Linden Prize 2010
The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop is the winner of the 2nd annual Linden Prize; http://j.mp/9IHCFo
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Linden Prize 2010 Finalists
Linden Lab announced the Linden Prize 2010 finalists: the top 10 out of 130 applications; http://j.mp/cqxzJF
Gerrit Eicker
Second Life 2.0
Linden Lab released the final version of its Second Life Viewer 2.0, ending the public beta; http://j.mp/SLv20
Gerrit Eicker
Second Life Viewer 2 (Beta)
Linden Lab launched Second Life Viewer 2. Everything you need to know: http://j.mp/SLViewer2 (via @GiannaBorgnine)
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Gerrit Eicker
LL: “Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of Viewer 2 Beta, the next generation of Second Life viewers – combining an easy browser-like experience with shared media capabilities – providing what we believe is the best experience yet for accessing Second Life, and a new option to choose from among Viewer 1.23 and other Third Party Viewers. … Shared Media, a standard capability in Viewer 2, makes sharing standard Web-based media and content in Second Life easy, and enables content creators to make more compelling, interactive experiences. Content creators can now place Web pages, video, Flash content, and other web media, onto any surface in Second Life. … But, it’s still Beta. And that’s why we’re putting it into your hands now. So, put it through its paces, stress test it, and give us your feedback in the Viewer 2 Forum.”
SCS: “While all of these features are great, and there is a whole slew more of them… there is something bigger. Perhaps bigger than the launch of the viewer itself, is the launch of Second Life Shared Media (SLSM). SLSM is 100% a game changer for Second Life. It will allow you to display fully interactive, shared web content on any surface of a prim in Second Life including Flash, Javascript, and embedded movies.”
ST: “Viewer 2.0 is, in fact, dozens of long-requested features. The fact that these features we’ve asked for years and years of Linden Lab to deliver for the Second Life platform is a testament to the teams and leadership, and is a very good sign for the longer-term viability of Second Life as a platform. Two of the most stand-out features are HTML on a prim and treating a browser like a browser. But there’s lots more. … Many, many doors have just opened for the possibilities of Second Life. Having interactive HTML and flash support alone makes lots of possibilities available. Combine with an array of interface improvements, and this really is a much cleaner, better experience.”
HB: “The ability to pull WebEx, Google Docs, YouTube videos into a virtual world would be ‘perfect’ for government, educational and enterprise users.”
DW: “This shift goes deeper, however, than rethinking the Second Life experience. There are early hints that this opens up a new front in which Second Life the world, Second Life the brand, and Linden Lab (the company behind it) may no longer be one-and-the-same. – Whether the shift from engineering-based to a more design-based approach, from evolutionary commerce to blatantly commercial, and from business-agnostic to business friendly will so overturn the in-world culture that the result is a diluted online experience remains to be seen. … And welcome to the new future. It begins now.”
VWN: “Perhaps most importantly for bringing new brands and services to Second Life, though, is the ability to drop Web pages, video, Flash content, and other media onto any surface in Second Life. TVs can now broadcast Hulu in the virtual world and arcades can play host to a variety of Flash games (including some casual MMOs) without leaving Second Life. The company also says it will be announcing new services for shared documents and collaboration, making the Web makeover as much about business as entertainment. – With the move towards the mainstream has come a bit more mainstream attention.”
Scoble: “Linden Labs has just released a new player for its virtual world, Second Life. This is important because it makes significant moves toward the Web and shows a new strategy: one of integrating into social networks (much of that shift has yet to come, Linden Lab’s CEO, Mark Kingdon told me in an interview).”
