Glory to the Builders

My previous blogpost, Day of the Greenies ,was the of the official opening of the Greenies Home in Second Life, but not the apotheosis, the masterpiece of this build. A small crowd gathered since Rezzable's founder Right as Rain Rimbaud had niceley build up expectations in the past weeks. Right as Rain Rimbaud:
"we have a new piece from Light Waves. We all cried like little babies when we saw it first time: It is unique in metaverse."

And truly , this 30 prim sculptie is of exceptional quality. Look at the level of detail and shadow. Inside this oversized build the statue doesn't look all that big, but trust me, it's supersized.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Greenies%20Home%20Rezzable/141/16/22

The Greenies go Public

Today I had an exciting talk with Jonathan Himoff, the founder of Rezzable, also known as RightasRain Rimbaud inside Second Life. The company's website itself is empty for now, but he was kind enough to send me the new corporate logo.

Since I posted on the Greenies - the softlaunch, it hit the blogosphere quite massively. Here are some posts:

• Caleb Booker: Rezzable’s Big Gamble
• VintFalken: The Greenies found a Home at Rezzable
• Second Life Insider: The Greenies
• Metaversed: Things to Do visit
• Second Life Crew: Honey, I shrunk the avatars!

The Greenies are getting a buzz. Aside from some criticism and crooky post in the Herald, I've heard nothing but cheers for the Greenies.

Me taken by Verde, one of the candid camera greenies.

Official opening party

Vint Falken wrote on her blog that she met up with a few people on the opening party, but here's the news: The official opening party still has to come!

Rezzable's official Opening Party: July 31st.

There will be a press preview around 12 am SLT and Jon really got me going for this one. There will be reveiled a sculpture of spectaculair nature, one like you've never seen before.

I jumped and said: "lemme see, lemme see", but his answer was: "Sorry mate, you'd be dying knowing and not be able to blog it."

Shortly afterwards there will be the official public launch.

Rezzables Proof of Concept

So, who's behind all of this? Caleb Booker a.k.a Onder Skall asked in his report. Is Rezzable doing this for a company? Who's putting up the cash? I asked Jon if this was a signed contract or just an expensive business card.

The Greenies is a Rezzable sim allright, no contractor, just purely a statement by Rezzable, but not to be viewed as an expensive business card, but their Proof of Concept. Rezzable wants to make sure the (virtual) world knows Rezzable is able to write a new chapter in User Experience.

The chapter will continue, there are more sims coming up!

Rezzable is hiring

Finally, if you're out there thinking "I can do this too!" give RightasRain Rimbaud a call inside Second Life as Rezzible is hiring. Rezzable is a new, small, London based firm with great ideas and projects coming up.

Geek Meet Gadgeteers Edition 2

This week's Geek Meet saw a new Gadgeteer episode with a wide variety of speakers.
Fortunately there were some 'technical issues' that caused sound to be unfavorable. Fortunately since it's easier to blog this way.

First up was Giff Constable, or as you like Forseti Svarog of the Electric Sheep Company on the exciting OnRez shop that's replacing the well known SLBoutique.

"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."

Next up is Metamart's Robbie Kiama, a Geek-Meet regular and dedicated twitterati.

"Let me first tell you about meta mart and how it was started: First of all we are all about making solutions, I hope you will agree with me that back in 2005 it was hard to find stuff in SL because you had to Travel all the places to search for quality items and that's when the idea came - to do a Store that walks up to you and not vice versa. So In 2006 we introduced I think a revolutionary system - Store on a HUD, it was slow and laggy. Since then we have thought aA LOT, did lot of research and figured out - that Search is greatly needed.

In 2007 Januuary we introduced the first Store in a HUD that allows SEARCH, in 2007 march we thought that Comunity is extremely important and introduced MEta MArt with Comunity Ratings. So TODAY we are releasing new solution and I think this will be extremely great for the comunity. I hope you will agree with me - that one of the most fun things in Second Life is Seeing cool places and I think finding one isn't that easy of a task. So we are introducing a new service: metaTravel."

As far as I can tell, I've already got my MetaTravel-guide, Nick Wilson at Metaversed with the Things to Do group, but for people walking around aimlessly in SL, this could be another hit.

Today's third speaker was Anjin Meili, one of the Sculpt guru's of Second Life, driving home a "Sim in a Prim" message.

"When I first jumped on the Grid, I felt that having a model of a parcel I was building on to be highly valuble. My first mapping system first rezzed blocks, 1 for every 4x4 meter parcel, into a chunky lego map looking affair. This was refined to using polygons, but that took two prims for every 4x4 meter parcel. To map a full sim required 10,000 primatives... Not exactly usable for anything more then 'Woohoo!!! Check this out man!'

I recall when I heard about sculpties... I told my wife, Elzbiet, that they would solve my problem. I could use them to create the terrain! I was to young to play on the beta grid though, so had to just wait until they made the main grid. But as soon as they made it, within the first hour, we had our first sculpted maps.

I recall us popping over here to Dr Dobbs island, and using the LSL Logo sandbox to rez a mapping pod and make maps of this Island. The same day Sculpties were released to Second Life. As one cannot make a sculptie on grid, the challange was to provide an easy to use system that integrated with a backend capable of making the finished textures. We worked hard to build such a system, and made the on grid piece so simple, we feel its akin to buying a can of coke. You open the box, pop the top, and when its done, the probe dies and nothing is left but a URL to a finished map sculptie.

