Monday, December 10, 2007

Metaverse Update November / December

Last weeks have been either too busy to blog or too quiet (i.e. I'd taken some days off to spend some quality time with the RL family), so I've lost track of a couple of new metaversal releases. Here's a couple of tidbits from the other blogs:


Ambling in Second Life

Aleister has been quite busy in the past weeks and blogged on a wide variety of topics, here's a few picks:

Another report from Ambling in SL is titled "AOL Pointe RIP", and reads:

AOL opened their AOL Pointe island in Second Life around the start of the year. I rather liked it, as I wrote back in February. However, I heard quite a lot of sniping about the site thereafter, and rarely saw much sign of an emerging SL community. By the end of the Summer I was hearing the damning "ghost sim" in relation to it. So perhaps it should come as no suprise to find that AOL have pulled out of Second Life.According to this AOL blog:

AOL Pointe was built to provide a fun and engaging place for the Second Life community. We created this experience to learn more about virtual worlds and what people like and don't like.

It has been a fun and rewarding ten months, with streaming music (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Linkin Park, etc.), Sticky Wall contests, and Friday nights at Club AOL. We are grateful to the avatars who attended these events, as well as took advantage of places like the Centrifuge Skate Park and the Quiz Time Lounge.

We've gained a lot of insight from our participation in Second Life and we're now refocusing our efforts in virtual worlds. While we have closed AOL Pointe, you will soon be seeing more of AOL products and content across the metaverse. So stay tuned to aol.com for more information about when and where.

AOL are not the first company to follow this route, and certainly won't be the last. I would be curious to know the real story here... or rather, the full story. And what of the future? Will we see AOL3D next year? Or more dabblings in other virtual worlds, such as There or (if you want to go global) HiPiHi?I still liked the AOL build and am sorry to see them go.

AOL isn't the first company to leave Second Life but it's good to know they're still game for virtual worlds.

3PointD Crash

Another departure is even more stunning, as the one time leading metaverse blog 3PointD has collapsed without prior notice. I mean I've been bad at blogging for some time now, but Mark Wallace used to be a paid blogger. I'm wondering how the 3PointD sponsors (Electric Sheep Company) feel about their investment and publicity engine gathering metaversal dust.

KZero's metaversal marketing news

KZero's Nic Mitham must have been bought. His attention and anticipation of the arrival of Football Superstars has been incredible. Another FS snapshot series can be read here: Latest player and environment imagery from Football Superstars.

But there's more to be read at KZero:

You've been Metaversed

Where 3PointD crashed, stocks are going upward for Nick Wilson at Metaversed.com. After a hugely succesfull start up of the Things to Do group (spring 2007) there was the more or less succesfull Grid Safari (summer 2007) and a promising podcast series (Second Rant with Prokofy Neva - which sadly went down the drain. After a slight dip Metaversed came up with another smash hit, the Metanomics sessions (fall 2007) on virtual economy (allthough some argue that this is a sponsor event and you get all sorts of economy and financial hotshots telling you all about how it should be without ever having been in a virtual world themselves).

Latest addition to the Metaversed event line-up is the VBI sessions, the Virtual Business Innovators (winter 2007) which focusses on the native metaverse content creators and innovators, the "Virtual Brands" as KZero would call them. Too bad I missed the first session.

There's a downside to this though, as there's no longer room for fun sessions like the Geek Meets (not even the Gadgeteer sessions) because it's no longer attractive (sponsorwise). That's a problem when you have to make a living of blogging and depending on sponsorships. I can blog, be critical, have fun and not wonder if I can buy dinner tomorrow. Anyway, it just takes away a bit of the fun and puts a slight ? behind "objective journalism"

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Friday, July 06, 2007

Eco Savvy Eolus

Although I was stressed because of my doubledate (which later evolved into a triple and even quadruple date), tonight's main venue was the sneak preview of Eolus One.

The best way of introducing Eolus is by quoting another excellent Ugotrade post:
"I met Eolus McMillan from Implenia on Second Life yesterday. And, I heard the extraordinary story of how creative minds from different backgrounds, IBM, SAP, Wago, Zumtobel and Implenia amongst others, have come together to make a major leap towards 3D internet. The fruits of this collaboration will be unveiled on July 6th, on Second Life. The picture above shows a birds eye view of EOLUS One on Second Life.

The most important aspect of this breakthrough is the EOLUS focus on Real Life and Second Life interactions that serve to make a better world - addressing many aspects from CO2 Reduction, Energy Management, Health, to Education, Collaboration , Networking, and more."


