I can’t recommend this list highly enough – I found three things that will change the way I work. Enjoy.
Speed building in Second Life
April 15, 2007 by 2 Comments
If you’ve ever wanted to see a large build in a short amount of time, then watch this.
SL resident and Urban Planning student Lordfly Digeridoo tracked his own progress over a week timespan building a 6000-prim replication of a real-life area. I hope he got the marks he deserved. What the video accentuates as well is some of the shortfalls of SL’s building tools – there’s a lot of avoidable and repetitive work in a large build.
SBS TV looks at virtual worlds
April 14, 2007 by 2 Comments
This coming Tuesday at 8.30pm, SBS TV are screening New Cyberspace Worlds as part of their Future Focus series:
It’s unclear at this stage whether the show is a local production or an imported product.
Update: the show was a Europena production that covered SL, WoW and Entropia Universe, all in quite some depth.
VastPark
April 12, 2007 by 4 Comments
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?
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.
Check it out in-world or go to fishace.com.au.
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.
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.
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!!”.
“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.
There are plans on expanding to an island location in the future.
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
Nissan 2304
IBM Main island 1893
American Apparel 1782Â
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 100Â 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.
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