One of the most popular posts I did in 2008 was my end of the year list of the 10 best places I visited during the year. Most of those 10 made the list due to the magnificent scenery that can be found. While this years list has a few outstanding scenery locales, I also picked out a few that are outstanding in other ways. If you want to see these in person, you might want to hurry, two of the places I considered for this list are gone.

Tempura Island

Originally Posted: Three Beautiful Japan Regions
A beautiful garden and castle build inspired by modern Japanese style. This place grew in popularity throughout the year. The building interiors use many special effects for a surprisingly beautiful look.
SLURL – More Pictures – Video – Official Website

Kijiji (Visiwa)

Originally Posted: Africa in SL
Probably the best representation of Africa in SL. Multiple servers filled with unique African architecture mixed with Dutch Colonial buildings.
SLURL – More Pictures – Official Web Site

Kalepa (Garden of DaVinci)

Originally Posted: Fun Fantasy Regions for SL Explorers
This build has been around a while, but I finally got around to blogging about it this year. Mixed fantasy architecture, a multi layer, and a unique “eagle” ride to help you get around, makes this a fun place to explore.
SLURL – More Pictures – Video

Mouse World

Originally Posted: Theme Parks in SL
“Mirror Worlds” are 3d computer places designed to look like real places. One of the most ambitious I found was “Mouse World” an amazing recreation of a Disney theme park. There is another 3D replica of Disney World in Google Earth as well, but this SL version has actual working rides.
SLURL – More Pictures – Video – Official Web Site

Frideswide (World War One Poetry Archive)

Originally Posted: War Memorials in SL
This late entry built by a group at Oxford University has amazed many visitors for its immersive SL experience. Audio mixed with pictures, mixed with a detailed stretch of a real WW1 trench. Lots of information here to explore.
SLURL – More Pictures – Video – Official Web Site

PAX (Where the Wild Things Are)

Originally Posted: Scenic Organic Fantasy-Historical Mostly Outdoor Regions
This beautiful inventive sim has multiple natural settings transitioning nicely. Lots of good places to take screenshots.
SLURL – More Pictures – Official Web Site

Pillars of Hercules

Originally Posted: Fun Fantasy Regions for SL Explorers
This Greco-Roman designed fantasy build has caught on as a pretty background setting to model clothing lines and take screenshot photos. There is so much stuff here, it is amazing it all fits in a single 256m x 256m region.
SLURL – More Pictures – Video

Daden Space (Apollo 11 Landing Site)

Originally Posted: Recreating the Apollo 11 Voyage in Second Life
This educational region allows you to see in detail the landing site of the Apollo 11 lander. You can even follow the paths that Armstrong and Aldrin followed and recreate some of their experiments and photo ops. An excellent example of SL as an educational resource.
SLURL – More Pictures – Video – Official Web Site

Japan Kanto (Hosoi Ichiba)

Originally Posted: Three Beautiful Japan Regions
I found this place from an impressive machinima video on You Tube. This furniture store is part of a group of Asian inspired builds that also includes Mao, a popular build of a section of the Great Wall of China.
SLURL – More Pictures – Video – Official Web Site

Mont Saint Michel

Originally Posted: Three Fabulous SL Recreations of Real Architecture
A detailed 1:1 scale recreation of a historically significant island just off the coast of France. The only difference being the kinds of stores you find in the shopping area as you climb up the islands hill.
SLURL – More Pictures – Video – Official Web Site

Virtual Society 2009, exploring, secondlife

On a web page I wrote about the history of computer animation, I charted how the industry went from cutting edge to mainstream in about a decade, wearing off the novelty, but still producing quality from time to time. I believe that is the present state of SL today.

Second Life is becoming “mainstream”.

I have said on a few occasions that SL is like a 3D AOL before the world wide web exploded. In the early days of the web it was fun exploring new web sites to see what people were posting. As the web progressed, the number of web sites exploded, and the overall quality improved.

At that time I was a reader of PC Magazine and they were doing an annual “Best of the Web” list each year. They had to stop when the web reached a saturation point. I feel like we have reached that point in Second Life.

We used to go to really original places like Svarga, Straylight, and Insilico and be amazed. Now dozens of new servers pop up monthly with similar looks to these places. It is getting harder and harder for builders to trump the latest, and even if they do get something amazing built, it gets lost in the noise.

