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Frenzoo: Avatar Style

May 29, 2009 by 1 Comment

Anstia-MetaverseJournal2

Although originally billed as being for teenage girls, the Frenzoo concept has proven to be of interest to a much wider audience. Even though it’s early days yet, the site still being in beta, there’s already a thriving community of folks participating in Frenzoo, with a wide range of ages and nationalities, and both genders, being strongly represented.

What is Frenzoo about? Primarily, it’s about sharing style – not just "high fashion" or "mainstream" style, but whatever takes your fancy; as long as you stay within the terms of service, and your images fit into the PG category, your style will be celebrated by the Frenzoo community.

Ztylist

Your Ztylist is your avatar in Frenzoo. In addition to personalising their face, there’s a wide range of beauty products, hairstyles, clothing and accessories to choose from to create the look you desire for your avatar. Once you have chosen your Ztylist’s look, you can also alter the way they move (their Pose), and change the way their background (Home) looks. The Pose is a looped animation; you can easily choose when in the sequence to take an image (Snapshot) to get the effect you are after.

Shop

One of the ways to achieve your personal look is to shop for items. Clothing, hair and accessories are made by the Frenzoo team, and also by VIPs, who are able to create items to stock their shops with. Though currently somewhat limited in range, the number of items is growing daily, and the range of styles covered also continues to expand. Right now, only Frenzoo team members have the ability to create make-up, though they are always open to suggestions as to what they should add to the collection next.

Create

Of course, if the shop doesn’t carry just the item you desire, you can always make your own. Making personalised garments, shoes and accessories is a snap with the item creation tools supplied. There’s a stage for cutting, for making the pattern for the fabric, and for adding details like buckles, pockets and gems. Simple items can be done very rapidly – more complicated items take more fiddling and more time, but are eminently possible. The original shape of your item is determined by the template you choose initially: a ball-gown cannot be cut to make jeans, but jeans can easily be cut down to make shorts.

Right now, VIP status is gained by demonstrating your capability and interest to the Frenzoo team – look in the Frenzoo forums for the appropriate information.

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The Zoo

Under the Zoo tab, you can get a quick overview of what other people’s Ztylists are wearing, and you have a quick link to their profile pages. Also under the Zoo tab are the Clubs, which are a great way to meet and communicate with people who have the same interests as you.

Shows

Shows are a fun and entertaining way to share your outfit creation and compilation abilities! It’s also a good place to make new friends. Each show has a theme; past themes have included Barbie, Emo and Cosplay (Superheroes, in this case). The idea is that you dress according to the theme, and then everyone gets a chance to vote for their favourite outfit. To keep things fair, the Frenzoo team has ensured that you can’t vote for yourself, and asks that you not spam people asking for their votes!

Share

Frenzoo has made it easy to share around the Frenzoo love – there are a wide range of banners and logos available to place on other web sites, and it’s also easy to place snapshots of your Ztylist on blogs, Myspace, and other similar places.

Forum

The Frenzoo forum is essentially like any other forum – it contains useful information about the site, alerts users to upcoming shows and changes to Frenzoo, and is a great place to carry on conversations with other users in the community. Moderation is in place to keep the atmosphere friendly and safe – if you wouldn’t say it to a 13 year old, don’t say it here.

Verdict

Frenzoo is a nifty piece of work, and there are more improvements to come. It may or may not be attractive to you now, but be aware that there are many changes in the pipeline – and one or more of those might make the difference that gets you intrigued.

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

Metaplace impressions

May 28, 2009 by 2 Comments

At The Metaverse Journal, we’ve followed Metaplace closely and covered its beta phase previously. Senior contributor Tateru Nino was asked to put Metaplace through its paces to ensure we haven’t been too starry-eyed about its potential – Editor.

Still in beta, Metaplace still has some rough edges and glitches, but it is certainly coming along very nicely.  The look and feel of Metaplace mostly calls to mind the isometric 2D games of the mid 1990s. That’s very much the look and feel of much of it, though it is in a considerably higher resolution than the game titles of yesteryear.

You could be forgiven for thinking its areas as strikingly similar in some ways to the tactical maps of the old X-Com game series. It runs conveniently in a browser, and is entirely Flash-based, downloading what it needs, when it needs it.

