So in my last post, I revisited some Japan regions, this time I thought I’d cross the sea into China, which I did not really do very well in my around the world adventures last year. China is all over the place in Second Life, so much that I even listed it as a cliché in a previous post. For this post, I decided to go the opposite as Japan, and post a modern build first.

First let me say, that unlike Japan, I do not think I would like to visit China. Their draconian censoring of the internet and ban on anonymity makes me sad. Nevertheless, it does not stop me from visiting Chinese themed regions like these…

RMB City officially opened late last month, as an urban build very loosely based on Beijing China. Its not a “mirror world”, and truthfully it is hard to describe. Part art project, part stealth political statement, its … well the official web site says “RMB City is an online art community in the virtual world of Second Life. This project is an experiment exploring the creative relationship between real and virtual space, and is a reflection of China’s urban and cultural explosion.”

Here’s a far away picture of this four server build, but exploring the build on the ground reveals lots of details as well. Here is a representation of a street market I found deep i the build:

According to Koinup, the Mao region was one of the most visited in 2008. The region is one of a group of asian themed builds that also includes the Virgin Island build I featured in last weeks visit to Japan.

The Mao region is simply a representation of the Great Wall of China. Its pretty well done and photographs well, hence the attention it gets.

I decided to be artistic myself and for photo of me and the wall. The Great Wall of China has been represented in SL before, in fact Linden Labs did a great wall on the northern continent that stretches for quite a few servers.

The majority of the real Great Wall was built during the Ming Dynasty (1368 to 1644), which also built the Forbidden City in Beijing. A near perfect replica of the front gate can be found in SL at beyondspaceandtime.

This pretty build is designed to promote beyondspaceandtime.org a website built by IBM in cooperation with the Chinese Government to educate others on Chinese culture. What they have there is a 200MB download that allows you to explore the entire forbidden city in 3D. The SL build is merely the front gate and represents maybe 5% of the entire forbidden city.

Ever the consumate virtual explorer, I decided to venture outside of Second Life and check out the program. Here are some screenshots:

This screenshot was taken at approximately the same spot in the Forbidden City as the SL picture was taken. I am dressed in male peasant clothes. In keeping with Ming Dynasty rules, females are not seen in the Forbidden City, so I have to wear a disguise.

Sneaking my way past the main courtyard, headed toward the palace.

This is a full screen shot showing the interface. Throughout the build, there are representations of Chinese life, though I am not sure what “Cricket Fighting” is. Maybe I should look it up?

Virtual Society 3D art, China, exploring, forbiddencity, secondlife

After circling the globe last year I occasionally ran into new “mirror worlds” worth blogging about. I thought I’d save them up and blog about specific regions and countries as they come up.

Today is Japan. You know that country in the ocean somewhere that sends us all their Manga and Anime? I’ve heard it also say that because Japan dominates the video gaming market, it can be said that Video Game culture = Japanese culture. So it is never a bad thing for us gamers to learn a little.

The first beautiful Japanese sim to check out is Virgin Island aka Hosoi Ichiba. This sim started out as a Japanese furniture store has expanded into a mini Japanese cultural center with multiple examples of old architecture and gardens.

Next is a Japanese garden center called Kenroku by Ableseed. They sell garden plants, and the land actually changes with the season. As pictured above, they are in a winter phase, but I first visited last summer when it was green. Again more traditional Japanese arcitecture. to check out.

For a bit more modern Japanese architecture, take a visit to Tempura Island. I discovered this place accidentally, while trying to find something else. Decided to bookmark it and come back later.

You arrive in a garden area with fall colored trees. and an elaborately decorated path.

At the far end of the path is a palatial estate, not uncommon in Second Life, but the more Asian look to the palace is different. I could not help but go in and check out the interior. May I just say “WOW”!

The palace interior uses a few old tricks. Glowing effects on lights, semi transparent floor with a mirror build underneath, objects textured with built in shadows. The resulting feel of the room is one of the most truly “luxurious” I have seen in SL.

—–

Previously featured Japanese places: SICK, Kyoto

Virtual Society exploring, Japan, mirror worlds, secondlife

This is the third “opinion” essay on the imminent shake up of 3D Virtual Worlds, separating myth from reality. Today’s focus: Infrastructure realities and their effect on marketing.

