Monday, July 23, 2007

SLBoutique ReRezzed

For quite some time the SLBoutique has been a topshopping site for Second Lifers next to the SL-Exchange. As the Second Life economy grows, these shopsites grow accordingly. Most started over a private initiative and SL-Exchange evolved into what I'd call a typical Open-Source community design.
The SLBoutique was taken over by the Electric Sheep Company several months ago and was pretty mothballed due to ESC's neglect, and in its latest design it's just pushing the ESC logo and brandname.
Today, July 23rd, the curtain falls for the SLBoutique as it will be taken offline to return in the shape of Shop OnRez come thursday. In the meantime its content will be migrated.
The Shop OnRez previews I've seen look very promising, giving it an overall slick Web 2.0 look and feel. I've never been much of an outworld shopper -primarily due to crappy navigation on these shopping sites - This one I might check out.


Last friday, ESC's Giff Constable promoted the new OnRez shop at the weekly Geek Meet. In the wrap up I've published just a part of Giff's comments on OnRez, here's some more:
"To give you a quick intro, The Electric Sheep company has long been known as a consulting company for virtual worlds, but our business goals always included building a consumer software business. Our goal is to create technologies to make virtual worlds easier to use and make information flow more efficiently.
We are launching a new brand around these consumer technologies called OnRez, with the first step launching next Tuesday. Shopping has always been important to us, which is why we bought SLBoutique in early 2006, but while we focused on our consulting business SLBoutique was neglected.
That changed early this year when we looked closely at the technology and decided we needed to overhaul the entire SLBoutique system. On tuesday we're launching Shop OnRez. Our goal overall is to make shopping easier wherever you are, and to make life a lot easier for the small businesses of SL.
We've made a lot of changes to make the whole thing more robust, to make deliveries more stable, and the whole thing better functioning. SL has some tricky things around object deliveries that took some finagling.
What really interests me though is how we're trying to bridge the Web and SL (as some others are as well). We provide a single place for a seller to load their goods, we now provide scripted vendors so they can sell those goods on the Web or in their stores. We provide search capabilities so that you can walk into a store and search right for the item you want.
The in world shopping can take the form of a scripted vendor specific to a seller, or a general OnRez shopping HUD, or a shopping kiosk you can put up. Frankly I view HUDs as rather crude, so we're also working on the open source SL client to see how we can improve shopping by embedding functionality right in the experience, but HUDs are the best we have right now!
A HUD is built on prims and LSL and it's text display and input capabilities are rough, to be extremely kind, I'd like to see more widget type functionality but that's not a tomorrow thing. we're months away from that but my view of all of this is that we need Linden Lab to improve the SL performance and scalability -- make what we have now better, but we also need to see innovation on top of this platform.

In a few weeks we'll also be relaunching the second life search engine. Linden Lab is also working on one, and I look forward to what they come up with, but we are going to go ahead and try to put out some better Web search capabilities than currently exists right now."

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Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Transformers Exclusive

SundayI blogged on the arrival of the Transformers into Second Life as part of Paramount Pictures campaign to promote the new Transformer movie.




Tonight Liam Kanno of the V3 group was kind enough to give me a personal guided tour of the Transformer sim at Sector 7.

"This build was done by 12 members of the V3 Group team for the Picture Production company, for Paramount Pictures and took 2.5 weeks to complete. The day after the V3 Group completed the Die Hard 4 sim we moved on to this build."

Again we started on top of the dam, which is based on the Hoover dam in Nevada and sector 7 concept in the movie.

"We decided to used the default setting of the sim (The cloud cover) to mask the views since we couldnt create all of Hoover dam, we felt the fog and mist will help create a mood."

The build is impressive and complicated, nearly using all available prims. Was it just a coincidence that they’ve managed the build, or was it pre-planned, I asked.

