(left to right:) Reuben Steiger, Wagner James Au, and former Virginia governor Mark Warner, in avatar form
Former Virginia governor and possible Democratic “fallback” candidate for president Mark Warner spoke to a crowd of about 30 avatars in the virtual world of Second Life this afternoon, in a live interview with journalist Wagner James Au of the New World Notes blog (Hamlet Au in SL). The event, which lasted about 45 minutes, marked the first appearance by a national political figure in the virtual world, and went off without a hitch. The governor appeared to respond “live” to Au’s questions in text chat, and used the space as a politician would use a physical space, walking through the crowd as he left the stage rather than simply logging off where he sat. The event was held in a model of the New Globe Theatre built by Reuben Steiger’s Millions of Us virtual-world services company, which produced the event. (Millions of Us is a sponsor of Au’s blog.)
Warner was apparently led to Second Life after one of the staffers at his political action committee, Forward Together (which is concentrating in part on taking advantage of the Internet as a promotional platform), met Au last spring. The result was the first virtual whistlestop on any national political tour, and — quite aside from setting a precedent — gave attendees a good look at what could form the planks of a future Warner campaign. 3pointD will save further commentary for a later post, but for now here’s a transcript of the interview (minus audience comments): (more…)
The “population” of the virtual world of Second Life passed the 600,000 mark sometime early this morning — at least in terms of the number of avatars that have ever been created. But many of these are people who have looked in once and never returned, and many more are “alts,” i.e., alternate avatars created by the same person. (I have about five. Some people have many more.) The SL splash page lists 264,281 as the number of avatars that have logged in over the last 60 days, but even that number overstates the true population in terms of users, due simply to the alt phenomenon.
Whatever the “correct” population number, Second Life has seen strong growth over the past year — strong enough to inspire a mildly famous quarter bet between Linden Lab’s CTO Cory Ondrejka and University of Illinois games researcher Dmitri Williams. Cory puts his coin on Second Life having more North American users than hit MMO World of Warcraft by March 2008. A couple of recent reports suggest Dmitri may have to start saving his pennies (well, 25 of them, anyway) in order to make good on the wager. (more…)
Mark Warner, former Democratic governor of Virginia and likely “fallback” candidate for president should Hillary Clinton not run in 2008, will visit the virtual world of Second Life today for a chat with New World Notes’s Wagner James Au, at 12:30 SLT (3:30pm EST), in an event produced by Reuben Steiger’s Millions of Us (a sponsor of James’s blog). The idea for the visit seems to have come from within Warner’s Forward Together political action committee itself, according to an interesting interview Au has with Nancy Scola (SL resident Nancy Mandelbrot), whose job at Forward Together consists in part of trying “to connect with the technology/geek community.” While there have been local political candidates in SL before, this certainly marks the highest profile politico to visit this (or probably any other) virtual world. It also raises interesting questions of what’s public and what’s private in a place that (on the surface) is primarily governed by a Terms of Service rather than by a Constitution. [And see update below.] (more…)
I’ve played a bit of City of Heroes, but really not all that much, so I was interested to see the following tags attached to a friend’s COH screenshots on Flickr:
• City of Heroes
• coh
• cohtagged
• coh:x=-964
• coh:y=327
• coh:z=-662
• coh:zone=V_City_02_01
At first I was impressed that he had thought to tag his screens this way, but he informs me that the game embeds the information into the pics automatically. “When I upload them to Flickr, it just interprets them into tags,” he says. Interestingly, Second Life resident Lev Kamenev posted a similar idea to his blog the other day. All it needs now is someone to write a quick Flickr app to turn SL geotags into SLurls. (more…)
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Trevor Smith, a former Xerox PARC researcher who’s busy creating Ogoglio, a project that explores “shared [3D] online worlds in the context of web enabled work,” has an interesting post about the concept of the back button in what he calls “3spaces.”
