June 15th, 2008
It’s sunday, a day with few slow news on virtual worlds.
The expanded time leaves space for thinking.
Today I’m thinking, in fact, on the future of Second Life.
I’m trying to figure out where SL is going, and if that direction is the one I wish.
I think that Second Life has huge adoption barriers, that block a great mass adoption in the world; also, the framework is not easy to use, and it exposes its flanks to critics. In general, Second Life should evolve, as a service.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg.
The focal point is that Second Life, in a few years, will be part of a huge virtual “cloud”, in which different virtual worlds will exchange informations, avatars, services, objects. Virtual worlds will witness something similar to what it’s happening today for Data Centers: the emergence of “clouds”.
I can also guess that a standardization will come, sooner or later. They need it, in order to survive. Otherwise, another company will enter the market and kill Second Life.
What are your guesses? Your fears? Your suggestions?
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By sbrunozzi -- 0 comments
June 14th, 2008
Good news for OpenSim: Microsoft, according to its SL developer Zain Naboulsi, is going to offer some volunteer development work for OpenSim. This could be the start of a precious partnership, don’t you think?
I strongly believe that OpenSim is the way to go, and I’m convinced that Linden Lab, and Second Life, will be the first beneficiary. It will help them remember what open source is, and weigh their decision on it.
Here’s the whole interview.
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By sbrunozzi -- 0 comments
June 13th, 2008
[news source]
This is soooo cool! For Second Life’s 5th anniversary, the metamusicians Dizzy Banjo and Lillie Yifu have created a huge bottle: you can fill it with text or audio messages, even if Dizzy prefers audio because “…it will play intermittently as part of a fun interactive sound and music installation…“.
The messages should try to answer the following questions:
What does Second Life mean to you?
How has your Second Life affected you?
What hopes do you have for the future of SL?
If you are not familiar with audio recording and uploading, Dizzy prepared this YouTube tutorial that explains everything.
Do it, before June 18th!
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By sbrunozzi -- 0 comments
June 11th, 2008
OpenSim is an interesting project, an open source server to host virtual worlds.
From the wikipedia page:
“OpenSimulator uses libsecondlife to handle communication between the client and server, so it is possible to connect to an OpenSim server using the Linden Lab Second Life client“.
Second Life and OpenSim can now enjoy a limited, yet very important, interoperability.
This is so important because OpenSim is forcing Linden Lab to think about their open source policy, in a way or another.
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think that going open source is always THE only answer; some companies, such as Linden Lab, are at risk, and they can’t simply go out, open their code, and hope for the better.
Still, they need to focus on their strategic view, which of course implies going Open, sooner or later (like Facebook).
Otherwise, users (and businesses) will find better platforms, and migrate there.
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By sbrunozzi -- 0 comments
June 11th, 2008
I wasn’t aware of it, neither, but it seems that Second Life can now support active and live web pages on SL objects. When “web on a prim” was released three months ago, it could only serve static pages. That was something, but still…
To be honest, I think that having this integration between the web and SL is useful ONLY if you consider it a temporary solution: in the future, Second Life must evolve into something that doesn’t really need the web; it could be with a new set of programming APIs, or with an extension of the Linden Scripting Language. But it HAS to evolve.
We hope it will do so!
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By sbrunozzi -- 1 comment
June 10th, 2008
Sardigna is proud to invite you to ATLANTIKA’ in Second Life.
The show will open today, tuesday june 10th, at 21:30pm italian time (12:30pm PST).
Visitors will be able to admire the Anatolian, Phoenician, Carthaginian, Roman and Catalan vestiges of its rich past.
With Barumini, a nuraghe fortress on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, Sardinia questions its prehistory, especially the imposing vanished civilisation of the Nuraghes, which seems to have played a major role in Mediterranean Antiquity.
The exhibition has been part of the international symposium “Knowledge of the Ancient World: Where Were the Columns of Hercules?” by UNESCO.
The symposium, based on Sergio Frau’s book “The Columns of Hercules: An Investigation”, was focused on the ideas of real and imaginary boundaries and borders that nurture our vision of Antiquity.
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By sbrunozzi -- 1 comment
June 7th, 2008
James Wagner Au shows a list of more than 250 Second Life Blogs, submitted by his readers.
Thankfully, Second Life Pros is among those!
Great!
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By sbrunozzi -- 1 comment
June 6th, 2008
You can watch this 8-minutes video of A virtual study of Macbeth, an interesting project that brought a great piece of literature into Second Life.
I’m particularly proud to say that some of the scenes were recorded in the Assisi location, where we built the Basilica of Saint Francis.
[image source]
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By sbrunozzi -- 0 comments
June 5th, 2008
Both of them.
Let me explain.
Second Life is good when you use it for some purposes (of course, which purposes depends on your interests and skills).
I, for example, find Second Life useful to visit reproductions of real places, to meet with people without being physically close to each other, and occasionally to see new form of arts and entertainment.
I’m sure, nonetheless, that most users find Second Life unattractive, because they have such high expectations on its potentials; people sign in because they think Second life is an incredible virtual world, and after an hour they’re still stuck in Orientation Island.
This attitude need to be changed.
First: dear newbies, remember that Second Life is not for the mainstream, yet.
Second: SL will not solve any of your problems, so take the best out of it, and don’t blame anyone.
So, the short answer is: Second Life is good sometimes… and is bad, some other times.
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By sbrunozzi -- 0 comments
June 4th, 2008
[hat tip to Frank :-)]
Today Vollee’s highly anticipated streaming games service debuted with the launch of Second Life for mobile phones!
The new, free application allows anyone with a 3G or Wi-Fi enabled handset to explore, interact and communicate across the entire 3D virtual world right from their handset.
Vollee’s proprietary solution is the only one on the market that can stream any high-end PC title to mobile, including popular massively multiplayer online role playing games.
Hope it will soon go out of the beta!
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