Entries Tagged 'Second Life' ↓

Wherever people gather there is the chance for humanity to impart itself upon those gathered.

We should expect no less from Second Life.

In a garden pavilion on an island, I sat with an assortment of human beings - one clad as a teddy bear wearing a Santa hat, another as a brazen vixen, a blue man, a tuxedoed prom king - and poured out my heart from a place of loneliness and grief. Click click went the computer keys, like the staccato beat of my heart. Clack clack went their replies, their empathy and their own tales of triumph and woe. Via my avatar - the persona I’d created to engage here - I was participating in an “anxiety support group” in the free, virtual world of Second Life.

As I write those words, I can hear the scoffing. Pathetic! Escapist! Are you addicted to computer games? Do you have no friends? Second Life? That place is just about weird sex fantasies!

I saw my first instance of online group therapy in the form of an email list in the mid-90s. Second Life is no different really, it is just a more immersive experience than email. And that immersion could be the key to better connections and a more expressive group therapy experience. Gone are the vulnerabilities of speaking to strangers in person. Expressing issues is more important I believe than rubbing elbows at the local church.

Edd Hifeng barely merits a second glance in “Second Life.” A steel-gray robot with lanky limbs and linebacker shoulders, he looks like a typical avatar in the popular virtual world.

But Edd is different.

His actions are animated not by a person at a keyboard but by a computer. Edd is a creation of artificial intelligence, or AI, and researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who endowed him with a limited ability to converse and reason.

It turns out “Second Life” is more than a place where pixelated avatars chat, interact and fly about. It’s also a frontier in AI research because it’s a controllable environment where testing intelligent creations is easier.

“It’s a very inexpensive way to test out our technologies right now,” said Selmer Bringsjord, director of the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory.

Bringsjord sees Edd as a forerunner to more sophisticated creations that could interact with people inside three-dimensional projections of settings like subway stops or city streets. He said the holographic illusions could be used to train emergency workers or solve mysteries. (full article)

Nimbus CEO, Storm Williams, appeared in Second Life last week for a taping of The Late Show with Angelico Babii.

Williams’ avatar name is StormBear Hitchcock and he was the last guest of the night. He discussed the the creation of Books For Soldiers and the technology used to bring Books For Soldiers to Second Life.

Angelico’s show is part of the MBC’ (Metaverse Broadcasting Company) 1600 in-world screens and the show is seen throughout Second Life and is also available on the web. If the below player doesn’t work for you, you can also see the show HERE.

CNBC ran a story on Second Life and how SL is creating a new economy much in the way eBay has. One woman profiled is on track to make over $80,000 in US dollars this year from the sales of her clothing line in Second Life. Her initial investment was a tad over $500.

The video is worth watching.

Second Life, Open Sim, and now there are sniffs of Google in the metaverse wind.

Massively thinks so.

major media outlets speculated that Google would use its then-newly-acquired SketchUp asset to turn Google Earth into some sort of Second Life-type experience. Then The Wall Street Journal reported that Google was to acquire Adscape Media Inc., a company that specializes in creatively integrating advertising into games. In September, ASU students began testing a mysterious application very likely connected to Google, and observers speculated that the application could be a 3D virtual environment.

Google made a deal with Multiverse (the company connected to the possibly problematic Firefly MMO) to sync Multiverse’s flexible virtual reality engine with Google’s assets and tools. The Reuters blog MediaFile points out that au courant industry figures are taking the existence of a Google virtual world for granted at this point.

The fire keeps getting more fuel. Multiverse’s Corey Bridge was quoted in The Financial Times describing a future when people will use their real identities (rather than fictional character avatars) to interact with one another in virtual worlds that will be integrated into social networking platforms similar to Facebook or MySpace. Google is making a huge social networking push this month.

Google has a unique ability to increase market pressures and push users into new technologies. Second Life is adding about 1000 private islands a month. Imagine what would happen if Google ups and adds a thousand or so islands. Or, what if every Gmail account suddenly gets 2048 square meters of OpenSim space?

Once OpenSim can link into the SL grid, the metaverse changes forever and no one knows how it will change.

This says a lot about the state of activism.

Second Life just passed the 2 million account mark and the growth rate for the past month is remarkable.

The Second Life login screen and XML statistics blobs are reporting that Second Life has passed it’s two millionth signup. The figures normally only update at midnight, but someone manually updated them within the last 90 minutes or so.
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It’s always busy out there. Except for updates, concurrency remains over 7,500 now, peaking over 18,000. Unless something goes drastically wrong, it isn’t going to get less busy than this.

The next 12 months will tell the tale of whether Second Life flames out like Friendster or grow like AOL did in the mid 90’s. Our feeling is that Second Life will be on the AOL track. SL is a quantum leap in user experience, similar to what AOL did for the online experience. If we are looking at a high growth track, SL will also have all the problems AOL had in the mid-90’s.

In recent months, Second Life has been criticized heavily on several fronts. Most of these criticisms focus on client-side bugs, grid outages and the ever present “griefers.” I began working for AOL at the dawn of time (well, the early 90’s) and watched AOL grow, grow some more, and then grow faster than capacity could be added.

Looking back, the same problems AOL had in the late 90’s, Linden Labs is now having with Second Life. AOL, though a string of blunders, stumbled and lost their edge. Users graduated from AOL to the unwalled frontier of the World Wide Web. Instead of starting up their AOL app, they launched browsers, email clients and instant messenger software - all from competitive vendors.

The landscape is different for Second Life. AOL had competitors. Thousands of ISPs launched in the 90s, all giving users a more robust world than AOL could manage to produce. Second Life has no such competitor. Yes, there are other minor players in the metaverse sector, but none matches Second Life in terms of growth (despite the tech problems) or user experience.

The thing that will secure Second Life in the future is open sourcing their grid software and allowing independent hosts to connect with the SL grid. There are, of course, a host of issues even with that. The SL currency called Lindens being probably the biggest problem related to open source expansion. Until then, watch new accounts to continue to be created and concurrency to continue to grow.

Hand-cream sales will also be on the rise.