Filed under: Geek stuff, Innovation, Innovative gaming, Second Life, Social media, USA, creativity, social entrepreneurs, virtual worlds | Tags: Burning Life, Festival, Second Life, virtual worlds
Burning Life
I see that SL has held it’s first ever Burning Life festival in world. For those of you who are not familiar, Burning Life is the Second Life version of a real Art, Fire and Community festival called Burning Man. Both Burning Man and Second Life began in San Francisco, California, USA, on planet Earth. Check it out here
Filed under: Gaming, Geek stuff, Get another life, Innovative gaming, Looking for insights, Machinima, Second Life, virtual worlds | Tags: Clive Thompson, Collision Detection, CollisionDetection, gamers, Gaming, Halo, MIND Labs, MMORPG
In his blog CollisionDetection, Clive Thompson who writes for Wired and the NY Times has posted a great piece about about the pleasure and release MMORPG [massive multiplayer online role playing gamers] feel when they get killed [as opposed to when they kill others]. His findings are based on a study by Niklas Ravaja at MIND Labs, who wired up a bunch of gamers with biosensors and found that they gave off strong pleasure signals whenever they died in the game Super Monkey Ball.
The rest of his post is here and if you haven’t checked out his blog, it’s worth a look in:
Filed under: Second Life, virtual worlds | Tags: , abc, Accenture, alternate reality, australia, everquest, Innovation, Second Life, SL, telstra, virtual business, virtual world
Fascination with Second Life and the other ‘alternate realities’ seems to be continuing. I went to a seminar the other day to listen to a bunch of Aussie businesses who were making their foray into the SL universe. Telstra’s bigpond is undoubtedly the succes
s story from our shores, having created and nurtured a fully functional thriving community on their island. Likewise the ABC are dipping their toes in the virtual shores of Second Life as an R&D experiment much like many others. There was also a real estate company present who is using recreating their real estate imagery boards for sales and linking them through to the website. It’s odd when people mimic their offline business models online, given the capacity of Second Life to completely change the way we think about real estate altogether. Nevertheless, all brave companies for giving it a red hot go.
Filed under: Asia, Digital culture, Emergent media, Geek stuff, Innovation, Innovative gaming, Nice products, Second Life, beta
For those of you Second Lifers who are waiting for the next big thing, the first 3D virtual platform from Chinese has just entered public beta testing.
HiPiHi works in a similar way to SL, users can create & customise avatars, own virtual land and share or build pre-fab objects in a similar way to the SL prim system.
If truth be told it looks very similar to SL but we’ll have to wait & see how far it takes the metaverse beyond what’s currently on offer.
The bad news is that whilst the the Beijing based company is looking to cooperate with “global leaders in the Internet and communication industry to establish a set of relevant hardware and software standards for the development of the 3D platform”, they still don’t yet support the mac platform.
Nevertheless this is a market where more than 20 million Chinese game regularly, spending almost US$500m. Although the government in Beijing was reported to be introducing controls to deter people from playing longer than three hours, the measures were designed to combat addiction to MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role playing games) such as World of Warcraft and Lineage II.
Given that metaverses are time intensive games and in fact, depend very much on the amount of time spent in-world (especially for those residents operating genuinely viable virtual businesses), it will be interesting to see how HiPiHi tackles the big men up top.
One to watch. Check it out :: HiPiHi
Filed under: Digital culture, Innovative retail, Second Life, Street art, australia, neophiliac, unbusiness
Hi folks
Just thought I would let you know that I’m just in the middle of putting up a new exhibition of street art photographs I took in Newtown, Sydney Australia.
I’ve got some ripper stencils of the cultural terrorist, the usual anti-Govt and anti-war stuff and some beautifully designed stickers. Anyway, the walls are almost finished so if you’re in-world drop by the gallery & check it out.
Filed under: Digital culture, Emergent media, Second Life, Street art, Trends stuff, neophiliac, unbusiness
What is Second Life exactly?
Second Life is what’s known as a MMORG which stands for Massive Multiple Online Role Playing Game. This basically means that it is an online game to which thousands of users around the world interact in different roles (or characters) simultaneously. It’s also often called a ‘metaverse’ a phrase coined by Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel SnowCrash (1992). Stephenson’s definition of metaverse refers to a high definition 3D digital virtual world where users, represented by their avatars (game characters) can meet and interact just like they do in the physical world.
Instead of building websites like in today’s Internet, Metaverse developers build fully 3D virtual spaces (scapes) which can closely mimic the physical world, or be as different from the “real world” as the imagination of the developers permits. For example, in the Metaverse you can visit an accurate replica of a real city, a future imaginary space settlement on Mars, a micro-scale world where you can see individual molecules and cells, etc.’ (Quote source :: uvvy.com)
Second Life was founded by Philip Rosedale of Linden Lab in San Francisco California in 1999. Version 1.0 was launched on the 23rd June 2003 and is continually updated as Linden Lab re-release new versions to support the evolution in-world. In 2004 SL had 14,000 residents, in 2005 it had 59,000 and now in 2006 Second Life consists of 216 km sq of virtual land that hosts over 514,000 residents who hold over 500 events a day and spend upwards of USD6.8M a year on resident-to-resident goods and services.
Still think it’s insignificant and only for nerd losers?
I’ll post some more but in the meantime; check it out :: whilst it’s still in what marketing people would call “the early adopter” phase, as broadband penetration increases and drives prices down (especially in Australia) and as more corporates move in world and the game gets more press, we’ll find that parts of the game become more mainstream.
The only way to get a real sense of it is to check it out for yourself.
If you do, drop by my art gallery and say hello :: Kitty Kabuki’s Street Art Gallery
Filed under: Digital culture, Machinima, Second Life, Street art, neophiliac, unbusiness
Inside the Machinima
Machinima is the creation of film or movie content inside a video game. For those of you not playing second life until 5am in the morning, let me explain…
You can create sets inside a virtual world game which feature houses, landscapes, movie theatres or any kind of background you could imagine in real life. You can dress the avatars (characters inside the video game), have them speak in-game via a microphone and even have them act out a pre-prepared script just as you would in real life. In fact, professional machinima is more similar to real life than you might think.
You can shoot from any angle inside most games (if you have the right equipment), you can then edit & create effects in post product just as you would for normal movie content. Where multiple actors are employed, teams emply different real life individuals to play their avatars and follow the director’s script.
In fact, one machinima workshop we went to, a team showed us how they had built a series of cars & machines inside a virtual reality game :: when we looked at the sets we realised that even in-game they had only built two dimensional objects because they only needed to shoot them from one side!
Whilst machinima is gaining popularity amongst avid gamers it won’t be long before mainstream cottons on thanks to the likes of Gofish.com and Youtube.com distributing the content to a wider audience.
Imagine if you created a whole TVC in-world . . No talent fees, cheaper location & post-production . . Not to mention a greater variety of distribution channels.
Sound crazy? I bet a mainstream brand will jump this puppy in no time.
Check out this video of a real virtual machinima studio.
