Raph's Website » A quick roundup of interesting articles

A quick roundup of interesting articles

May 1st, 2007 (Visited 1894 times) Tags:

I was off traveling lately, at my dad’s retirement party, and of course there were plenty of interesting things happening that could have merited a blog post. Here’s some of them:

Ypulse has an interview with the CEO of Gaia Online. It gives out plenty of stats, and also gives some real insight into what the core of the service is: not in-world hanging out (there is a 2d virtual world hidden in there) but instead hanging out on forums. I suspect that this is probably true of many MMOs: that forum activity may well outweigh in-world activity for a substantial number of players.

I have been wondering about the fact that there are Zwinky ads airing during prime-time TV shows already — I caught one last night at 10pm. Now I see that they are gearing up to layer a virtual world on top of their avatar system. Their avs are, well, kinda ugly, but they do seem to have had a fair amount of adoption.

Of course, more traditional metaverse types are probably more interested in the new feature coming to Second Life: “sculpted prims.” This appears to be a method to deform spheres using the principle of homotopy – basically, the old “turn a coffee cup into a donut” trick. No word on how you handle toroidal topologies, or more complex surfaces. These are of course mathematically describable forms that can have meshes generated at various levels of detail on the fly, etc. Really, most of the prims in SL could have been done this way from the get-go, since cones, cylinders, cubes, spheres, and so on are all topologically equivalent. Anyway — the deformation is described using a texture lookup that displaces the verts, and exporters are planned to allow generating this format from apps like Maya.

Back at Web 2.0 Expo I commented on the panel that cereal makers would be bigger publishers of virtual worlds than game developers. I was cheating, because I knew about Millsberry and the like…

Oh, and LOTRO is out.

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3pointD.com wrote on May 1st, 2007 at 11:55 pm:

Recent Comments: ¶ NBA takes on Second Life on NBA Takes Its Shot In Second Life: stern, nba games, nba merchandise, second life, virtual world Posted May 1st 2007… ¶ Raph’s Website on Zwinky Builds Virtual World For Toolbar Avatars: I have been wondering about the fact that there are Zwinky ads airing… ¶ Theory Shaw on Open-Source Museum Opens in Second Life: It appears that most of the prims at the OSMOSA site cannot be

External News wrote on May 2nd, 2007 at 2:01 am:

[...] A quick roundup of interesting articles [...]

csven said on May 1st, 2007 at 3:26 pm:

“No word on how you handle toroidal topologies, or more complex surfaces.”

Actually, there is word. Additional base prims will be supported in “rev 2″, and a prim “plane” will apparently be introduced as well. Of course, let’s get to “rev 1″ first.

Raph said on May 1st, 2007 at 4:23 pm:

Ah, nice.

mike said on May 1st, 2007 at 4:51 pm:

It’s probably more accurate to call Gaia a forum with a VW attached; as I recall, in the early days it was basically just a forum with avatars you could dress up–each post is a word balloon coming out of your dude–and by posting you earned gold bbs-style which you could spend on more clothes.

(even if your point still holds: forums, being low-intensity and asynchronous, have the potential to suck up more user hours. it’s certainly possible to alt-tab out of a game to argue in its forums.)