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Openlife: the momentum builds

September 16, 2008 by 7 Comments

Openlife resident Macphisto Angelus has posted an excellent summary of a recent meeting for Openlife residents. There were a couple of notable announcements out of the meeting.

First, there’s the partnership with realXtend and its promise for a graphically rich world. Second, a range of browser options are on the way, including a Mac version (Mac users can only use Openlife via the Second Life browser at present). Third, some fascinating avatar enhancements are on the way, leveraging off the realXtend platform.

Since we first dropped in on Openlife in February it’s been evolving steadily. If you’re wanting to dip your toe in the waters of an alternate grid, now might be a good time and why not support the Australia-based Openlife?

Filed Under: Alternatives, Australian News, Virtual Worlds Tagged With:

Armory Island closes

September 9, 2008 by 4 Comments

Last week I received a message from Apollo Case, the Australian owner of Armory Island in Second Life. It’s been a high-traffic, successful business over the past two years I’ve observed it, so I was surprised to hear it’s closing.

It’s not the end of Apollo’s involvement in Second Life, with a much more modest presence already open. It shows just how much commitment it requires to sustain a large in-world business, with no guarantees of sustainable revenue. Good luck to Apollo for the scaled-down venture.

(Disclosure: Armory Island is an advertiser on this site).

Filed Under: Australian News, Virtual Worlds Tagged With:

VastPark release Immersion player

September 3, 2008 by 1 Comment

VastPark have been a littler quiet on the news front recently but they’ve changed that today with the announcement of a virtual worlds’ player called Immersion. The player, which will be open source, will allow for VastPark-created worlds to be embedded into websites. VastPark themselves mention Google Lively as the obvious comparison.

CEO Bruce Joy’s take:

“We think that virtual worlds will start to become more utilitarian: you can create a room in minutes and decide to have a VoIP based meeting in there. This will lead to many businesses wanting to host their own micro worlds just as they host their website. We want to make that easy, low cost and provide an open source and a commercial white label software choice.”

Immersion will have scriptable “PowerPoint-style” controls and the current Browser and Viewer technology used in VastPark will be merged into Immersion.

The open-sourcing of Immersion comes on top of the VastPark server code being open source, so it’s an overt strategy by VastPark. It’s probably a necessary strategy as well given that behemoths like Google Lively are now competitors. That said, the open source route is being pursued with some protections built in for the company. Lead Developer at VastPark, Craig Presti, explains:

“VastPark is built for developers, by developers. The whole system is easily extended by developers creating plugins that can remain proprietary or be open sourced at the discretion of the developer. We’ll continue to release binaries under an entrepreneur friendly end user license. That’s much better than being essentially forced to open source your widget or your plug-in by the GNU GPL. We think there’s a middle way.”

Whether this middle way is the path to success is obviously up for grabs. What’s encouraging is that a smaller (and partially Australian-based) player is remaining in the game and not being fazed by the ever-growing competiition in the marketplace.

We’re waiting on confirmation from vastPark on Immersion’s release date.

Filed Under: Alternatives, Australian News, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: ,

A year ago on The Metaverse Journal

September 2, 2008 by Leave a Comment

A year ago we covered the AIIA inworld-forum titled “Are Virtual Worlds relevant to my Marketing Effort?”

The same week, ABC Island ran a CSIRO forum on human life extension.

Filed Under: Australian News, Virtual world history, Virtual Worlds Tagged With:

PacRimX, Skoolaborate and Global Challenge merger: the beginning of an Education Grid?

September 2, 2008 by 2 Comments

Bakamatsu region, Kyoto, on the Second Life Main Grid

PacRimX (Pacific Rim Exchange)

Stan Trevena, director of technology for Modesto City Schools, is the man responsible for the PacRimX project, developed in 2007. The idea was that kids from Modesto and their counterparts from Kyoto Gakuen in Japan would be able to interact with each other in a virtual environment, prior to an international student exchange in which 20 Modesto students traveled to Japan, and vice versa with 50 Japanese students.

Due to time-zone issues, video-conferencing was ruled out as a solution early on. Instead, Trevena bought an private Island on the Teen Second Life Grid. He fitted it with some basics, including a welcome centre, but noted that “a lot of the innovative use of the island will come from the kids.” The number of islands has now expanded to four. Trevena describes the facility as “a place for our students to communicate and collaborate with each other in building a place where they can share their interests, cultures and languages.”

Students from Kyoto arrived in Modesto on June 24, 2008.

