The YouTube video above comes to 3pointD from Birgit Frenzel of I-D Media, whom we last met in Berlin, back when the Lifecrawler team had begun to offer client services in the virtual world of Second Life. The video features some new hacks the German team has apparently been cooking up, including the ability to jog through Second Life via a treadmill, and to steer with the D-pad on a Wiimote, which was hacked up by Gideon May back in March. The video is cool — get fit while navigating the virtual world! — but of course we have to give props to our neighbor in Second Life’s Louise sim, Moriash Moreau, who had the same thing going almost a year ago. Then again, the Lifecrawler one is a bit smoother and not so DIY, but hey, Mori’s a pioneer. The Lifecrawler team has also made good strides (sorry) on the Destroy Television-like technology for which they’re named, which is now working pretty smoothly, judging from this cool YouTube video. 3pointD hears that the Lifecrawler team may soon provide a virtual video streaming service not unlike Ustream that would let any SL resident stream their second lives to the Web. Watch for it.
The virtual world of Second Life is often compared to the annual Burning Man festival in that both are a place where fantasy becomes reality and almost anything goes. But SL resembles another, more mid-90s slice of festival culture as well, at times, and never more so than this weekend, when it takes on the guise of a field in Hampshire (extra credit for catching that reference) with the three-day SecondFest that’s about to kick off, sponsored by the Guardian newspaper and Intel, and organized by Rivers Run Red with promotional help from the ever-brilliant Aleks Krotoski, who writes for the Guardian. The festival gets underway tonight with DJ sets from people like the Glimmer Twins and Tom Findlay, according to the schedule, and wends its wooly way through to a Sunday-evening set from none other than the Pet Shop Boys. Taking place over no less than nine sims (»start here«, and see map after the jump), and with multiple stages, screens and, of course, tents, and too many acts for me to bother to count, it sounds like SecondFest could actually be some kind of landmark entertainment event in Second Life — if no more than 500 people want to get in at the same time. Sounds like fun in any case. Check it out. Easier to park, and just as much chance for muddy casual sex — if you like your muddy casual sex virtual, that is. (more…)
With the news a few days ago that MMO space opera EVE Online had hired an in-game economist, most commentators focused on how much fun he would have compared to all the other economists in the world, and how curious it would be to read quarterly reports from an imaginary universe. I think it has broader ramifications than that, particuarly when it comes to economies such as that of Second Life and Entropia Universe, which are explicitly tied to real-world currencies. Though Second Life pushes itself as a place where real money can be earned, it has consistently done a very poor job of making any useful economic information available. Its reports don’t resemble traditional economic and business reports, and in any case lack clear explanation of their methodology. They’re useful as far as they go, but they don’t go nearly far enough — which is an inexcusable state of affairs for a place that’s advertised as a capitalist paradise. The presence of EVE’s new economist should provide at least some distant motivation for Second Life to get its economic act together. (more…)
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MapJack.com is a new Web site offering the kind of street-level views that Google Maps‘ Street View feature does, only in better focus and with a more interesting interface. MapJack only has San Francisco, for now — and only part of that city, to tell you the truth — but if they can add more streets and cities and find a way to capture users’ attention, it could become a useful or at least entertaining tool — more entertaining than Google’s feature. MapJack splits your browser window in two, as seen above, with a satellite street map in the bottom and a street-level photograph above (of better quality than Google’s; see comparative screenshot after the jump). You can place “Jack” on any of the blue dots on the map, and you can also click on the dots in the photo to move him around. Since he’s a tiny little articulated avatar, you can also see which way he’s facing. (more…)
View22 has been inking some interesting deals lately, and today comes the announcement of another one: the company, which makes a 3D eCommerce solution called Immersiv, has just struck a co-marketing deal with design software maker Autodesk to cross-promote View22 for sales and Autodesk for design. “Autodesk will recommend View22 as a preferred partner for providing web-based, thin-client 3D sales automation solutions for its current and prospective customers. View22 will recommend Autodesk as a preferred partner for 3D design and engineer-to-order products for its current and prospective customers,” according to a press release. This kind of browser-based 3D eCommerce stuff is likely to become a bigger part of the 3D experience going forward. It’s a lot easier to get in front of people through a browser than it is through a downloaded client. Not that this means View22 or Autodesk necessarily win loyal customers and clients through such a deal, but it could help open the market by getting the browsing public more acclimated to useful 3D.