After this excellent blog, the story was quickly picked up by Nick Wilson of Metaversed who quickly arranged a podcast interview to give us a lowdown, followed up by today's Things to Do outing.





















Our host was Eolus McMillan, or Oliver Goh gave us the grand tour of the site, which started at the museum:

"Here you can see the story of how we came up with the idea of Eolus One. It basically started one evening at a European computer exhibition. Ansi and myself met there. She had a booth at the IBM stand showing digital divergence and I was there for the energy management part.

We met one evening and found that we had a common vision to merge the projects and we sketeched out a plan on a napkin, you can see it in the corner. The idea was to bring partners from cross industries together to form a think tank."

Well, on the pics below, you can see that it worked out, there are many well known names participating in this project.

"In this building we have many aspects of every day life that we cover shopping on the first floor an exhibtion/ innovation area in the second offices in the thirs together with residential and an executive floor. Behind me you see a model of a house (still in the museum), a house that I live in in RL. The house can be fully controlled from SL"



















When we came to the control room, Oliver showed us what he meant by controlling his house from Second Life.

"What you see here it the control center of Eolus One. It is actually tied to a number of rl buildings. The idea here is to show how companies can improve Facilities management services
to make the processes more efficient and improve the failure rate.


I will be able to show you the technical parts when the exhibtion opens (which should be open by the time this blog is done). The system is linked in to ERP2005 (SAP) and the whole maintenance process is shown here. You can monitor the hvac systems, change schedules, programm the building automation system and so on. The idea of the control room is that it knows the identiy of the avatar and represents the data in the context of this person. So for example if a finance person sits here he would receive other info on the screens as a technical person"

We're closing in on 7-7-7, Earth Day and Eolus is one more climate savvy project trying Second Life as stage. Yesterday I blogged on the Spanish getting climate savvy in SL as well, and today Philips was giving out energy low lamps.

However, Eolus does hold some extraordinaire potential in making real and virtual worlds interact. This is a show to watch!

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

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Tuesday, July 03, 2007

3D Business Search Directory

Tonights Things To Do was all about the introduction of a new tool in Second Life called Business Link.

It is quite a cool new system, created by Tue Turok, and is basically a 3D business directory that aims to help Second Life residents find businesses without running into crappy, sloppy sexadvertisements and invalid locations.

Although it has much of the functionality you'd expect to find in a classic web directory, there are some interesting web2.0 tie ins.
Tonights Demo was a square setup with a search cube centered in the middle, surrounded by four walls of billboards. Once you select your category in the center, the walls around you will display the results.
Each screen is divided into several areas:

1. Top area for products
2. Center Area for Logo and Landmark
3. Lower Left for online/ofline status vendor and
4. Lower Right for website and other stuff

It's a little early to tell if this is going to be the next big SL tool since it's just launched and the directory has to be filled yet. A good thing to take into consideration might be KZero's thoughts on "Why Billboards don't work in Second Life" Normal Billboards will surely not work for Real Life brands trying to get people to visit their sim or website, but in this case it might work for the Metabrands.

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Monday, July 02, 2007

Sistine Chapel

Second Life seems to be a fine place for preserving Italian art and architecture. After the wonderfull sims of Venice and Tuscany, now there's the Sistine Chapel, brought to us by the students of Vassar College, a highly selective, residential, liberal arts college located in the heart of the Hudson Valley in New York.


Tonight at the Things to do you can get a tour and learn how it was done (1 PM SLT)
SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Vassar/128/128/0

Late Nite update

Here's some pics from the things to do (churches always look better with people in it)



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Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Sim in a Box

Building a proper sim takes time, a whole lot of time, unless you are a master builder like Lordlfy. But if you're just that average kind of bloke who barely scraped together the money to buy a complete sim and you want to make money from renting out property, you'll want it up and running smooth and (especially) fast.


So your sim is in and you want to rent out as soon as possible, since you don't have Anshe's wallet to be able to leave it unused for a year or so. Monthly tiers can be a killer to many starters. For those the Sim in a Box might be a very good solution that can jumpstart your sim.
The Things to Do group got a demo today of how to build a sim in 5 minutes. Well, it works.
Though I'm not really charmed. I like mine with a little more labour-of-love touch than what this instant-sim HUD does.
However, from a technical point of view, I think this is a big step forward. Predefine content and make it rapidly deployable, auto rezzing your inventory might be huge timesavers.

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Saturday, June 16, 2007

VeeJay's Facelift

Okay, in my previous post I blogged about the Cyberextruder's sim in which the company found another way to use its high tech facial recognition system. It's a fully automated system that scans a photograph and maps it in a texture. Everything else in the sim is just for the show, but makes up for a good laugh.