Skoolaborate

Westley Field, Director of Online Learning at MLC School Sydney, founded the Skoolaborate Project in 2007. Skoolaborate works with junior high schools around the globe to foster students collaboration, involving the use of digital technologies: wikis, blogs, virtual environments and other online learning tools. The Skoolaborate learning space, also on the Teen Second Life Grid, is a private, secure area with an invitation required to access it. “Skoolaborate now has 14 schools from Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore and the USA.”

Global Challenge

“In the Global Challenge, teams of US high school students collaborate with international counterparts from October to May to address global climate change and compete for prizes and scholarship awards.”

Approximately 2,000 students have already participated in their program.

The merger

Kyoto Gakuen has been working with both Skoolaborate and PacRimX independently since the genesis of each program in 2007. This is how a relationship developed between the directors of the programs, which ultimately led to the merger between the two. The Global Challenge program was brought in separately, to complement the work of the others.

The resulting merged program, featuring input and participation by 17 schools from across the globe, is now the world’s largest virtual environment project, designed for kids of junior high school age.

“Schools collaborate using a variety of online tools and environments to share experiences, thoughts and ideas from around global understanding, social and environmental education.”

Thoughts

Having a private project on the Teen Second Life Grid could have been a great way to ensure that students encountered a slow-moving, sterile environment, with great homogeneity of culture, opinion and thought. However, this partnership should bring together a rich and diverse mix of folks, students and educators, which should create a varied, stimulating environment in which to learn.

Linden Lab is in flux, and the cause is not at all clear: speculation is rife and rumors abound, and the Lab has all but cut off communications with it’s residents. The Millennial Generation does not seem to be the target audience for the Second Life “platform” – this indicates that there is unlikely to be an “Education Grid” any time soon, or perhaps at all. It looks like the program developed by the combined force of PacRimX, Skoolaborate and Global Challenge will be the one of the largest contenders for an alternative.

The question is: will the Teen Second Life Grid remain active for long enough for any of their goals to come to fruition?

Filed Under: Australian News, Education, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: , ,

Telstra BigPond launches customer service centre in Second Life

September 1, 2008 by 2 Comments

Telstra today took the next step in the ongoing evolution of their significant presence in Second Life with the launch of a staffed customer service centre. There’ll be Telstra-employed avatars available between 11am and 10pm Monday to Friday AEST to answer “service-related queries”. Obviously there won’t be too many queries from those whose connection has gone down but it’s a worthy expansion of customer service in-world.

A launch party was held from 5pm today:

There’s plenty of space to wait if it comes to that:

With sixteen sims, Telstra are a corporate behemoth in Second Life and a successful one at that. It’ll be interesting to see how many people utilise the service. The press release states that “this initiative was driven by the popularity of this virtual world with BigPond customers”. We’ve asked for some figures on this – the common assumption behind Telstra’s popularity is that BigPond customers have their Second Life usage unmetered and it’d be good to get some solid figures behind the claim.

The natural reaction from non-Second Life residents would be to ask why you’d bother logging in to ask a question when it’s easier to phone or email the query. To some extent this is valid but it misses the point of the exercise (beyond its PR value) – it’s one of the few corporate experiments in actual virtual world customer service. Whether it’s successful is only part of the equation – it’s useful research for the future when virtual worlds more successfully enable business transactions. This sort of exercise is fodder for that future.

Check it out in-world.

Filed Under: Australian News, Business, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: , ,

Pool: the ideal Second Life tie-in opportunity for the ABC

August 26, 2008 by 2 Comments

I received a press release from the ABC’s Radio National, who have launched collaborative content creation site called Pool.

It’s a joint initiative between RMIT University, University of Technology Sydney and the University of Wollongong and runs on the open source content management system Drupal. The call is on for people to contribute their words, pictures, sounds or video with the ability (via a Creative Commons license) for every participant to download the work of others to build or collaborate on. It’s another plunge into participatory media for the ABC – something that’s been explored in the ABC’s presence in Second Life.

I contacted the ABC to ask about any potential tie-in of the Pool initiative with Second Life and at this stage nothing’s planned in that regard. There seems to be some obvious collaborative opportunities for Pool that involve Second Life, or indeed any virtual world, so here’s hoping for further exploration of that.

One way to drive that exploration would be to join Pool and start contributing material from your virtual world life…

Filed Under: Art, Australian News, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: , ,

Kim MacKenzie hits back on negative media coverage of Second Life

August 23, 2008 by 3 Comments

Kim MacKenzie, a PhD student from the Queensland University of Technology, completed some research into Second Life that formed the basis for an article that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age this week.