The overall quality of SL region builds is going up, which is a good thing for us players that love to explore, but it is getting harder and harder to find places unique and original and wonderful enough to blog about. My next post is going to be the my second annual best of SL, and it will probably be my last best of list.

At the same time SL is changing its business model. Recent xstreet changes have been made which have upset casual merchants, but at the same time should help keep the copybot pirates from making a quick buck. SL is also limiting scripts people can run simultaneously, and making other changes that hurts the “freedom” in SL, but should make the platform more attractive for casual users.

All of this is following the same trend we saw in computer animation and the world wide web. We are reaching a saturation point. Second Life is no longer cutting edge, instead it has dulled a bit.

The cutting edge is in the Open Sim community, which still is working on improving the platform to match SL, and hopefully surpassing it soon.

The potential cutting edge can also be seen in Blue Mars, which recently added the Caledon “steam punk” community from Second Life to Blue Mars and is opening stores.

My current plan is to keep this blog going, but instead of pushing myself to post every week, I may post only when I find something to post about. Hopefully there will be enough to keep me busy.

Metaverse News, Virtual Society 3D Web, blogging, secondlife

I made an unusual change to the Date Simulator, it has been on the online version for a while, thought I’d release the changes  to the offline version.

I added “On mouse over” and “On mouse out” text to every link on the pictures which displays either an action (in italics) or a quote (not in italics)  underneath what Ariane says.  The idea is to give it a more comic book feel, while also making things easier to read and navigate on small browser windows (i.e. mobile phones).   Some mobile browsers still don’t work, unfortunately, but it works well anyways.

You may notice that sometimes the text below and the text on the link does not match, this is intentional. In some places the text below is random which you can change by moving your mouse over the link, the text on the link remains generic.  If the text below does not make sense, look at the link text.

Except for a couple of minor bug fixes, there is no change to game play from version 6.0.

Media, Metaverse News Dating Simulator, updates

November is best known for Thanksgiving, but Veterans Day is also celebrated on November 11th, the anniversary of the end of World War 1.

Which is a good lead into one of the best educational sims I have ever seen The First World War Poetry Digital Archive (More Pictures – Link to website) built by a group from Oxford University.

The link will take you to a starting spot, where you can get a free WW 1 uniform or a nurses outfit. This is not a RP sim so you don’t have to dress up. I decided to dress as a soldier anyways. I know a female on the battle field is not historically accurate, but what the heck. The region is very sound heavy, so make sure you can hear things. There are a lot of historical recordings, many of which you hear as you click on objects.

Follow the arrows to the “This Way To The Trenches” sign and click on the object there, and you will be teleported over a build of a trench. As you fly over and pass through a biplane dogfight, you hear a description of the history of trench warfare. When you finally land, you can follow the trench or try and run across the battlefield dodging mortars and mines. Click on the soldiers and hear personal accounts from the trenches.

This is a truly awesome use of Second Life that is immersive and educational, and everyone should check it out.

Meanwhile, on the boards was a request for links to recreations in SL of US historical places. The list assembled on the NMSUA website is already extensive, and worth trying some links.

The first link is for a place I knew existed but never visited, an SL recreation of the Vietnam Memorial Wall (More Pictures). The place takes a while to load as the wall plates are in high definition so as to show you the list of soldiers killed in Vietnam. If you never been to the real wall in Washington DC, this is a good substitute. Turn on your video and see images, songs, and a robot voice reading all the names on the wall, something you don’t get at the real wall.

Virtual Society education, exploring, secondlife, war memorials

With Guild Wars 2 looking at a 2011 date, I decided to quench my craving for new fantasy gaming content with a desktop based RPG game, the new Dragon Age Origins, which just launched last month.

I have played a few MMORPGs, but this is my first PC-RPG and it is quite the experience. There are advantages to desktop RPGs that you don’t get online. The obvious one is cheat codes, game mods, etc. If you get stuck somewhere these are options.

MMORPG requires eveything be balanced, while PC-RPGs actually thrive on imbalance. Finding power combos (like taunt and forcefield) that are way over powered aren’t going to get nerfed in the next update. It sets up a choice whether you want to go the easy way or the “pure” way, as nobody gets hurt from your “cheating”.

