Second Life Extends its Reach
Free the Avatars - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog
IBM teams up with virtual world developer - MSNBC
Update: Here’s the official press release with a little more specificity than the above two articles.
With the new crop of "open" virtual worlds systems like Areae’s Metaplace coming out, Linden Labs (makers of Second Life) clearly had to take their ground-breaking but oft-criticized efforts up a notch. And they have, with this announcement of an initiative (with the muscle of IBM behind it) to make their avatars, and by implication everything else, cross the boundaries of their grid.
Avatars should be free to move from system to system, from place to place, translating at least as effortlessly as real humans move from country to country (customs and immigration notwithstanding). It’s going to be no easy feat to pull this off, as every system out there has a very different conception of what an avatar is, how it moves, and how much it can change, not to mention how one pays for those changes and accessories. And distinct ‘countries’ is a good way to think about the problem, as a common language and currency is often hard to come by. Something is inevitably lost in translation.
But here’s the thing that people should understand about Linden’s avatars in particular, assuming they serve as the model for the new open system. They’re much more than mere body descriptions, poses, animations, and morph targets. They can have an ungodly number of attachments — literally 3D objects from Linden’s world — along with textures and scripts, also in Linden’s own language. So to support Linden’s avatars is to support Linden’s protocols for 3D objects and scripts, meaning that any system that can import these faithfully must effectively work like Linden’s grid, or in fact be Linden’s grid.
And here’s the other thing to note: Linden’s avatars are one of the main reason they can only handle 50 users per simulator before things get bogged down in bandwidth hell (it’s no wonder that Cisco would be interested). It’s not a matter of bad coding, but of allowing maximum flexibility in avatar customization. There’s lots of baggage that goes with it. So the big question will be: will other companies accept such "fat" avatars, or will Linden be forced to slim down and/or optimize the hell out of their systems? Either way, it works out better for them, so it’s a very smart move.
My related prediction, which is not much of a stretch, is that this and the new grid architecture are the final two prims needed for Linden to either go IPO or get acquired in 2008. What’s not clear to me is how much they need to actually achieve with these steps, or will the mere expectation of soon "taking over the world" of virtual worlds be enough to push their valuation high enough (given a few rounds of investment and lots of mouths to feed) to make it so.
Having the capital from such a move would enable them to not only address technology issues by merely acquiring companies (as they did for their sky rendering previously), but also to mop up some of the competition and be positioned properly for the coming fallout from too many virtual worlds for too few customers, otherwise known as a bubble.
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BTW, the other news of the day so far is that Electric Sheep has finished their alternate Second Life client, intended to be easier to use. I met with Sibley early last year, so I had some idea this was in the works. I’ll be interested to try it out. Usability is certainly one of the most pressing issues, though I’m not sure how much of that has to do with the architecture and grid vs. the UI right now.
Coming back to this, after this morning’s upgrade of Entropia Universe to the new v9 platform… MindArk completely farked the entire game, not providing the proper cross-compatible graphics rendering for mobile chipsets.
I even attempted to run it through a couple emulator apps, like 3D Analyzer to see if it’d force. No dice.
This becoming the biggest problem in the virtual areas, I’ve found. Totally disregarding user-base by not providing adequate drivers is getting ridiculous. Google Earth is suffering the same issue, even they too don’t care to admit it.
The reason this bugs me, really, is because the entire push for the metaverse shouldn’t really be intended for the Desktop alone — it’s true functionality is actually ultimate in the mobile arena.
A frustrating morning on my end.
I did a little digging. This is looking more like Marcus / MA pushed the release due to Linden’s avatar push, and the Google rumors. I’m personally thinking of making a b-line back to Second Life, now that MA has completely disrupted the concept with yet another shotty upgrade. I had such high hopes since they’re in the process of integrating CryEngine.
Plus, now they’re ‘taxing’ decay on items, which totally looks like a desperation play on the part of the company to force funding. It makes absolutely no economic sense in-game — it looks like a forced infusion into the Ped (currency) stream in the house’s favor (as always whenever they tweak the eco-system).
I think I’m done with Entropia.
The downside now though, is that I’m fully aware that Linden has integrated much of MindArk’s economic model since the last time I was in there. That’s troublesome to me on various levels — so it’ll be an interesting thing to see if I even have much of an interest if I see the system being nothing more than another circle-jerk to pursuade a bottom-line - I’m not going to bother.
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