Huge global marketing and communications company Publicis and big 3D design company Dassault have teamed up on a new plugin-based 3D browser tool called 3dswym, which will “offer a collaborative Web-based platform allowing marketers to connect directly to consumers in order to jointly create and adapt new consumer goods and new retail environments using advanced Web and 3D tools.” You can plug in and mess around with an early version of 3dswym, but it doesn’t seem to offer anything special at the moment. That said, it sounds like it could be cool once it’s spun up. The tool is based on an interesting premise, though: “Successful marketing must permit consumers to enter the product creation process at a much earlier stage, so that products and services are in fact co-generated with them” according to a press release. Thing is that the global reach and sway of these companies could well help drive things in a more co-creative direction. Keep an eye out for 3dswym coming to a consumer products company near you — although not necessarily soon.
Good news, all you obssessively grinding World of Warcraft addicts: “Success as a business leader may depend on skills as a gamer,” according to Jim Spohrer, Director of Services Research at the IBM Research Center in Almaden, California. IBM has just done a study with Seriosity (one of the cooler companies at the virtual goods summit) which found “significant parallels between online gaming and the future of work,” according to a press release. “Today’s gamers are learning collaboration, self-organization, risk-taking, openness, influence, and how to earn incentives linked to performance and be flexible in the way they communicate.” That’s a lot better than the hand-eye coordination that most people think as the limit of what games have to teach. More below. (more…)
New media marketing firm crayon kicks off a series of monthly “thought leadership” panels in the virtual world of Second Life today, and guess who’s moderating the first one. Yep, I’ll be »on crayon island« from 9am SL Time today (noon Eastern), for a chat with some of the people who’ve been doing branding in SL, including:
Charles: What motivates people to stay engaged, and how do virtual goods play into that?
Ryan: For us it’s about self-expression. When our users spend 4-6 hours online, self-experssion as they show themselves in their IM, in their blogs, in the game, is incredbly impoertant to them. Our most loyal users are female. Unlike in Second Life, where they routinely blow up the American Apparel store, it has to be a conscious choice to engage with the brand. We find our users actually associate with brands. It comes down to, I’m online and I want to express something about my identity to everyone else. (more…)
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Conference host Susan Wu moderated an afternoon panel addressing the question of whether virtual worlds are “the next big business model” at the Virtual Goods Summit.
Panelists:
Tim Stevens of Doppelganger
Kevin Effrusy, general partner with Accel Partners (investor in Facebook)
Dan Kelly, CEO of Sparter
Min Kim of Nexon
Susan: How do you guys estimate the size of the overall virtual goods market?
Dan: It’s easily a billion dollar [secondary] market. Consumers have told us these things have value, the industry now is trying to reconcile that with their business model. (more…)
Nabeel Hyatt of Conduit Labs moderated a panel on Why Virtual Goods Matter, and What’s Driving User Adoption, at the Virtual Goods Summit at Stanford University.
