SBS TV looks at virtual worlds

This coming Tuesday at 8.30pm, SBS TV are screening New Cyberspace Worlds as part of their Future Focus series:

It’s unclear at this stage whether the show is a local production or an imported product.

Update: the show was a Europena production that covered SL, WoW and Entropia Universe, all in quite some depth.

Popularity: 4% [?]

New viewer update next week

As per the offical Linden blog, there’ll be six hours downtime for the upgrade of the grid - with viewer update required. The details of the new features / improvements can be found here.

The most exciting addition for a lot of users will be the embedding of the LSL Wiki into the browser.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Profile: Bella Dutton

Bella Dutton is an Aussie SL resident who has a very busy second life split between her involvement with QT Labs and her own clothing line, BDD (Bella Dutton Designs). Add to this Bella’s role as a member of the production crew for the band Space Junkies and a raft of other building and shop projects and Bella has filled the nine months of her residency in SL to the brim.

After opening up a shop called “Red Earth” within her first few weeks in SL, Bella is now at the point where she is running a team of designers for her current shop BDD whilst acting as part of the QT Labs group as an Advanced Virtual Integration Expert.

I caught up with Bella the other night and asked her where she was at with her Second Life and involvement in QT Labs.

Bella Dutton: We believe that at QT Labs we provide a virtual integration of creation, nurturing, building and subsequent maitenence/upgrades of virtual communities. We understand the philosophy, design requirements and intended use and schedule for occupancy so we provide the skills to integrate any organisation or collaborate into SL enviroment/community.

Graham: And you personally - where do you see yourself in say 6 to 12 months in SL? Apart from the AVIE and QT involvement, the shop is your personal enterprise isn’t it?

Bella Dutton: It is, l work with a team of designers and work as a mentor too for newbies.

Graham: I have noticed that SL is a sharing community. Do you think that aspect is a vital one?

Bella Dutton: It does have that sharing community, that is very true as when you think with us all here we are creatures of nature, we all need to feel part of a group or team.

Popularity: 3% [?]

VastPark

VastPark is essentially a 3D-interactive workspace for game developers, business or anyone wanting to create 3D content. It’s a business fronted by Australian, CEO Bruce Joy.

Using the VastPark site builder you drag in a 3D model from your modelling application and go from there. There’s a good overview provided on how VastPark works here, and the first thing that occurred to me after watching it was the ease of the relationship between offline modelling and the actual creation of the 3D experience.

Is VastPark an obvious takeover target for Linden Lab?

Popularity: 5% [?]

Fishace - in-world environmental education

On a modest plot in Epsilon Orionis, Fishace Pye has set up a backyard waste management system to demonstrate the real-life benefits. Fishace sums up the purpose of his plot:

“Fishace Ecological Engineering is an Australian consultancy specialising in the design of zero waste systems. With climate changes ahead we need to do things in different ways. This system shows how you can treat your waste and get value back from recycling nutrients. The microalgae photobioreactor has just hit the news as one way to soak up CO2 from smoke stacks and then recover biofuels from the algal feedstock. The educational exhibition outlines future nutrient mining technology.

Check it out in-world or go to fishace.com.au.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Making real music in real time

I was pointed to a fascinating blog post - a Tokyo-based artist, Lance Shields is the real-life alter ego of both Andres Watanabe and Juria Yoshikawa. He’s developed Sound Station 1.0 - there’s a streaming video on his site.

If you watch the video, the Sound Station has obvious uses for musicians or other performance artists in-world. We’ve dropped Andres a line to find out more, watch this space. Anything that takes virtual music performance beyond streaming is a big step forward.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Second Life - is the central server model its downfall?

The Easter weekend saw large concurrency on the grid and things held up relatively well, albeit with some glitches. As relative newcomers to daily immersion in Second Life, we’re behind the eight-ball in realising how restrictive the central server model is on community events specifically and end user enjoyment more generally.

An effective 50 to 60 avatar limit on a event is obviously restrictive, both for the people who miss the event and the fifty who may be dealing with significant lag during the event. Islands are now considered a great value proposition because of the likelihood of reduced lag. Our own in-world launch was modest but managed to crash the server once we got above 45 avatars. The ABC Island / Four Corners launch had quite a number of people trying to access the island unsuccessfully due to it being ‘full’.

Critics of Second Life say the issue is the centralised server model and I’m yet to see any significant rebuttal of the claim. Potential competitors like Outback Online are touting the peer-to-peer (P2P) model as being the solution, claiming a 10 000 avatar population at an event as being feasible. If P2P is able to replicate the virtual world experience at the level Second Life has achieved whilst dramatically increasing concurrency of population, then the stampeded is likely to be significant. That said, I wouldn’t be alone in both hoping and assuming that with Linden Labs going the open source route, a P2P model may be in the platform’s future. Or at the very least a significant performance breakthrough that makes more than fifty people in a room a bearable experience.

What are your thoughts on the issue - if a competitor offered better performance would you pull up stumps and go elsewhere?

Popularity: 11% [?]

« Previous Page — Next Page »