range of prims from 35,000 to 45,000.

Residents may also rent land from land owners, or get their feet wet from the community starter parcels, on the Ruby Shores region, from just $10 a month.

New Residents can sign up for InWorldz and get a username and password here.

To connect to InWorldz all you need is a viewer, and you can use the InWorldz-provided viewer, available from here, or the Hippo Viewer, available from here.

To connect with Hippo, follow these instructions:

Load the Viewer
Select the Grids button at the bottom of the interface
In the new window Hippo pops up, you'll see an Add button, press the button (this will clear all fields below)
For the field Login URI: type in 'http://inworldz.com:8002/' (no apostrophes)
Check the drop down box is set for OpenSim
Click the Get Grid Info button
Click Apply then OK

To use just type in your User First name, Last name, and password, and Log In.

InWorldz comes with an active Resident's Forum, a Support Centre, a Mantis bug tracking system, and a Wiki. From the website you can see the World Map, and also add events to an Events Calendar.

Considering that this Virtual World has been in existance for less than a year, it is remarkably advanced and well thought-out in its concept. I was impressed enough to seek out its owners, and they agreed to an interview so I could find out more.

Interview with the Proprietors of InWorldz
The proprietors of InWorldz are Elenia Llewellyn and Legion Hienrichs, and soon joining them will be Tranquillity Dexler.

Q. Tell me something about the history of InWorldz.
A. It started out at the end of 2008 / beginning of 2009 with a few of us in a chat room discussing if we could even DO a full virtual world, it was a testing phase for us. Then we had people who were actually interested in seeing if we could really pull it together, and lo and behold, we had a live world. I had the time and dedication to devote to it, so we started looking at what could be used, worked on, where it really was in grand scheme of things, and by February 2009 we started our testing, and by April 2009 we actually allowed residents to come in and take a look for themselves. We got our first paying customer that same month, talk about our celebration, we were amazed!

Q. What are your goals and aims for InWorldz?
A. First and foremost, to become a viable platform that is comparable to SL. Then move on to advancing that platform. This will include things that we've spoken about as far as physics, meshes, and so on. These are all things we'd like to tackle later on to improve the platform.

Q. InWorldz is based on the Opensim platform. Are you happy with this choice of platform?
A. OpenSim has alot of potential in the fact it's not so far along it can't be revamped to our tastes. So in that regard, yes. We have done many tweaks over time with the opensim code. Most of which are geared towards making it a more reliable and usable platform. The basics are all there for the most part and we've been able to use the hooks provided to add missing functionality.

We have added a new system for profiles and other user data, revamped some of the permissions system, and rewrote the entire script event engine This was done because the current code as it stood was unable to reliably process scripts on the very region you stand on. We did some profiling, took a look at where the code was having issues, and fixed those issues to make the script engine run more like SL's.

We're concentrating on core services such as the script engine, assets etc. to make this a solid platform for growth.

Q. What is your stance on content theft, copybots, etc?
A. Copyright material needs to be protected. That's a clear cut situation for us, as we're content creators ourselves. We can't, however, police every upload, so we've made it clear, if DMCAs are filed, we will happily abide by them and remove the content from the world. We ask every resident who uploads here to abide by the wishes of the original content creator, or they will see themselves being banned from our world.

Thus far I've not run into anything that is blatant, but if I see something, I have no issues questioning the resident about the item(s). And residents will regularly ask me if "such and such is ok" to bring here, I routinely tell them, if in doubt, ask the creator first.

Q. I see you have your own viewer for InWorldz, in addition to the Hippo Viewer. Who designed your Viewer for you?
A. Legion Hienrichs: I did the viewer work. The information is freely available, so I basically did some text changes and added a few things a lot of other talented people created. Prim Backup, the permissions in the new 1.23 viewer, Worn Folder, etc. I am happy with this now, but it's as far as I can take it. We need someone with C++ skills to take this on. I am not a programmer.

Q. What avatar choices are available to a new resident?
A. A new resident only has the default (Ruth) avatar at present. they can change its sex, modify its shape, create hair, eyes, skin, shape and clothes for it, but there are no premade ones at present. A choice of premade avatars is something that has been sitting on my long list of to-do's for a while now, but when we did the web rework a couple months back, it fell further down my list. So at this point, choices are not available, but it is definitely slated to be available within the next 6 months.

Q. InWoldz has its own currency, the I'z. Is this currency convertible out, as well as in, and if not, do you have any plans to operate an exchange?
A. Yes, we have an ATM in SL and InWorldz where you can convert from I'z to L$ then back again. We have no operating exchange as of yet, but it is in our plans to provide one as the world grows.

Q. How many Regions does InWorldz currently have? How many residents?
A. We have a 25 region mainland, and then about 15 private isles outside of that... our current resident count is 620+, what we actually see as being logged in is around 1.5% to 2% of that during peak hours.

Q. How many staff does InWorldz have, apart from the Proprietors? What are your hours of operation?
A. You're looking at us! Other than our mentors who are a huge help and the residents who go out of their way to help new people. As for hours of operation, we have the US Daylight hours covered, then it goes to at least 10pm EST from there.

Q. Is InWorldz funded solely by the proprietors, or do you have external sources of funding?
A. Originally, was completely funded by the Proprietors, while Legion was a big part of that to get us going. As for external sources, we've discussed it, with no firm decisions on that yet. Our business plan is solid though as we're self-sustaining already

Q. Is there anything else you would like to add?
A. I would like to add that we have to give a huge thank you to our current residents. Without them, we would not have gotten as far as we have, and they deserve a nice mention for putting up with all our bugs over the last 8-9 months.

Good luck guys.

Thanks!