Reeves: The human brian is not specialized to differentiate between virtual and real. Same neurons fire when an avatar smiles at you as when a real person smiles at you. Seriosity is looking at what happens when you create an opportunity to do serious things with virtual currency attached, such as sending email messages with virtual currency attached. The result? You open the email faster when currency is attached. Virtual money changes real behavior. (more…)
Min Kim of Nexon gave a presentation at the Virtual Goods Summit and said the company would probably announce the release of its KartRider in the US soon, which has been in closed beta. Kim also said Maple Story has been “kicking ass” in the US, with 3.5 million registered users. The company is also introducing prepaid cards at Target that can be used to buy virtual items, which it expects will push up sales as well. It also just released Audition, which already has 100,000 registered users, more than half of them female. (more…)
Kyra Reppen of Neopets gave a presentation at the Virtual Goods Summit on MTV’s Neopets. Like other MTV presenters before her, she began her presentation with a video. Perhaps the most interesting part, though, was about the new NC Mall that Neopets will introduce in beta next week. It’s about customizing and self-expression. It’s complementary to the Neopoints economy, no exchange between the two. Themed items around Neopian events. Launching with PayPal. Why do we think this is going to work? Digital is real life for this audience. Technology is invisible. Emotional connection makes the pixels go away and it’s about these experiences. Virtual worlds and virtual economies are simply applications to achieve those four core goals: fun, self-expression, social needs, and control. Kids ages 6-14 have $60 billion in income. One important feature of NC Mall is try before you buy. (more…)
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David Wallerstein of Tencent began the Virtual Goods Success Stories panel at the Virtual Goods Summit with a presentation, mostly to demonstrate what Tencent is doing in China: Chinese Internet penetration is only 10.5 percent. Wireless is 35.2 percent. Roughly 40 percent of Internet usage in China takes place in Internet cafes. Tencent currently has more than 4,000 employees, with roughly 30 percent R&D staff. Tencent has five leading online platforms:
• QQ.com is the #1 portal in China
• QQ games portal is the #1 mini casual games portal in China
• QQ IM, #1 IM service provider in China
• They also have a leading wireless portal
• Qzone, the #1 blog site / MySpace in China
Revenue has grown from RMB250 million in Q1 2004 to RMB750 million in Q1 2007. The largest share, 65 percent, is Internet value-added services. 25 percent mobile, 10 percent advertising. (more…)
Google’s search czar, Udi Manber, gave a short pre-lunch presentation on what he has to deal with at the company:
“Search is hard, very hard, because of scale of what we have to deal with. The scale we operate at is almost beyond comprehension. The main thing is the diversity. The log boggles the mind. Also the expectations. If there’s one piece of information I can give you: 20-25 percent of the queries we will see today, we’ve never seen before.” Manber quoted Oliver Wendell Homes: “The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries,” but it cannot be dealt with like mathematics. Udi: We can say the same thing about search. (more…)
Denise Caruso and Clay Shirky opened Supernova 2007 this morning by approaching the socially networked environment of the World Wide Web from two different directions. Caruso’s basic thesis was that people needed to break out of their insular social networks and take additional risks in order to bring in a greater variety of viewpoints and push innovation forward. Shirky called for the industry to rely more heavily on love, and posited that love would be a better indicator of where the IT industry is headed than business models are. (more…)
I’m still catching up from flying across the country today, but I have to post this one, since it’s pretty big news. Virtual world services and marketing firm Millions of Us has struck a partnership with Gaia Online, which bills itself as “the Web’s
fastest-growing hangout for teens.” According to a press release, the partnership is “designed to bring new advertising clients to both parties while providing Millions of Us with an additional community in which to conduct campaigns.” That’s pretty significant stuff, since Gaia, which boasts an active membership of more than two million, is not an open platform, as is the virtual world of Second Life, where Millions got its start — along with 3pointD’s sponsor, the Electric Sheep Company, and firms like Rivers Run Red and Infinite Visions Media. The press release doesn’t say whether the partnership is exclusive to Millions of Us, but it does open a new world to Millions that its competitors don’t currently have access to. Congrats to Reuben and co. Full press release reprinted below. (more…)
The number of universities entering the virtual world of Second Life never ceases to amaze me. One that I have been keeping an eye on for some time is Princeton. It has been closed to casual strollers while construction proceeds, but following a bit of string-pulling, I was able to get an advance preview earlier this week. I have only one small problem: the amount of information I now have is so huge it is going to take all of my ingenuity — and there’s precious little of that — to prune it down to the bare essentials. The sim will not formally open to the public until the next academic year, but much of the work is now complete.
Incidentally, aware that I over-use the term “iconic” I have opted in this post to go with “signature” instead. Time will tell whether this is a sensible move.