After the virtual processing tour I received a purchase number to go to the website and upload my picture. I send in just an ordinary pasport pic (the one you see in the final result pic) and here's what their software came up with:
So that's me huh?

And here's the final result. I think the texture is quite okay, I'm just having a hard time getting the shape of my head right... Guess I'm just having an impossible face there.
Well, you'll be the judge. Spot the difference I'd say, so I can tweak a little more.

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Thursday, June 14, 2007

Cyberextruder's Facelift shop

Here's another episode in the rise of the Metabrands as Cyberextruder comes to Second Life with a new über-cool Second Life service. One of the things I've noticed over the past months in Second Life is than many people are paying a lot of attention to their looks, some painstakingly tweaking their face until it does resemble their real life appearance.
Up till now it has been hard to get your real life face texturised and mapped on your face. I've experimented a little, but it would take a skilled person to make it look good, but ata Avatar Island you'll get it done the cyberway... automated laser surgery in freeky chairs ;)
Here's the island which has the main Laboratory and some free vendor sites for related avatar business, one of them is Cryogen Labs where you can pimp the rest of your avatar.


Well, mighty thanks to 57 who organised a trip to Avatar Island for the Things To Do group and got us free surgery (normal price at about l$ 2400, so close to 10 US dollar).
In normal plastics you're face swells up, gets bloody and messy and you're absolutely not allowed to laugh, talk cry, shout get angry or whatever. At Cyberextruders'nothing went really wrong, except SL went haywire, constant client crashes and forced client updates didn't really better my mood, so I barely dared look in the mirror.

Okay, SL is quite buggy'right now and is taking huge amounts of memory so I won't get into the report on my face job. That will have to wait until tomorrow.

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Monday, June 11, 2007

Virtual Tourism: Chichén Itzá

Today's Things to Do outing is a trip to virtual Mexico, commissioned by the Mexican Tourist board and opened up yesterday. The Sim's landingpoint is a platform on the New Wonders of the World election, and it's website new 7 wonders is also a good point for some basic background on the build.

Chichén Itzá, the most famous Mayan temple city, served as the political and economic center of the Mayan civilization. Its various structures - the pyramid of Kukulkan, the Temple of Chac Mool, the Hall of the Thousand Pillars, and the Playing Field of the Prisoners – can still be seen today and are demonstrative of an extraordinary commitment to architectural space and composition. The pyramid itself was the last, and arguably the greatest, of all Mayan temples.

And a great temple it is. Usually I take pictures with the time set at noon to get clear and bright images, but somehow this build made me use the sunset timing (from the recently released Firstlight viewer), giving the sim a somewhat romantic or mysterious feel.
The text in typeface courier below are descriptions from the notecards available on the island.
It was common practice in Mesoamerican cities to periodically build larger and bigger temple pyramids atop older ones, and this is one such example. Archaeologists discovered a doorway at the base of the north stairway that leads to a tunnel, from which one can climb the steps of the earlier version of El Castillo inside the current one up to the top room where you can see religious Jaguar Throne, carved of stone and painted red with jade spots. The design of the older pyramid inside is said to be a lunar calendar, with the newer pyramid being a solar calendar.


The Temple of the Warriors was built by the end of 800 A.D. It is located on the eastern plaza of the central plain of Chichen Itza. The Temple of the Warriors is flanked by 1000 carved columns depicting fallen warriors. Near the Warriors is a large plaza surrounded by pillars called "The Great Market."
Vendor stands featuring replications of ancient Mayan artifacts and traditional Mexican goods thrived near the base of the pyramid.

Cenote (say-NO-tay) is the Spanish equivalent of the Yucatecan Mayan word for a water-filled, limestone sinkhole. In Mexico's northern Yucatan Peninsula, where there are few lakes or streams, cenotes provided a stable supply of water for the ancient Maya people who settled there. The great city of Chichen Itza was built around a cluster of these natural wells, including the one known as the “Sacred Cenote.”

The sim is impressively detailed and a lot of attention has been put to make the landscape look natural. The trees are among the best I've seen in Second Life. Again, I'm impressed, there was just so much to see and explore, much more than I've written and shown in this post. I'd suggest you'd better check it out yourself.

Two members of the Things to Do group immediately decided to don the Mayan Princess and Mayan Warrior outfits which were really cool freebees.

Finally, we knew the Mayab's were an advanced culture, but we didn't know they had HDtv as well.

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Wednesday, June 06, 2007

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

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Wednesday, May 30, 2007

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.

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Tuesday, May 29, 2007

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.

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Monday, May 28, 2007

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!

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Sunday, May 27, 2007

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 :)"

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