Philips Launchparty (2)

Last week I blogged that Philips is planning to open their sim to the public on June 1st. Here's some more details.

The event will start at 14.00 CET and from reliable sources I've heared that the launch will start in the Virtual Holland sim 3. I went over and indeed found some signs of Philips. There's a platform with a clear path to the open sea, which could well be the place where the Philips sim will immerse.


Connecting with Virtual Holland to some extend makes some sense, also suggests a Rivers Run Red influence.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Our%20Virtual%20Holland3/96/47/28

Okay that'll be it for today. It's not much, but RL has been extremely tiring today with severe SL presentations so I'm totally knackered.

A closer look at Amazon

A little while ago I blogged on the great Amazon build. Today it was on the Things To Do list and we received a personal tour guided by Amazon's Webservices resident guru Jeff Barr.

He told us how it all began: "Last year I got an SL account and started to attend all sorts of events. After attending a NASA launch with live video, I started to get the crazy idea that I could actually do part of my job from within SL. People looked at me like I was crazy. But I persisted, and gave some talks last year on Info Island and at other places. The response was awesome and told me that I wasn't crazy. I proposed to my management the design and construction of this island. They thought it was a good idea, and now, here we are."

This time I got round to asking a few more indepth questions (ahum), like how Amazon teamed up with Joshua Culdesac from Virtuool, a freelance French builder.

Jeffronius Batra: "VeeJay, this is a great story. I bought a little plot of land in Athabasca. Shortly after I started building, this wolf started to hang out nearby. We started chatting and he showed me some of what he was building. I was very impressed with his skills and we became good friends. I shared with him my vision for what we could build here, and it turned out that he was in the process of making a career change to become a full-time SL builder. He's based in Bordeaux, France and has a background in building 3D objects as a hobby, by the way. When I had approval to start building, I wrote a spec and asked him to submit a proposal, and the result is what you see here. He did an amazing job of taking my ideas and turning them into something even better than the vague pictures in my head. We never once talked on the phone during the build phase. I didn't even meet him in person until last month. All in all the process worked out very well and I am quite happy with the results. I wanted to make this place look like it had been buried for hundreds of years and then rediscovered."

This story is off course one hell of an example how inworld collaboration can work out. From idea to end product without ever meeting once

We toured the sim then and saw a very imaginative auditorium, probably one of the most original ones I've seen so far and we toured the Amazon again in the boats I blogged on in my previews posting on Amazon. This time, even the boats caused havoc as one actualla sank!

Virtually Shipwrecked !!!

Actually, we were all kinda amazed that it could happen, even Jeff who certainly knew of no premeditated scripted intend to sink us. Anyway, our clothes dries quickly and we moved on.

The sim is filled to the brim with places to stimulate the 240,000 people Amazon Webservice development community using their S3 (Amazon's storage service) and EC2 (their compute cloud) in various ways related to SL. Linden Labs is also using the S3 as building block for their client. This morning saw their first tech meeting with about 20 developers present.

Finally it seems like Amazon turns out to be one of the places to watch when it comes to rallying the community, potentially more so than IBM or Intel for that matter.

Inworld Companies 1: The Avastar

In the past weeks we've seen a number of Real Life media companies trying to establish a foothold in the virtual world of Second Life (Channel 4 and Skynews). Now it is time to take a closer look at a new media corp that has immersed from within Second Life: The Avastar.

Lately the Avastar is gaining popularity over older Metaverse newspapers, such as the Second Life Herald or the Metaverse Messenger largely due to it's gossipy, colorful appearance. The sim is no different, it's slick, futuristic and right on the spot.

The sim is build up by several hovering globes, possibly representing the different virtual worlds notion. The design is low on textures, but with a lot more subtility than the German Designs I've blogged. Here it's functional, adding to the overal futuristic impression. Several press rooms, info rooms are set up along the outer rim.


Last but not least on the main Globe, at its core there is a conference room and at the summit a very nice bar to end a night of heavy talking with a good virtual cocktail.