My tour guide was the charming and ridiculously well-informed (not to mention often downright hilarious) Persis Trilling, who, apart from heading up the Princeton in-house IT education support services, is something of an expert on the History of Architecture and is overseeing the build in Second Life. (more…)
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I’m off tomorrow for California, where I’ll be moderating a panel at the Virtual Goods Summit being put together by venture capitalist Susan Wu and Google’s Charles Hudson. I’ll also be hanging around Supernova just to see what can be seen. I’m very much looking forward to the summit, especially because, as Susan points out, it’s now clear that “virtual goods represent a real, viable business model and will likely have a huge impact across all of the consumer Internet.” (More thoughts from Giff.) That means not just as part of gaming or even as part of virtual worlds, but most everywhere. I’m not sure what the recording and archiving plans are for the conference, but look for reports from 3pointD, since plenty of excellent speakers will be in attendance who hopefully will have plenty of interesting things to say.
Ceedubs (in red t-shirt) looks out from the virtual gallery and through the screen, while Destroy, housed in the real version of the virtual kitchen cabinet at center, looks on, and the real CW (not pictured) looks in from outside. Confused? Good.
Electric Sheep Christian Westbrook reports that he has now posted a downloadable series of the adventures of Destroy Television in the virtual world of Second Life. (Downloadable series of enormous files, that is.) Destroy, of course, is the multiuser avatar who lifelogs her every virtual moment on Flickr. But because she’s taking a screenshot every five seconds, ceedubs has been able to cut these all together into a very cool series of short films. The films are taken from the ten days in which Destroy was on display at the Fuse Gallery in New York City, and includes the 683MB monster I’m downloading at the moment — downloading because I want to see how much of our wedding Destroy managed to capture. It sounds all good fun and games, but there’s a serious side to it as well: consider what Destroy’s up to in the context of things like Justin.tv and Ustream. The original plan (not sure if it’s still the plan) was to embed clickable information into Destroy’s home movies, using a service like Click.tv, which seems to be dark at the moment, but which lets you embed links and comments at any point in a video clip, displays them as an overlay on the clip, and lets you click directly to that point. Imagine that kind of digitized information overlaid on your own lifestream, complete with whatever other information was embedded in the environment around you. Second Life constitutes an excellent testbed for that kind of service. Useful? Not at the moment, but it will be.
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Virtual worlds entrepreneur Anshe Chung seems to have inadvertently caused quite a stir on the 3D avatarized chat platform IMVU, where she (she is really two people, a husband and wife) makes 3D objects that IMVU members can buy for their virtual environments. Anshe apparently lowered prices on some assets that other people had incorporated into their own products — a move that, given the vagaries of IMVU development, seems to have affected the derivative products by allowing competitors to introduce lower-priced virtual goods. Judging from forum traffic and comments on a recent 3pointD post, a lot of people over in IMVU are mightily pissed off. Anshe has apologized, but as usual, people seem to believe what they want to believe. Anshe has been a polarizing figure in the virtual world of Second Life over the years, so it’s hardly surprising she’d attract similar controversy in IMVU. It’s an interesting question, though, of whether she’s attracting more controversy being a user who has accumulated developer-like weight over the years, or whether a similar cock-up on the part of the developer would attract more ire. Hopefully, we’ll get a chance to discuss these kinds of things at the Virtual Goods Summit this Friday, where I’ll be moderating a panel.
I’ve somehow broken the Glitchy Links that usually appear here, so Glitch has had to send this along by hand: It’s a 3D email application called, what else, 3D Mailbox, which represents your email in three dimensions — i.e., as objects in an environment I think you can navigate as you would a first-person shooter game. At the moment, there’s a single “level” which is built to resemble Miami Beach. According to the site, “Beautiful models represent good email, and sleazy guys represent spam.” Coming soon (if you pony up the $29.95 for the premium edition) is the Los Angeles International Airport level (I think a “wtf?” is not out of place here), where your email is represented as jetliners. Man, there would be some serious congestion at LAX if my inbox were trying to get clearance to land. The trailer (above) quite brilliantly invites users to “hang out with your mail poolside or feed your spam to the sharks.” Is this a threat to Seriosity’s Attent? Probably not. But Robert Savage, who’s behind 3D Mailbox, apparently likes the value proposition in representing flat data as 3D objects, since he’s done it before with VisitorVille, which turns statistics about the people who have visited your Web site into, well, people. To me, these feel like rather lonely applications. Or perhaps they’re just testament to the current frothiness of 3D.
