Monthly Archives: January 2009
The Battle for the Desktop Begins!
In late 2007, Linden Lab had published their viewer roadmap for 2008, a way for us residents to take a look at what they were planning to release in future versions of the official Second Life® client. It all looks very promising, when you suddenly realise that this page has not been updated since August 2008; other Wiki pages linked from there are even older. So, what happened? The drive…
Linden Lab buys XstreetSL and OnRez Shop — why?
I’ve just posted this on the Second Life forums, where it will be buried for all time, so I thought I’d re-post here as a reference: I might imagine that the major reasons for prompting this buy-out have pretty little to do with “LL wanting to be a monopoly”, although I’m pretty sure that’s what the media (SL media mostly) will say. There is one practical side to it. IMVU…
Excellent customer support from the Kunglers!…
I usually don’t write things about fashion… I leave that to the pros! This time, however, my focus is on a particular aspect of the very competitive market of fashion design in Second Life®: custom service. We all know that the vast majority of fashion designers (and, indeed, most in-world-shop-based content creators) establish themselves as mostly an “automated shop”. The rationale behind it is that people are used to shop…
Automated Avatars in Second Life — ‘bots 2.0?
You’ll be quite favourably surprised when watching the video below, courtesy of UK high-tech company Daden Limited, who have just presented their latest attempts at combining pretty reasonable artificial intelligence techniques, including environment awareness and links to external sources of media (Wikipedia, Amazon, BBC) into a Second Life® avatar. It’s important to observe that this is not “merely a chatbot”, although it’s definitely to use it as one. Daden’s AI…
Obama brings RL discussion of politics to Second Life
In an excellent piece of work, in-world video reporter Draxtor Despres brings us the coverage of might be a beginning for RL politicians to seriously use Second Life® as a platform to bring together citizens around a topic and listen to them: The topic is the US’s possible forthcoming national healthcare policy; notice how eager Obama’s representatives in Second Life have embraced the virtual world technology to recreate a “talk at…
Post-immersionism
Henrik Bennetsen, in his old masterpiece article Augmentation vs. Immersion, launched one of the biggest debates in the history of Second Life®’s psychology. The clarity of his ideas finally defined the two possible relationships a resident of Second Life might have towards the virtual world: either as a different space or as an extension of the real space. Bennetsen cleverly explains that both visions are imaginary ideals on the opposite sides…
The Traditional Predictions List for 2009…
I guess there is no blogger that hasn’t posted their 2009 predictions yet, to be able to boast next year about how many they’ve predicted correctly, so I’ll comply with the tradition and add mine as well… First, a disclaimer. Yes, I’ve been reading what others have predicted, and some of them are quite along the same lines of what I think, so I’ll bow to their opinions and am…
OpenSimulator: The Choice for 2010
With Google Lively out of the picture, and an uncertain future for “new” virtual worlds to be launched in a world gone insane with the perceived financial crisis, it’s natural to ask over and over again, if there is an alternative to the Second Life® virtual world platform, what it will be. Since early 2008 I have been very skeptic about “alternatives” to Second Life. In my mind, and specially…
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