Those following virtual worlds have probably heard about recent “changes” to Linden Lab’s position in regards to how they – or supposedly their residents – will police Second Life to make it “safe, together” (Link). While I’ve been involved in the debates, there is a separate opinion I’ve formed regarding what’s occurred that I consider worth mentioning here: the less like the Internet Second Life becomes, the less reason there is for a company to stake a claim inside it.

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I’ve repeatedly said that the best, if not only, reason for a company to enter Second Life is to get a sense of what the future 3D internet might be like (reLink). Linden Lab’s dogged determination to maintain a relatively strict hands-off policy made Second Life an excellent sandbox for advertising experiments and brand marketing tests. Griefers and virtual grey goo attacks and a virtual weapons market {which includes this gem, the Insult Bot – reLink}, as well as residents who both claim to live inside the virtual world and seem to be obsessed beyond all reason with it (and anything/anyone associated with it), offer glimpses into the kinds of issues a company’s future online presence may encounter.
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A long time ago I watched “Aliens” and got to see some pretty interesting portable self-defense systems.

When I played Half-Life 2, I got to virtually deploy a version of those colonial marine robotic weapons systems in the game (“List of Combine combat technology in Half-Life 2” – Link).
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Via the Metaversed blog comes word of a post over on media agency Centric’s blog listing “The Top 10 Things About HiPiHi (Link)“. I won’t list them all, but will instead cull the top three I think matter most and list them in order of importance:

1) The Lag Monster

“10. It’s surprisingly fast. Even though it’s served from China, we’re seeing 75-100fps typically on a midline system. Of course, the maximum concurrency is low, so we’ll reserve judgement on heavier use for later.”

Arguably the biggest issue for any virtual world is going to be speed. Not so much having those kinds of frame rates, which are heavily effected by client side hardware, but the “refresh world” rate between world states such that when someone moves something inside the virtual space everyone else sees the change at least within something like 1/30 of a second (film fps is 24; most video is 30). If not, then the “lag” will may be too disruptive to the experience.
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Via Mashable (Link) comes word of the entirely expected: Google is bringing AdSense – and then some – to Google Maps. The way they’re doing this, however, is interesting. It’s more than just text they’re offering. Mapplets, as they’re called, will likely carry much more since this feature allows developers to build their own applications within Google Maps.

As it comes hot on the heels of their recent pseudo-3D addition to Google Maps (reLink), all that’s left now is to wait for them to take this into Google Earth.
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The first time I glanced over the Meshverse Journal’s entry, “Gear Mesh: Power To The Peers” (Link), I wasn’t sufficiently focused to follow the significance of what was being said. I also didn’t follow the link to BetaNews, which does a nice job explaining something really interesting about Google’s new Google Gears offline application effort. The minute I read it, having a sense of what the Meshverse Journal typically discusses, I didn’t need any further explanation… though if asked I couldn’t now easily explain it. Here’s a snip from that blog entry: Continue reading →