ComputerworldUK has a nice article up about the possibility that different virtual worlds will one day support a standard that would let users travel freely among them. This is an idea I’ve been hot on since even before starting this blog, so it’s nice to see other people supporting it — especially when they’re people like IBM vice president of standards and open source Bob Sutor, who’s quoted in the piece. Sutor has been putting up a nice series of posts on his blog since the beginning of June, detailing his basic requirements for virtual worlds, his desire for more VW artificial intelligence, some scenarios for moving assets, information and identity among virtual worlds, and the need for worlds to run on multiple platforms. (Sutor will be at a virtual worlds event at MIT’s Media Lab this Friday, apparently, though I can’t find a link.) A lot of what he’s talking about in those posts, if you ask me, points toward the broader future of virtual worlds. But feel free to poke holes in my arguments below. Even if it’s only to complain about the great length of this post. (more…)
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Hm, I must have fallen out of favor with the folks at MTV, since I heard about this not from them but from one of the artists involved in the project. What is it? It’s nothing less than Virtual Lower East Side, or vLES, for short, which is basically the implementation of what was to be known as MTV’s Music World. Using Doppelganger’s technology, MTV has built out a more or less street-for-street replica of New York’s Lower East Side, complete with virtual versions of the area’s real clubs and restaurants. This is like the seedy sister world to Virtual Hills and Laguna Beach. Essentially, it’s a 3D virtual world with a MySpace for bands attached. If things are still on course, your band can get promoted from the Web-based social network into the virtual world, if you’re popular enough, with the distant possibility of actually getting into rotation on one of MTV’s channels if you do well enough there. (The site doesn’t say that, but that’s what I was told wehn I was working on the article linked above.) It’s just now in alpha, so you probably can’t get in yet, but the site shows some promising features, including a cool map highlighting the few establishments that have already been built out. But the $64 million question is, Can this gain any traction with young hipsters here and with those who aspire to hipsterdom elsewhwere but who can’t get to the Lower East Side they’ve always wanted to see?
A couple of events to briefly note today, including a new presence in the virtual world of Second Life, the U.S. State Department. Also, 3D printers are getting cheaper, but even the “home” versions remain prohibitive. Plus some microelectronics that could prove awfully cool someday. (more…)
MacArthur Foundation president Jonathan Fanton will appear in the virtual world of Second Life on June 22, at 9am SL Time (noon Eastern), for a conversation with Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale on the role of philanthropy in virtual worlds. 3pointD hears that the appearance may be precursor to the MacArthur Foundation establishing a more permanent presence in SL in order to explore native, in-world culture. Regardless, my sense if that when Fanton is talking about “the role of philanthropy in SL,” it’s the in SL bit that’s important. As Fanton puts it on the MacArthur site, “I believe that the importance of virtual worlds may be less about their growth as economies, and more about their capacity for collaboration and human development. Activities in virtual worlds already are supported by MacArthur and other foundations, but we have much to discover about the right role for philanthropy itself in virtual worlds. We are interested in learning about virtual worlds and how to operate within them. We look to the residents to help us determine how to be helpful and are eager to share our on-going work in such areas as affordable housing, urban renewal, and human rights and international justice.” (more…)
After running as a bit of a stealthoperation, Playboy is finally ready to reveal all. The magazine and attendant flesh lifestyle empire opens its »island in the virtual world of Second Life« today, with a party at 4pm SL Time (7pm Eastern). Playboy island will house a virtual Playboy retail store, and host a variety of events and “social opportunities,” according to a press release. Playboy’s Second Life retail location will feature merchandise from its e-commerce sites, PlayboyStore.com and ShoptheBunny.com Residents will be able to purchase Playboy-branded apparel either for the real world or for their Second Life avatars. “The virtual store will be staffed by female avatar employees wearing Playboy-branded apparel and the famous Playboy Bunny costume,” according to the release. That leaves tons of space on the island to serve as a “social space” for residents to interact. It’s not entirely clear how Playboy will fill that space and time, but you can hear more about the project on C.C. Chapman’s Managing the Gray. (Note that Playboy is an advertiser in the Second Life Herald, a 3pointD sister site.)