The biggest difference is the storytelling possibilities. MMORPGs have linear storylines which occasionally branch but eventually re-merge. PC-RPGs can be very complex, and because enemy difficulty can change along with the player there is no need for easy regions or hard regions. The path you take is fairly open.

The NPC’s have complex personalities, and keeping good relations with them is a part of the game. Some of them will even quit your group if you make decisions they are upset with. On the other hand, some can develop into sexual relationships. (One of the reasons why the game is rated M).

The first thing that amazed me was the first big battle cut scene. Hundreds of characters on the screen at the same time is something I have never seen in a video game before. Most “battles” I see are maybe 12 characters fighting 12 enemies, more of a skirmish than a battle. To see battles the size and scope you see in the movies is a new experience.

The world is immersive, the stories emotional and complex, the directions it could go are not open ended, but there is a lot of content here. Choices you make on the opening character creation screen can completely change the story that is told, making the game very replayable. Many people in the know say this is the best RPG game ever made, and I see no evidence not to believe them.

Metaverse News dragonage, reviews, role play, videogame

I’ve been having some ongoing issues with godaddy hosting, I believe the server is falsely reporting too much traffic or too many connections.

I’ve set up a mirror blog at http://arianeb.wordpress.com

I have not decided if the move will be permanent, or if I should maintain two mirrors, or if I should just move to a new host

Uncategorized

Three other blog posts generated a fair amount of feedback over at SL Universe this week.  First was a protest over in world copying promoted by the Shopping Cart Disco blog.  Second was an article at the Pixels and Policy blog about how real life gender affects second life play. Third was a proposal by Hamlet Au at NWN about integrating Facebook and Second Life in an effort to get more players into SL.

My response to all three was decidedly negative.  Even though these three separate issues have little to do with one another, they all deny the whole vision and purpose of Second Life as if they are a part of a concerted effort to turn SL into something it is not.  Have we lost the vision of what SL is supposed to be?

The bulk of my venom is over the second and third posts, but I should begin and end with the first.  I did not participate in any protests over copyright issues.  Not that I am opposed to copyright protection or removing counterfeit goods, or punishing those that violate copyright in world.  I am opposed to changing the rules of SL to accommodate copyright protection.  I have explained why in previous posts.

Every now and then we get an article about how people play avatars that are nothing like who they really are. Men pretending to be women, women pretending to be men, adults pretending to be children, children pretending to be adult, humans pretending to be animals, animals pretending to be human.  You get the picture.

My response is always: That is why it is called SECOND Life. Yes, there are fake people in SL. In fact the vast majority of players look nothing like their avatars in RL, whether it being a few inches taller, or 20 pounds lighter, all the way to playing fantasy alien species.

The truth is there are plenty of fake people in real life as well, the fake people in Second Life are a much more interesting fake.  In real life we pretend to be something other than ourselves, because societal norms tell us we should.  In Second Life what we pretend to be is a personal choice, a creative representation we choose to project.

As I have pointed out before, there is a large part of the general population that doesn’t get this.  They believe that our online persona should be real, that the virtual world should mirror the real world, they are offended by even the idea of “role play”, and they are likely to show up more often in social networks like Facebook.

I did finally get a Facebook account and use it to talk to family and old friends.  I don’t bother with all the other crazy stuff that goes on there like Mafia Wars and Farmville.  So yes I understand that SL’ers may be ok with social networks.

I’m not so sure a typical Facebook user would be that interested in Second Life.  Advertising SL or integrating Facebook in SL will not work.  The TOS policies in FB are decidedly anti role play, and they will occasionally suspend accounts of people using fake names or 3D rendered profile pictures.

Bringing in the Facebook crowd means bringing in the kind of players that reports people wearing child avatars for being under age; that think it is cool to “out” the gender benders; that take offense at furbys and goreans and nekos; the type of people that don’t understand “role play” and generally cause problems for those that do.

These kind of players don’t last long in SL anyways. If SL wants to attract future loyal players, they need to hit sci-fi and comic conventions, SCA and Renaissance fairs, war reenactors, and other places likely to attract the role playing types. I’ve met lots of SL players who are into all of this stuff IRL as well.

