So I’m back with SL activities expert Rebecca, who last time taught me how to surf. We are meeting on the SL region of Nantucket located in the middle of a group of islands collectively known as New England. While many of the houses here are privately owned, they conform to certain architectural standards, specifically New World Colonial. The result is an area of islands that look like the north eastern coast of the United States.

“So what activity are you teaching me today?”, I asked.

“We are going sailing.”, she said, “Lets head out to the marina where I have my boat docked.”

“This is a Flying Tako”, she said, “This is one of the most advanced sailboats in SL, because it conforms closely to the physics of real sail boats.”

“Maybe, but compared to the other boats in this marina, it looks kind of crappy,” I said.

The Flying Tako is the boat of choice of the Second Life Sailing Federation. At L$250 they are relatively cheap allowing anyone to get into sailing. You can buy one here.

Rebecca explains the basics:

“When you get in the driving seat of the Tako, you can say “hud” and two attachments will appear on your screen. The upper right shows wind direction and sail position. The bottom left is clickable to control the ship.”

“You have two sails, the main sail and the spinnaker. The main sail works like a wing, the curved shape results in forward motion, and steering is controlled by the rudder (left and right arrow keys). when the wind is behind you, you can also raise the spinnaker for extra speed.”

“So far so good,” I said.

“So what happens when we want to sail into the wind?” I asked as we come to a stop.

“Bottom line is, you can’t,” she said.

“You have to turn left or right enough to allow your main sail to move you, then turn again the other direction, making a zig zag pattern. This is the part that takes a lot of patience and practice.”

I tried it her way for a while and did not get very far. I then suggested we do things my way.

“And what exactly is your way?” she inquired.

“A speed boat with an inboard motor,” I answered. “I got this from Seawolf Marine, one of the oldest boat stores in SL, and the first to introduce particle wakes.”

And off we went, exploring the New England isles. Not exactly kosher, but New England is part of a bank of 126 interconnected water navigable regions. Designed primarily for sailing, other watercraft are allowed.

The Nantucket and Mystic regions make up the heart of the New England area, its a pretty build with lots of houses and stores.  As we cruised through Mystic, Rebecca got up on the bow and took off her shirt.

The sun was going down, so I stopped at a pretty spot and joined her. I promised to practice my sailing some more and we would try again someday.

Virtual Society activities, exploring, sailing, secondlife

So I decided to follow up the kind of negative post about Lively with something more positive. There have been a few small positive news stories on the 3D Virtual World front: XBox Live has added their own Avatars similar to Wii Miis, Football Superstars is now in Open Beta so anyone can sign up, Playstation 3 Home will be opening as well in December, Project Blue Mars has announced plans to go beta in January 2009. A new casual gaming site called Moondo opened up this month. The only negative news is that Awomo is putting their 3D social game on the back burner to focus on their streaming gaming platform.

What all of these stories have in common is that they point to the future of 3D social virtual worlds, namely 3D game integration. I have been advocating this for 5 years now.

The basic pattern is this: Group meets in 3D social world and decides to play a multiplayer online game. Group migrates to that game and plays. When they are done, group moves back to social game to chat about experience.

The result is that it enhances the gaming experience in both ways: The problem in social virtual worlds is there is not always stuff to do or talk about. The problem in multiplayer gaming is you do not get an opportunity to chat with your co-players. With integrated 3D gaming, you get the benefits of both.

As I see it, this is the future of the 3D web. If you can also move your ID or better yet avatar from game to game even better.

Despite all the news stories above, we are not there yet, but that is the direction we are headed. Lets start with the Xbox360 live story. One of the fun little “toys” that came with the Wii was the ability to make mini avatars. They are very simplistic, but there are enough ways to change them that everyone can make unique ones. Then once you create a Mii, you can use the character in some Wii games, particularly Wii Sports. These have proven so popular that Microsoft decided it would do something similar for the XBox360, and their avatars are now available to live subscribers starting this month.

Two years ago, when the latest console wars began, Sony announced Home for the Playstation 3. The closed beta has gone on for a year and a half now, with apparently a lot of internal drama. The primary role of PS3 Home is to do exactly what I described above, the multiplayer games being limited to Playstation 3 titles.

Two new online multiplayer games also demonstrate this concept, though incompletely. First is Football Superstars. This game is a combination multiplayer football (Soccer) game and 3D social virtual world where you can live the “lifestyle” of a pro athlete, cashing in fame for goodies.  This an excellent proof of concept that could be expanded to other online games, or multiple online games could share a social virtual world.

A second demonstration is at moondo.com. There is no “social” virtual world on this site, but it does have the ability to design avatars that can play multiple 2D and 3D online games with the same character/avatar and again gain rewards for avatar add ons.

Finally, there is the upcoming Project Blue Mars, which I wrote about earlier, starting a beta test in January and aiming for April for full release. Built on a gaming engine platform rather than a VW platform, integrating video games into this social virtual world should be easy.

What I do not see happening yet in any of the above programs is a true combination of 3D virtual world and 3D gaming. The makers of PS3 Home insist on no user created content, and no accommodation for “role play”, making it purely just a meeting and shopping world.

The ideal will be a 3D world that does everything, and if the transfer protocols are done right, there can be more than one 3D social virtual world, just a simple protocol to move from one game to another, alone or in a group, via some teleport hyperlink.

That would be the true beginning of a 3D internet!

Metaverse News 3D Web, bluemars, footballsuperstars, moondo, PS3home, virtual worlds, xboxlive

Last night, the Google blog announced the end of Google Lively. This may rank as the shortest lived 3D virtual world ever, less than 6 months.