Finally, the other two globes host a luxury pool for exlusive parties and a talkshow set up.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/The%20AvaStar/114/93/79

3pointD hooks up

Normally I'm not very much into Second Life social events and weddings, but tonight's an exception as Mr 3pointD, Mark Wallace (who's nominated as a potential metarati) and the lovely bride going by the nick of "Destroy Television"


Special guest were Lordfly Digeridoo as best man and Mr. Jerry Pfaffendorf, Electric Sheep CEO as father of the bride. The vows came down to "do you, Destroy Television, take to Walker Spaight to be your virtual husband? In sickness, in health, through lags, crashes, ghosting, mis-bakes and missing textures?"

The event took place in one of the many Celedon sims, hotspots to the streampunk community

Virtual Banking (6): Wirecard unwired

I blogged earlier that Germans are coming to town. Many German cities are immersing lately, like Augsburg and Munich. When I speak of Munich, I speak with respect, it is an impressive project with high levels of texturing.

This is so untrue for German business sims. In the early days of this blog I wrote on German Design, on the sims of Toca Me and BMW New World as being a desing without any texturing. This Wirecard sim is no different, leaving me under the impression that Photoshop isn't available in German.

The Wirecard is a pain in the eye, another German impulse to spread snowblindness. However, it's not all that bad. The design itself is exploring the future, though with a very minimalist approach.

As for strategy Wirecard is taking a different approach than e.g. ABN AMRO (or Barclays or Bank of Scotland... what will it be next week?), ING or Saxo and tries to push their core business, Finance, to SL.

It's time to sit back and observe to see they'll succeed. They've got a chance...

A trivia for this build is that they didn't hire pro's but resourced it internally.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Wirecard/128/128/0

Belgacom softlaunch

Today I stumbled into Belgacom by accident. I've seen this sim on an earlier trip last month, but then I couldn't get in. But this time I could.

According to Alain Gufler, Belgacom's Marketing Manager the sim opened up May 24 and they're now in softlaunch mode to find some User Acceptance. In the past days they've already seen more than 100 visitors, mostly from Spain looking for Football (soccer for our us readers).

To my question if that wasn't a serious image problem, the answer was quite simple. Belgacom isn't sponsoring a football team, but it is one of their cornerstones for their Broadcasting activities, so that's why it's in their search string.

The sim is build radiating from a central point towards 4 domes, representing Belgacoms productlines: Television, Telecom, Mobile and Internet. Pulsing beams across the walkways symbolise their convergence to crossover mobile television and so on.

It was nice to get some personal attention and explanation of the sims build, and though the guided tour is a smooth ride (available in English, Dutch and French), it's a bit of a long stretch at 5 minutes.

Finally there's a maze which will probably take about 10 minutes to figure out first time, top time right now is 2:07. Fastest labyrinth killer will receive some great freebees, as long as they're Belgian residents.

Now, shortly on the build itself. It's a decent build, no prim-jitter and nice fresh colorings. However, while I dig their philosophy on convergence, there's something missing. It misses immediate active participation or something I just can't put my finger on directly.

Last detail is that Belgacom has hired a Belgian Concent Creation company... I forgot to ask which.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Belgacom%20I/128/128/0

Roland Garros at IBM7

Well, tennis season is starting again and this time it's Roland Garros, the French Open that's started. IBM is the tournaments techsponsor, so they've set up a miniature centrecourt at their IBM7 sim.

New, and innovating? Not really. I've seen images of Wimbledon and the ABN AMRO tournament (Rotterdam) before in Second Life. But it is good to see IBM is staying tuned to RL.

A closer look at Intel

After the press conference finished (about 10 SLT or 19.00 CET) I had to relog since I'd frozen and couldn't move. My SL Client was pushing my (intel CPU) to the limits. Here's a few screeners from the sim:

These two small thumbs are about the whole story. The sim isn't a fancy build. It has the following features:

1. Development Room
2. Showcase
3. Conference Area
4. Sandbox

The larger buildings are for conferencing and showcasing, smaller stands are to get the community involved, through blogs and movies. Honestly I liked Intel better at the OCC or the Live without Boundaries sims which had gotten my hopes up for this one.