"One of the tricky aspects of this build is when Paramount makes some of their pictures there is no master over arching seemless plan of layout... i.e. they would film the top of the dam and film the stairway scene in Hollywood and the elevator scene perhaps somewhere else and. yes. during the Bumbleebe Avatar contruction, we had to build that on one of our other sims but otherwise it was well planned.”

Through good cooperation with Paramount V3 managed to put it together in 2.5 weeks but
“In terms of the movie translation to 3d. when it comes to making a movie process seemless in 3-D there are alot of gaps therefore we have to use alot of creative licence to fill in the blank spots and get it approved by paramount. As we received assets from ILM and Paramount we got more accurate, but never had to do a rework. The discussion was mainly about... "How will the rooms be layed out., or how will we solve Bumblebees 16 foot height issue." and how do we put more emphasis on the Megatron room.”

The Megatron room is the press room where the movie junket with Michael bay and 4 of the other main talenSt from the movie took place (prerecorded interview can be seen on www.slcn.tv). Megatron itself is a little different from the original cartoon.

“yes, quite, we put quite a bit of emphasis on creating mood with sound . We had several builders in here create parts ranging from pumps to Megatron sculpties, to structures etc. The majority of it was orchestrated by Kelly Emms the V3 Producer.
Building megatron in SL is almost insanity due ot his organic design. We had to do a combination of 2d art with sculpties, and basic prims to give the presence of him and we put more emphasis on mood and lighting then hyper accuracy. Due to the time constraint we had to focus more on the mood but if we had an extra week. we would have finished him as a full prim sculpture.”

One of the hottest items in the build is the Bumblebee avatar freebee.

“We feel that the sim is just an anchor to a marketing campaign, but the Avatar is the viral aspect. Bumblebee was the first robot seen in the movie, and had the most human likeness. We are working on other avatars at the moment. Avatars are excellent marketing tools in SL since they spread quickly across sims.”

One of the hardest thing to put into perspective was the all-spark cube;

”The allspark cube was the most tricky since we recieved assets 1.5 weeks into the build and we saw that the allspark cube was huge in the movie which we could not recreate in SL since we try to keep certain builds within 64 meters so all parts draw in at the lowest setting so in order for us to make this space appear much larger, we made all the objects in this room 1/4 scale.”

There are a number of rooms inside the build that do not fulfill a utilitarian need, but help to create mood and give the impression of the movie. As the Picture Production company puts heavy emphasis on the "art of the film".

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Sunday, June 24, 2007

Transformers launch in Second Life

Early june I reported that there weren't enough bots in Second Life as it is. After the copybots and landbots Hollywood thinks it's time Second Life sees the Autobots and Decepticons coming. Hollywood kindly asked me to hold my thoughts for a while, but now it's an official release.

The moviepromo is build by Silverscreen (who are also responsible for Die Hard 4 and a few other goodies) and is build in the sim Sector 7. It's an enormous build and they had less than 400 prims left when they'd finished.


The first pic is a Bumblebee avatar, though contrary to the original series it ain't a beetle, but it's a real American Chevy (must be a sponsor thingy). The second one is Megatron captured in the deeps of this huge build.

The build is actually a sort of double-decker sandwhich with dark sci-fi autobot HQ looks at the bottom with lots of tunnels, (press) rooms and such. The top level is the more cityscaped area with a huge dam - a centerpoint in the upcoming movie.


I was planning to say something sentimental on the Transformers, but it would be a copy of Moo Money's remarks at the Second Life Insider, so here's her view:
"I'm not much of an action fan, but Transformers is a throwback to my childhood, so it's a must see for me. When the time came, Maxwell Lisle appeared to moderate the event and the journey began. First up were Michael Bay, executive producer of the film, and Lorenzo di Bonaventura, producer. After that, some of the cast members were interviewed, including Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, and Tyrese Gibson. The film premieres on July 2nd, so don't miss it!"

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Thursday, June 07, 2007

Hollywood bots to invade Second Life

Last week we saw Bruce Willis (in some blogs said to be Yippie Kay Ay, or others as Bee Dub) come to Second Life to promote his new movie, Die Hard 4 (blogged here).

