Many kind thanks to all the folks who linked here, blogrolled and rolled over laughing, commented and cross-pollinated….and while I’ve flagged this in the header and so on, for those of you catching this in an RSS feed kindly note that I’ve switched domains so I could crawl out from under being on a WordPress server and take all the flack personally for glitchy stuff or slow connections.

Visit me at http://www.dusanwriter.com and if you have time update your blog rolls, it’s much appreciated.

(And for all you Papervision fans, I’ve set up your own little corner and have a few new samples for your entertainment).

To try to keep my mind from getting to muddled, I’ve dropped past posts on Papervision into one page for reference. (Also available in top nav).

Enjoy.

Vollee has launched the ability to browse Second Life on your cell phone - rendered, ability to move, and testable now for free (if your phone is compatible).

This site has moved. Read the rest of this post here.

Planning cities and buildings - the real ones - has, for a long-time, been a top-down exercise. Meaning that concepts and city plans were, for the most part, implemented from on high through architects, city planners, consultants and developers, allowing for very little collaboration with those in the “bottom” and those for whom these projects would impact the most - namely, the ordinary citizen.

This site has moved. Read the rest of this post here.

Digado points us to a Papervision-like Flash 3D development project built by a team of Russians at Alternativa 3D.

This site has moved. Read the rest of this article here.

The search for a new CEO is over as Linden Lab announced the appointment of Mark Kingdon to the position, and residents watched for smoke in the upper window and the choosing of a name, much like the anointing of a Pope, it’s just too bad he’s, well, M Linden, I rather like Marcus Voom (who mysteriously I believe is on my friend’s list, must have been that beach party with the 8 foot avatar dressed as a, um…I digress).

Mark, or M, who is expected to soon name Kate Linden Agent 005 Linden and Sidewinder will become 006 Linden, with Philip Rosedale becoming 007, which is the same as Chair, murmured the right noises in his interview with Reuters about the failures of big brands in 2007…

The rest of this post can be read here on the new domain.

There’s a sweet spot somewhere out there for marketers, a dream space where that elusive beast the consumer (that means you and me, or maybe not, maybe it means Joe FlickrPack with his mySpace page and his Facebook widgets, but in any case), and the Electric Sheep Company are graphing it out and hunting it down.

And they’re on to something. Because what they’re trying to do is build a bridge from the vision and promise of the Metaverse to today - where it’s a lot messier looking, and the technology isn’t quite there yet, and the user base isn’t quite large enough, and the promise and hype of last year and the rush into Second Life was followed by….hmmm, well, it was followed by a rush into the promise and hype of Facebook widgets, or is it viral youTube videos like that bad hair lady, or are they now sniffing around Twitter?

THIS HAS BEEN A TEASER. Head on over to the new domain to read the rest of this brilliant and scintillating article. Or, because I have a picture of an old guy bowling on a Wii.

Christy Tucker at Experiencing E-Learning liveblogged from the TCC08 keynote address presented by Dr. Barbara P. McLain, a professor at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and Professor Lilliehook in Second Life.

The keynote addressed the question, “Why Do We Need a Second Life?” as it pertains to professional educators. The main point of the presentation was that “change ahead requires vision now.”

Overall, the two professors were effusive in their praise of Second Life’s potential for education. They cited the growth of online education as a precursor to virtual education, and then cited the many reasons that virtual ed. should be a major part of a teacher’s toolkit in the future, including:

- The trend to social networks

- That everyone has the ability to build in SL

- Almost anything can be taught in SL (exemplified by the phrase, “No Subject Left Behind”)

- SL - and virtual worlds in general - are more engaging than the traditional lecture

- “91% of students see the Internet as a place for answers”

The keynote ended with some comments about prickly adminstrators who would need to approve virtual learning programs. The professors concluded that, in order to move ahead a forward-thinking move such as virtual education, “sometimes you have to wait for those administrators to retire.”

Toyota, whose history in virtual marketing is already notable, has launched its own virtual island aimed primarily at a Japanese market (the site, thus far, only uses the Japanese language).

The island itself will be self-sufficient and boasts residential areas, a museum for automobile prototypes, a mall, and an event hall.

The technology uses the meet-me platform, a Japanese reality simulation game that some call a “G-rated” version of Second Life. Toyota is connected to the Tokyo meet-me, which was launched in December of 2007 specifically for a Japanese audience.

While the development of Toyota’s 3D presence through meet-me may seem a slight to Second Life, Linden still views Japan as a key market, according to an anonymous source reporting to the AP. The source said that “it plans to strengthen its Japanese services,” and notes that Japan lags behind only the US and Germany in number of hours spent in Second Life.