Intel's new HQ

Today's the day of a new Intel sim opening up. At exactly 9.a.m (18.00 C.E.T.) the sim will open up with a press conference. In april I reported that Intel geared up with several new sims being under construction, and before that I've blogged on the OCC and Live without Boundaries theme sims by Intel. First on the spot today were the gang from Things to Do., rallying at the New Business Horizon sim.

Right after we went over to the Intel site, which was soon filled to the brim with 53 people.

We were urged to find a seat, but many of us didn't dare move a hair with this visitor load. From the press comes a nice pun that Intel believes itself to be part of the "core of Second Life" and they see SL as "a wonderfull place to explore and engage" and so on.

The sim is build by Millions of Us and will act as Intels new virtual HQ.

update 18:45 CET 9.45 SLT

According to Intel's General Manager "Second Life is not the ultimate environment, but it's a start" Oh, yeah, they're still talking about getting the Developer community involved and "Help shape the future". I guess I'm not really a press conference type of guy, but it's very rude to slip away. Hope to get to do some networking in a bit.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Intel%20Software%20Network/156/83/90

Real Life Cities 7: Munich

The Germans are coming! Second Life is hot in Germany, where it currently sees the fastest growth in registrations. This also reflects on the arrival of a of new german builds. The great city of Munich is such a new sim under construction.

It still is under construction, but already interesting enough to blog it, although the first sight didn't trigger that idea. The first thing I saw was a stand with the well-known German beer pot.

The sim is covered with a simplified map of Real Life Munich and it seems to be the intend to build an exact copy.

In the second sim work is actually being done. Rough outlines of the buildings are quite decently build and also the texturing is coming along on various buildings as well. This will sure be a sim to visit when it is complete.

The detail and complexity of this build will be challenging and the possible showstopper in this build will be the time needed to stream all textures to the SL client.

Developments can be monitored at the website Muenchen-SecondLife.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Muenchen/101/98/63

Things to do on the Track

Following yesterday's post on this blog today's Things to Do event took place at the ING Renault F1 track and saw hectic moments.

It's official that (metaverse blogger and group initiator) 57's virtual driving license has been revoked for trashing and drunk driving. The wild miss Gillian Waldman was disqualified for several false starts and certain bends caused real havoc.

As to testdriving to sim, I noticed that at some points the track wasn't properly laid, at one point you couldn't get back on the track once you were out of it. Also, the go-karts are very direct in steering, causing some impressive moves to be observed.

Today was ladies night however, and if you ever thought your wife looked handsome with her helmet on.... well, Misacha Vaughan looked stunning. I'd like to see that more in F1 racing.
If you like things to do, search for the group and team up!

Skynews hits the virtual sky

Yesterday saw the opening of yet another media corp to Second Life, this time it's Sky News. And like Channel 4 it is a Rivers Run Red production, so I was wondering what they'd come up with this time, since the Channel 4 release earned heavy criticism in the blogger community.

Many people I've talked to say a Real Life company should go for a daring, innovative design in a virtual environment and not stick to a RL representation. In this case, they're absolutely wrong. The Sky News sim is rather RL-like, but works a lot better than the C4 sim I just can't relate to.

The Sky sim consist of a large complex in which various stages are set for talkshows, news and weather presentations which could well be very much alike their RL stage. There's a lot to do to, explore and enjoy at the sim, or as Nic at KZero puts it:

"The main aspect of the venue is the virtual Sky News Centre, complete with an audio feed from the RL centre as well as streaming video of Sky News show on the plethora of screens and monitors. Part of the roadmap for this venue is the re-creation of news events and stories and this will be the sweetspot for enabling residents to engage and interact with the news - this is what metaverse marketing applications is all about : Engagement. Another key success factor for metaverse marketing is integration and there’s lots of it here."

