Journal
New Open Source Virtual World Platform
9 March 2009
Sirikata is an BSD licensed open source platform for virtual worlds. We aim to provide a set of libraries and protocols which can be used to deploy a virtual world, as well as fully featured sample implementations of services for hosting and deploying these worlds. We are aiming for an alpha release in late Q1 2009 and this video teaser should give you some sense of what to expect.
Not a lot of information as yet, but you can check out their teaser video on Vimeo.
Human-Avatar Interaction
11 April 2008
I recently spent a couple of hours in Second Life attending a Caroline’s grand re-opening party. This was the longest stretch of time (about 3 hours) I had been in world in quite a while. Apart from the occasional customer service issue which requires me to jump in world, I don’t visit SL much any more. I’ll have more thoughts in a post marking my 5 year rez-day in a couple of weeks.
At the party eveyone was dancing and there was a central “dance ball” that anyone could touch that would animate his/her avatar. The dances were nothing to write home about—I recognized many bits and pieces that were ripped straight from old Poser 4 (I think it was 4) stock animation and combined with other “found” animation. (Test animations I had uploaded during the 1.4 Preview back in June 2004, if that tells you anything). Other individuals had a variety of different dance animations, some of which I really liked.
While everyone dancing together and listening to the same music/dj is great fun, the only difference between last week’s experience and parties we had in 2003 was the scripted dance animation. Don’t get me wrong, I think animation is great and SL 1.4 was probably one of the most exciting releases to date. And while there are advantages to pre-scripted animation allowing everyone to type and chat, I really longed for more direct interaction.
As chance would have it I was alerted to two bits of info last week which seemed to provide a possible solution to my desire for more direct human-avatar interaction. The first was a tweet from Lordfly about a project that was started back in 2006 by a dev team at LL (Cube Linden, Aura Linden, and Ventrella Linden) called Avatar Puppeteering. Please do check out some of the videos on the site for a working example of puppeteering in action. The project certainly showed a lot of promise. That is, before it was put on indefinite hold so that the team members could work on “viewer stability, bug fixing, and performance” issues. Tateru over at Massively has done a little digging and found out that Ventrella (and, yes, he was responsible for flexi-prims) left LL last year. Her conclusion is that this project has suffered perma-death.
Which is unfortunate because Mitch Kapor, LL’s Chairman, seems to have become interested in human-avatar interaction himself. According to this article Kapor and developer Philippe Bossut have been developing a hands-free, camera-based interface for Second Life. You can visit Kapor’s site to view a demonstration.
Given these projects and the success of accelerometer-based interaction of the Nintendo Wii and Apple iPhone and camera-based interaction like Sony’s Eye-Toy, some form of more advanced human-avatar interaction is coming. Will it come from Linden Lab? I wouldn’t get your hopes up.
Prêt-à-Porter—Spring/Summer
10 April 2008
Here’s a little inspiration from the RL runway for all you virtual fashion designers. The circle and dirndl skirts are fun, and there’s something about the higher waistline that’s appealing.
Sculptie Tool: Plopp SecondLife
4 October 2007
New tool for creating sculpties in Second Life. Plopp: “PloppSL allows you to create intriguing Sculpted Prims for SecondLife™ easily. Both texture and model are created in one step. Simply paint the front and back side of your model and it will be converted to a Sculpted Prim by PloppSL.”
The Trough of Disillusionment
25 September 2007
Being a data junky I’ve enjoyed watching the stats for this Web site over the past couple years. I’m actually just about to hit 150,000 unique visitors which I suppose is a good enough milestone as any to reveal some statistics. Not so much as an exercise in egotism, but as a casual examination of Second Life’s popularity filtered through this site over the past ten months. I’ve had this site for over 2 years now, and prior to 2007, visits were few but steady. But as we all know, SL exploded this year with meteoric hype.
The Piracy Paradox
22 September 2007
James Surowiecki, who wrote the highly recommended Wisdom of Crowds, has a great article in the New Yorker on the economics of the fashion industry and its notably weak intellectual property laws.
The paradox stems from the basic dilemma that underpins the economics of fashion: for the industry to keep growing, customers must like this year’s designs, but they must also become dissatisfied with them, so that they’ll buy next year’s. Many other consumer businesses face a similar problem, but fashion—unlike, say, the technology industry—can’t rely on improvements in power and performance to make old products obsolete. Raustiala and Sprigman argue persuasively that, in fashion, it’s copying that serves this function, bringing about what they call “induced obsolescence.” Copying enables designs and styles to move quickly from early adopters to the masses. And since no one cool wants to keep wearing something after everybody else is wearing it, the copying of designs helps fuel the incessant demand for something new.
While I admit that texture theft in virtual worlds is a different situation I think there are lessons to be learned from how the RL fashion industry handles intellectual property theft. Of course real life fashion designers aren’t happy about companies ripping off their designs either. The smart designers, though, are starting to directly compete with the stores that sell the knock-offs from their couture collections. Vera Wang at Kohl’s? Fantastic. The companies that peddle knock-offs will lose in the face of such strong, established brands.
What can you do?
Build a strong brand: create a cool store experience, design great packaging, build strong relationships with your customers and reward them for their loyalty. Communicate with your customers via in-world groups or something like Subscribe-O-Matic (haven’t used this, so can’t vouch for how good it is). Create a weblog. Get your stuff on onrez and SL Exchange. Keep innovating and creating new stuff. You’re the one with the talent so use it as best you can to beat the thieves. The reality is that they’re not going away.
Second Life is a huge place now, which makes it easier for the thieves to peddle your designs without your knowledge. The great thing about building up a loyal customer base is that they’ll tell you if they see your stolen designs. When that happens, take a deep breath, and handle it in a business-like fashion. Do what you can to handle the thief, informally at first and then via Linden Lab if need be, but don’t let it consume you and don’t let it dishearten you or keep you from working on your next piece, because then the thieves really win: they’ve robbed us all of your next design.
Why I Don't Have Comments
19 September 2007
A perfect distillation as to why I don’t allow comments on this journal. Very funny. The audio is NSFW.
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