Hollywood now has a turn on on Second Life and has decided that Second Life needs more bots. After copybots and landbots and tons of other not so nice spiderthings Second Life is heading for the Autobots and Decepticons as Silverscreen is prepping the SL entrance of the Transformers movie.


update 11 june 2007


It seems I was a little ahead of the official press. I've been kindly asked to hold down on this post for a while.

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Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Metaversecrawler

The Electric Sheep Company is getting ambitious. They've launched a new search service for the virtual world of Second Life today, at search.sheeplabs.com,. The service doesn't depend on users adding their products to the searchengine, but is actively crawling the metaverse for content that is listed for sale. This immediately causes nightmares for those premium account members that couldn't get a hold of a speck of First Land because it was always snatched away by the dreaded landbots.

The service allows avatars to opt out of the system, or to list all items they own, and doesn’t crawl private islands. Results are returned with a teleport link, price, object creator and owner, and description. According to the Sheep, it also puts less load on the system than a single avatar, so it shouldn’t create much lag.

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Tuesday, February 13, 2007

First Land killer for SL

Taken by the endless opportunities for Second Life I upgraded my account to premium about a month ago. One of the benefits is that you can trade.... and are entitled to a speck of dust in the virtual landscape, 512 sq. meter to be precise.

This 1st land comes cheap, at L$ 512,- (Linden Dollar) , so $1 for 1 mtr. whereas normal land now trades at beyond L$20 per meter, and I even saw USD$ 42 /month being asked for a tiny speck of land. So, in order to have yourself a nice little home to start out with, 1st land is a must have.

First Land Catch
However, the catch is: You're entitled to it, but 1st land is not always available. After 1 month of searching I encountered 1 piece of 1st land sofar. And it was sold before I got there. I stuck around though, and within the hour over 200 residents came looking at the speck of land, hoping for their chance to finally own a virtual yard. Each and everyone frustrated that 1st land was hard to come by, and all that sort of stuff.

Last week I spoke to this Linden guy -the one in charge of land sales- and he said that on friday 50 bits of land were made available for 1st land. The time and amount of available land varies daily. All cute and true, but on Friday I was ill and had spend about 8 hours online from bed, regularly hit the search button, but never did it return results for 1st land. In fact, I'm pretty darn sure that from friday till tuesday not a single piece of land has gone up for 1st land.

Virtual Moneymaking Machine
In short, First land is the promise of virtual land accompanied with the disclaimer that it might not be available. Thousands of members have paid for it -paid for Linden to plug in extra hardware, but they don't have to deliver. Wow, this is good marketing! People are paying for something they might never receive. Linden must make millions from idiots like me.

The Dying Grounds
Numerous frustrated paying members have now organised themselves in groups like "First Land Searchers", and are trying to get Linden to deliver. If this group gets organised and more media attention, this will surely have a downcast on Second Life. Will Linden commit suicide on First Land, or not?



Additional Resources:

From Wikipedia:

Land Ownership: Premium members also have the ability to own land (up to 512m2 without additional fees). Owning larger areas of land attracts an increasing additional fee (what Linden Lab calls "tier") ranging from US$5 a month up to US$195 a month for an entire 65,536m2 of land or individual island.[3] [4]

Land sales system: Linden Lab usually sells land in small 512m2 blocks (16 by 32 meters) through its First Land program, or as entire 16 acre (65,536m2) regions. Residents also buy and sell land to other Residents, generally intending to make a profit by selling the plots of land at a price higher than the original purchase cost.

The First Land program is used to reserve small blocks of land for first time land buyers, intending Residents to purchase their first parcel of land below the current market value.[5] This program also serves as an incentive for new Residents with free accounts to upgrade to premium accounts. A Resident pays a fixed fee of L$1 per 1m2 for a 512m2 plot.[5]

These First Land plots are frequently consolidated into larger plots when the original owners sell them to other residents.

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