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Metaplace is divided into worlds. Each world being more or less a variably-sized map, viewed in a variety of ways and interconnected into a larger, multidimensional abstract geometry. There’s no broader landscape, and no particularly enormous spaces. Like – say – Richard Garriott’s Ultima VII, there’s an internal sense of the three-dimensionality of objects, but it is primarily a two-dimensional experience. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

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Metaplace’s strengths appear to be largely organized around social and gaming. Metaplace strongly supports the creation of spaces, particularly gaming spaces. Objects are almost trivially easy to create within metaplace, and the system actively supports a variety of relatively painless ways to get content into the system.

If you want, for example, a boat, the system will offer to take your search to Google 3D Warehouse, where you can simply select one of the available models, and Metaplace will do all the heavy lifting to import it for you. A useful variety of behaviours can be added to objects with just a few clicks, and no-scripting, and there’s support for more intricate systems as well.

tmj-tan-metaplace3 Views of spaces can be customized, UI widgets can be added. There’s a great deal of support for building game-spaces, and if I were able to spare the time for making a game, Metaplace is definitely where I’d want to be doing it.

Metaplace tracks experience (‘metacred’, actually) and assigns levels, keeping track of the basic types of activities you indulge in. People can tell at a glance if you’re a socializer, explorer or builder by nature – though hardly anyone actually seems to pay attention to that. You gain metacred and presently also coins (for the economy prototype) by, well, socializing, exploring and building, basically.

Some issues still present themselves, of course.

The economy and monetisation of the platform is still in the early stages. It’s “soft-launched”, if you like, and users are still in the early days of getting to grips with the potential of the platform. Much of the content you’ll see is still under construction.

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The urge to right-click – for context menus and the like – is almost overwhelming, but of course that just brings up the options for Adobe’s Flash Player. Some of your basic tools can be a little erratic. Sometimes your mouse scroll-wheel will function to zoom in or out of a scene, and sometimes – well – it just won’t. Even left-clicking on things can be somewhat erratic.

tmj-tan-metaplace5 Likewise, we’ve had a few issues with setting properties on objects and getting those to actually stick. The further you are from Metaplace in network terms, the more erratically it seems to behave.

That said, Metaplace is still early in the beta stage, and we’ve got every confidence that its various teething problems will continue to sort themselves out. We’re definitely looking forward to seeing how the platform, the economy and the user-generated content all develop.

Filed Under: Alternatives, Gaming Worlds, General News, Op-ed, Virtual Worlds Tagged With:

The first landmark in Second Life

May 26, 2009 by Leave a Comment

In Second Life, I’m a bit of a landmark hoarder, and I noticed that I had kept the very first landmark I saved when I became a Second Life resident in 2006. As was common for new residents, I’d saved the location of the casino whose chairs I used to sit in to gain Linden dollars. Those were the days. So, I then decided to visit the landmark itself and found that the University of North Carolina at Pembroke has replaced the casino of my Second Life youth:

It’s hard to avoid the juxtaposition of Second Life’s evolution since 2006 and my landmark experience: gambling, along with unregulated banking and activities like ageplay are no longer, with educators a stalwart community. There’s both upsides and downsides to those changes, but what hasn’t changed is the uncertainty over where Second Life will go next.

So now it’s over to you: do you remember your first saved landmark, and if so, what was it and does it still exist? Or has something else taken its place?

Filed Under: General News, Landmarks of note, Op-ed, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: ,

Macarthur Foundation and Bartle interview machinima

May 26, 2009 by 1 Comment

Over the past few days I’ve been sent two really interesting machinima that don’t really fit our Weekend Whimsy slot.

The first is a detailed tour of the Macarthur Foundation’s island in Second Life, created by Draxtor Despres. The Macarthur Foundation is a US-based philanthropy organisation working worldwide, with a well established pedigree in funding virtual worlds projects:

The second machinima piece comes from Pooky Amsterdam, and it’s a two-part interview with MUD pioneer and games researcher, Richard Bartle. There’s some awkward moments and some glitchy audio in the interview, but that’s well and truly outnumbered by Bartle’s insights into a range of topics. I found his explanation on the wider societal motivations for creating a MUD fascinating (essentially he was railing against the propensity of British society at the time to judge people too quickly and the MUD provided an opportunity for people to be themselves):

Part 1:

Part 2:

Over to you on the Bartle interview in particular – were there any new revelations for you or points you disagreed with strongly?