Prokofy: “I’ve never cared about HTML on a prim. If I wanted to HTML on a prim, I’d go out on the Internet, where they have HTML without slowing it down by putting it on a prim. That works best. There really is such a thing as a sensible membrance between web and worlds that is like ‘the blood/brain barrier’. Useful, evolutionarily developed helpful stuff that keeps your brain from being suffused with blood. The membrane that kept out the web from the world of SL for six years was a good thing, too.“
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Gerrit Eicker
LL: “Second Life Shared Media, a new Viewer 2 capability, makes sharing standard Web-based media in Second Life easy and seamless. It enables content creators to make more compelling, interactive experiences. Basically, Shared Media brings the Internet inworld. – For the more technically inclined, what this means is that you can now put media textures on any prim in Second Life. More specifically, the viewer uses WebKit to create a fully interactive, dynamic texture from a Web URL. … Behind the scenes, Shared Media is different. Second Life always stays synchronized for all Residents. That is, the simulation takes place on our servers, and each person’s viewer renders their perspective on that simulation – everyone is looking at the same thing. Shared Media, on the other hand, can look different to different people — sometimes. Everyone’s instance of the Shared Media is always presenting the same URL.”
BV: “Second Life 2.0 Viewer … has a lot of potential to open the door for more nonprofit, educational and government applications for virtual worlds. … Bringing your web-based content into the virtual world is essential for most organizations that have been operating on the web for the past 15 years. … It’s a lot simpler for a non-expert user to figure out with all the main stuff on handy tabs on the right side and bottom of the screen. … For your average public sector institution, being able to bring in your existing web content, get your users in-world more smoothly, find what you need fast, and access all the power tools, pushes Second Life way ahead of the other virtual world platforms.”
MJ: “Overall, Linden Lab deserve kudos for delivering a significantly revamped viewer that should make using Second Life markedly easier for new residents in particular. Linden Lab have consistently stated their commitment to improving the user experience and this is one of the more concrete examples of how that is now being delivered. The proof of Viewer 2’s success will only come with widespread use, but initial impressions are positive. Of course, Linden Lab need to pull off a usability coup to ensure ongoing growth. Combined with potential improvements in grid performance, the horizon seems a little brighter than it has been in a while.“
Gerrit Eicker
Second Life Goes Avatars United
Linden Lab (Second Life) has bought up Enemy Unknown (Avatars United), a community for avatars; http://j.mp/bc4R6F
Gerrit Eicker
Second Life 2009
Second Life economy wrap up 2009: strong overall growth but continued decline in user hours; http://j.mp/7T0tFY
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Ton Zijlstra
Decline in user hours for Q4 compared to Q3, but still growth as compared to Q4 2008. Overall growth in user hours in 2009 still above 20%. Linden writes the user hours declined most for their most heavy users. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the current 12 months. Might be a blip, might become something else.
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Gerrit Eicker
Indeed. Still, the trend (Q2-Q4 2009) doesn’t look healthy to me. And the growth year-over-year (Q4) is marginal (< 1%).
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Gerrit Eicker
The Metaverse in 2010
Will AR surpass full virtuality? Will SL be acquired? What about interoperability? 2010 predictions: http://j.mp/7NeF4H
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Gerrit Eicker
Haskell: “There will be increasing awareness that Augmented Reality, and not pure Virtual Reality, will be the future for what we now call virtual worlds. … By year-end 2010, 50 of the Global 1000 will have dramatically expanded their presence in Second Life, with collaboration being a key enterprise target. … There is a 30% chance of Second Life being acquired by a larger company in 2010. IBM, Microsoft, Sony, Facebook, and Google are all candidates.”
Neva: “Augmented Reality will become the hugest thing, with everybody scrambling with zealous greed to create APIs and games and features and better phones. … Linden Lab will sell itself. Note that I say ‘sell itself,’ and not ‘IPO’. There is no IPO coming, not in this recession and post-VW boom climate. Instead, LL will become a ‘partner’ to something bigger. Perhaps IBM will buy the Enterprise function and keep Lindens on as a content-creation studio, and they will keep that brand or even call themselves Nebraska or something equally stupid but they will all be Lindens.”
