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Archives for 2007

VastPark

April 12, 2007 by 4 Comments

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VastPark is essentially a 3D-interactive workspace for game developers, business or anyone wanting to create 3D content. It’s a business fronted by Australian, CEO Bruce Joy.

Using the VastPark site builder you drag in a 3D model from your modelling application and go from there. There’s a good overview provided on how VastPark works here, and the first thing that occurred to me after watching it was the ease of the relationship between offline modelling and the actual creation of the 3D experience.

Is VastPark an obvious takeover target for Linden Lab?

Filed Under: Alternatives, Profile, Virtual Worlds

Fishace – in-world environmental education

April 11, 2007 by 6 Comments

On a modest plot in Epsilon Orionis, Fishace Pye has set up a backyard waste management system to demonstrate the real-life benefits. Fishace sums up the purpose of his plot:

“Fishace Ecological Engineering is an Australian consultancy specialising in the design of zero waste systems. With climate changes ahead we need to do things in different ways. This system shows how you can treat your waste and get value back from recycling nutrients. The microalgae photobioreactor has just hit the news as one way to soak up CO2 from smoke stacks and then recover biofuels from the algal feedstock. The educational exhibition outlines future nutrient mining technology.

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Check it out in-world or go to fishace.com.au.

Filed Under: Education, Profile, Virtual Worlds

Making real music in real time

April 10, 2007 by Leave a Comment

I was pointed to a fascinating blog post – a Tokyo-based artist, Lance Shields is the real-life alter ego of both Andres Watanabe and Juria Yoshikawa. He’s developed Sound Station 1.0 – there’s a streaming video on his site.

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If you watch the video, the Sound Station has obvious uses for musicians or other performance artists in-world. We’ve dropped Andres a line to find out more, watch this space. Anything that takes virtual music performance beyond streaming is a big step forward.

Filed Under: General News, General Tech, Music, Virtual Worlds

Second Life – is the central server model its downfall?

April 9, 2007 by 10 Comments

The Easter weekend saw large concurrency on the grid and things held up relatively well, albeit with some glitches. As relative newcomers to daily immersion in Second Life, we’re behind the eight-ball in realising how restrictive the central server model is on community events specifically and end user enjoyment more generally.

An effective 50 to 60 avatar limit on a event is obviously restrictive, both for the people who miss the event and the fifty who may be dealing with significant lag during the event. Islands are now considered a great value proposition because of the likelihood of reduced lag. Our own in-world launch was modest but managed to crash the server once we got above 45 avatars. The ABC Island / Four Corners launch had quite a number of people trying to access the island unsuccessfully due to it being ‘full’.

Critics of Second Life say the issue is the centralised server model and I’m yet to see any significant rebuttal of the claim. Potential competitors like Outback Online are touting the peer-to-peer (P2P) model as being the solution, claiming a 10 000 avatar population at an event as being feasible. If P2P is able to replicate the virtual world experience at the level Second Life has achieved whilst dramatically increasing concurrency of population, then the stampeded is likely to be significant. That said, I wouldn’t be alone in both hoping and assuming that with Linden Labs going the open source route, a P2P model may be in the platform’s future. Or at the very least a significant performance breakthrough that makes more than fifty people in a room a bearable experience.

What are your thoughts on the issue – if a competitor offered better performance would you pull up stumps and go elsewhere?

Filed Under: Alternatives, Op-ed, Open Source, Virtual Worlds

Bonza Gallery

April 8, 2007 by Leave a Comment

Tucked away on a small platform in the sky is a new Aussie start-up business called Bonza Gallery. The gallery is the selling point for photos of various Australian places, landscapes and tourist attractions such as the Opera House. All scenes and photos are typically Australian.

Each picture is $150L and the proprietors have attempted to provide a product that allows builders to incorporate pictures for homes, commercial areas and any other settings SL residents are building.

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Being primarily a gallery of photo images sourced by its RL professional photographer Bonza Bailey, the offerings in their gallery are small in number at theBonza Gallery location. However, its strength is in giving a wide taste of the kind of images they claim number over 1 million images, all shot in Australia.

Bonza also offer a personalised service by which customers can request a specific type or style of image and they will attempt to source it for clients.

Look up either Bonza Bailey or Diaz Anzac at their gallery or IM them if you need an image for your current SL build.

Filed Under: Business

The Cavern Club opens

April 8, 2007 by Leave a Comment

Last night the Liverpool sim launched with an opening gig at the SL Cavern Club. The real-life Cavern Club is a renowned music venue most well known for its relationship with The Beatles. The launch involved a live gig by rock group ‘What The…?’ and a full sim resulted.

