Amazon Web Services Opens Second Life Site
I checked into the virtual world of Second Life tonight for a sneak peek at two islands that were just opened by Amazon Web Services as a community-building effort for AWS developers. According to SL resident Jeffronius Batra (aka Jeff Barr, Amazon’s senior Web services evangelist), »the islands« — which are an official Amazon project — will not only provide resources for developers but also link to and show off what the AWS development community has created inside Second Life. (Jeff mentioned Jnana as an example. You can read more about what they’re doing in SL on the AWS blog, or just visit »Jnana in Second Life«.)
The virtual architecture, by Joshua Culdesac (who lives in France), is very handsome, though some of it was too tight for my camera. Jeff did the terraforming. Amazon took delivery of the islands in December, Jeff said, though planning had been going on before then. Amazon’s virtual estate is near an IBM island (and not by accident; Jeff invited them to buddy up), but there’s a mysterious island named Innovation that intervenes. Jeff hasn’t been able to get into it yet to find out what’s going on there. The Amazon islands aren’t quite done yet, Jeff says, but from what I could glean in my visit, they seem to have succeeded in being “very SL-friendly, not overly corporate,” as Jeff says they were intended. Amazon has been poking around in Second Life for something like a year now. Nice to see them finally get something going on an official level.
Among the features of the islands — all layed out in a very cool scale model at one corner of the main island — are a Museum of Web Services, a conference center, a gift shop or bookstore of some sort that wasn’t finished yet when I was there, and a place where you can create an Amazon Web Services account.
The company is still considering how staffing of the island will work, but Jeff said he’ll be spending more time there in future, between trips. The island has been a part-time effort for him over the last several months, in part because he travels so much from Seattle.
One cool thing about the Museum of Web Services, which will showcase SL projects as well as Web-based ones, is that it is built to be expandable by snapping on new modules. Plus it just looks cool:
Joshua Culdesac does deserve kudos for that building. What a pleasant merging of architectural syntax with VW grammar.
Curse you, Wallace, you beat me to it!
I spent around an hour there last night – too short a time to get more than a flavour of it, as there is just so much there.
I really like the Virtuool take on building in SL. It is imaginative and has a light touch, showing a strong but not over-powering sense of humour. Joshua and Piper have built some great stuff here – with ideas that I can see others plundering mercilessly. I love the 3D orientation map, for example.
On a downside – maybe it’s just my nVidia card – but I get real display problems when people use “full bright” – and this is something Virtuool use extensively. Also, the site is so heavily scripted I do wonder how it will manage under load.
AppL$tore would like to extend it’s congratulations to Joshua and the rest of the build team. The project looks amazing.
This is a must see build in SL
Neil Nielson
CEO
AppL$tore
The IBM “innovate” project is briefly described in the eightbar blog ( http://eightbar.co.uk/)
I am the CEO of Jnana. Based on what we have learned during the past 18 months in Second Life, Jnana will soon be making available to the Second Life community, for free, an expanded and upgraded set of tools. These tools, like all Jnana products, leverage Jnana’s underlying inference engine and AI capabilities, and require no coding or programming to use. If we hit the mark, these new tools will enable non-technical people to create more compelling 3D stores and simpler, more efficient SL shopping experiences powered by Amazon Web Services and the Jnana Logic Server platform. Stay tuned!
Outstanding work Joshua!
@ Trevor: “…architectural syntax with VW grammar” Can I use that? =P
Beautifull build. Thanks for posting.
I really enjoyed the conference center, with the vertically stacked seating, the personal interactive screens, and the digital projector setup.
Looking forward to some great developer events and seeing this island grow as a real resource for us AWS groupies!