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Book your tickets to Denmark. There’s yet another virtual worlds meetup in the works, this one being held by Copenhagen’s Innovation Lab, home of past metaverse meetup attendee and Terra Nova guest poster Peder Burgaard. The Lab will hold the LifeLike conference on September 26 [UPDATE: The conference is just on the 26th, not 26-27, as previously reported]: “Looking at the prevailing trends and technologies, the virtual worlds seem to be a natural effect of a series of causes: the game industry is perpetually redrawing the boundaries for graphic prowess; and their turnover has long since passed that of Hollywood. Social networks are forging virtual bonds between several hundred millions of people. Today, the sharing of digital properties, such as e.g. sound and images, constitutes the majority of all Internet traffic. Web 2.0 and open source are labels conveying a much more interactive exploitation of the Internet as a tool. Concepts such as CustomerMade and Crowdsourcing express a net-based and extremely active user involvement, where products or -– in case of virtual worlds, entire worlds -– are created by the users themselves. All this leads to an unavoidable and natural consequence: our lives are becoming virtual. LifeLike is an international stocktaking of the aspects and perspectives of the virtual worlds.”
One of the great things about lifelogging is that it takes a bunch of data that formerly had been in the hands only of companies and the government, if anyone, and puts it back in the hands of the individual. At the moment, Amazon.com knows enough about me to recommend Infotopia, but unless I care to do some clumsy screen-scraping, what I buy on Amazon stays on Amazon; there’s no way for me to combine that Amazon data with a Netflix history and my Zappos purchases to build a more detailed profile of myself. That’s a shame, but we’re now approaching the point when something like that should soon be possible. Already, there are services and applications out there that can record my browsing history in more or less detail, including stuff like Google History, Justin Hall’s Passively Multiplayer Online Game, Slife, Me.dium and several others. Me.dium, in fact, has been able to leverage the attention data flowing through its Firefox plugin into a $15 million Series B round of funding. This very perceptive blog post (which is excellently titled — and from which I’ve stolen the image above) starts to get at why lifelogging services like Me.dium could become very valuable as the broader metaverse takes shape: “Me.dium’s technology, by tracking people’s behavior, could become valuable to advertisers looking for more ways to target ads.” (more…)
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I’ve been interested in what little information is available about Outback Online and the “user-generated spaces” that Yoick CEO Rand Leeb-du Toit is building there, so when I read (in an article I’ve since lost the link to) that Australian research institute NICTA had developed the peer-to-peer technology that is supposed to make Outback more scalable than any 3D online world we’ve seen before, I got in touch. NICTA’s Dr. Santosh Kulkarni was kind enough to give me some time on the phone. Between what Dr. Kulkarni was able to reveal and what I was able to understand I seem to have got a rough outline of NICTA’s technology that hopefully sheds some light on the new techniques being developed there. (more…)
These are busy days in the metaverse! Get your B-Town 3D on tonight with the latest metaverse meetup, which features Ogoglio’s Trevor Smith demo’ing his open-source 3D spaces project. The evening starts at everyone’s favorite Williamsburg retro video game bar, Barcade, before proceeding into the night — or into Jerry’s apartment. Also, check out machinima from IBM and CBS, food from Spain, and (presumably) naked avatars from Playboy. (more…)
Virtual worlds entrepreneur 
Hm, I must have fallen out of favor with 
A couple of events to briefly note today, including a new presence in the virtual world of 
After running as a bit of a 
One of the great things about lifelogging is that it takes a bunch of data that formerly had been in the hands only of companies and the government, if anyone, and puts it back in the hands of the individual. At the moment, 
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