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

The Watch – virtual worlds in the news

May 25, 2009 by 2 Comments

1. Bizinformer (USA) – Entering an Era of Virtual Currencies? “There’s money. People (me included) carry it around in their wallets and save small pieces of it in the ashtrays or cup holders of their cars. And they buy things with it – hamburgers, gasoline, and sometimes other small things. Then there’s checks and credit cards. We pretend they’re money and much of the time that works for us. They’re closely related to money. Then there’s RockYou Pets from Hi5, Linden Dollars frm Second Life, and PEDs from the planet Calypso, in an online gaming world called Entropia Universe. How much like money are they? Some would say they are money – to the extent that you live your life in a particular virtual world. Some of them are actually exchangeable in the real world; 250 Linden Dollars is worth one US dollar. You can provide a service or sell a product in Second Life, change the Linden Dollars into “real money” (whatever that is now) and take it to the grocery store or the mall. PEDs can also be converted back into real money; 10 PEDs equal one US dollar.”

2. Ottawa Citizen (Canada) – It slices, it dices … it markets to kids. “We’ve come a long way from the days when placing ads for toys and sugary cereals alongside Saturday-morning cartoons was the slickest way to sell stuff to kids. Marketers have become increasingly sophisticated in their efforts to expand brands with young consumers. Some present kids with the keys to the product image, allowing them to create new products. For example, media companies provide audio and video clips that young fans slice and dice to create montages. “Advertisers and broadcasters are approaching children as participants in cultural production and not as audiences,” says Stuart Poyntz, an assistant professor of communications at Simon Fraser University.”

3. IntoMobile (USA) – First Look: The Sims 3 for iPhone. “EA Mobile’s stable of iPhone games is already impressive, but it’s about to get even better. The mobile arm of famed game developer EA is putting the finishing touches on their latest in iPhone gaming – The Sims 3 for iPhone – and we’ve got the first-look scoop for all our readers! These are the same guys behind iPhone-tastic gaming titles like Spore Origins, Tiger Woods PGA Tour and Need for Speed Undercover, so you know their “next big thing” is going to be, well, big. And, after spending some time with the EA Mobile team and their Sims 3 iPhone game, we’re convinced they have a hit on their hands.”

4. Mediaweek (USA) – eMarketer: 50% of Kids Online Will Use Virtual Worlds by ’12. “hile virtual worlds like Second Life still represent a fringe activity in the general market, more than half of the kids who use the Internet will be regular visitors to virtual worlds in just four years, predicts researcher eMarketer. Virtual worlds — game-like Web environments where users can create avatars in a fantasy landscape and interact with other users — have become particularly popular among young children. Currently, eMarketer estimates that there are 6 million kids age 3-11 who visit virtual worlds at least once a month, representing 37 percent of that Web demographic. By 2012, there will be 8.7 million kids 3-11 using virtual worlds — or 50 percent of the entire kids’ online universe.”

5. New England Business Bulletin (USA) – New corporate training options include virtual worlds. “Online options have rewritten the world of corporate training, expanding possibilities well beyond the traditional presenter with Powerpoint show. Today, businesses across the globe are using 3-D virtual world technology as a way to hold meetings, simulate business in any environment, conduct training and much more. One growing example, Second Life, dubbed a “virtual world imagined and created by its residents,” is an online world that businesses have begun to get acclimated with over the last year or so because of the possibilities it holds for nontraditional learning.”

6. BusinessWeek (USA) – Studying Epidemics in Virtual Worlds. ” day after news reports about an outbreak of swine flu in Mexico, health officials in Allegheny County, Pa., huddled to discuss contingency plans. How should they respond if the virus came to their part of the world? By closing schools? With widespread vaccinations? To test different courses of action, they turned to computer scientists who had built a working model of the county. “It helps come up with recommendations of when and how to intervene,” says Dr. Ron Voorhees, chief of epidemiology and biostatistics at the Allegheny County Health Dept.”

