So last week Rebecca taught me how to surf at Epic Conditions Surf. This week she is showing me around a few other popular surf places. First stop is the PrimWorks server, where the inventer of SL Surfing Heather Goodliffe has her home base.

“Last week we saw the epic waves,” says Rebecca, “there are two other kinds of surfable waves, the foam waves and the pipeline, both of which are for sale here. While there are resellers out there, here you know you will also get the latest versions.”

“Well, since I dont own a ton of land, I’m not in the market for my own waves.” I said, “But, I could use a surfboard.”

“Good thing we are standing in front of a mall filled with various board designers, then.” said Rebecca.

“Ooh, shopping!”, I exclaimed.

So I found this cool hawaiian board, traditional wood with a flower print. I asked where Rebecca recommends surfing next.

“The epic waves on Majini Island, are the coolest place to surf,” she said. “There are actually 6 server islands dedicated to surfing here. This is where the SL surfing experts all hang and try their stuff.”

“Cool, nice to know, but this looks like the place we went last week,” I said, “Are there any original surfing builds?”

“Yes there are, but its not for beginners,” she said, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Whoa, what is this?”

“This is the Boneyard,” she said, “waves and rocks to slalom through.”

“Looks like fun, lets go!”

I caught a “pipeline” wave and slalomed my way through the waves. It was not too difficult, and a nice change of pace from the epic waves.

“Yeah, that was fun,” said Rebecca, “it can get a bit laggy here though so the controls are a little tricky some times”.

“Shirts can also get a bit wet here too apparently,” I said.

And so we surfed around the rocks over and over, until I slammed right into Rebecca and we hit a big rock, and we both ended up dead. How ironic.

Virtual Society activities, beach, exploring, secondlife, shopping, surfing

I have been keeping track and trying many of the 3D Virtual Worlds and even related 3D websites out there, and I have been noticing a trend: Most of the newest 3D web programs have focused primarily on creating what amounts to 3D web pages.

The list keeps growing: scenecaster.com, 3dxplorer.com, vivaty.com, lively.com, exitreality.com, and the latest is justleapin.com. They all take differing approaches, but their goal is the same, they want to be the “standard” 3D web page program.

What each is about is letting people build a customized 3D web page like a “room” that can be explored via a browser (and ultimately a browser plug-in since nothing is standard yet), and allowing others to visit as well. If two people are in the same 3D room at the same time, they will see each other and can chat with each other. Like 2D web pages there should be conventions for connecting and linking rooms together, embedding media, allowing comment posting, etc.

3D web pages have been a goal for a while now. VRML has been around for years, and was supposed to be the 3D equivalent to HTML. You could even create VRML using a simple text editor, if you knew what you were doing. Most tools to create VRML were hard to use, and VRML took forever to load, especially in the age of dialup that everyone had in the 90’s. The technology was never there to display properly either. VRML is still around: As mentioned in my review, Exit Reality is based on it.

After VRML failed to catch on widely, the trend moved towards “persistent” worlds, like Active Worlds, Second Life and There. These are separate programs designed to access a “grid” where players rent space to build what they want. You can travel between spaces if you want or teleport from place to place.

Maintaning the “persistence” turns out to be very complicated, and as players of these programs know, buggy as hell.

So the later 3D virtual worlds simplified things as much as possible. IMVU came out only to do 3D chatting, the most popular activity in these earlier worlds. But building and decorating was number two, and most of the latest 3D virtual world programs, like Kaneva and Twinity, provide a “house” you can decorate as you please. They just drop the complication of house to house travel, every player has their own space to use as they see fit.

The websites in the second paragraph attempt to offer something even less complicated. They allow you to build 3D “rooms”, often as many as you want, that can be viewed in a browser, embedded in a web page. They replace the separate executable download with a browser plug-in that is generally easier to get the viewing audience to accept.

For all intents and purposes, we have come full circle; these sites deliver the 3D web page experience that VRML promised only with better graphics, with rooms that are easy to build, easy to load, as customizable as possible, and accessible by all.

If the idea of a 3D web is to catch on, everything must be customizable, it must work like HTML, and must be as simple as HTML. You must be able to start with a blank slate, or a pre-built template, navigation must be intuitive, and interactive. Quality should vary from simplistic to photo realistic depending on the computer capabilities of the viewer. Special effects (weather, particle, lighting, animation, water, physics, reflection and refraction) should be optional to both the builder and the user.

