Blue Mars one-upped other virtual world platforms today with the introduction of embeddable Flash-based content in the environment. Similar to more corporate virtual environments such as Protosphere or Croquet which allow interactive, embedded content, Blue Mars now allows its worlds (and world creators) to include embedded Flash-based content. The announcement comes on the heels of an intriguing cross-world brand move: the opening of Caledon in Blue Mars, which brings a popular Second Life steampunk-themed community to the Blue Mars platform.
According to Kazuyuki (“Kaz”) Hashimoto, president of Avatar Reality, “The Blue Mars system for Flash is super easy to use. You can create a Flash panel in a few seconds. Just drop the Flash panel where you want it, paste the URL into the form, and hit the Enter key.”
The announcement is touted as a world’s first:
“Avatar Reality Inc., creators of the platform for virtual worlds, Blue Mars, announced the world’s first system for rendering fully interactive Adobe Flash 10™ content in a high-definition massively multiplayer 3D environment. Developers can now create immersive 3D worlds in which thousands of users can experience and interact with Flash™ content simultaneously in any given world.”
This opens up a wide and rich set of possibilities for activities in the virtual space, including both viewing of content in Flash format (youTube, Hulu, etc.) and INTERACTIVE content such as embedded Flash games.
Interactive Native Flash 10 in Blue Mars from Blue Mars on Vimeo.
While other virtual world platforms have similar embeddable functionality such as clickable Web pages or interactive Word documents, Flash is a rich media platform and its inclusion in Blue Mars sets a new bench mark.
In other news, the successful Second Life community of Caledon has opened an outpost on Blue Mars. This steampunk community represents a large continent in Second Life, and their opening of a world on Blue Mars is both interesting in that it is a huge vote of confidence in the platform by one of the larger operations in SL – but will also be a fascinating experiment in whether brands can exist and be managed in more places than one. If so, it may represent a significant new insight into how brands can create cross-platform experiences for consumers.
Blue Mars is a multi-world mutli-player platform where the environments are developed by approved content creators. Unlike Second Life or OpenSim, the content is downloaded ahead of users accessing the individual worlds. This allows far more users to share a space at the same time, but it does not allow ‘real-time’ building within the space, which is not necessarily a disadvantage for companies that want to create controlled experiences for users. What it misses in being a user-generated world it gains in the quality of the visual experience and the ability to host larger numbers of participants.
This week’s announcements, while not proving that Blue Mars will get traction in new account sign-ups, certainly set it on the right path as it heads into 2010.
(Jim Sink of Blue Mars was recently interviewed on Metanomics. Watch the full interview here. Or read an earlier review of Blue Mars).
….and whether this will kick Linden Lab’s, um, momentum on launching the MediaAPI (already built into the code for Snowglobe) remains to be seen.
I just wish Blue Mars was more fun. I can already interact with others in Flash via instant messaging or a Skype conference so it has never been much of a hindrance really.
Where the hell is MediaAPI anyway? They announce these things and then don’t talk about it ever again? Its time for SL to join the 21st century and allow more media than quicktime.
[...] This steampunk community represents a large continent in Second Life, and their opening of a world o… [...]
The media plugin achitecture is in the Snowglobe client but what’s lacking it would seem is the actual plugin. The dev forums seemed ominously quiet last time I checked. Not much of a roadmap either afaik. Lindens should realise this is serious omission for edu and business communities but there doesn’t seem to be a readily identifiable LL champion. Smoke and mirror promises only hold good for so long. If nothing else, they should increase the number of media streams per parcel (as was promised) as a holding measure.
I’ve been trying to find out what’s going on with the llMediaAPI too. I’m running the latest SnowGlobe release, so the embedded browser is actually using the media API to talk to WebKit as far as I can see (pages run in the new browser report themselves as running on WebKit), and there are options around who is allowed to interact with the browser, but that actual ability to interact isn’t there. Nor is flash. In this respect, Web.Alive have also stolen the initiative from LL – they now have the Awesomium 3D version of Chrome embedded in their environments (eg – the ThinkBalm Web.Alive build) – I’ve tried it and it is perfect, a full working shared 3D-embedded browser. I was able to log into authenticated content and edit/interact with it right then and there. So the mystery of what happened last year when the author of Awesomium spent a summer secondment at LL needs explaining, and the equally mysterious Awesomium section on the LL Media Plugin code wiki, which links to nothing… I’m busy putting together solutions for both ‘real’ browsing and multiple browsers on a parcel – I’d stop immediately if I knew that solutions to these were just round the corner
Thanks, Neil. I noticed you were in the forums. Useful, if somewhat tantalising, update.
[...] Dusan Writer’s Metaverse » Blue Mars Virtual World Gets Flashy – Virtual worlds and creativity, business, collaboration, and identity. [...]
Neil – I’ve found the lack of documentation and activity on the MediaAPI to be troubling or frustrating, depending how you look at it. Have you spoken with Aimee? I know she’s doing tons of work in this area and she might be, um, plugged in to the specific developers.
The Lab needs to establish better points of contact on this, for sure.
By the way, I tried but failed to figure out how you actually LOAD the plug-ins….I need a lesson! I’m not a code type but trying to take the code posted on the repository you clearly need to know what you’re doing to activate the plug-in in Snowglobe?
Neil, I’d be careful the day you release your multibrowser solution the Lab will roll out their own and put all your hard work to waste, just like they did to Ajaxlife, Motor Mouth, Real Estate etc..
Personally I see this as a detriment.
Flash has become the overloaded, fat beast of the Internet. I have yet to see anything worth seeing that is compelling in the Flash format. All I (mostly) ever see in Flash format are:
…advertisement that are incredibly (as a rule) annoying.
…cute, often offensive and uncouth “arcade” games.
…video – which is really sad as Flash is probably the worst CODEC one could choose to present motion pictures with on a 29.97 frame-per-second paradigm.
Flash is boated, buggy, sucks system resources and the scourge of the Internet if you ask anyone in the professional photography/videography/motion picture arts industry.
And many will point to Google YouTube. Uh, guess what: if you have Flash turned-off, you automatically get the far-higher-quality, lower bandwidth MP4 (H.264) version of the same video.
Thank goodness the new HTML 5 specs are pushing for a real video CODEC with the intention of abolishing Flash as a “video player” tool (as far as HTML standards go).
Dusan: Neil and Aimee have indeed corresponded in the Forums and, from my recollection, it was an illuminating exchange in terms of how web implementations work in different virtual worlds (and SL’s solution, being client- rather than server-based, had some issues as I vaguely recall). I hope I’m wrong but I personally don’t expect too much too soon though that doesn’t stop me whinging. But hey, it’s almost Christmas and that alone is cause for optimism, right?
Ari, regardless if you view it as a detriment or not they should have the option… Quicktime is so 90s
Awesome news. Will allow companies to ease into virutal worlds while still benefiting from technology they are quite used to.
This is where SL is ham-strung by it’s own glorious user-generated content model. In the controlled world of Blue Mars content providers can ensure that only one or two flash-viewers will be in view at any one time. In SL the issue is the potential for lots, assuming that the parcel limit on media URLs is removed. Anyway, in the spirit of playfulness against the backdrop of this thread I’ve built a little collaborative browsing between SL and realXtend. Pointless fun http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is3K-IZswTI