7. Popular Science (Australia) – Businesses Seek a New Lease on Second Life. “What ever happened to the online virtual world revolution? You know, the one where everyone would spend hours every day blinging out their Second Life avatars and crashing weddings in World of Warcraft? Well, those days never quite materialized. The media fanfare around virtual worlds has transitioned from an initial wildfire of exuberance to essentially nothing, as expectations for growth and revenue failed to pay off.”

8. VentureBeat (USA) – Second Life generates 15 billion minutes in web voice calls. “When you think of phone companies, Linden Lab’s Second Life virtual world doesn’t come to mind. But the company is announcing today that its users have used its web-voice calling feature to talk to each other for a total of 15 billion minutes since it was introduced 18 months ago. The voice-over-Internet-protocol web calling service inside the virtual world is now being used at a rate of 1 billion minutes per month, said Mark Kingdon, chief executive of Linden Lab in San Francisco. By comparison, the VOIP service Skype has been used for 200 billion minutes in the past six years. At any given moment, 50,000 Second Life residents are using the voice application.”

9. Gamasutra (USA) – Sixth Annual State of Play Conference Discusses Future of Virtual Worlds. “Organizers of the Sixth Annual State of Play Conference announced that this year’s event will be held on June 19th and 20th at the New York Law School. The conference will focus on the social impact of virtual worlds and multiplayer online games. State of Play’s sixth annual showing will bring together scholars, games developers, industry figures, and government leaders to examine the development and study of virtual worlds. Speakers at this year’s conference will discuss whether scholars have reached a limit in the understanding of multiplayer online spaces, and will seek to determine whether virtual worlds have stalled at a development plateau.”

10. CNN (USA) – ‘Virtual currencies’ power social networks, online games. “When Santiago Martinez wants to give his friends birthday presents, he buys a cake or flowers or sometimes a teddy bear. But the 41-year-old, who lives on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, doesn’t spend pesos or dollars. He buys the gifts with an online-only currency called hi5 Coins. He also doesn’t deliver the gifts in the physical world. They appear digitally on his friends’ online profiles on a site called hi5, which is a social network like Facebook or MySpace. “They can’t eat the cake. It is an image — the thing that it represents,” said Martinez, an accountant with a wife and two kids. “You can send the feeling of that [cake] that you want to send.”

Filed Under: General News, Virtual Worlds, Virtual worlds in the media Tagged With:

Weekend Whimsy

May 22, 2009 by Leave a Comment

1. SECOND LIFE: Stupida Scuola

2. Second Life Kool-Aid (OH YEAH!)

3. Returning to Second Life: The Misadventures of The Space Pope (and Jyggorath too)

Filed Under: User-generated, Virtual Worlds Tagged With:

Merged realities – events and issues for virtual worlds

May 22, 2009 by Leave a Comment

manhattan_group 1. Linden Lab are excited about the take-up of voice in Second Life, stating more than 15 billion minutes of voice have been delivered in-world. It’s also worth reading the comments in response to FJ Linden’s post on Second Life’s ‘Green’ infrastructure.

2.US-based hospitality recruitment firm, Manhattan Group, are increasing their presence in Second Life, including weekly office hours to speak with potential applicants. Nothing ground-breaking there, just a tiny step along the road to widespread adoption of virtual worlds by enterprise. You can check out their presence here – there’s even a bunch of Australian hospitality jobs listed.

3. Speaking of static rows of 2D listings, the FBI are excited about Second Life too.

Filed Under: Events, General News, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: , ,

Evolver – portable avatars

May 21, 2009 by 2 Comments

evolverThere’s a great story over on Maxping about Evolver, a now web-based avatar creation tool from Darwin Dimensions. There’s no shortage of tools like this but where Evolver shows particular promise is in regards to being able to share avatar creations across a range of platforms and media.

The majority of partners are yet to be announced but the beta already offers sharing with the following virtual worlds: Friends Hang Out, 3Dxplorer, Qwaq, WorldViz, Vast Park, Torque Game, Wonderland and Active World. The detail of the avatars isn’t to be sneezed at either – as the public gallery shows

There’s also a service to clone your real-world face onto an Evolver avatar, something I’ve never really seen the point of doing but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t popular. All up, Evolver has promise – a Linden Lab takeover target perhaps? You can also read a short interview with Darwin Dimensions’ CEO here.