Kim has posted a thoughtful response on the post that looked at the SMH article.

It’s worth repeating Kim’s elaboration in full here:

What is it with the Australian media? Why are they focused on slandering Second Life as a failure? I have recently discussed my research findings of commercial activity within Second Life with several journalists, where only minimal quotes have been used out of their original context; in order it seems, to support an obvious negative bias.

This is extremely disappointing as it is not an accurate reflection of the important invaluable opportunity that Second Life has provided pioneering commercial exploration of VR capabilities. Just because some commercial enterprises have pulled out of Second Life does not equate to ‘failure’. Vital 3D avatar immersion lessons have been learnt, modeling and building skills developed, use of digital agents, telepresence, interactive, navigational and communication applications explored, and platform and cultural limitations realised. This is all invaluable experience for commercial frontrunners preparing to invest in a virtual future. Fundamental lessons have been learnt, and these firms will reap the rewards by being well positioned to take informed advantage of future VR developments. And fundamental developments are essential that encompass service delivery stability, ‘in world’ governance and behaviour policing, legal and copyright protection, a shift away from ‘virtual reality is just a game’ consciousness, and mainstream user adoption.

However, even though a pioneering learning curve has been successfully realised by many commercial organisations, my personal views gained from the research study is that organisations are still very limited with their exploration of VR capabilities. Most of the activity was trying to mirror real world offerings. Whilst there is merit in replicating reality using virtual building tools, I believe that the potential of VR technology offers so much more. VR is essentially an extremely powerful visualisation tool. It provides the ability to build visions that users can immerse in and experience, which offers a tremendous opportunity. An inherent human capability is to use visualisation techniques to achieve goals and outcomes. Ask any high achiever, or acclaimed athlete, of how they build success, and I am sure the concept of ‘visualisation’ will be associated. A success vision is created, and the work is done step by step to realize that vision.

My point is this. The visualisation power of VR could be instrumental in shaping visionary goals/outcomes/solutions to all sorts of situations, including humanity’s greatest problems. For example, what would human equality ‘look like’, what would a sustainable earth ‘look like’, what would ‘world peace’ look like? Collectively trying to build a vision of these scenarios using VR capabilities could provide the roadmaps for eventual real world solutions. It also means working together and pooling ideas and resources, not competing as separate entities for individual profit or gain, but rather, collectively gaining some powerful potential to move humanity forward. It’s a big idea I know, and we need ‘vision makers’ to lead the way. It would be great to start a virtual global campaign, called something like ‘Vision Quest’ that unites individuals, communities, educational bodies, United Nations, and corporations, to build visionary solutions for the future. Now that’s a success formula!

Kim’s agreed to an interview on her research, which should appear in the next week or two.

Filed Under: Australian News, Virtual Worlds

Episode 7 of TMJ Podcast – Feldspar Epstein joins the fray

August 22, 2008 by Leave a Comment

This episode consists of a discussion between Feldpar Epstein and myself on a range of topics including virtual worlds addiction, Google Lively, education in Second Life and much more.

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For details on how to automatically receive these podcasts, check our podcast page.

Filed Under: Australian News, TMJ Podcasts, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: ,

Second Life – on the wane for aussies?

August 21, 2008 by 9 Comments

Asher Moses from the Sydney Morning Herald has run a story titled ‘Few lives left for Second Life’. It’s based on research undertaken by the Queensland University of Technology’s Kim MacKenzie, who’s completing her honours thesis on Second Life and business.

The research findings aren’t surprising in a lot of respects – there are significant areas of Second Life that are ghost towns and yes the numbers of people on one sim are usually very low at any given time (something I’m quoted on in the article).

A point I did make that didn’t make the final cut was that businesses like Telstra and the ABC had been successful in Second Life because they were aware of the experimental nature of Second Life, particularly where business is involved. The notable failures occur when the business jumps in boots and all expecting true return on investment in the short to medium term. Telstra’s sucess in particular has been its ability to leverage its large presence to provide a breadth of activities including residential options.

The story overall is quite pessimistic but does accurately cite the challenges Linden Lab face. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again now – 2008 is meant to be the year of bedding down stability for Second Life. Some gains have been made, but time and patience is running out for a lot of people.

What are your views – does Second Life have a few more lives left?

Filed Under: Australian News, Business, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: , ,

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