Eventually, one of those websites listed above may become the new defacto standard for “3D web pages” which will eventually lead to a 3D internet. Lets face it, if any of them do, it will be decided by advertiser dollars more than users. That means it will be Google Lively.

Except that Google Lively fails in most of the criteria listed, especially in the customizable part.

The program that inspired me to write this post in the first place was justleapin.com, now in open beta. It is lacking somewhat in features at the moment, but shows great promise in doing exactly what a 3D website program should do. Currently instead of avatars, you can add, animated people. Room navigation is simple mouse view. I dont know if avatar support is forthcoming, but I like the idea of adding animated people the way you add an animated gif to a 2D web page. You can customize any texture in the room, or embed videos, music, sounds, etc. There is a small library of 3D objects you can add, which could grow in the future. It also displays the room in decent graphics quality without being a resource hog.

I think that the decoratable “room” or “house” may be a popular model right now, but I know from my SL explorations, that thinking in just room terms is too limiting. Ultimately creating a 3D “space” should not have form limitations.

I do not know when or even if 3D web pages/sites will catch on. I do believe that expressing ideas should not have to be limited to 2D text or pictures or video, and that sometimes 3D may be a more effective and desirable way to express them sometimes.

Metaverse News 3D Web, 3dxplorer, exitreality, justleapin, lively, metaverse, scenecaster, vivaty, VRML

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know I am really into exploring 3D worlds. My friend Rebecca though is more into doing stuff. She agreed to show me around some of the cooler activities in Second Life.

First stop, surfing.

A couple of years ago, the first prim waves started appearing in Second Life. An enterprising SLer named Heather Goodliffe had the idea of creating prim waves that are surfable. It starts with waves that push any physical object that makes contact. Then creating a controllable board that moves with that physical push. The result is a surfing effect.

Surfing has grown into its own sub culture in Second Life. There are dozens of places to surf commercial and private, and numerous clubs, events, contests, etc. dedicated to the activity. Rebecca invited me over to the Weather sim, this is a group of sims sponsored by the Weather Channel with various activities, including one of the best places to learn to surf.

“If you just want to try it, there are free boards available in the surf shack,” she explains. “Go get one and meet me in the water.”

I did what she asked and noticed a problem. “Um, either I weigh too much, or this board does not float right.”

“Oh, sorry about that. That’s a bug that hit the SL surfing world last April when they implemented the Havoc 4 server code. The board will still work right, but it looks a little funny sunk in the water like that,” she says. “Let me loan you a non-bugged board.”

“Thanks, so how does this work?” I asked.

“Its just like real surfing, you paddle out to where the waves break. If you use your mini map, you can usually see four squares out in the ocean. This is where the waves usually start,” she explained, “There’s one starting now, lets see if we can catch it.”

And away we went. The steering and such is pretty straight forward. Left and right arrow keys turn, “c” wil cause you to crotch down. “e” you can stick your hand out and touch the wave. There are some boards with more complicated maneuvers, but those are the basics for the standard board.

Here’s some more surfing screenshots:

For our next surfing adventure, we will visit some of the other surfing sims, and checking out the whole surfing scene as a whole.

Until then, surfs up!

Virtual Society activities, beach, exploring, secondlife, surfing

It seems that Second Life, especially the mainland, is like an American shopping mall. Go to any shopping mall and you will find the same 50 chain stores as the mall closest to your home. Most mainland builds are all the same unoriginal clichés repeated. I’m sure there are some original builds, but mostly its generally the same stuff over and over again.

So I decided to make a game of it. Introducing Second Life Cliché Bingo! Its part Bingo, part scavenger hunt.

Start with the picture above, or make a 5×5 matrix and fill each square with something you see a lot of in Second Life. Then pick a random spot on the mainland, and see how long it takes you to find five in a row or black out the whole board. Notice that I did not include any avatar clichés, the truth is that if you really pick a random mainland spot, you run a 70-80% chance of going somewhere where there are no other people around.

Anyways, here are the clichés I included in the picture above. I found all 24 within a group of 6 servers, and screenshot the evidence.