The opening of the sim coincides with the Guardian Hay Festival, which explains the extra setup at the back of the main building (picture left). A last nice feat of the sim is a number of fake decorums, like the entrance of 10 Downingstreet (picture right) which leaves you wondering how they do it in RL, especially if you've seen the Wag the Dog movie.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Sky%20News/117/123/23

Renault Italia and ING Renault Formula 1

First of my Renault stops is the Renault Italia sim which is still under construction. The sim is largely build by Virtual Italian Parks. This site is still heavily under construction, so I was amazed I got in. Only the parcel was set to limited access.


being a Renault driver myself (yeah, I love Jag better but my wallet doesn't) I was interested to see what they've come up with. The sim is going to be the launch of the new restyled Twingo, which makes Renault the umpteenth Createur d'Automobile who uses SL as new model promo platform.

Aside from the Twingo show there's gonna be a racetrack and some other things that I can't see yet. Why Renault needs another racetrack is unknown to me, as they've got their testdrive lanes laid out at the ING Renault F1 sim as well.

update

Tonight Zoe Visconti of Virtual Italian Parks contacted me to give some additional info. The sim is going to open next thursday (31 may 2007) at 21.00 CET, there will be an opening party and free twingos to ride on the track (and gadgets as well).

SLURL : http://slurl.com/secondlife/Renault%20Italia/128/128/0

So, logically. the second stop was the ING Renault Formula 1 site. Since it's a F1 day it seemed to be a good day to visit the sim, but it was rather empty. The build looks good though. At the moment I was visiting and snapshotting the sim, Rivers Run Red CEO Justing Bovington contacted me and we had a nice conversation on various RRR builds.

I noticed that the Renault Italia and the F1 sim were quite similar to eachother, but according to Justin that was purely coincedence. Renault Italia and Renault / ING F1 are completely different entities. According to Justin the F1 sim is a softlaunch and "activity is coming up, they have to run the Monaco event too as in the RL one."


All in all, I totally like this build. More details on the build can be found at KZero's excellent blog.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/ING%20Renault%20F1/128/128/0

Channel 4 update

One last interesting piece of information on the Channel 4 sim, which I -and a few other bloggers didn't particularly like is that the"channel 4 build is interesting, its going to change a lot :)"

Real Life Cities 6: Augsburg

In Real Life, the german city of Augsburg was founded in 15 BC "in the reign of Roman emperor Augustus as a garrison called Augusta Vindelicorum." and opens up in virtual Second Life may 29th. Upon teleporting into the double sim I immersed in sight of the Augsburg Town Hall.

From upfront it looks quite decent, but from aside it looks a wee bit out of proportion. Around this landmark are several typical German houses of varying quality.

Throughout the center are stands and stages set up for the coming opening party, with a line-up of (to me) unfamiliar German artists. As with most virtual city replica's (or if you like VCR, since that term has become obsolete) the majority of the sim is reserved for shopping to get some return on investment (ROI).

In this particular case I doubt a ROI will be met, because the build itself doesn't attract me enough to come back since most of the sim is made up of the usual mainland ghetto-builds, and especially the second sim, Augsburg City II is entirely reserved for gaming and rentals with some luxury homes and casino's.

In short, I would have liked to see the Augsburger Dom (cathedral), the medieval Fünfgratturm tower, or I would even have settled for the Machinenfabrik Augburg which merged with the factory in Nurnberg to form the MAN factory where mr. Diesel himself pioneered the Diesel engine.

In short:

+ The Townhal is a decent build, though with few detail in interior decoration
- Missing a consistent theme and no other Augsburger landmarks
- Too many ready made, cheap builds scattered over the sim


SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Augsburg%20City/128/128/0

Real Life Cities 5: Salzburg

Upon entering the virtual representation of Salzburg I ended at the side of the sim, showing a row of houses build next to a little stream. I intended to fly to one of the landmarks to start shooting snapshops and start bloggin, but this is as good a point as any to start.

The city of Salzburg is one of Austria's best known towns, and
"... is on the banks of the Salzach river, at the northern boundary of the Alps. The mountains to Salzburg's south contrast with the rolling plains to the north. The closest alpine peak – the 1972 m Untersberg – is only a few kilometers from the city center. The Altstadt, or "old town", is dominated by its baroque towers and churches and the massive Festung Hohensalzburg"

Well, the Wikipedia entry is in line with the sim's build. The little stream I started near is the Salzach and the castle Hohen Salzburg is dominating the far end. On the other end of the sim, across the town, snowcovered mountains rise, hosting one of Austria's most touristic attractions: Skiing and Snowboarding ramps.