The first sign of trouble was the sudden jump in popularity, followed by the fairly consistent drop in popularity within a couple of weeks after release. It never picked back up, and apparently there is a ton or never released content waiting in the wings. The second sign was Google shutting down its offices on the ASU campus that served as the primary development location of Lively.

So what happened? How did the internet’s biggest developer release a cool product like this and fail? And what does this say about the future of similar projects like 3dxplorer.com, vivaty.com, exitreality.com, justleapin.com, scenecaster.com, and any other 3D worlds designed to work in 2D browsers?

(And may I also note, this is not the only high profile closure I am aware of. Cyworld is closing its US operations to focus on its Asian business. I wrote about it a couple of years ago, but heard diddly squat about it since then.)

I posted earlier that I thought Google Lively had the potential to be the progenitor of a 3D internet.  Guess I was wrong. In fact, this may require a rethink of the whole concept.

Here is my rethink: The idea of a 3D internet built to work in a 2D browser shall never succeed beyond the “novelty” phase. There will be the “ooh thats cool” exceptions that some advertising team does for some product, but the die has been cast. The concept is a failure. Lets move on.

Furthermore, and let me change to bold type, The failure of Google Lively puts the last nail in the coffin to the idea that any 3D virtual world can succeed under the same business model as 2D virtual worlds.

2D virtual worlds that run on 2D browsers are doing very well, but the additional overhead and useability of 3D kills much of what makes 2D virtual worlds successful. In 2D worlds you can buy a room and decorate it with purchaseable pre-designed items. The fact that is only 2D means that it is so simple a young kid can figure it out, and young kids love these 2D worlds.

The added dimension to 3D makes things harder. To build stuff in 3D requires understanding perspectives, camera controls vs avatar controls, size, yaw/pitch/roll, 3D texture mapping, etc. The people that cope best are experienced 3D gamers which instantly limits your audience. Then any useful 3D virtual world is going to require a seperate client download, which limits the audience further.

The successful 3D VWs (Second Life, There, and IMVU) allow users to create their own content and sell the content to others, something even 2D virtual worlds don’t do. This is the fundamental difference between 2D and 3D.

Google lively attempted to bridge the gap. They succeeded in creating a 3D web embeddable viewer, They made building and arranging your “room” amazingly simple and offered a large inventory of free stuff to put in the rooms. That, and the fact they are Google, offered the best hope of bridging the 2D and 3D gap. But, ultimately the useability wasn’t satisfying to the 2D crowd, and the lack of custom content wasn’t satisfying to the 3D crowd.

Hence the end of the experiment. The 2D and 3D virtual worlds are likely to evolve even further apart now that they have proven incompatible.

Metaverse News 3D Web, closed, lively, philosophy, virtual economy, virtual worlds

When I first joined Second Life, one of the first “WTF?” moments was encountering a large dragon made of round prims that was scripted to turn its head and eyes toward you. You move, and it would follow you with its eyes. It was freaking cool! Unfortunately that dragon is gone.

One of the early cool builds in SL that I ran into also had a Dragon theme. The Dragon Moon Resort is an older “island” build with at least half a dozen dragon statues on display around the walkway. Its still around and attracts a few visitors.

One of the newer cool island builds in SL is also dragon inspired. In fact, the Aggro server build features a store that sells incredible dragon avatars. Even if you are not interested in Dragons, the build is worth checking out. It inspired a discussion on another blog about whether SL graphics are better than Warhammer Online graphics.

I generally do not spend a lot of money on avatars, but the dragon avatars in Aggro are worth it. They are even HUD enabled and customizable to an extreme.

I got one and flew around the server for a while. I tried going back to Dragon Moon Resort, but they do not allow flying there .

So I decided to use the old search option and find other dragon themed places, which led me to the Isle of Wyrms Cathedral, the central location of a large server group dedicated to Dragon culture. I went as a human.

I had one of the head “dragons” show me around the cathedral. Its a huge multilevel complex with long halls, high arched ceilings and tall towers with stairwells to negotiate. Down in the basement is a subterranean maze that requires you to answer riddles to pass through doors. Quite the entertaining place to visit.

Among the things sold there are dragon eggs. I did not investigate how they work, but fans of Harry Potter will no doubt be interested. I finished up my visit to the Isle of Wyrms by changing back into a dragon and flying around the whole island group.

Virtual Society dragons, exploring, fantasy, role play, secondlife

Congratulations, if you are seeing this, you are seeing the new blog. I moved from Serendipity blog software to Wordpress. Still have not settled on a theme, but this generic one will do for now.

Notice all the blog entries have “tags” now. This should help immensely in finding stuff, and should direct search engines better as well. Notice the tag cloud on the right. Yep, this is mostly a secondlife blog. Wordpress is a lot easier to update as well, and loads faster for most people.

If you use an RSS feed to read my blog, be sure to update the feed address. Hopefully I will soon have a redirect for old links.

As I was tagging the old entries, one entry reminded me of an online project EA was working on called Virtual Me, and the press release said there would be something soon at virtualme.com. The entry was almost two years old, surely they should have something there by now right?

Well they do, and its all in Polish. Apparently, whatever Virtual Me is, they are test marketing it in Poland. The avatars, look suspiciously like the characters EA is developing for The Sims 3. Hmmm…

Metaverse News blogging, sims3, virtualme, wordpress

Went to a great Election Night party in Second Life sponsored by the So there Forums. Lots of fun, and most of us were rooting for Obama. A great celebration followed him getting over the top.

Time to plan an Inaguration Ball for January I believe.

Virtual Society election, event, secondlife, sothereforum