metaverse

  • ExitReality

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 8 Comments

    ExitReality launched in open beta today and there is coverage in a few places. Virtual Worlds News has detailed coverage with lots of interview questions, while CNet has a slightly more critical article.

    What does it do? It automatically grabs web content and sticks it into a 3d space. You can shape the 3d space if you want, but it does it by default — no work for the site owner. It also slurps 3d content of all sorts from basically anywhere to let you build with it. I don’t know what the scripting is like, and it (like most all the 3d solutions) is based on a plugin, and one that as of yet is still limited to Windows. But that seems like an obvious thing to want to remedy.

    I haven’t tried it out yet, but it does seem like an important transitional step in some ways. It’s still the notion that people want to see websites in 3d, which I think is basically wrong, but it does it in a manner that is much more like the web than past attempts.

    It will be interesting to see where this one goes.

  • AGDC: Bruce Sterling keynote

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 18 Comments

    Again, sorry for typos.

    Bruce Sterling, Future of Entertainment

    Hello, thanks for having me into your event today, and thanks for that intro. Though there is a problem with that, I am not Bruce Sterling. He couldn’t make it, he sent me instead.

    The reason he couldn’t make it is that in 2043, Bruce is 89. Dr. Sterling is too frail to get into a time machine to talk to game devs, so he called on me to do it. I am one of his grad students. I volunteered, sort of, to journey back in time using some of our new technical methods. It wasn’t exactly easy, and I am here and fully briefed.

    Before I get started about computer entertainment 35 years from today, even though that is a very interesting topic and I am writing my thesis about it, I think I should level with you. I should tell you a few things first confidentially.
    Read More “AGDC: Bruce Sterling keynote”

  • AGDC08 / WiM: Google Lively keynote

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 3 Comments

    Liveblog, hurried and it was hard to hear and muffled so lots of typos and elisions.

    Kevin Hanna, Creative Director, Google Lively

    About a year ago the first rumors hit about Lively. My favorite was one where some bloggers decided to debunk the rumor, presenting arguments as to why Google would never go into this space. At the end the question is why would Google do this?

    So we are here to answer the question of why is Google in this space?
    Read More “AGDC08 / WiM: Google Lively keynote”

  • Virtual worlds in the ambient cloud

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 22 Comments

    The Web is moving towards a user-centric experience. Whereas a few years ago, it was all about visiting destination sites, now it is about destination sites spitting out data that comes to you, via RSS. The attraction of things like Twitter or Facebook lies in the ambient information that flows out and about, and in your largely asynchronous, largely placeless, largely shallow updates on what your friends are doing. You come to know them deeply not by engaging deeply with them, but by building up pictures of lots of small actions they take.

    Compare, for example, the destination-like IRC versus the ambient Twitter. Hardcore Twitter fans use it almost in realtime. They answer people, with their @fred syntax convention. They have a better history, perhaps, because they can search the stream in a way that IRC doesn’t really support. But more importantly, you follow Twitter by filtering it; it’s one big stream, and you take little bits of it out. It is as if IRC were all one channel, and you happened to build an aggregate channel of just the people talking that you wanted to hear.

    Read More “Virtual worlds in the ambient cloud”

  • VW08: Business Guys Debate the Future, one take

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 5 Comments

    Dusan Writer has a take on the panel I was on, casting it as Metaplace vs Linden Lab — though to my mind that leaves out the contributions of Mike Wilson of Makena and Corey Bridges of Multiverse. That’s because Dusan is interested mostly int he clash of philosophies about where virtual worlds are going:

    But it leaves a question: are virtual worlds places? Or will the technologies that enable 3D spaces become so ubiquitous that we’ll stop thinking of them as distinct places? Because in Raph’s view, the tools and technologies to create 3D artefacts, the system for managing your avatar and identity should be EXPRESSION-agnostic. In other words, we should have the tools for creating content and then be able to seamlessly publish that content to cell phones, browsers, Flash, separate clients – whatever, it’s not the viewer, it’s in the engine from which content is derived and creating standards and tools for expressing the content from that engine.

    FWIW, virtual worlds are definitely “places” in my mind. But to me, clients and devices are merely windows that look onto that place. That doesn’t preclude rich 3d “windows” — I merely happen to think that multihead, flexibly represented VWs is the future. I would swap the word “engine” for “server” perhaps, or “world.”