I mentioned in part one that the technology behind Second Life, There.com, Guild Wars and World of Warcraft, are all radically different. A truly successful mainstream 3D virtual world needs to somehow merge them all together. That’s my primary thesis.

Here’s my corollary thesis: Second life has a fatal design flaw and in five words or less the flaw is “computing power equals real estate”. This defect has been biting Second Life in the ass a lot lately.

First, they cant keep up with demand. Every four 256mx256m server means an additional computer is needed on the server farm. They have been expanding a lot lately, partly in an effort to lower land prices which a year ago were spiraling out of control. Land prices are finally lower now (much to the chagrin of people that made money speculating on land). The price for cheap real estate is steep: it takes in excess of 3000 web servers to run Second Life.

Second, a real estate design (open spaces) that came out last year was using too many resources. They answered that by raising prices way up, causing a loss of real estate equal to the size of a small country. In October, total real estate in Second Life was 1800 km sq. As of January it is down to 1600km sq.

But this is not just a recent concern. Many companies have dismissed Second Life as a marketing tool because of the low upper limit of traffic. No plot of land can have more than 100 people on it at the same time. Most players know it starts to get bad at around 60. Without ways to allow for thousands of players to be in the same place, it seriously limits the marketing potential of Second Life.

There is an upper limit to “crowds”, no matter what game you play. Other games just handle it better. Guild Wars for example has “instances”. If more than 40 people want to be in the same city, they open a second instance, and just keep on opening instances as needed. Some major events have exceeded 300 instances. It is possible under this system to move to the instance where your friends are, as long as any instance does not exceed 50.

For There.com, instead of computers = real estate, it is computers = players online. This is needed because There real estate consists of an entire planet almost the size of Earth. The entire planet runs on approximately 50 servers, significantly lower than Second Life.

There.com can get by with so few because the servers are independent of geography. If an area is busy, servers can be adjusted to compensate, something Second Life can’t do. When There started hosting concerts for Universal Records, they needed a way to hold hundreds, There “funzones” are limited to 50, sometimes less in certain zones, they initially built multiple venues that shared the same audio/video feed, but eventually developed a Guild Wars like instancing system to accommodate everyone that wanted to come.

Second Life has had some major concerts and events as well and was stuck only accommodating the 100 who could get on the server. The Electric Sheep Company has compensated by running multiple servers with the exact same content for promotions with “The L Word”, “CSI:NY”, and “Gossip Girl”. This works if your content can be duplicated, but in the case of concerts or lectures, where the presenter is in avatar form, it does not work. If Linden Labs (or the makers of the open sim project) could create an instancing system with presenting avatars able to appear on all instances “NPC” style, then events could hold thousands of players, and make Second Life more attractive to advertisers.

Now I know what you are probably going to ask. If they implemented an instancing system, wouldn’t all those instances require additional computing resources? Yes of course, but they have the resources to spare.

This is the other major flaw of the Second Life computers equals real estate scheme. At any given moment, about 80% of all real estate in Second Life has no one visiting. Probably closer to 90%. That’s a lot of computing power not being used for anything. That just amazes me.

Now what all that computing power buys you is flexibility of course. The primary goal of SL was to be as flexible as possible, and that is a huge benefit, There.com runs on far fewer computers, but lacks the customization (scripting, animation, physics, etc) available in SL.

But, for a system designed to be as flexible as possible the odd 256×256m land restriction seems oddly inflexible. I understand the limits on prims and user traffic are necessary to keep servers from being overloaded, but why the map size restriction? Why not instead of offering open sims, you offer the ability to make a sim 512×512 or 1024×1024 with the same prim and traffic restrictions? There are many uses for large area sims like this. I can also think of uses for a small 64×64 sized region, like a popular club or venue. And how difficult would it be to have a 64×64m region located in the middle of a surrounding 512×512m region?

A future 3D internet is going to have to have the best of all worlds. The flexibility of Second Life, the efficiency of There.com, and the instancing ability of Guild Wars for large events and commercial viability.

Metaverse News secondlife, There, virtual economy, virtual real estate

Why are amusement park rides in Second Life just not that interesting?

My friend Rebecca has a theory, “Second Life rides are not that interesting, because Second Life is itself just an amusement park ride.  In the game, you are in full control of what you see and where you go. In-game rides take that control away from you.”