Filed Under: General News, User-generated, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: ,

Second Life user retrospectives

May 19, 2009 by Leave a Comment

This may be the future, but Im looking at the past.

This may be the future, but I'm looking at the past.

The Second Life sixth birthday is looming. What, I wondered, were the changes, for good or for ill, that made the biggest impacts upon the community of users, since the last birthday? While pondering this, I had the following thoughts:

“Don’t worry, users can barely remember what happened last week. 12 months down the track, they’ll have forgotten the whole thing.”

We’ve all had this thought at one time or another: we’ve held the expectation that the majority of users will not only not notice the impact of the Second Life event that causes us so much elation, or grief, or confusion, but will surely not remember it in times to come. Perhaps the majority of users have not even held an account for that long.

Maybe that’s true.

But stop to consider this: a minority of users are deeply invested in Second Life. If a minority of users both notice and recall events that occurred with respect to Second Life, perhaps that’s ok. If the minority of users are the people who use Second Life more of the time, then the impact of their memories could be weighty indeed.

Let’s take that as read.

Now combine this with the fact that memories are elastic in time. Things that you felt very strongly about at the time will tend to linger in the memory, and can seem to be more recent than other, less charged, memories.

So, we have a minority of users who, with their investment in Second Life, are more likely not only to have long and sustained memories of things that affected them, but also to continue to talk about those things, and to pursue restitution where things have gone badly. Their effect upon Second Life and upon the community is greater than you might otherwise expect, in this specific fashion.

During the week, I asked readers of Tateru Nino’s Dwell On It blog, and others, to leave a comment containing their memories of Second Life, highlights and low lights, over the past 12 months. I also asked them not to do any research, but to work from their own memories alone. I felt that it was important to ask users who have enough investment in Second Life to read blogs about it, and to respond.

As you might expect, respondents remembered quite a number of things that had happened previous to that time as actually occurring in that year.

The other thing that struck me was the overall number of events that were recalled by each user; i.e. many, many more than I had expected, or could remember myself.

So, with those thoughts, I present to you the list I compiled from the responses I received, in date order, with links to interesting and pertinent information.

Age verification: announcement to implementation.

4 May 2007 Age and Identity Verification in Second Life

5 December 2007 Age verification arrives on the Second Life grid (updated)

Ageplay: in the media, getting banned.

10 May 2007 Child Porn Panic Hits ‘Second Life’

30 October 2007 Virtual Ageplay Still Too Real

The gambling ban.

25 July 2007 Wagering In Second Life: New Policy

The banking ban.

5 January 2008 Virtual Banking – Linden Lab intervenes

Bay City announced.

22 February 2008 http://secondlife.wikia.com/wiki/Bay_City

Trademark issues.

25 March 2008 Linden Lab asserts control of names and images

Havok4 released on the main grid.

31 March 2008 Cry “havoc” and let slip the squirrels of war!

Mark Kingdon, new CEO.

22 April 2008 Announcing our New CEO!

Second Life fifth birthday: who and what is not welcome?

21 May 2008 Calling All Cultures to the Second Life 5th Birthday Celebration

30 May 2008 Calling all cultures? Not any more.

30 May 2008 Shape-Based Exclusion [Updated]

5 June 2008 M-rated avatars disinvited, then re-invited, to Linden’s birthday bash

16 June 2008 LL Hopes For Nipple Free 5th Birthday Celebration

SL5B.

“M Linden’s speech at SL5B viewed by many as a slap in the face of early adopters.” Marianne McCann

“The Linden Prize was also at SL5B. I remember how everyone was anticipating the “big news from Mitch Kapor”, and then scratching their heads at what it turned out to be.” Jacek Antonelli

Mono.

21 August 2008 Mono Launch

Burning Life 2008.

Ran from 25 September to 5 October 2008 http://burninglife.secondlife.com/

New City Sims.

20 October 2008 New City Area Discovered

Immersive Workspaces.