If you’ve been wandering around in a shared 3space for twenty minutes, what should happen when you press the back button? Should your POV shift back along the 3D path you’ve taken? What is the granularity of the history? Are its units ones of time, space, dwell time, or 3space landmark? Or, is it a continuous path? Is the beginning of the history at your entrance point to this 3space, or at the entrance to the first 3space in this browser session? Where is the balance between an understandable user concept of “back” and an engineer-able artifact of a back button and history?
Take them for what you will, but press releases this week from two new gaming portals indicate to 3pointD that the momentum of games as a major entertainment medium continues, as does the migration of more and more gamers online. The services are Verizon’s PlayLinc, which lets gamers host their own FPS and other servers for free, and Ijji.com, a free single- and multi-player portal for more casual gamers from Korean game company NHN, which comes complete with a little customizable avatar to represent your online presence (though I couldn’t get the avatar creation screen to work on my Mac, for some reason — finally got it going in IE on my PC). (more…)
It was in Austin last spring, after the South by Southwest Interactive conference, that the ideas behind this blog finally gelled in my head (even though I’d staked my claim to the 3pointD territory months earlier, for no good reason). Now, not even six months after SXSW, 3pointD is headed back to Texas to chat about some of the stuff we write about here, on a panel filled with much heavier weights than mine, at the Austin Game Conference on September 6. Jerry Paffendorf of the Electric Sheep Company sponsors of this blog) has convened a panel on The Future of Virtual Worlds (at 1:30pm on the Online Multiplayer Tech/Art track) that will see me sitting beside legendary MMO developer Raph Koster, Linden Lab chief technology officer Cory Ondrejka and Multiverse’s Corey Bridges. Can anything I have to say possibly be of value? (more…)
Second Life resident Chili Carson is launching what could be a great boon for SL’s business owners as well as their customers: a Chamber of Commerce for the virtual world. While news of the venture first surfaced at the Second Life Community Convention and on New World Notes, 3pointD has some fresh details from Chili as she builds out the concept and seeks to garner support in the virtual world. The question now is whether the chamber can withstand the slings and arrows of the Second Life community. (more…)
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Second Life resident Tao Takashi Rik Riel recently stumbled on a very cool build in the virtual world, a re-creation of ships and other gear from the short-lived but disproportionately excellent television series Firefly, which was created by Joss Whedon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame. (The TV show was created by Joss Whedon, not the SL build.) You can visit a huge replica of Serenity (the ship after which the movie of the series was named) in Burnet (128, 144, 46) [<–SL link]. The ship is so big (I’m floating just at the trailing edge of the blue panels in the pic above) that there’s plenty of room inside for various locations to have been re-created in striking, shiny detail. If you loved this show, it’s definitely worth a visit. Even if you didn’t, it’s a great build. And if you’ve never seen Firefly or Serenity, get thee to a video store. Now.
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Johnny “Jazz Hands” Ming is back, with the latest episode of Second Life’s favorite podcast, SecondCast. In Episode #30 we talk to Mark Barrett, who created the SLStats.com site, which has caused no small amount of controversy among SL residents. SLStats, until Mark altered the site, tracked how much time you’d spent in Second Life, where you’d been and who you’d met there. But community pressure over privacy concerns led Mark to scale down the functionality. It’s an interesting discussion over privacy concerns in general, and how they manifest themselves in virtual worlds in particular. We’ve been on a bit of a hiatus lately, but stay tuned for more — including SecondCast’s first taping in front of a live audience, at the recent Second Life Community Convention. Fun stuff.
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Add terrorism and politics to the list of world-historical factors now driving people into the metaverse. Several links in this VRoot post discuss “how travel restrictions have given a boost to telepresence and effective visual collaboration as alternatives to physical travel.” Add to that high fuel prices that may simply make it cheaper to hold a meeting at your desk, rather than at someone else’s desk across town, and even environmental concerns about the pollution you’re pushing into the atmosphere to get there.