Second Life is a world designed and built for role players of all types. That is what it has always been and needs to remain.  Concerning yourself with real life identities is a waste of time.  Trying to “mainstream” Second Life is counter productive and wont work.

Linden Labs needs to stop marketing Second Life as a place to make money, especially since only about 2-3% actually do. They also need to stop marketing as a social chat environment as there are dozens of better places to chat.  It is far more effective, I believe, if SL were marketed as a fantasy mecca, as a place to create your world. Its what those misleading ads for Evony and IMVU do, and they have attracted millions of players.

Which brings us full circle to those concerned with copyrights and stuff.  SL was not designed to protect copyright. Many real life 3D artists don’t bother with SL for that reason.  I figured this out a long time ago myself. If you release something cool in SL, it will get copied and stolen, and spread around.  Somehow this idea that SL is a place to make money has caught on and has turned into an entitlement, they are demanding that the Lindens protect their investment with draconian rules to limit play for non-paying players, or to limit what can be uploaded and by who.

From a role play perspective this whole thing is silly anyways.  I build my character, make or buy clothing, make or buy housing and enjoy the world.  If I want to play the role of “fashion designer”, I design avatar clothing, and have fun doing it, and if I make money too, great!  It means I can play the role of successful fashion designer.  If others are making cheap knock-offs of my product line, well that’s the life of the virtual fashion designer.

Worrying about what others are doing with your stuff just leads to stress and burnout.  Aside from filling out the occasional DMCA ticket, people shouldn’t waste their time over it.  This is all antithetical to the whole spirit of Second Life.  SL was designed as a fun diversion, a fantasy escape, with as much freedom as possible, not a big business platform that needs to be scrutinized and regulated.

With the recent departure of some key players, Second Life seems to be at another crossroad point. In these times, there is always this serious risk that things could change enough to destroy what has been built.

It is time to remind people of what the whole purpose really is.

Virtual Society philosophy, role play, secondlife

What if you built an awesome 3D Virtual World and nobody came? That seems to be the question facing the makers of a 3D virtual world that I recently discovered.

I was tinkering around with evolver.com a 3D avatar maker that hopes to create a common avatar for multiple web based 3D worlds. I was using it to create a new avatar for facebook, and I saw one of the “transport” options was something called

friendshangout.com

The name sounds atrociously lame. Sounds like a chat website for lonely emo teenagers. Who would want to go to a website like that? Curiosity, of course, got the better of me. The website was as lame as I thought it would be, featuring lots of pics of good looking college kids with dumb smiles on their face, and a video of some blonde chick reading marketing dribble from a teleprompter.

My first reaction was “I want no part of this”, my second was to see just how lame of a 3D chat this was going to be, like slowing down to look at an auto accident, or smelling expired milk before throwing it away.

So I create an account, go to the 3D chat page and pick a beach setting. My expectation dropped even further when I saw the 3D Chat runs in a web browser (remember Google Lively?). I was ready for the worst, and then…

OMG!!!

This was completely unexpected! A beautiful fully developed 3D world with awesome graphics, easy to use navigation, decent evolver avatars, that runs in a freaking web browser!

There are also vehicles to ride, and about a half dozen environments to explore. The only thing I didn’t try out was the chat feature as I could never find anyone else online. I pretty much had the place to myself, which was kind of sad.

This is a quality 3D Virtual World that impressed me way more than Blue Mars, and it is too bad it is buried behind crappy marketing.

Further reasearch indicates that the virtual world is based on the Unity game engine. The friends hangout “Island Paradise” is identical to the demo “Tropical Paradise” as seen on unity3d.com. Apparently some of the other places at friends hangout consist of other demos, or worlds created from arteria3d.com.

A little whois research indicates that friendshangout.com was registered over five years ago by a company that has a bunch of similarly designed websites, which tells me it is some off the shelf web template they are using.

So someone has managed to combined cheap avatars from evolver.com, with a cheap web based 3D gaming engine from unity3d.com (was $200, now available for free), and put up a cheap website with a domain they already owned.

If they were to actually get some professional web designer with a decent social network web system, and buy a decent domain name, and promoted it, they may have something really cool.  