And here I thought it was because simulating a roller coaster is not the same as riding a real one. The only appeal to building a roller coaster in Second Life is in the “can it be done?” factor. The answer is no it can’t, apparently. I have yet to see a working roller coaster in Second Life, that actually operates like one. But that’s beside the point.

Are there any exceptions to the rule? Can pretend rides in game be cool? I asked Rebecca.

Rebecca took me to Svarga, a place I have been before. We went for a ride on the hornet tour that flies around the island telling you about the stuff there is to see there.

“Now this is a cool ride,” she said.

“Well it helps that it flies around one of the most beautiful islands in SL,” I said.

“That’s exactly the reason, in fact that is the only reason it is a cool ride. You can’t feel the jerkiness or smoothness of a ride, nor can you get the rush of wind in your face as you ride. So the only reason a ride is cool is if the environment it is in is cool,” she explained.

Going on rides in SL is like a mini movie. Riding through interesting environments is fun, pretend riding for riding sake is lame.

To illustrate the point further we took a trip to Koreshan Amusement Park. This place has a creepy run down look to it, that is also campy and retro. Its an entertaining place to explore.

There is also something else kind of ironic about this “amusement park”… none of the rides work.

“Who cares if the rides work or not,” said Rebecca, “its more like a theme park with amusement park as a theme. Theme parks have themes, amusement parks have rides. If rides in SL are lame, then a theme park with no working rides is better than an amusement park.”

Somehow that actually made sense.

So I had to ask. “Are there any ‘theme parks’ with working rides that are worth checking out?”

Rebecca had this sinister look on her face. “Yeah, I can think of one.”

She took me to a place called “Mouse World” that looked oddly familiar, but I could not place it.

“I think I have been to this region before, but I can’t find a bookmark,” I told her.

“Yeah, this place has this affect on people,” she said.

We started out taking a ride on the Pachyderm Ride, which just went in circles, but we could go up and down with some buttons. Yeah it was lame, but the surroundings were “Magic”. like some kind of magic kingdom or something.

Some of the rides were broken, like the Jungle Cruiser. Others were closed for renovation, like the Hunted Mansion. But Thunder Mountain Railway was working, as was Void Mountain.

“I got it!” I proclaimed, “This place is exactly like Dis–”

“DONT SAY IT!” Rebecca Yelled.

Well, anyways we spent a fun evening at Dis… uh, Mouse World.

______

Previously blogged Theme Park Carnival of Doom

Virtual Society activities, event, exploring, secondlife

This is the second of three “opinion” pieces on what I see as an imminent shake up in 3D Virtual Worlds, dividing myth from reality. Today’s topic: economic realities.

Two things are certain today: Virtual worlds are growing in popularity, and the economy is shrinking.

I think it is a safe bet to say that virtual worlds will not save the economy, but unfortunately a bad economy might be very destructive to virtual worlds.

The primary effect is that VC start up money is likely to dry up fast. Any virtual world currently not making money via customer sales and/or corporate sponsorship is likely to fail soon.  Who knows how long corporate sponsorship will last as well. I know a big sponsor of There was Cosmogirl, a magazine that has recently stopped publishing. There still has MTV, Coca Cola, Paramount Pictures, and Toyota as sponsors, so they will likely survive. I have noticed many corporate sponsored servers in Second Life have also disappeared as companies tighten their marketing belts.

On the other hand, historically sources of cheap entertainment tend to prosper in hard times. Movies were big during the great depression, but the price of tickets have gone up since then. Virtual worlds are cheap or free for most players, so it is possible they may continue to grow during hard times.

Basically, 2009 is going to be a bad year to launch new Virtual Worlds, many unprofitable ones will likely drop out as well. But, older established worlds will likely see growth in traffic.

Here’s the dark side as I see it: Today’s established 3D Virtual Worlds (principally There and Second Life) are already “old” technology by today’s gaming standards. I know of at least four 3D Virtual Worlds that will be going into at least beta this year, maybe into full release, with superior graphics and (hopefully) smoother game play. In today’s economy, do any of them stand a chance? The principle goal for all new games from now on is: MAKE MONEY FAST!! Spending five years being unprofitable while you build an audience is no longer an option in today’s economy. We are likely to see more products appear and fizzle out like Google’s Lively did.

Part 3: 3DVWs failure as an advertising platform, and what to do about it.

