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Category
Applications and Tools
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02.18.11Conventional WisdomI was invited to speak at Train for Success yesterday and, frankly, the audience was the main attraction. Maybe there was something about the topic (the Future of Virtual Worlds) - but there was no shortage of ideas, passion and discussion....I only wish it could have gone on longer. Much of the discussion sort of spun off from my recent interview with Rod Humble, the new CEO of Linden Lab. It felt like we all wanted to answer the question: is there still hope for virtual worlds, for Second Life, for the idea of the metaverse? Mitch Wagner attended - and I ...
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10.12.10Mesh Is On Strategy for Linden Lab, But You Are Not a CreatorAllowing mesh imports into Second Life is on-strategy for Linden Lab and part of their broader 'Fast, Easy, Fun' mantra, according to Jack Linden with whom I appeared on last night's Designing Worlds. (Video after the break). I actually thought it was a good discussion, although I'm not sure I personally made a lot of sense, but that's par for the course. It was only in the latter minutes of the show that Jack said something which felt like something more than 'tech talk'. One of the things that the Lab does astonishingly poorly is putting platform changes into a broader context. ...
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08.20.10Beyond Mesh Import: Second Life NextPhilip Rosedale confirmed at the recent Second Life Community Convention that the ability to import mesh objects (a standard format for 3D objects) into Second Life is a go, and will be rolled out in public Beta by the end of the year - bets are on a late September launch. In discussions with Philip Rosedale, I started to sense that there may be a wider expectation (by him at least) of where mesh imports could take us. But to give a glimpse of what mesh "looks like", here's a little preview of what's possible: I've written at length about mesh (and ...
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08.10.10Second Life Growth: New Groups versus New UsersIt sometimes feels to me like there are two types of users in Second Life: the single dots, and the multi-dots. I remember the early days of Second Life - the map was a friend and a mystery. As I wandered the Grid, I'd use the map not because the geography that it showed seemed particularly relevant - I mean, most sims on the map look like a random collection of squares and squiggles and don't tell you much about what's there before you arrive. But the presence of green dots became a sort of pulse-taker of activity on the Grid. The ...
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07.08.10Metanomics Commentary: Courage to CreateWe just wrapped three episodes of the Metanomics Master Class - and I have to say, it was a really exciting series for me. First, I learned a lot, but it was also encouraging to talk with people who remain as enthusiastic as ever about the potential of virtual worlds (and Second Life). I'll have more thoughts in the coming days. In the meantime, I thought I'd post my closing commentary from yesterday's show: Last week, Alexander Macris, in talking about games, said that the challenge in creating great immersive games and stories is to remove the distance between the player and ...
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06.23.10Mesh In, Wisdom Out: How Second Life May Inform the Next Generation of 3D Content[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="480" caption="The terror of mesh?"][/caption] Concerns over a wave of content creators arriving in virtual worlds with a bag of mesh objects created in programs like the (free) Blender or the (incredibly expensive) Maya seems to cause jitters amongst the current content creators who have created businesses within Second Life. We discussed this a bit on today's Metanomics (video and transcript will be up tomorrow) and I concluded by saying that while the ability to IMPORT objects (including content that exists elsewhere) might seem like the main shift in dynamic, I actually think it's what Second Life will EXPORT ...
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06.22.10Mesh Imports in Second Life ImminentTomorrow, I'll be hosting a discussion of 3D content development during a Metanomics Master Class, and with any luck Linden Lab will do what it seems to do with some regularity: make a big announcement right before the show. (They don't do this intentionally, it just seems to happen that way). In this case, rumors are that the Lab is about to lift the NDA on the work to-date on mesh imports. In fact, they sort of lifted the NDA already, only to clamp it down again after something like 15 minutes. Someone at a senior level decided they weren't ...
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05.29.10Metanomics Masterclass: Inside Virtual WorldsHmmm. I forget how to blog. I haven't had much time the past few weeks. Er, actually, I forget how to get all 'meta' or whatever it is people say I do. So let me throw some spam your way. Er, useful promotion and information. Metanomics Summer Season The summer season of Metanomics will kick off in a few weeks and I'll be jumping in to do some hosting as we take a look at some of the nuts and bolts of virtual world development. Which doesn't mean, of course, that I won't also go off on a tangent about the psychosocial meaning ...
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05.10.10Betting on the Future of 3D: OnLive, WebGL, and Google Shifting Gears from O3DStreaming 3D content and 3D in the browser are the next frontiers in the evolution of technologies that allow for immersive environments and virtual worlds. On the one hand, server-side rendering of games and virtual worlds are being touted by OnLive and Otoy as the path to ubiquity: there's no need to download a multi-Gigabyte-sized game world when you can have it streamed to your desktop. Forget loading Warcraft onto your hard drive, simply boot up your browser and start playing. Server-Side Rendering OnLive sums up the story: OnLive is launching the world's highest performance Games On Demand service, instantly delivering the latest ...
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05.07.10Of Two Minds: Virtual Worlds for Education and EnterpriseI went to two schools when I was a kid, and they swung from one extreme to the other. In the first school, my teacher would start the day by pulling out a guitar and singing to us. One of the highlights of the day was "feeling time" when we'd all be asked to place our heads down on our desks and to consider what we were feeling - were we happy or sad, frustrated or bored, and at the end of this communal silence, we were supposed to share. During 'feeling time' I'd slip a book into my lap ...
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