As IT Week executive editor Martin Veitch puts it, “The old model of business collaboration is broken.” Of course, that doesn’t mean a 3D virtual world is the perfect place for every meeting. But it does mean that people are increasingly looking for alternatives to physical meetings that might more efficiently be held elsewhere. Seek and ye shall find. (more…)
I’ve been trying to find time lately to figure out how to bring Glitchy Links into the main thread here on 3pointD, and I thought I had it wired earlier tonight — until I started seeing red. While you can easily get del.icio.us to post your latest links to your blog (go to: settings > daily blog posting), I was looking for a WordPress plugin that would let me format the posts more attractively. I found a couple, but they’re just not doing what I want. And some of the text in the first trial post is showing up in red for some reason! (There’s nothing resembling red in the CSS here at 3pointD.) Weirdly, it only shows red in Firefox. Something’s very wrong here. Bear with us as we attempt to correct the color-coding over the next few days.
In any case, we proudly present (with reservations as to my inept coding) inline Glitchy Links! Stay tuned to your RSS reader for Glitchy’s bulletins from around the metaverse, Web 2.0, interactive entertainment, games, music, video, film and a bunch of other places. It’s about time.
It looks like Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world of Second Life, have quietly gone and found someone to write an “official guide” to getting around their corner of the metaverse. [Via Tony Walsh and Aimee Weber.] Due out in mid-December, the volume “explores in detail every aspect of Second Life’s rich and multilayered virtual world, explains how it works, and offers a wealth of information and practical advice for all Second Life residents.”
The book was written by Michael Rymaszewski, who in the past has penned official guides to such popular video games as Age of Empires III, Zoo Tycoon 2, Rise of Nations and others. On first blush it seems an odd choice, since game guides usually focus on getting from start to finish as easily as possible and uncovering hidden corners of the game in question. But Catherine Smith at Linden Lab tells me that it was the publisher who approached the company about doing an official guide. In addition, “LL has had lots of input into the content, the look and feel and the writing of the book,” she says. The volume promises more than just min/maxing tips, to be sure. (more…)
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Giff Constable of the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog) has posted a really perceptive critique of the challenges of mounting a play in the virtual world of Second Life. “Putting on a play using Second Life is a bit like trying to crack a walnut with a refrigerator,” Giff says. I’m not going to try to disentagle the simile, but I love the image. Giff points out the limitations of humanoid avatars and text chat for conveying the kinds of emotions that plays need to get across, and ponders a more Second Life-like possibility:
What else can heighten emotional content so the audience engages more fully? How about the actor forms themselves? Instead of using the humanoid, mesh-based frames most people wear in Second Life, how about using less-realistic, prim-based characters where emotions and expressions can be exaggerated in an almost bunraku style? I also think it would be useful to hearken back to silent movies where everything was done with motion and music/soundtrack.
The All Points Blog points to a post on urban travel site Gridskipper that wistfully hopes people will start doing more mashing up of the many mashups that are already out there. In this case, it’s a pair of Google Maps mashups that show the locations of fast-food restaurants in one case, and demographic information in another. “I’d love to see a Google map mashup that allows you to search the Census data through fast food locations so you could find the median income level, ethnicity and age around a specific Burger King location,” Gridskipper says. (In fact, would it be possible to write an app that could automatically mash up any two mashups? That would be beautiful.) I love the idea of mashing together mashups like this. And especially when applied to maps, it’s just the kind of 3pointD stuff that’s tying the Web ever more closely to the real world.
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Free site-tracking service StatCounter is offering a new service whereby you can view recent visitors to your site on a Google Maps map. There are already a couple of services that can do this for you, but this one seems nice since it’s attached to a popular site-tracking service and requires no set-up. I’m going to check it out, but first I need to clean up the front page here, since it’s taking forever to load these days. Wish me luck.
