Closer Look At Babbage Linden’s SL Digglike
Okay, Babbage is getting ready to give his acceptance speech at 3pointD’s Favorite Linden awards ceremony, but he’s got a little work to do before the committee ratifies the choice.
In computer gaming circles, a roguelike (yes, it’s a noun) is a game that borrows many of the characteristics of the 2D ASCII dungeon-crawling computer game Rogue. What Babbage is building borrows many characteristics of the Web-based ratings system Digg, so I’m calling at a Digglike. It’s coming along, but it isn’t done yet.
Earlier today I blogged about a Digglike HUD system Babbage was cooking up that looked like it let you rate objects from within the virtual world of Second Life — except that mine wasn’t working. Supposedly, you could rate objects on the grid as thumbs-up or thumbs-down, and the cumulative ratings would show up somewhere. I couldn’t get my HUDs working, so I complained in an earlier post.
I just ran into Babbage on the Grid (actually, he godmode teleported me to his plot »in Ambleside«), and we spent a while figuring out what was wrong with his thinget. (You can see the debug messages Babbage wrote into the HUD crawling up my screen above.) Happily, my copy is working now, and it will indeed work something like Digg, eventually, though it’ll be its own Second Life version that stores information on a separate Web site.
What happens is this: When you attach the two HUD units that comprise the system, a green thumb appears that cycles through objects in your field of view. A number appears above the thumb displaying each object’s rating. At any point, when the thumb is hovering over an object, you can click the green thumbs-up or red thumbs-down that appear at the top of your screen. This increases or decreases the rating of the object by one point. That’s it. At some point, though, you should be able to view all the ratings that have been given to an object in some Web-based fashion.
It’s early days yet for Babbage’s device, but this is just the kind of thing I’ve been looking for in SL for some time. It’s a great demo project for getting information flowing between SL and the Web in a social fashion. I’ve no idea whether it will be widely adopted (this is the great barrier that most things like this face), but it’s nice to see someone at least working on an implementation.
Thoughts for Babbage:
• Perhaps make the hovering thumb a different color, neither red nor green. I was a bit confused at first that it was the same color as one of the thumbs at the top of my screen.
• I’d slow down the cycling slightly. It switches too quickly between objects.
• I’d love to be able to direct the thumb to an object of my choosing, rather than having to wait for it to cycle around again, but I know this may be too difficult.
• Keep up the good work!
Feeds
I really must get a copy of this, to see the maths for resizing and moving the HUD indicator. The Digg-related component is actually relatively minor compared to that for me; pinging servers back and forth, well, they deliberately make that easy, but having an HUD that properly integrates with the world in 3D….
Babbage, Diggのような評価システム in SL…
「Closer Look At Babbage Linden’s SL Digglike」という記事が 3pointD.comに上がっています。Babbageという Diggのようにみんなで SL内のオブジェクトを評価しよう！というシステムが開発中という紹介で…
Funny, I was just reading in Wired about how there are websites a person can go to in order to hire people to game Digg at $1 / vote. If there’s one thing we should have learned from Web 2.0 and fairness, it’s that anonymous user input is great when there’s no money on the line, but that it’s gamed completely when there is. Wikipedia’s a great example of this. I think Digg is a crutch until we find a better system.
The existing SL rating system was completely gamed and is widely considered a failure. What makes Digg in SL any different?
What *is* valuable is something like ebay’s ratings, where you only get to submit a rating after completing a real transaction. SLExchange has this for its items. Maybe I should include something like this in my next vendor kit. *smirk*
Hiro, I agree that gaming sites like digg is a problem, but I also think that we really need better ways to collectively sort and filter content in SL. One of the goals of this BarCamp demo was to show the web community that all the tools are in place to start doing filtering outside SL where web platforms like Django make it much easier and faster to experiment. Lets build digg, learn from it, then build a better digg.
Hi again! I posted a comment yesterday about a bookmarking HUD for SL (www.sloog.org), but it seems it has been removed. Is there anything wrong about it?
Cheers.
Sorry, Atomo, no it wasn’t removed, it must have been mistakenly caught by the spam filter. Apologies. Looks cool, I’m going to check that out.
Slateit Hud clever tagging in Second life…
Rating objects with a clever HUD overlay that detects what you can see and where it is.
……
[…] I am a lot later with the post that I had wanted to be, but it still is well worth writing about as it is gaining some traction, of course 3pointd has already covered it. and has some interesting extra services to check out in this post Babbage Linden has produced a Slateit or Hateit heads up display to enable you as an avatar in Second Life to just look at something and then rate it. I particulalry like the way this is done as a HUD it detects objects in you camera field of view, works out where they are relative to you and then overlays a rating number for that object for your HUD. So thats a proper targeting HUD. If you move it recalculates and then re-overlays. By clicking on the number in your HUD over the object you are given a set of tags to choose from then you hit the slateit or hateit button in the dialogue and the rating for that object zips off to slateit.org and will then be reflected in your HUD and anyone else that is passing. I used it last night to rate Gingers Timeframe over on IBM 1 (Babbage had told me off for practicing rating things on our private islands) You can go and get a HUD from Babbages kitchen, then pop on over to IBM 1 and rate Gingers timeframe if you like. […]