Top Row:
A piece of furniture with sex “pose balls” attached.
An object with the default pinewood texture
One of those stupid home security scripts telling you to leave in 10 seconds or else!
A parked vehicle (car, boat, plane, etc)
A tree made of sculptie prims

Second Row:
An Asian build (Chinese, Japanese, Indian, etc.)
A flag or banner made with a flexi prim
A house, complete with yard, floating high in the sky
A nearly vacant plot of land with an off limits barrier in place
Something that spams Notecards or landmarks to passers by

Third Row:
Any object that emits particles
A vacant nightclub or bar
free space
church, cathederal, wedding chapel, or religion oriented build
A beach with fake prim waves

Fourth Row:
A clothing store
A wall picture containing nudity (or selling skin textures)
A “Castle” or a medieval inspired build
A pointlessly tall skyscraper build
Prim rotating spotlights

Fifth Row:
A temp object that didn’t de-rez, or any object that got stuck and abandoned
An animated animal or robot wandering around
A rotating “land for sale” sign
A “No Fly” zone
A 16m plot of land with advertising

Good Luck!!

Virtual Society bingo, cliché, exploring, mainland, scavenger hunt, secondlife

So there was some drama in the last 24 hours over a supposed 3D Virtual World called “Cityspace”. It all started with this article on Techcrunch about a video showing up on Liveplace.com, a web domain owned by one of the peopla associated with MySpace.com.

The video was quickly taken down, but techcrunch reposted it at blip.tv.

Here is the claim on the video: Cityspace can realistically render the city in real time using server side computing (cloud computing), meaning that the city can be viewed in a simple browser on any computer or even a mobile phone.

Why does it smell like bullsh!t?

Well the first clue was posted in the comments section of the Techcrunch, the first 30 seconds of the video is from a known “pre-rendered video” posted here.

The second clue is the sheer insanity of the whole concept. Real time realistic rendering via cloud computing? Every 3 words is an stupid idea. Realistic rendering is very time consuming. Every frame of a 3D animated movie takes hours to render. So lets add realtime realistic rendering, and you are talking about each frame rendering in 1/12th a second. And then we are adding to that doing it in cloud computing, where experience has shown everything takes longer, not shorter.

The claim is that this is all possible via new technology called OTOY. Their website features some screenshots that look identical to the video and a 2006 spech about deploying 3D games and virtual worlds in a web browser. Here is another company doing just that, but if you try it yourself, you will probably notice that its far from realistic. It renders client side using Java. There is another experiment in embedding second life locations into web pages, but it too uses client side renders, and renders no better than Second Life does.

But there is another element of sheer stupidity involved here. Anyone who would pre-build a giant city for a forthcoming “virtual world” has not been watching the virtual world market at all. Nobody wants to have an apartment in a prebuilt city. People want open space to build whatever they want, and maybe some professionally built meeting places to meet people and explore. Realism, is not necessarily a draw, in fact it can be a hindrance if made too real. I know all this stuff, and anyone doing minimum research into 3D virtual worlds quickly figure this stuff out too. If “Cityspace” really is a program under development, its a program doomed to failure.

The third clue that this smells like bullsh!t is the video itself. If this was actual footage rendered through a web browser, where’s the interface? If this was actual footage from a 3D world, where is the avatar controls? Why do we never see avatars move except during those first fake 30 seconds? How are lights turned on without pointing and clicking with a mouse? And if so, where is the mouse cursor?

What I see is multiple 3D models being navigated through using a 3D mouse, with obvious fake “jerkiness” added to simulate typical gaming camera moves. I also see a post process filter in most of the video softening the image and making the viewing area round with black corners. I also see evidence of post editing and added stills. There are also obvious lies like when viewing the suburb houses at night and the voice says “none of this is shadow mapped” when the houses were obviously shadow mapped to the point where the shadows were even in the wrong direction from the light source.

I also see zero evidence that any part of this video was rendered in real time, in fact the lack of interface and mouse cursors and avatar animation is very strong evidence that the whole video was post rendered. The narrarator was either reading badly from a script, or pulling the whole 3D virtual world concept out of his ass.

Why would they do this? Either its a real stupid internet joke, or a scam for VC money. I hope its the first, because the second is a felony.