There is not enough content here for long term interest, but in the mean time, I am enjoying what is here.

It is a nice place to visit on the remote outskirts of the Metaverse.

Metaverse News 3D art, evolver, friendshangout, metaverse, reviews, virtual worlds

With the popularity of IMVU now matching Second Life levels, I decided to check IMVU out again after a 4 year absence.

I signed up after IMVU went open beta, and was the 814th person to do so. In those days IMVU was Instant Messenger Viewer Utility. It was a tool that you add to any IM program of your choice, so to use IMVU you had to be using AIM or YIM, and the person you were chatting with must be as well.  Finding people to chat with was difficult. Eventually, they got smart and just started their own IM service for IMVU users to use.

Even after creating their own IM service, I found it annoyng that you could only form a chat with one person, and then add people to the chat.  I prefer to chat wih groups rather than random strangers.

I returned back about a year later to discover they were experimenting with a group chat feature. I liked this, but it was a bit flaky at first. It wasn’t long before I lost interest again, and I pretty much did not have it even installed on my computer for 4 years.

So, after reading the press release about IMVU making money,  having 6 million unique monthly visitors, and traffic equal to Second Life, I had to go check it out again after a long absence.

A lot has changed, so much that I feel like a noobie again.  The biggest change happened in July 2009 when they completely revamped the client program.  In the early days you had to keep 3 windows open to use IMVU: the IM program, the client, and the website.  When they added their own IM service it was reduced to two.  As of July 2009, you only need one.  Shopping, friend finder, group finder, and profiles are all now accessible in the client itself, even through tabs.  It is all organized really well, and Second Life could learn a thing or two, (or three, or four…) from the client.

IMVU now has in my estimation the best 3D client program of any 3D Virtual World I have seen.  Its unfortunate that the bar for this achievement has been set so low.

Since the last time I started IMVU, they have changed the default avatars.  The oversized heads are gone, feet are smaller, and they look more proportional to human normal.  Hands are still big though.

The bad news is that my account still has the old avatar with the big head.  Some would just roll a new avatar with better looks, but in the last 4 years I have collected over half a million game credits through various promotions. Plenty to fix my avatar’s flaws. Its also too cool to have a 3 digit ID number when most have 8 digits.

I have been visiting random rooms, trying to reestablish myself.  I like the rooms with 6 to 8 other people.  I don’t know very many other players so I just dive in and see what people are discussing.  It is mostly just fun blather — the same stuff I find a lot in SL or There.  Part of that is due to the max 10 person limit in all rooms.  The small limit also  forces you to circulate, don’t feel obligated to stay in one place, and don’t get offended if you get booted from a room due to overcrowding.  There are all the usual rooms: roleplay, night clubs, sex play, etc.  Finding stuff you are interested in is not too difficult. Finding people you actually want to hang with is a little more challenging.

I got an “adult pass” years ago, allowing me into all but the VIP rooms.  Rules on the use of adult pass (known as AP) has changed a few times.  For a while there, the only difference between AP and not is the ability to see and say dirty words.  Today nudity is allowed in AP rooms, though it is not as prevalent as one might imagine. People like to dress up a lot. AP is a good way to avoid the “teens” and troublemakers on freebie accounts.

Among the things you can purchase in IMVU is music that you can play in world.  Its about 65 cents a song, but you have to be in a room with someone else to play the music — RIAA rules.  Most of the music comes from emusic.com, so lots of indies, not a lot of mainstream hits. There is some good stuff in there though.

So far I am enjoying the visit, but I have no plans to become one of the IMVU addicts.  My favorite activity in 3DVW’s is to explore, and the format of IMVU is largely anti-explore.  The 10 person per room limit restricts the kinds of events you can have.

Metaverse News IMVU, reviews

The video above is not Google Earth, or Microsoft Virtual Earth. It is a creation of five guys in Britain led by Michael Fotoohi of Micazook.com. They have an ambitious plan of creating the entire planet in 3D navigable by avatars as seen in the video.  They use freely available aerial photography and digital street maps to create their world.  They are hoping to make a combination of Google Earth, Second Life, and Wikipedia.

Sounds like a cool project. More info can be found here.

Media, Metaverse News avatars, googleearth, mirror worlds, virtual worlds