One of the good things of this sim is the festivity calendar, giving a good overview of ongoing and special events. The town is primarily dominated by the Salzburg Cathedral
"The Salzburg Cathedral (German: Salzburger Dom) is a 17th century baroque cathedral in the city of Salzburg, dedicated to Saint Rupert of Salzburg. It is the site of Mozart's baptism."

Throughout the sim statues can be found, and though they are part of Salzburgs RL view, these could have been left out. Like most trees and other statues in Second Life it's made of two texturized prims with a lot of tranparancy, but it is hard to get a good view of this. A suggestion would be to try and replace them with sculpted prims, a feature added in last weeks release.

Finally, as with most real life cities in Second Life, there's a lot of shopping to be done. Aside from the cathedral, the rest of the old town is set up as shopping center.

A short wrap up:
+ The sim represents most of Salzburg's best known features
+ A lot of events are organised in the sim, as well as hosting a number of ongoing events.
- The statues are too 2D and should be replaced with sculpties as soon as possible.
- The build is quite crude, especially the castle.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Salzburg/128/128/0

SL Event overkill

Tonight it's been crazy. I've been buzzed by everybody telling me they're at the greatest event of this weekend... I'm getting a little crazy here. This is definately gonna be my last blog for tonight.

Online Machima Film Event

After visiting the Venice opening, I briefly visited the Online Machinima Festival, which showed a number of Machinima Films. With Machinima being a rather niche corner of the Second Life community, the crowd consisted of various illustrious residents.

Elf Haven Contest dance & music

Then I popped it for a quick glance at the Elfen festivities on the great Elfen Contintent to enjoy a whole different feast. Since I was just coming from a classy event, my 'black tie' ensemble fell slightly out of tune. With over 50 residents attending it was a wee bit laggy though.

World Park opening; World Trade Center and Live Music

Finally I shot in for the opening of the World Park, holding the World Trade Centers. A quick survey learned that it isn't the first sim to hold the WTC, but rather the 3rd or 4th. However, the sim was neatly build, but enourmously laggy due to the more than 75 residents listening and dancing to great live music.


Well, I guess I'll call it a day today ;)

Real Life Cities 4: Paris 1900

As I blogged about the new real life cities coming to SL I mentioned that I'd forgotten to blog Paris, so it's high-time to correct that omission. Browsing through my snapshots I noticed I also forgot to snapshot the Moulin Rouge, so I decided to go back, which was a good thing. The first thing I noticed was that it is expanding. I now noticed it is a 4-sim build, with the humoungous Eiffel Tower spread over all of them, neatly joint in the corners.

Technically this is a very hard thing to do, builds overlapping sim borders usually need to be quadruppaly reinforced to ensure you're not falling through at the edges. The other thing I noticed was that a sim called "Champs Elysees" is added... Seems like they're expanding.

The first thing I saw when entering the sim was a lot of ground. It took a while for the textures to stream, and then I saw I was at the metro station. The build here is a little primitive. I walked up the stairs, leaving the metro station and walked into the "Moulin Rouge", the fabled Parisian nightclub from the early 1900's.

Since it spreads four sims, the Eiffel Tower needs quite a bit of time to render, as well as the rest of the sim, though the build is a lot less detailed than that of Venice, at times even a bit crude. The sims top attraction is the parachute dive from the top of the Eiffel tower, but there are a number of nice shops to be found as well, especially on the Champs Elysees extention, which end in Paris' dreaded roundabout at l'Arc the Triomphe.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Paris%201900/128/128/0

More arrivals: Renault, Accenture, Maldive Embassy

Last night I started a little mailing in order to try and get some of the great SL bloggers together for a bloggerconvention and logged in early this morning to see where we'd ended up. When I logged in, Nic of the outstanding KZero blog was already on. My netvibe SL feed page rang out time and again as he was blogging like a madman.

Also new to (or opening in) SL this week are:

• Renault Italia
• Renault / ING formula 1 (blogged here earlier)
• Accenture
• Maldive Embassy.

