|
October 2009
The Archives
-
10.30.09De-Augmenting My Reality and Beach Houses in NebraskaMy new spot in Winterfell. Trying to figure out how to decorate. Ping me if you wanna visit. I'm feeling kind of militant these days about my identity. In fact, I feel almost wistful for the day when I was able to stand up in full horror and ire and fight back against someone who called me an augmentationist. I had street cred as an immersionist, I lived in-world, I had a house, I knew Midian City, I had some of the best dance moves in anyone's inventory, and I'm not even sure that I had linked my real name ...
-
10.30.09Teen Grid Merger with Second Life Low on the RadarMark Kingdon, CEO of Linden Lab, assures me that while there is a great deal of interest in exploring the idea of merging the Teen and Main Grid in some fashion, this is NOT currently on the Lab's roadmap. Several people had contacted me about an event at which a Linden Lab employee seemed to indicate that the idea of a merger was something being actively pursued. This was clearly, however, speculation or 'off-the-cuff' thinking. Quoting Kingdon: "There is indeed interest in Linden Lab and the wider Second Life community in having a mixed grid but it would come with a long list ...
-
10.30.09Living in Nebraska: Virtual World SmackdownLinden Lab will launch its 'stand-alone solution for enterprise' next week in San Francisco and we'll get all the details about how companies and schools and secret government agencies can run their own little mini-grids behind firewalls and wear suits and ties or naval uniforms while reviewing PowerPoint presentations. The folks over at 3DTLC cornered Amanda Linden on her recent Second Life blog post about work avatars, which I think was meant to leverage the Gartner data and say something along the lines of "hey, other people are taking avatars seriously for work, isn't that great?" but became a community pile-on ...
-
10.28.09Teen Grid Merger with Second Life NOT Imminent (Update)Update: Right - so my unsubstantiated rumor idea doesn't work so well - what seemed like a good source (a Linden speaking at an event) turns out to have been more like a speculative "yeah, we should move in that direction" off-hand remark. As clarified by Mark Kingdon: "There is indeed interest in Linden Lab and the wider Second Life community in having a mixed grid but it would come with a long list of challenges. As such, integrating the grids is not on our current roadmap. It would be a significant policy change for the Lab and we ...
-
10.26.09Barbarians at the Gate: Policy in Virtual WorldsOK...I had this stone in my shoe. I kept popping over to Pixels and Policy to see what was up and finding myself grindingly irritated. And I wrote the editor something along the lines of: stop posting provocative-sounding pieces with so little basis in fact. At which point I figured I'd call it a day and remove the site from my reader. But phrases like the following on PixPol still jumped out at me: - "Now, no one at Pixels and Policy believes Second Life will be dust in five years - Linden Lab is turning a profit off of its virtual ...
-
10.26.09Mark Kingdon to Unveil Nebraska on MetanomicsMark Kingdon will unveil Linden Lab's stand-alone server solution (still code-named Nebraska) at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco on November 4th. The event will be broadcast in-world on Metanomics, as Amanda revealed this weekend in a longer comment about work avatars: "Ok, back to the core issue. (Work avatars). The question that quite insightfully came up again and again is, “Why are you writing about this now?” It’s a very good question. There are two reasons why. First, we are going to be releasing Second Life Work multi-cultural avatars with the upcoming behind-the-firewall solution. I’m looking forward to sharing ...
-
10.24.09Apple’s Magic Mouse and Virtual WorldsOK - gadget drool alert - but I love the look of the new Apple Magic Mouse, and I immediately wondered whether this couldn't be some kind of middle ground between a mouse and the Space Navigator as an interface device for virtual worlds. The new Magic Mouse allows clicks, 360 degree scrolling, screen zoom and swipes. I'm imagining using it to control your camera position in Second Life. While Space Navigator also includes 'up/down' this seems like a pretty handy alternate interface. I'm not sure what it would take to map the controls from the mouse to those of Second ...
-
10.24.09Symbiotic Links, Google Wave and Second LifeAdvertising Age asks whether Google Wave will achieve success where previous platforms have failed if it doesn't form a symbiotic link between the technology itself and a fundamental dimension of humanity: Looking back at it now, I realize what we failed to do last time around is to symbiotically couple this whiz-bang technology with fulfilling a fundamental dimension of our humanity. Technology by itself is sterile and a communication and collaboration play was pretty sterile sounding. This time round, though, Google Wave really has a chance to get it right if it forges a tight symbiotic link between this technology and ...
-
10.24.09Second Life’s Killer App for Residents: Each OtherTom Hale Presents at Web 2.0 Tom Hale, or T Linden in Second Life, recently presented at the Web 2.0 conference at which he proclaimed that while the hype cycle came and went, the world stayed, survived, and thrived. And it did so because of its 'hardcore' users who were there not for sex but for because they could connect and socialize with each other. Now, I've seen Hale present a few times, including a keynote at the Second Life Community Convention at which he previewed the new SL client (which by all accounts is a game changer when it comes to ...
-
10.23.09Blog Search Terms: David Hockney Gets a Prim ComposerI think it was ArminasX who put me on to the game of glancing at the search terms that people use to find this blog and so every now and then I see if anything interesting is popping up or what the trends might be. The stand-bys, for this blog anyways, all seem to be related to rendering and builds: ambient occlusion, megaprims, Second Life dynamic shadows....stuff like that, about which I typically write in a sort of round-about way, usually related to third party developer tools like 3DS or Maya or whatever. For some reason David Hockney is the number ...
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.