Live theatre has been a bit of a dead issue in the virtual world of Second Life until now. Occasional projects come and go, but nothing of any scale seems to get off the ground — perhaps because of the difficulty of operating avatars and “listening” to a performance in chat. Reuben Steiger’s virtual world services company Millions of Us is determined to see it done, however, and is holding an evening of live theatre tonight in the Millions of Us sim. Rather than produce its own plays, though, Millions has issued a challenge to SL residents — complete with cash prizes — to create plays they can perform live at the New Globe Theatre this evening.
The performances will begin at 6pm SL time, though there’s apparently been only one full scale entrant so far. “From the Shadows” was written by SL resident Enjah Mysterio, and features a cast including Eilen McTeague, Lucipher Baphomet, Selador Cellardoor and Ida Keen. The performance will be directed by Osprey Thereian, who also designed the sets. [UPDATE: Reuben has posted a video of a portion of the production on YouTube, complete with voice added in. Check it out.] (more…)
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Aaron Delwiche of San Antonio’s Trinity University and the Terra Nova blog posts the news that the next State of Play conference will be held January 7-9 in Singapore. “We are convening thought leaders from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas to engage in a lively discussion about the unique regulatory and cross-cultural challenges posed by the growth of transnational virtual worlds.” It’s an interesting choice of location for what’s probably the most forward-thinking conference on virtual worlds. Asia has more virtual world “residents” than any other region of the world, and has seen a number of legal decision handed down that treat virtual worlds more like real places — with real property laws — than any in the West. Singapore will be tough to get to for many Western-Hemisphere VW pundits, but it also opens the dialogue to people we haven’t heard that much from on te other side of the world. (more…)
This in-world collaboration tool for the virtual world of Second Life has been around for a couple of months at least, but 3pointD contributor Chip Poutine just flagged it to me, and it looks so cool I thought I’d flag it here. Its name is self-explanatory: “communal writeboard.” Created by SL resident angrybeth Shortbread and described on her blog, “the main ideas behind its design are to have a slideshow presenter that anyone can add or remove pictures from, plus a range of overlay tools that can be used to annotate or point to areas of interest within an image. These overlay tools can also be used to create simple mindmaps or visual polling events.” (See a shot of the overlay tools after the jump.) (more…)
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An interesting article in MediaWeek wonders whether MTV Networks might have plans to build a MySpace-like social network out of various properties it’s acquired lately, including things like Xfire and Neopets. While MTV’s still-in-alpha Virtual Laguna Beach isn’t mentioned by name in the article, it can only lend more weight to the theory, despite the fact that it doesn’t have much of a social-networking component — yet.
The MediaWeek writer doesn’t seem to be reading 3pointD, or he might have made more of the following, which is buried toward the end of the piece: “Rumors persist that Viacom is cooking up a social networking play of its own—perhaps melding that trend with the virtual reality phenomenon. [MTV Networks president Michael] Wolf wouldn’t get specific, but hinted something was in the works using avatars (virtual representations of people).” Taking Virtual Laguna Beach into the social networking space could be quite interesting. That’s one feature Second Life and other virtual worlds could benefit from, if you ask us.
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I’ve had a ton of stuff to transcribe and clean up from notes I took at the Second Life Community Convention last weekend. The latest is this keynote speech given by Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale, in which he explains some of his personal motivation for setting out to build a metaverse, and talks about the early days at Linden Lab and the moment at which user-created content became the watchword of his virtual world. “As a kid, I was really into the way things worked. I was just always dreaming up things to do,” Rosedale told the crowd. “I always wanted the world to be LEGO somehow.” The real world isn’t all that LEGO, but the virtual world of Second Life arguably is. (more…)
libsecondlife, the reverse-engineering effort by a group of talented Second Life residents (which has caused no small consternation among some users of the virtual world) got a welcome imprimatur from Linden Lab chief technology officer Cory Ondrejka in his closing talk at Saturday’s sessions of the Second Life Community Convention in San Francisco. Ondrejka also gave a look at changes being made to the code-base, changes that should make building Web-based SL mashups easier for everyone, whether or not you know enough to pick apart the platform to build something like libsecondlife.