I really do have some caching up to do

Real Life Cities 3: Venice

Today I got back just in time to visit the Venice opening party at Venice island. After typing Venice into the map I TP'd in... and went down the drain immediately. The teleport ended in a closed cellar, filled with water. There was barely room for me to keep my head above water and breathe...

At first I thought it would be a grand entry, like at Paris 1900 (which I forgot to blog, so soon to come), where the TP hub is set in an underground /metro station. But it wasn't. It was just a cellar, and no way out. People above my head were talking Italian so I couldn't make sense.

I TP'd to the neigbouring Veneto sim and flew back in. The Venice sim takes quite a while in rendering, needing loads of custom textures to stream to the client, but it's worth it. The sim is filled with small piazza's and palazzio's that show some of the grandeur of this fabled merchant city of old. Some of the texturing is absolutely beautiful, but in some places it looks a bit too 2D.

The San Marco, the bridges and canals are all very recognisable, just a bit "condensed" at times, as Aleister put it when we discussed it. Hether and tether you'll find some shops and other signs that look a little out of place, and from a commercial point of view I doubt they'll be succesful, being hard to find in the sim. But maybe Italians are used to that.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Venice%20Italy/128/128/0

Real Life skyline

May seems to be the month of Real Life cities coming to Second Life. In the past I've blogged about Amsterdam, Zoetermeer and visited Paris 1900, but forgot to blog it. Last month we saw an excellent Salzburg sim go live and this month is a true avalanche with sims of Manchester, Munich, Augsburg and Venice.

My good friend Aleister wrote a strong piece on the Manchester kick-off, though he was rather disappointed. It seems judging Real Life cities entering Second Life is a little complicated. A businesscase or requirement set that we can put to business sims doesn't work out. Do we have to judge them by innovative design? Certainly not, it needs to be as close to Real Life as possible.
Yet when a virtual representation for RL Companies is a bore, and a must for RL cities, it's not the sole requirement. The Virtual Tourism market needs a little extra, some attractions that make people visit. Sweden and the Maldives have set up their embassy in Second Life, but I doubt that will do the trick. The City of Berlin (new Berlin sim, not Berlin) is hosting a cross reality / simulcast event with the "Festival of Cultures", running may 25th to 28th, which is a good start to show the world what's going on in your city.

Here's a few pics:

Augsburg City:
Opening: May 29 Location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Augsburg%20City/128/128/0

Swedish Embassy:
Opening: May 30 Location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Swedish%20Institute/128/128/0

Venice Italy:
Opening: May 26 Location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Venice%20Italy/128/128/0

Philips Launchparty

The Dutch electroniscs and household mogul Philips is finally opening up its sim in Second Life. For months the sim stood out there in the Rivers Run Red area, frustrating bloggers time after time by not opening up its doors. Finally the wait is over...

Friday, june 1 is their official kick-off, with several freebees thrown in. .. "PHILIPS Design have launched in SL with a promise to work with residents more actively than many RL firms have managed in the past" reports Billbo Winkler in the popular weekly "The Avastar" newspaper.

Responsible for the build is (a.o.) Wendyy Mahana, who's also involved with the development of our Virtual Holland, so there's a definate Rivers Run Red involvement.

Sogeti Netherlands receives Innovation Award

"INFORMATICA WORLD 2007, Orlando, Florida, May 1, 2007—Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA), a leading provider of data integration software, today announced the winners of the Informatica 2007 Innovation Awards at Informatica World 2007"

The Innovation Awards is one of the most prestigious prices to be won in the IT sector and this year's winning combination in the category Data Migration was a tie in. One of the two winning entries was the migration of Air France / KLM Cargo performed by Sogeti Netherlands while using its innovative Mikado migration approach.

In the Netherlands we alsways look towards the US of A when it comes to innovators, but this years list was going Dutch, giving accolades to Rabobank (Broader Data Integration), Achmea / Atos Origin (Integration Competency).