Gwyn: “Interop will become a reality. Don’t expect miracles before the year’s end, though. Starting just after June 2010, when the interoperability communication protocol among grids becomes an Internet standard, LL will work together with at least IBM and Intel (and possibly some large OpenSim grid co-location services – which will exclude most of the OpenSim grids people usually talk about) to allow Gold Grid Providers full interoperability with Second Life Grid.”
MJ: “2010 will see the United States further formalise taxation arrangements in regard to virtual goods. I doubt the Australian Tax Office will make any substantive rulings in the coming twelve months. – 2010 is going to see the largest MMO launch since World of Warcraft: Star Wars The Old Republic. It won’t eclipse the incumbent but it will become the solid number 2 player in the short-term, with all bets off in the longer term. – This year saw social games like Farmville take off in a big way. There’ll be some significant fatigue from users with these platforms, but there’ll also be further innovation to make them more engaging and with easier integration of virtual goods without the spam-like accompaniments that plague people’s Twitter of Facebook timelines. Overall: continuation of exponential growth, albeit not at the same level it has been the past six months.”
Frisby: “Consolidation continues throughout the first half of 2010. – Platforms with relatively simple feature sets will continue to face increased competition from free products and their more technologically complex brethren. Many will survive on one or two large clients – but as a whole they will languish with a dearth of new clients. … Entertainment Worlds continue to quietly succeed year-after-year. – I’m not talking about MMORPG games here either. The consumer entertainment virtual worlds will continue to grow, or at least will not stagnate as fast as business worlds. There.com, IMVU, Second Life will all continue to see growth – although at a smaller percentage than they have previously (5-15%). – Blue Mars will languish for the first half of 2010, but may gain serious pace in late 2010 as usability problems are fixed and average user hardware specifications continue to improve.”
Gwyneth Llewelyn
Let’s hope so :) It’s nice to see how people continue to keep their optimism about VWs and their uses! It’s a technology that is approaching maturity (at least on some platforms) but it’s still so much misunderstood… for 2010, I wish that this technology starts to become better and better understood as its uses become apparent…
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Gerrit Eicker
Indeed. Maturity rules, the hype is (mostly) over. – I’m not setting any hopes on a broader understanding as long as (old) media still hawks “Second Life” in its literal sense.
Gerrit Eicker
SL Enterprise
Linden Lab introduces SL Enterprise, now in beta, and SL Work Marketplace; http://j.mp/31RTnq
Gerrit Eicker
Nebraska
Linden Lab will unveil Nebraska, the stand-alone solution of Second Life on November 4th; http://j.mp/5YDs0
Gerrit Eicker
Second Life: erfolgreich, auch ohne Medien
Kingdon über Second Life, Manager Magazin: Die Presse ist verschwunden, die Nutzer sind geblieben; http://j.mp/2UXvh
Gerrit Eicker 09:02 on 2. June 2010 Permalink |
SL: “The Tech Virtual launched in 2007 with the mission of bringing faster and more collaborative exhibit development to museums worldwide using an online platform. Last year, the core concept of Tech Virtual was extended beyond prototype exhibits to virtually prototyping an entire museum gallery and share that with stakeholders such as administrators, curators, exhibit designers, and sponsors. In 2010, The Tech Virtual began to prototype and test a new and participatory exhibition, called Expolab, to institutions such as Citilab Cornella, the Science Centre Singapore, the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of American History who built a Places of Invention. The Tech Virtual has gone beyond the ‘virtual museum’ concept into one in which the virtual exhibits become a precursor of the real construction. These are results that those in both the virtual and real worlds can experience and appreciate – a core requirement for the Linden Prize.”
TV: “The Tech Virtual is revolutionizing the way exhibition content is created and tested. Learning centers, museums, and cultural institutions around the world can access open source exhibit concepts, designs, and educational materials. – This project is creating an ‘open source’ collection of science and innovation-based design concepts that can be used by institutions all over the world. Through The Tech Virtual, designers and educators from a diverse, international, professional community can share input and resources. – Designers, architects, educators, students and others can add their individual designs, or join collaborative teams to work on projects together.“