“The official position of Linden Lab on libsecondlife is, we like libSL, you guys rock,” Ondrejka said. “We are blown away by what you’ve accomplished, and we’re very excited to see you do more, so do not stop. But everything you’ve reverse engineered is changing, and for that I do apologize.” libsecondlife hackers that 3pointD spoke with at the convention remained unconcerned, however, as the changes Cory described will no doubt be slow in coming. (more…)
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Linden Lab chief technology officer Cory Ondrejka amused the crowd at the end of last Saturday’s sessions of the Second Life Community Convention by showing them Linden World (video above), the precursor to the virtual world of Second Life, as it was in 2001. Apparently, videos of Linden World have never been seen outside of Linden Lab, and Linden World itself has not worked properly since SL was in beta. (more…)
Your humble narrator, waiting for those sweet sweet words: You were killed.
Having abandoned aspirations for a career in first-person shooter (FPS) games a long time ago for reasons related to nausea, disorientation, and an overall skill level that might be best described as Emo, I have nonetheless been fascinated with the genre since its inception, due in large part to game developers making tools such as Software Development Kits and Level Editors available to vibrant amateur communities who then ‘Mod’ their proprietary technologies into new games and gameplay experiences. The possibilities for making and examining architecture within this arena have been another story, seemingly dominated by an established set of conventions for map-making, as evidenced by a preponderance of precisely scattered wooden crates and redundantly symmetrical networks of dimly lit corridors.
To simply look at screenshots many would assume the Source Forts Mod for Half-Life 2 to be just another CounterStrike clone. All I can say to them is duck and cover. While surreptitiously perhaps, the developers of Source Forts have placed architecture and the act of making architecture at center stage, and in so doing have lobbed a 3pointD grenade into the Pantheon of FPS clichés. (more…)
The closing keynote talk at the Second Life Community Convention this past weekend was given more or less in tandem by Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale and Chief Technology Officer Cory Ondrejka. While the pair were their usual charming and amusing selves, their act having been well honed by now, they looked back at the history of Second Life more than they looked forward to its future. More about that past in a post soon to come; for now let’s look ahead with Cory at what the future of the SL codebase may hold. (more…)
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The Second Life Community Convention, the second annual gathering of residents of the virtual world of Second Life, kicked off on Saturday with a fascinating speech by Mitch Kapor, creator of Lotus spreadsheet application (often credited with helping make PCs ubiquitous), founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and chairman of the Mozilla Foundation. Kapor also serves as chairman of the board of Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, and gave an engaging account of the process of getting SL off the ground, and his vision for where it might be headed in the future. His talk interweaved parts of his own story as a technology entrepreneur with the trajectory of Second Life, and speculated about “some of the larger meaning of it all and where we might be going.”
Kapor gave great insights into Second Life’s early history, and a nice vision of what the future might hold. 3pointD took as many notes as we could, which we’ll present here essentially unalloyed. The upshot, however, was this: to Mitch, Second Life is a disruptive technology on the level of the personal computer or the Internet. “Everything we can imagine and things that we can’t imagine from the real world will have their in-world counterparts, and it’s a wonderful thing because there are many fewer constraints in Second Life than in real life, and it is, potentially at least, extraordinarily empowering.”
“You are the pioneers and the founders of this new world, and you have unbelievably great opportunities to put your stamp, to leave a legacy, to create things which will endure and have value. The opportunity to participate in the creation of a new world is really a rare one and so I hope you cherish it.” (more…)
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Simon Spartalian (SL’s Simon Jezebel) is a Chicago art student who has introduced a service that lets Second Life residents produce real-life versions of their in-world objects, possessions or selves. He gave a brief talk at the Second Life Community Convention after lunch, about how such a service might help create real value in a virtual world. (more…)
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Mark Warner, former Democratic governor of Virginia and likely “
Live theatre has been a bit of a dead issue in the virtual world of 
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