My first virtual world was SimCity. Stuffed at the bottom of a drawer somewhere is a printout of the city I created - printed on a dot matrix printer of course, and I figure I still have the MS-DOS floppy disks somewhere. And sure, it didn’t have avatars or presence, but it was the idea of interacting with a world that was persistent whether I was paying attention to the screen or not (when I’d get the right set of conditions there was nothing finer than to let the PC run all night and come back to find the city thriving), and that while it was run on code, the code formed a sort of policy backdrop against which you were still in control.

So the Second Life world comes along, and I had no idea what it was, booted it up expecting some sort of SimCity kind of thing (as I’ve said before, I stumbled across Second Life because it was in the top 20 search returns for Spore, and I was looking for the release date).

Lately, we’ve been talking about tipping points, or tipping points that didn’t happen, and the breakthroughs that might get us a little closer to the Metaverse, and a lot of the conversation has flipped over to education and business collaboration, and that’s all fine but in the meantime there’s some serious work being done over in gaming land, and there might be more clues over there for how this might all come together than in comparing VastPark to Second Life…they’re just platforms, after all, and we’re still waiting for the content that’s going to attract the masses.

At the Virtual World conference in New York recently most of the talk was on kid’s worlds - Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin, Virtual Barbie. And the astonishing numbers, in the millions, participating in those worlds. But again, over amongst the gamers there’s a whole different scale of work going on, and Steven Spielberg has thrown his hat in the ring, and his first title through EA games is a puzzler game, kind of a super-hyped up Tetris, but it has characters and towns and who knows what else.

Image from Kotaku.

His second title is under wraps, but is briefly described:

Players will apparently follow the story of an ‘ex-special agent’ as he tries to protect a computer-controlled woman that displays her emotions by changing the colour of her skin. The state of mind of the female character then affects the how well she’s able to help out the protagonist along the way. Spielberg describes the main challenge is to question whether, “the game [can] have an emotional impact on players while they are actively manipulating the world?”

Emotional impact while manipulating the world. Hmmm.

See, I’ve been trying to track Google and Microsoft a little too closely. They’re all about mirror worlds, after all, and who knows how close they are to bringing avatars into city maps, but I’m more interested in those other bits of the Metaverse Roadmap, the ones about life logging and immersion. So maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong place?

EA Games Says that User-Generated Content is the Way to Go
The Imagina conference in Europe brought together Electronic Arts with BMW, a conference devoted to things 3D, from urban planning to games. Glenn Entis, senior VP at Electronic Arts said that the commercial future of the company would be centered around creating games that rely on user-generated content, such as the soon-to-be-released Spore (sure, it’s kind of like waiting for the soon-to-be-released open source SL, or soon-to-be-released light viewer). he said:

“If you create a platform that is exciting for people to build their own content in, then that is a good business strategy,” adding that when users buy the game, they’ll play in a platform that is enriched by the millions of worlds that can be created and explored by players. “That’s value for money. There are also limitless possibilities for micro-transactions and subscription-based games in the future.”

That sounds a lot to me like Philip Rosedale talking. Only thing is, Philip Rosedale doesn’t have Will Wright or Steven Spielberg on staff. He has coders.

Even Microsoft Sees a GameSpace Slice of Virtual Earth
But maybe we shouldn’t discount the Microsoft folks so quick. After all, X-Box is hardly a minor player. But it continues to intrigue me that Microsoft bought out Caligari, adding to a little ecosystem that includes the 3DVIA folks and their 3DXML and other gadgets. So Caligari creates virtual spaces, including one called GameSpace, and following the announcement the CEO said:

“I was challenged to increase the scope of our vision (by Microsoft)” and he said was convinced that the Virtual Earth team has “a significant long-term commitment to the 3D Web”.

Over at Sony
We’re still waiting for the relaunch of Home, the virtual world platform by Sony that will provide an environment for gamers to socialize, find fellow players, live in cool little condos (um, well, maybe) and swap/buy/get neat stuff.

Ran across an interesting article on their popular Uncharted game in which the developer comments:

We don’t currently have any plans for downloadable content - instead, we included all our bonus content as unlockables right on the game disc. We’re excited about future integration with Home, though, and are looking forward to supporting Home with additional content when we’re able to.

And while on the subject, have a look at this for the PS2…a 3D camera somewhat in line with Emotiv or maybe Mitch Kapor’s 3D camera for Second Life.

The Metaverse Arriving
On the heels of the Virtual Worlds conference there was a lot of discussion over what it would take to make the Metaverse real. Sibley of Electric Sheep says there’s technology work to do. Others say the platform isn’t ready for prime time, that education and business will drive it to the next level.

Meanwhile, behind the walled gardens of game titles and platforms, there’s a lot of talk about multi-player social environments, the importance of great stories, stellar (and stable) technology, user-generated content.

Second Life is not a game. But with all the worries and dread about being mistaken for a game, it seems like the games aren’t quite so precious, and it might be time to think about whether there’s lessons over there amongst the joystick crowd.