Enterprise VWs — do they suck?

 Posted by (Visited 8035 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,
Oct 032008
 

Second Life technology continues its slow move towards being an enterprise solution with the announcement that the SL-derived OpenSim project is getting commercialized by 3Di.

Enterprise was a big buzzword this year at the Virtual Worlds conf in Hollywood. (Of course, in the midst of it, someone had to ask “what is enterprise anyway?” It means “selling VWs to businesses”). The penny has also dropped for some users that SL itself seems to be trending in this direction — as Tateru Nino writes on Massively,

When you look at the hiring of Tom Hale, the ongoing hiring of enterprise sales and marketing staff, and the licensing of the Immersive Workspaces product from Rivers Run Red, this all seems to signal a clear direction for where Linden Lab is taking Second Life. Clearer than anything else we’ve seen in a year, certainly.

Of course, we have also seen Forterra and their OLIVE platform (derived originally from the There.com codebase) continue to focus on this area over several years, with particular success in work for the military.

Is all this a surrender of the dream? What about user-creation virtual worlds for consumers?

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VW08: Business Guys Debate the Future, one take

 Posted by (Visited 6247 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , ,
Sep 042008
 

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.”

Google’s Lively

 Posted by (Visited 21221 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , , ,
Jul 082008
 

So at this point, I imagine everyone has seen the news about Google finally decloaking off the virtual bow with Lively.

The coverage showed up in both the gaming press, where Google shared a bunch of tidbits that seemed to indicate a PR outreach to the gaming community, and also of course in the tech press, where commenters seemed overall less than impressed, questioning how Lively relates to Google’s avowed purpose of “organizing the world’s information.”

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HiPiHi in open beta

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Apr 212008
 

SuezanneC Baskerville notes that HiPiHi is entering open beta now.

For those that do not recall, this is the Chinese take on Second Life — I got a close-up demo of it about a year ago while at VW Fall, and it looks like a pretty complete system. It offers not only the sort of building you see in SL, but also has things like prefab buildings and layouts offered by the operator.

If you read through the social media slides I posted last week, you know that China is a massively connected society these days, and growing more so. We have mostly seen that to date with MMORPGs in this space, but the hyperactivity there surrounding UGC, particularly with blogs, is fascinating. It will be interesting to see how things go with HiPiHi.

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