I know its ironic that I call Cityspace bullsh!t when I just did a post on another realistic looking 3D world Project Blue Mars. The technology surrounding Blue Mars is technology I am familiar with and I know is possible. The Cityspace technology is speculative at best, and requires major leaps in technology that does not exist yet.

I’d be more than happy to take it all back if these guys showed up to do live demonstrations at E3, CES, or one of the Virtual World Expos, but until then I’m not buying it.

Media, Metaverse News cityspace, fake, liveplace, realism, techcrunch, virtual worlds

So a few weeks ago I discussed the ups and downs of realism in gaming, more or less stating that realism is good up to a point, though not necessarily needed for success. I also recently demonstrated that Second Life is not all that realistic anyways.

Also in recent weeks, Google Lively was released and turned out not to be the Second Life killer we all thought it might be.

Then there is the matter that Second Life is 5 years old, meaning its 5 year old technology. Its only a matter of time before something better comes around, something to steal away those that crave realism, something that really could be a Second Life killer.

I recently came across info on a new 3D Virtual World in development called Project Blue Mars. You can read about it at http://www.avatar-reality.com/. Now its still in development with no release date, but the idea behind it, and the awesome screenshots and more awesome screenshots tells me this may be the game changer we have been hoping for/dreading for a while.

The game plan is to build a world based on the idea of a terraformed Mars in the year 2177. OK a sci-fi conceptual world sounds neat. But its the tech underneath thats important.

First they are licensing the CryEngine2 gaming engine, used in the most advanced game out right now Crysis. Next you make a deal with e-frontier (now a division of Smith Micro) makers of Poser and Shade, and creators of a huge library of 3D objects that can be imported into the game, including realistic people avatars and residential houses, furniture, etc. Finally, you license 3D Game Studio, a gaming development platform that can create dozens of activities for players to participate in (notice the golf course in the screenshot above). This is the basic building blocks to a successful 3D Virtual World that potentially could blow all the competition away.

I’m not making any bold predictions, especially since there is no finished product yet, or any info on user created content potential, or any of the other dozen questions that come to mind. Let me just wish them well, and keep a close eye on this project.

Metaverse News avatar-reality, bluemars, game platforms, realism, secondlife, unreleased, virtual worlds

Every now and then I like to venture into the RP sims for some interesting exploration adventures. We got into a discussion at So There about "Steampunk" in Second Life. My primary exposure to the genre was reading The Difference Engine about 15 years ago.

Steampunk is basically about a reimagining of 19th century Europe (primarily Victorian England) where technologies imagined by fiction writers Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, as well as inventors Charles Babbage and Nikola Tesla actually came into being. There are lots of variations and sub-genres associated with Steampunk, and you are likely to run into most of them in Second Life as well.

First step in any RP adventure is to dress the part. A good starting place is Steam Forge, a mall dedicated to steampunk clothing and acessories. I found the above "rogue" look more to my taste than the traditional "Victorian" dresses. The boots blow steam when you fly.

Now I got an outfit, time to start exploring the steampunk worlds. A good starting point is the Steampunk Resource Center in Caledon. Caledon is a 45 server build dedicated to the Steampunk genre. Yes you read that right, 45 servers!

The resource center is where you can get landmarks to the best places. Its also centrally located so you can take off in any direction and find interesting stuff. The above picture was taken from a flying machine, behind me is Victoria City, one of the oldest Steampunk dedicated builds.

The other major build in SL dedicated to Steampunk is Babbage. With 6 servers, it may be small compared to Caledon, it makes up for the lack of size with attention to detail. This is a really beautiful build worth checking out even if you are not into Steampunk.

The place is covered in old victorian style homes, industrial plants, iron and glass buildings reminiscent of the Great Exhibition I mentioned in a previous blog entry.

But an easy to miss highlight is the Vernian Sea. This is a mostly water covered sim has an elevator at the end of the dock on Port Babbage.

Underneath is a huge underwater city complex, with ornately decorated tunnels and chambers, and all variety of fish swimming by. I’ve seen attempts at cool underwater builds, but this has got to be my favorite.

The tunnels are easy to get lost in, however, so a good explorer will venture outside in the water and swim around. I don’t have a steampunk diving bell or submarine. I also dont want to ruin my new outfit, and a bikini is so NOT steampunk. So the only choice is diving au natural.

Virtual Society exploring, role play, secondlife, shopping, steampunk, underwater