Yesterday I spent some time watching the videostreams from SXSW Interactive. One of the more interesting discussions imo was the “Virtual Worlds and Virtual Humans: NPCs and Avatars” panel. For a recap, you can check out Clickable Culture (Link). For continuing thoughts from one of the panelists, I’d suggest surfing over to Susan Wu’s blog and reading her entry (Link) as I suspect those of you who regularly visit this blog will see some familiar thoughts popping up in her comments.

As this is an area of increasing interest to me, I wanted to add a few comments (okay, a lot) and post a few links. Here goes…
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Lots of interesting stuff in that video and I won’t repeat it here. Besides, I want to point to an article over on the Obsidian Edge website (Link) that provides an excellent Q&A guide for people looking to mod the engine. In particular I thought the polycounts were interesting: Continue reading →

There’s a good article concerning Second Life over on Information Week called ” Inside Second Life’s Data Centers ‘” (Link). I was aware of most of what’s discussed, but this part came as a bit of a surprise:

While many Second Life residents are convinced that Linden Lab will release the server source code as open source, in fact that hasn’t been decided, said Miller. Linden Lab might simply decide to license the code to other companies, the way vendors now license any application. Linden Lab might publish all the APIs, and allow other companies to build clones of the Second Life sim software. Linden Lab might simply allow other companies to provide the hardware, which Linden Lab would run at its own co-location facility, running Linden Lab’s software. And there are other options as well, which Miller declined to elaborate on.

“Convinced”? I thought Linden Lab stated that it (and by “it” I’m not being specific to the client but to the whole ball of virtual wax) would – at some point in the foreseeable future – go open source. If it were easy to find, I’d pull up a quote where someone from Linden Lab effectively says as much. But then, it’s not like they have a good track record in that department.

via Blue’s News

New “Spore” videos are coming out of GDC 2007 and they’re all fun to watch. I like this one in particular as it shows the built-in object design tools a bit more than the other vids.

The mix-n-match blended integration system shown here reminds me a bit of Genometri and what I’d previously said about it (reLink). I think we’re getting an increasing sense of what the future of 3D sculpting looks like… especially when one keeps in mind the freedom permitted by additive fabrication.

Joi Ito has an excellent post specifically regarding the game industry but generally about business (and design) titled “Talking to the game execs” (Link). Here’s a couple of excerpts:

The sense that I got yesterday was that the gaming industry was basically the same mass production and mass distribution content industry machine that Hollywood movies and television are. And… while there are certain companies and individuals who are bridging the gap between the gaming industry and the Internet, the gaming industry is making the same mistakes that the content guys have been making since the beginning of networked computers. They ALWAYS over-estimate the importance of the content and vastly underestimate the desire of users/people to communicate with each other and share.
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