Raph's Website » Web-based VW news round-up

Web-based VW news round-up

January 14th, 2008 (Visited 1524 times) Tags:

A lot of stuff has been moving on this front lately, so here’s some recent notable news. I know that some of the gamer typs who read here aren’t that interested, but the crossover is increasing at a rapid rate.

3dXplorer has been released. It’s a Java-based system for embedding 3d spaces in a window on your webpage. Looks like it is single-player, like many of these solutions, but the 3d scene is hosted on their hardware, so there’s a service model underlying it (get lots of users, start paying). My thoughts: there’s likely a significant market for the embedding of single-user walkthroughs and 3d object representations, and several companies seem to be chasing this market or even already have offerings (such as Media Machines‘ Flux Player). But although the step from there to adding basic multiuser capability isn’t huge, the step of adding interesting multiuser interactivity is quite difficult.

It wasn’t very long ago that Gaia Online released their Gaia OMG app on Bebo and garnered a significant audience; now there’s word that they will be putting out a Facebook app as well. My thoughts: clearly, there’s a market here waiting to be serviced. Most folks seem to use SNSes asynchronously, but some of them basically live there. And stuff like Gaia is largely an SNS already.

Speaking of which, Conduit has put up a Facebook app called Make Me, which they make a point of saying isn’t the real thing they are building, but just a side project. It basically acts as a fancier version of Poke. My take: and that’s what all the most popular apps on Facebook seem to be: either fancier versions of Poke (poke with vampires! Poke with movie lists! Poke with stuffed animals!) or richer profile stuff (wall with video! Profile with movie lists! Wall with a stuffed animal!). Which goes to show what SNSes are built around: rich profiles, and presence.

And apparently Matt Mihaly’s Sparkplay is going to jump into Facebook games too. There’s some very interesting analysis of the top games on Facebook in his post, comparing high daily active user figures to the issue of ongoing engagement.

I think I didn’t mention the launch of BuildABearVille, which got a million users in a month.

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Wonderland: Gaia's Bebo app wrote on January 16th, 2008 at 12:06 am:

[...] Got this from Raph: Gaia Online put out a Bebo app, and is now planning a Facebook one too - so presumably it worked nicely for them. It got a 5-star (out of 5) average rating from Bebo users; Virtual World News reports the app got 100,000 downloads (Gaia has 4 million users). [...]

musings of a social architect: And a choice quote from Raph... wrote on January 17th, 2008 at 6:09 am:

[...] Raph’s Website � Web-based VW news round-up. … that’s what all the most popular apps on Facebook seem to be: either fancier versions of [...]

Len Bullard said on January 15th, 2008 at 7:59 am:

I found 3DXplorer to be disappointing. Bad 3D, over claimed, and so on. This isn’t a market changer. That sort of thing can set VWs back.

Speaking of that, and still thinking about the game devs and cheating threads, what happens in the gaming communities when the market turns “Serious”. My background being somewhat other than musician by day, I follow the progress of ’serious games’ as closely as I can.

http://thebulletin.metapress.com/content/w044377343n41421/fulltext.pdf

That is a good read. What would a Corporation for Public Gaming achieve? Are virtual worlds a better or worse test bed or is it the case that to achieve a high fidelity simulation, open worlds aren’t the best means, that is, the game has to be focused on a particular mission or organization as the public safety sims tend to be. At the same time, will standards for worlds that can quickly be interconnected for just-in-time gaming be better for public gaming? Is this where we see the real “Kobayashi Moru” take place, that is, cheating in these games is really unacceptable?

A lot to think about… whatever the case, at the edges of the gaming community things are happening that will reshape the current gaming culture from one that is focused on entertainment, RMT, cheat codes, etc., into something else. On the other hand, note the statement about ‘getting someone who really does know how to build a game’. They can’t do it without you but are you really ready to drop the ‘wild eyed gamer’ stance and do ’serious’ work?

3DXplorer said on January 16th, 2008 at 1:48 pm:

Dear Raph, Let us add a few precisions:
1) 3DXplorer princing is not going to change. The Studio is free for all. The player is free for low-trafic sites and requires subscription for high-trafic websites.
2) We agree with some of the challenges you mentioned. We work on them and will most likely show them soon, stay tuned.
3) We are sure, other online, multi-platform, multi-navigator, free tools, like 3DXplorer will be released in the future. For now, we don’t see that much. If we are not wrong, unlike 3DXplorer, the one mentioned is only running on windows, requires pre-installation, and its not yet live.
One last precision: 3DXplorer has no specific innovation claim on quality of renderring or such.
The main claim of innovation is on “3D for everyone” as there is no need to pre-install software, its multi-platform(PC/MAC/LINUX) and Multi-navigator (IE/FF/SAFARI/OPERA/…).
That maybe considered as not that important for gamers, but makes huge difference for the majority of the Internet visitors who are not familiar with 3D.
Hope this clarifies a bit.
Regards

Len Bullard said on January 16th, 2008 at 4:22 pm:

“.. the one mentioned” is the Media Machines FluxPlayer.

FluxPlayer does require installation. It’s free and no floating logo as seen in some systems. I’m not sure what ‘live’ means. If by that you mean, MU, that is so. MM works with the Web3D Consortium so is likely implementing the specification for the network sensor. The advantage here will be that X3D worlds from ANY vendor will interoperate. The Media Machines 3D editor is superb and is free for personal use. In fact, that editor is a very generous contribution to the 3D community as it supports several formats and has professional editing features. It also supports the H-Anim standards for avatars.

3DXplorer is a Java application. If one doesn’t have Java installed, as some Windows installations don’t, it doesn’t work. It also leaves some native libraries which anyone can see looking at their directory tree. The claims of “3D for everyone” based on that are a little disingenuous but that is the right idea and kudos for getting your application out there. Best of luck.

Web-based VW news round-up

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