Our gadget makes these sculpted maps. Lemmie dig one out and toss it up here real quick. We have a slogan for it: Map your Sim, in just one Prim!"

That was just awesome ! This has to be the übergadget of the year in my opinion, and soon to be available on Electric Sheep's OnRez site for a lousy $L 100.. not even 50 cents in real dough

UPDATE

• Thanks again to NickWilson from Metaversed, Dr. Dobbs and Information Week.
• A full transcript can be found here [PDF].

Sketchup: Sculpties 2 Go

Well, we've reported on Sculpties coming to Second Life, as part of the 'advanced 3D modelling' things to invade Second Life. One of the questions was if this would set homegrown primbuilders back and give professional modellers an edge in using expensive 3D suites, like Maya or 3D Studio Max.

Well, here's the good news: You can start for free! I found out at the Eightbar blog that you can export Google Sketch-up as well: http://eightbar.co.uk/2006/09/29/google-sketchup-second-life-export/

Playboy

Last month I wrote on Playboy entering Second Life, well, earlier this week they opened up with a big party -which of course was a USA timezone thingy, too late for me to stay up.

So I probably missed out on a few lightly clad party-animals, cyberchampaign and some music. No big fuzz then. I popped in for a peek to see how the build was done -though Nic warned me:

"This may not be a venue you would perhaps want to visit from work - it’s got a mature rating and most people there do seem to be wearing very little. Of course, you could always convince your boss (or IT department) that visiting the virtual Playboy mansion is in fact a research exercise into leveraging real world media into virtual worlds. Let me know how that goes."

It became PG rated somehow, Partner Guided that is, as I was having coffee with Mrs. Vee.

The Playboy sim is hard to miss on the map, it's logo stands out very clear and the design of the sim is very handsomely build around the trademark bunny. It's probably no surprise the general look and feel are on the sunny side of life, there's a high beach and coconut tree per square inch ratio. Being there from a business point of few I politely turned down "my Happy Meal" who asked me to dance.

The first thing that got me excited had absolutely nothing to do with Playboys' core business, but with simple communication. This is absolutely one of the very few business sims that has an Event Calender! How hard can it be ;)

The pic on the left is something that would please a colleague of mine, who's been immersed in There.com for several years and showed me several mood-pictures from his favorite places, they always had similar signs. On the right is The Cherries, the club "to enjoy formal elegance in an informal setting." Throughout the sim there's music, not only on the audio stream, but interactive music as well, like this harp. Later we'll get to Drum Mountain and inside the store I also saw a piano.

The Playboy Store

The sim's main event is the Playboy Store, which basically has a platform for clothing and apparel (left) and a hovering platform for Playboy movies and mags. (right)

The Sunny side of life

On the sunny side of life there's the Reed Resort, a Tiki shack with a sculpted bunny hostess and free raft rides" The pic on the right shows me doing a modelling pose, one of the many spread throughout the sim.


Then There's Drum Mountain with all sorts of drums and the Grotto, a lush secluded pool paradise for Hugh's private pool delights.

There are a few more elements on the sim, but I'll leave it up to you to explore. I'm a little pressed for time, so this time I'll skip the surfboards.

A short wrap up; unlike Nic's statement the visitors were quite decently clad (must be since I visited during US office hours) and the overall build is well designed and done. On a few occasions I saw prim jitter and cornerpieces that were slightly off. The most positive thing is that it's varied and has an event calendar.

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

5th Sogeti Workshop

Many bloggers out there have already noticed that Sogeti Netherlands B.V. has a precence in Second Life, some as early as March '07.

During these months Sogeti has primarily focussed on getting to know the world, as it sees Second Life as one of the paths leading to web 3D. In this process a series of workshops has been organised, of which tonights' session was the 5th in 2 months time.

With a headcount of 26 people it was a good session and SL veteran Damanios Thetan gave masterclasses on advanced scripting and prim modeling. A few minor hiccups in SL caused a bit of disturbance in the beginning, such as ghost prims (yes, they're back!) and assetmanagement problems but didn't interfere too much. Here are some pics.

FYI: The next workshop will be held june 26th, access to Sogeti group members only.

If you are an international Sogeti employee, please IM me, we'd like to get in touch.

Sculptie Contest in Second Life

One of the last client releases brought sculpties into Second Life. In short it means you can wrap up all sorts of 3D modelling tricks into one texture and apply it to a single prim making complex objects with less resource usage.

Some sculpties seem to behave a little odd, not everything is known about their behaviour inworld yet but the introduction seems to have two ways to look at it:

1. With access to advanced 3D modelling a whole new group of interested people will be attracted.
2. With access to advanced 3D modelling Second Life runs the risc of commercialisation with big 3D corps coming into SL and taking over from the homegrown primbuilders.

Anyway, there's been a first sculptie contest and the winning entries were lined up in the Luna sim. The Things To Do group got a special treat and the winner Nomasha Syaka showed us around. His winning entry was the horse that was even animated.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Luna/84/68/23