Metaverse News future, virtual economy, virtual worlds

OK, where to start. Let me start with where the screenshot was taken. It was taken at Rumsey Maps, which includes a huge 3D map of Yosemite Valley, as well as a bunch of other cool examples of cartography.

Maybe I should now start at the beginning. I was researching for an upcoming blog article and came across a fact that Second Life has over 1800 square kilometers in land. (I originally thought it was around 1000, but I was looking at old statistics). There are however reports that the amount of land is dropping rapidly because of the change in open space policy.

Anyways, I got into yet another discussion about the difference between There.com and Second Life, and this land issue came up. There.com actually resides on a 3D planet sized sphere slightly smaller than planet earth. It is possibly the largest 3D object in virtual space navigable by virtual avatars. It has even been circumnavigated, taking weeks to complete. The question always comes up, how much actual land is there in There’s globe? Turns out the answer is 630 square kilometers, plus or minus 20, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The next question usually is, how does all this compare to the real world?

It was about then that I discovered this entertaining video called A Geophysical Survey of World of Warcraft

Now this video awoken the geek in me, and all this talk about the relative land mass in There.com and Second Life, and that got me started on a pretty cool project.

The end result being this map. A scale map of Second Life, There, World of Warcraft, and Oahu:

Click picture for full size version. Its about a megabyte big, so feel free to copy and distribute it elsewhere so as not to kill my bandwidth. The relative scale is 14 pixels = 1km.

According to Linden Labs figures, the total land in Second Life is just over 1,800 sq. km. Oahu is around 1,500 sq km. So when you measure all the Second Life regions,  they a little bit bigger than Oahu.

To figure out There.com land area, I took the scale map of There, selected all the water and made it black, then inverted the selection and made the land white. I went around the map making sure I did not have any stray odd pixels to mess up the calculation. I also remeasured known distances to make sure my scale was correct. I then used a histogram function to find out how many pixels were black and how many were white. Of the 14,256,222 pixels, 122,883 were white. Divide that by 196 (14×14) = 627 km sq. There is stuff in There missing from the map (Saja, Snowman Island, and Coke Island), plus possible errors to my methodology, hence the plus or minus 20 km sq. part.

In scaling all the maps, I used multiple methods as well. The second life client, used to tell you the total distance from where you are to your destination, it doesn’t anymore. But, I found a way around that by finding the “grid position” of the region I am on in the debug tools then going to a region on the far left and the far right and finding how many regions across it is and multiplying by 256 to get meters, and divide 1000 to get kilometers. The regions charted at slurl.com (which is the map I used) is 186km across and 110km top to bottom.

I did the scale work in There years ago on my web site. Two prominent dots on the map, the white mountain on Comet and the tiny island of Egypt are 225 km apart.

WoW was based on work done on this link, confirmed in the video above.

Then I needed a real world island to use as a comparison. Ireland was way too big when I scaled it, Manhattan was way too small (about the same size as WoW). The big island of Hawaii fit but covered most of the map, and then decided to use the most populated and more famous island of Oahu.

And there you have a method, as accurate as I can make it, of comparing the relative size of three prominent 3D worlds with the real world.

Media, Virtual Society 3D navigation, cartography, exploring, secondlife, There, worldofwarcraft

This is the first of three “opinion” pieces I am writing about the future of 3D Virtual Worlds. I believe that ultimately the future looks bright, but we are at the beginning of a long overdue “shake up” that should finally separate myth from reality. Lets start with legal realities:

So one of the oldest but least successful MMO providers Worlds.com filed for patents of their 3D online technology back in 1995 and were awarded the patent finally in 2007. The two patents obtained were Scalable virtual world chat client-server system, and System and method for enabling users to interact in a virtual space

During those intervening 12 years a multi billion dollar MMO industry has grown. Some of it based around the same technology patented by Worlds.com.

So earlier this year I saw an announcement that Worlds.com has retained a major patent rights law firm to represent them, and on Christmas Eve they filed their first suit against NCSoft, founded in 1997 two years after the original patent application.

According to Wired, NCSoft’s official statement in response: “We can’t comment on potential litigation except to say that NCsoft takes all legal action seriously — even if the company believes a lawsuit has no merit. We intend to defend ourselves vigorously.” (emphasis mine because it is funny)

I have not studied the patents, and do not know how broad or narrow they are or what they actually cover. I do know that in worlds.com programs, you pre-load all the shapes, textures, etc. and there is virtually no way to do custom textures and buildings etc. MMORPGs work just like worlds.com programs, hence they seem to be the first target.