20 October 2008 Linden Lab and Rivers Run Red launch Immersive Workspaces 2.0

Openspace controversy.

28 October 2008 Openspace Pricing and Policy Changes

28 October 2008 Lost in the void

Big Spaceship.

3 November 2008 Transforming the Second Life Experience

Winterfaire.

28 November 2008 Winterfaire! Coming December 19 – January 5

13 December Win a Space in the Second Life Holiday Marketplace! (The Holiday Marketplace got underway shortly before the holiday period was over).

Xstreet and OnRez.

20 January 2009 XStreet SL and OnRez to Join Linden Lab!

Maps.

22 January 2009 Improvements to mapping and upgrade to SLurl.com

Linden Blog.

18 February 2009 After much ado with half-measures, the new Linden Blog is released.

Content Ratings.

12 March 2009 Upcoming Changes for Adult Content

21 April 2009 Update – Upcoming Changes for Adult Content

27 April 2009 What do Second Life’s new content ratings actually mean?

Second Life and Open Source.

30 March 2009 Intensifying Open Source Efforts

Finally, I noted that we noticed several Lindens leaving (Robin, Zee, Ginsu, Katt), but barely noticed those who came to take their place.

See this, Linden Lab? Users matter, and they have long memories.

Filed Under: General News, Op-ed, Virtual world history, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: , ,

The Multiplicities of Internet Addiction – a book review

May 19, 2009 by 1 Comment

This book review appeared yesterday over on Metaverse Health, but given the book’s Australian author and it’s broad examination of online behaviour, I thought it was worth re-posting it here.

Johnson – The Multiplicities of Internet 2a1

Nicola Johnson from the University of Wollongong in Australia, recently released a book titled The Multiplicities of Internet Addiction – The Misrecognition of Leisure and Learning. It’s an engaging read, not least for the very objective look it takes at the concepts of internet addiction and framing the issue within the realities of a net-connected society that has changed immensely in the past twenty years or so.

Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice is the frame for the qualitative study of eight New Zealander teenagers and the illumination it provided on the perception of technology use amongst those who’ve know no different (digital insiders), those who haven’t (digital newcomers) and those who are plain not interested (digital outsiders). Additionally, there’s some fascinating discussion on how expertise is being developed by digital insiders and how this expertise is at best partially gained from the traditional educational institutions in place at present.

It’s the elaboration of the experiences of these eight teens that allow Johnson to weave in a great deal of the substantive research that’s occurred into the nature of addiction in regard to online activity. There’s no assertion of internet addiction as non-entity, just a much smaller subset of use than usually claimed. As contributing writer Feldspar Epstein has written previously in relation to heavy use of virtual worlds by people with disabilities:

Can you imagine telling someone with no legs to forsake their wheelchair? How about someone with a pain disorder? Are you going to tell people with crippling mental disorders that they are not allowed to take drugs to normalize and enable them? Are you going to tell deaf people they can’t use Teletype in place of the telephone?

Each of these technological advances were radical in their time; some of them were seen as being destructive, to society or to the individual. It’s hard to imagine any of these people being denied their enabling technologies in today’s first world society (one hopes). I hope to live in a future where my enabling computer habits are accepted.

Johnson’s assertions based on a thorough exploration of the literature, reveal a similar conclusion: internet addiction does exist, but when the preconceptions of digital newcomers and digital outsiders are removed from the equation, the prevalence of internet addiction seems pretty limited indeed. As Johnson concludes:

Digital outsiders (and some digital newcomers) find it unfathomable to understand the preoccupation that digital insiders have with their online lives. Because it is not what they did in times gone by, they find it difficult to understand the value, worth and social capital received by avid users in what appears to be an unhealthy obsession. As I have argued, these practices are not only misrecognized as obessions or addictions, but they are misunderstood.

This book’s research base means it’s more likely to be consumed and digested by those who are doing research or study in the area themselves. Which is a shame, as the discussion deserves wider recognition and debate. Work like this balances out some of the excesses on the mainstream media side of the equation. It’s only a lack of dissemination of this perspective that will ensure the sensationalism camp prevails for some time to come.

You can purchase this book from our online bookstore, Amazon direct or direct from the publisher.

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

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