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

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

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

Recently two of the big 3D Virtual Worlds released some numbers of how they are doing, and I thought it might be fun to compare.

IMVU

Population: 40 million registered users
Active: 6 million average monthly uniques
Money Spent (Annual Run Rate) : $25 million
Activity: Users average 1 hour + per day on the site
Peak Traffic: 80,000 simultaneous users online
Other Stats: 770,000 chat sessions per day, and 175,000 virtual items are sold daily
Source

Second Life

Population: Over 20 million registered accounts
Active: Over 1 million unique logins a month,  over 750,000 average monthly repeat logins (logged in at least twice in a month)
Money Spent (Annual Run Rate) : over $500 million
Activity: Users average 1.3 hours + per day on the site
Peak Traffic: Peak Concurrent Users hit 88,065 in April 09
Other Stats: Over 1 million monetary transactions per day
Source and Source

These are very interesting statistics. While I realize that the nature of these two 3DVWs is very different, making meaningful comparisons difficult, they both can claim #1.

IMVU is easily the highest populated, thanks to an aggressive advertising campaign. But, the Second Life economy is about 20 times bigger. Oddly the activity and peak traffic statistics are very similar, so there is no clear winner based on popularity.

Then there are many that question whether or not IMVU is even a virtual world or not. By my broad definition it is, but others consider it a 3D chat program and social network rather than a Virtual World.  Since you can create your own avatar, build your own home, customize both as you see fit, and visit any room you want, its a virtual world in my book. The only significant difference between IMVU and the more narrow definition of virtual world is navigation.  You cannot walk around in rooms, you click on little yellow dots which animate your avatar to a location in the room. You also cannot navigate from room to room.You select an active chat, or create a new one, and you move to a room. Due to the lack of navigation, there is no real estate or vehicles, which explains why its economy is smaller than other virtual worlds.

Some of the statistics are questionable, or at least not directly comparable. IMVU’s active user count seems to be based on sign ins to their website, which is a social network site as well as a portal to the 3D chat, while Second Life’s is purely client logins. The IMVU client allows you to sign in and then wait for a friend to invite you to chat like other IM programs do. That would also skew the “activity” stat above.

Similarly, Second Life’s Activity stat is over inflated due to bots. “Bot” programs keep an avatar logged in daily for long hours, they are used to automate club invites or to model clothing in stores. While bots are a small number of the active user count, they over inflate the time spent in world. According to SL’s own charts 3% of the avatars log in for more than 300 hours a month. That 3% represents 34% of the “activity” in SL.

So are these the two biggest? Well most 3DVW services are a bit stingy with their statistics. About the only thing we have to compare is total accounts (Population), which as you can see above is misleading. No matter how you measure, “active” accounts is always significantly lower than total accounts.

Here are the next five 3DVW’s based on population stats (via kzero.co.uk and other press releases):

PS3 Home 7 million
Free Realms 5 million
Red Light Center 3 million
There 2.5 million
Kaneva 2 million

All others are under 1 million.  Of these five, I suspect There has the most robust economy (possibly bigger than IMVU), but Free Realms is the fastest growing (a million new sign ups a month), and likely the most active these days.

Regardless, it is clear by population alone that IMVU and Second Life’s position as #1 and #2 (or #2 and #1 depending on what stats you use) are safely uncontested at this time.

Metaverse News IMVU, secondlife, virtual economy, virtual worlds

Some strange things in SL news this week.

First up, Second Life has been interested in working with third party partners for a while now, that is no secret.  This week it was discovered what they were doing with these partners.

Dreamland, a privately financed continent created by long time business avatar Ansche Chung, started renting real estate at cheaper than tier levels. People looking into this have found out that Dreamland is purchasing real estate in bulk for a discount rate, and passing on the savings to its customers — which of course is growing because of the cheap rates.  Smaller real estate providers are crying foul!

I totally understand the SL side of this. Offering bulk discounts, or wholesale prices is a regular business practice of many businesses.  In a way this is a sign of Second Life maturing as a company.

