Monthly Archives: September 2006
“Second Life is Web 2.0 more than anything else”, says Castronova
Edward Castronova is believed to be the world’s leading researcher on virtual world economies. Recently, in a post on Terra Nova, the ultimate blog offering news and opinions regarding the social, economic, legal, psychological, and political aspects of these worlds, Castronova, reporting on the recent security breach in SL, asked himself the question: “Is 3D internet something that Terra Nova should cover?” Put into other words — if Terra Nova…
The Big Controversies in Second Life
Societies and communities have their own “backgrounds”. Although Second Life® does not have equivalent concepts to “skills”, “levels” or “experience”, commonly found on massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs), there is a single difference between a brand new resident and an older one: you’ll be familiar with the complexity of relationships inside Second Life, and, most likely, have an opinion on the types of controversies that occur in this virtual world….
“Second Life” gets added to list of “real countries”
I don’t know if this is the first time ever if Second Life gets listed as a “country” in a website, but this is deliberate. Arin & Susan have arranged to have their feature movie to be premiered in Second Life… provided that there is enough interest for that. As an indie production, the team behind “Four Eyed Monsters” is naturally open-minded enough to take up SNOOPYbrown Zamboni’s challenge: to…
Virtual worlds, yes, but real behaviour
Talking with Rubaiyat Shatner yesterday, he pointed me out to a very interesting article blogged by Hamlet Au, referring to a research paper announced on Terra Nova posted by Nick Yee. On that paper, using some statistical analysis, the researches were able to prove that in Second Life, avatars behave like human beings when keeping interpersonal distance and eye contact, and that the same variations (male/female, indoor/outdoor) that exist in…
More SL magazines — and their struggle for an audience
With (part) of the Second Life forums closing down, some of the few hundred regular readers of the forums were very worried that Linden Lab was somehow limiting their “freedom of expression”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of SL’s residents live in free countries with freedom of expression being one of their constitutional rights — and this naturally mean that most of us are able to set…
Lipsynching with Crazy Talk 4
Thanks to moo Money, I was pointed to this amazing piece of software called Crazy Talk 4, which is able to do all sorts of very creative lipsynching, very easily, using just a few pictures uploaded from Second Life (or… well… basically anything, really!). Sadly, this is the sort of company that still believes that the only computer platform that exists in the universe is Windows, but alas, what can…
Poser 5 for free… for a while!
After finishing a 2-month-long marathon to make a “proof of concept” machinima using Second Life for a customer, I just saw this post on the Official Linden Blog. Yes, for four days you’ll be able to get a valid license key of Poser 5 in your name. Although Content Paradise is famous for doing these types of promotions, this is a “one of a kind” type of promotion — Poser…
It’s time for a well-needed change…
Well… here it is. My blog gets a new look, and more important than that, it gets a brand new engine running in the background. Two years ago, when I started writing these articles, I had to pick a weblogging engine. I’ve evaluated a few, and almost all were very limited, primitive, and rather inflexible — you just got simple things like a place to type your article, save it,…
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