The award is one of many for Sogeti Netherlands which is constantly looking for ways to improve IT services and is responsible for many trendsetting IT servicing innovations, like TMAP (testing) and Inframe (Infrastructure Management)

Full press release here

MAS : Multi Agent System

One of the great things in the information age is...well, information. But it's getting too much too handle. It's only now that I've read up on the Automatiserings Gids, a leading Dutch IT mag which published an interesting story in it's February 2006 issue which features a story on the synergy between new grid technology and semantic web interfaces enabling core processes to be hanbled more efficiently, according to Dr. Chris van Aart.


Dr. van Aart is a specialist in Artificial Intelligence, doing both research and teaching at the University of Amsterdam (UvA).


"One of the challenges of Artificial Intelligence and in particularly Intelligent Agents is to construct collection of computational problems solver that work together to achieve a set of goals. Issues related to this activity are co-ordination, cooperation and interaction.My research investigates theories from the field of organizational science in order to apply these on organizations of computational problem solvers. Considered theories are Scientific Management (Taylor, 1911), Classical management theory (Fayol, 1949) and Organizational Design (Mintzberg, 1979)."


The great thing is that he's now a fine colleague at Sogeti and on board of the Second Life core team ready to put some intelligence into our plans. Switching back and forth between his two jobs he is dragging us into the mire of Multi Agent Systems in combination with Second Life.

Intergalactic news (2)

Here's another update on news from the vast expanse of networked virtual environments (NVE's) or simply called virtual worlds.

IBM

Big Blue is looking at the Torque game engine, proud product of the Garage Gamers as booster for their virtual escapades. IBM is rapidly advancing inte Virtual Revolution with a stronghold in Secondlife and in creating their own intraverse. They are also looking into the Multiverse which is still in Beta. This adaptiveness is surprising for a moloch from the days of the Digerati, the old school internet pioneers and is earning IBM's guru Irv Wladawsky a true nomination for the Metarati awards.

Shanda Entertainment

The Chinese corp Shanda Entertainment is digging into the world of Massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs. Shanda is China's largest entertainment and online gaming provider, with titles such as The Legend of Mir II, The World of Legend, The Sign, The Age, Magical Land and Dungeons & Dragons Online.

Shanda's move heats up the Asian Virtual World competition as 3pointD reports on nve's named HiPiHi and Splume.

Sony / Pinguin Club

The Sony entertainment group is aiming to take over the Pinguin Club according to Mashable with an bid close to $ 450.000 USD. The club is an online gaming world for children which is seeing an even more spectacular growth than Second Life.

The Canadian firm New Horizons launched the club in October 2005 and it has since grown to 4.5 million visitors in March 2007 and is subscription based. To Sony it may well be an interesting new marketing channel for their games, and perhaps merge with their Playstation Home, an alledgely superior virtual platform that will crush Second Life (according to Mashable)

Linden gets a light

One of the funny things of taking a 1-week holiday is that it seem like you've got a year of catching up to do once you get back. One of last weeks noteworthy tidbits is a post in the Boston Globe that Linden Labs purchased Windward Mark Interactive LLC, a Waltham company founded in 2003 by five Harvard University students.

So what do the windward souls do? They're in the business of creating highly realistic three-dimensional environments for use in computer games and flight simulators, and lighting is one of their strong points.

There are people out there that look down on Second Life as a "game with bad graphics", and true enough, it's not as slick as World of Warcraft and Cory Ondrejka, Linden's CTO believes that making the environment more visually realistic will attract and hold more users.

However, there are serious points to validate a "crude" graphic engine. Linden's USP is that Second Life is a world with easy tooling, generating vast amounts of user generated content. Sculpted prims and enhanced graphics may 'beautify' the world, but it will require more skills and perhaps even put more stress on datatraffic.

And then there's the Project Open Letter to remember. Linden's key focuspoint should be scaling, stability and adding test strategy and release management before getting into introducing all kinds of new slick things.

At youTube there's a vid of a new Second Life sky to demonstrate the power of Windward.

Chung boosts virtual finance

Earlier this month I've blogged about Anshe Chung getting a banking licence for the Entropia universe. It seems like that this was just a starter for our Metaverse Mogul, according to a press release on the AC Studio website:

"Anshe Chung Studios is preparing to launch a virtual financial market, financial products and a set of services t