I also understand the frustration of the small real estate providers who find themselves at a financial disadvantage. Virtual real estate is not a good thing to be into these days, prices across the grid are low, and getting lower. The PG vs. Mature vs. Adult policies is not helping things either.

Its a story worth following further.

Meanwhile, a 3rd party viewer client added an interesting and unexpected feature : jiggling boobs!

Yes, with the independently developed Greenlife Emerald viewer available here, you can now see all the female (and some of the male) avatars jiggle as they dance, walk, and whatever.

Just load the viewer and go to Edit > Preferences > Emerald > Page 2 > Effects > Click “Enable enhanced physics on avatar breasts”. (If it does not work immediately, you may have to restart the viewer)

I wonder how long it will take for this to be added to the official viewer?  I’m guessing a while.

Speaking of Official Viewers they released version 1.23.5 this week to plug a security hole involving notecards. Another 3rd party viewer called Neillife was exploiting this to allow people to copy inventory and remove permissions. Linden Labs caught a bunch of people doing exactly that and banned them.  This made a lot of content creators happy.

Well one person’s ban is another person’s slap on the wrist. The majority of these bans were overturned so fast I suspect a few of the violators didn’t even notice it.

Regardless, it sent a message not to use the exploit, and with the new official viewer the exploit has been plugged.

I just do not know how many people are going to be using the official viewer. What do you want a security hole free client, or one that allows you to look at bouncing boobies?

Finally a note. Second Life’s founder and former CEO is forming a new company. He will still be on the board at LL and will continue to be the public face, but he will only be at LL part time according to his note.  Good luck Phillip, and thanks for all the fish!

Metaverse News boobs, secondlife, sl clients, virtual economy, virtual real estate

There has been a fair amount of drama on the whole adult continent Zindra front. The move of all adult content to a new continent has brought land speculators, complaints, AR griefing, and other nonsense. Time to take a second look.

On September 15th, Linden Labs has drawn the line. All adult businesses must be on Zindra or an estate server set as “adult”. Rule breakers will no longer be seen in search and could be forced to move.  Furthermore, SL clients not enabled with code to handle adult permissions (1.23 or higher) will no longer be able to see adult islands on maps, or see any shops or groups that are adult in nature.  LL is still vague about their guidelines to prevent people from working around them, though there are 3rd parties figuring it out.

In the June essay, I mentioned two possible scenarios of where Zindra will head: 1.) A sanctuary away from alt griefing and kids pretending to be adult, or 2.) an adult oriented ghetto.  Many of the more established successful businesses have relocated to private estates rather than Zindra. Because of this, its looking more and more likely that the second scenario will prevail.

A quick tour around Zindra today is like a big mall of mostly crap. A good 90% of adult merchants do not know how to make a good store build. Lots of bright tacky colors, or way too big textures that cause load lag. I went to some of the busiest businesses and either found a lot of bots / camping chairs, or builds in private skyboxes.

That to me is a virtual ghetto.

Ironically, after exploring the main areas of Zindra, my favorite build I found was designed to look like a ghetto (More Pictures).  Its actually a group of builds in the same area with the same “ghetto” aesthetic.  Lots of naughty poseball furniture and toys, mixed with sexy clothing shops and booth and apartment rentals.  It is the most interesting build, or group of builds, I found on the whole continent. (Pictures in this article are from that build)

The as yet unanswered question is how will this segregation of adult businesses affect the rest of Second Life.  Adult rated regions currently make up almost 5% of Second Life, and the stricter enforcement (especially on estates) is going to make that percentage rise. Traffic will change, as will land prices, but how and how much are unanswered as of yet.

Below is a map of the main section of Zindra as it now exists. Compare it to the map I made in June and see how much it has changed.

Metaverse News, Virtual Society adult content, censorship, exploring, secondlife, virtual sex, zindra

This week, two of the more successful creators in Second Life filed  a class action suit against Linden Labs due to lost business resulting from other players copying their items and selling them as their own.  This is a very touchy issue for a lot of people, the thread at sluniverse.com was 15 pages long in the first 24 hours of the post.