NCSoft is the largest MMORPG producer in the world (yes bigger than Blizzard), producing Guild Wars, City of Heroes/Villains, Lineage 2, and the upcoming Aion. They were part of a landmark suit before. Marvel sued them over the ability of players in City of Heroes to create custom heroes that look like Marvel heroes. The suit ended amicably, with CoH game runners creating “Generic Heroes” of characters that potentially violate copyright.

Worlds.com lawsuit has far reaching implications. If Worlds.com wins, they could theoretically go after every producer of 3D online games, potentially killing the whole industry. You can bet there is a lot of support building for NCSoft to do everything in their power to invalidate the patents.

Two things can kill a patent: Prior art, and obviousness. The other defense is that the burden of proof of patent violation is on the patent holder.

Prior art can come in the form of older patents. Like this one. Or it could come in the form of 3D online games that existed prior to Worlds.com development. Obviousness is also an obstacle as the whole concept of 3D online games is a combination of Habitat (a 2D virtual world built by Lucasarts in 1985) and Doom (a 3D game that included multiplayer network play in 1993).

Then there is the burden of proof problem. The patents were based on technology developed in 1995. The technology around online game playing has changed radically in the 14 years since, and there are many ways to do the same thing. In a future posting I plan to compare the underlying structure of Second Life, There.com, Guild Wars, and World of Warcraft. The technology behind these four games is so radically different there is no way they can be compared as using the same technology except in a “look and feel” way.

While I do not know the ins and outs of patent law I do know technology. The whole paradigm of online game play changed radically in 1997 with Diablo. Blizzard offered online play for the successful desktop game and ran into a huge problem: cheaters.

Before 1997, the only thing online programs dealt with was communicating between players was position, movement, and chat. Everything else was handled by the player’s own computer. People soon figured out that by modding the game on their hard drive, they could do things that other players without the hacks could not.

The fix implemented by every online game that followed was for the game servers to keep track of everything. Hit a beast with a sword, the damage is calculated on the game server and the info is relayed to your computer to display the damage. Swing the sword again and another exchange between your game and the game servers is made. This keeps the game fair for all players. It also requires a very different conrol structure for online play, different than anything worlds.com has ever developed.

This lawsuit is do or die for worlds.com. Once the star of online gaming they have watched dozens of upstarts fly right past them. They have announced two new virtual world projects, but I bet they do not have the money to actually do them. They are counting on winning lawsuits to get them the capital to go on. Losing is likely a death sentence.

Good riddance I say.

I believe that all software patents are an abomination and should end!! Copyrights are fine, if another company is using art or code without permission, go after them. But NCSoft has built all of their games from the ground up. They are mirroring what everyone else is doing true, but they are doing their own thing. For Worlds.com to profit off the work of others because it is “similar” to what they did first, seems to me to be immoral.

But since when has law been equivalent to morality?

A trio of articles about legalities of virtual worlds:
The Rocky Legal Landscape of Virtual Worlds, Part 1: Trademarks
The Rocky Legal Landscape of Virtual Worlds, Part 2: Patents
The Rocky Legal Landscape of Virtual Worlds, Part 3: Copyrights

Note: While Red Light Center was built by worlds.com, it is a seperate entity, and not part of the litigation.

Metaverse News 3D art, 3D navigation, cityofheroes, guildwars, legal, philosophy, redlightcenter, worlds.com

I thought I’d start out the new year with a brief look into the future.

Recently, a newspaper I grew up reading, and even made money in school delivering, closed its doors. Small newspapers are closing while big newspapers are cutting back. Part of this can be attributed to the economic times, mostly it is the internet that is to blame. Newspapers have been replaced with RSS feeds, classified ads with craigslist, etc.

I do not think it will end there. In the not too distant future (five years tops) web apps will be available to scan the internet and create a custom video newscast just for you. One company working on this idea is News at Seven, though according to the site they were going to release a new version in September 2008 and here it is 4 months later and no new version. Who knows?

Anyways, I thought I’d illustrate the idea web comic style.

Media, Metaverse News comic, future, web 2.0