“I heard ‘What The…?’ and recognised their Beatlesque sound and asked them to open, also the leader of the band helped me set up the stream”, explained sim owner Deroiste Quijote

Quijote built the sim to recreate the Cavern club in it’s original place and form. “The modern day one is a hundred metres further up and as I play in Mathew Street myself in a band I am always getting asked where the original club was….Well here it was!!”.

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“The Beatles played here 292 times and someone thought it would be a good idea to knock it down. I have been building this sim “LIVERPOOL 2008″ since October in various locations,” Quijote said.

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There are plans on expanding to an island location in the future.

Check out the Cavern Club in-world

Filed Under: Landmarks of note, Virtual Worlds

Australian business popularity contest

April 7, 2007 by 5 Comments

On Friday we received an interesting email from Gary Hazlitt pointing out how well Australian business presences are doing in relation to their international counterparts. We’re fully aware that the Traffic statistic provided by Linden is indicative at best, but even so the performance of Australian businesses is impressive (Australian sites in bold).

Pondex Sandbox 5669

BigPond Welcome 5262

ABC Sandbox 4723

L Word Amphitheatre 4529

BigPond Billabong Bar 3151

L Word Welcome area 2348

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Nissan 2304

IBM Main island 1893

American Apparel 1782 

Sony Ericcson 1273

Apple Store 873

BigPond Club Illusion 820

Reuters 820

AOL 811

PA Consulting 803

BigPond Shopping Dome 702

BigPond Pyramid Spa 663

Dell Island 598

BMW 562

Sony Media Island 402

ABC Welcome area 392

BigPond Harbour Bridge 375

ABC Triple J 247

Sony BMG Music Ent 222

Text 100  183

Starwood Hotels 158

The comparative performance of Australian business presences is significant albeit due to the recent BigPond and ABC builds. Even at SLOz HQ we exceed a number of others (we were sitting at 578 at time of publication) so no complaints here either…

Correction: earlier today this article was published including live site visit stats compiled by SLOz based on visits to the sites today. These are obviously very different to the rolling average displayed on search results. This could have led to misinterpretations of the data suppplied by Gary Hazlitt so we’ve withdrawn those.

Filed Under: Australian News, Business, Virtual Worlds

Casinos in SL – the beginning of the end?

April 6, 2007 by 2 Comments

According to the Official Linden Blog, restriction are being put in place to prevent advertising of simulated gambling i.e. casinos.

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The response from users is mixed as always. A number make a fairly safe prediction – that gambling will just become more subtle and/or involve links to external websites. A number of others are jubilant that their lag issues on mainland sims is likely to reduce. What are your thoughts?

Filed Under: General News, Virtual Worlds

FBI and Gambling – Australian connotations?

April 5, 2007 by 6 Comments

Update: According to the Official Linden Blog, the report by Reuters is a furphy….

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As reported by Reuters earlier this week, FBI agents in the US have been investigating gambling within Second Life. The story is well worth a read and it poses some fairly substantial questions for Australians operating businesses in Second Life.

Firstly, every country has different gambling rules than the US so potentially, US-based casinos may need to shut down whilst others do not – on assumption Linden Lab aren’t directed to ensure gambling doesn’t occur at all on their US-based grid.

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Secondly, Australian authorities appear to have not taken a great deal of interest in Second Life at this stage although realistically any investigations are unlikely to be public. Aside from some coverage of the Australian Tax Office’s interest late last year there’s been little activity.

Finally, stories like the Reuters one on the FBI crytallise the ongoing issue that governments and their instruments like law enforcement have a great deal of catch up to do in regard to virtual worlds. You’ll know things are starting to happen when Parliament holds a Senate enquiry into virtual worlds – and no, we won’t be proposing that here at SLOz 😉

Filed Under: General News, Op-ed, Virtual Worlds

John Howard in SL

April 4, 2007 by 1 Comment

How many John Howards do you think you will find in SL at the moment? I went and had a look and… there are six of them! I also noticed an interesting coincidence. All these John Howards were created between the 24th August and 31st August 2006 but only one of them, perhaps the real John Howard stepping forward, had the correct spelling of our Prime Minister’s name.

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I’m not one for conspiracy theories but it struck me as a little weird that in the space of seven days at the end of August 2006 there six John Howards appeared in SL. None of them have any details in their profile other than the default details. It’s not unusual for new members to do some kind of profile adjustment, maybe a bit of information or a pithy little witicism on life, second life, death and the hereafter. Not these Johnnies – just a blank canvas waiting for, well, maybe an election?

If one of these John Howards happened to be linked to our current PM perhaps other members of our parliamentary system have also created themselves a new constituency. So, following my instincts I looked for Kevin Rudd…

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… no luck!

Who knows, maybe closer to the next federal election we may find a few other of our illustrious leaders.

Filed Under: Australian News, Virtual Worlds

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