I thought I’d share some thoughts on this. I am not a lawyer, and I have no clue how this will play out. My best guess is an out of court settlement that will not change the situation at all. Personally, I believe that there is plenty of blame and misunderstanding to go around.

Lets start with the basics:

1.) Second Life was not designed with security, copyright, or IP protection in mind.  Otherwise, 60% of all textures and 90% of all sound files would have never made it into the game.

2.) It is technically impossible to stop the copying of textures and objects on to people’s hard drives, and damn near impossible to stop these copied textures and objects from being imported back into the game under a different “creator” name.

Linden Labs has failed in two ways:

1.) They failed to publicize facts 1 and 2 above, thus giving most players the false impression that they can make what they want and no one could copy it. Even worse, they instituted a policy early on that the rights to all textures, animations, scripts, etc imported into the game would remain with the player that imported them, thus implying that they can be safely used in game.

2.) They have failed to enforce copyright claims, even at the bare minimum level an internet “service” is expected to do. Claiming to be a “service” and claiming only the users of the service are responsible if they violate copyright or trademarks has not stopped other internet services from getting take down notices, and should not stop Linden Labs either.

The filers of the class action are stating some things in the class action that are clearly not true as well. Take a look at point 6 on page 3:

6. Linden Labs has the means to simply and easily halt the alleged conduct, but refuses to do so because it makes too much money from all the infringement.  Plaintiffs bring this lawsuit in order to prevent Linden Labs from continuing to commit trademark and copyright infringement and to recover damages for Linden Labs unlawful behavior.

This paragraph is for the most part false, and its inclusion undermines paragraph 4 and other parts of the complaint. Especially false are the words “simply and easily” as if a simple command into some SQL database would solve a complex copyright issue.

There are a lot of ideas floating around to prevent copyright issues from coming up in the first place, and I have yet to see one that would not seriously harm legitimate businesses or the SL economy as a whole.  The most popular is to not allow people who do not have financial data on file to cash out lindens for dollars, in hopes that the lack of anonymity will scare away copy scammers.  The flaw is that it is not necessary to use Lindex to buy and sell lindens. If LL starts restricting the Lindex, it will open up third party exchanges.

The only way around these loopholes is to not allow any unverified free accounts to have any lindens at all. This will further deteriorate new player experience, and ultimately hurt the economy as a whole as it limits the customer base.

The least harmful way to enforce copyright is the “You Tube” way. Take it down if a copyright holder wants it taken down. The burden of proof of a copyright claim would be on the copyright claimer, requiring evidence that you uploaded said texture or created said item before the copy, to prevent false reporting for griefing purposes.

Complaints regarding copyright or trademark should be investigated. If the investigation determines the claim is valid, the offending object gets removed and replaced in people’s inventories with a notecard explaining what happened, and who made the complaint. It should also possibly result in the suspension of the copiers account, rescinding of land holdings and lindens.

I know this would result in a lot of innocent victims losing stuff they paid for, resulting in lots of complaints, but it could lead to other reforms for the better, like a rep system or insurance system. Who says these have to be run by SL?

Even this is not a fool proof system, but it is a way of doing something, which is more than they are doing now.

Some other 3DVWs that allow user created content that can be bought and sold by players, namely There and IMVU, have restrictive approval requirements, that also cost money to submit new items, and it takes days to get it approved.  This makes sure people aren’t copying other peoples work, but it also slows way down the growth of content in the virtual world.  Second Life has definitely benefitted from the exponential growth afforded from an open submission policy.  Restricting the policy would completely change every aspect of Second Life.

In conclusion, I believe this lawsuit will never get to court and will end in some settlement.  I’m not worried that SL will close, I am worried that LL will have to make some draconian change in policy that will ruin SL. Getting rid of the offending material, and maybe the offending avatars is fine.

Making changes to the submission process, or making economic changes, would no doubt do more harm than good.

Metaverse News copyrights, legal, linden labs, secondlife