Reactions to story from UgoTrade

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  Cracks in the Open, Source of Frustration for OpenSim?

  http://dusanwriter.com/?p=569
  91 days ago in Dusan Writer’s Metaverse · Authority: 106

  Cracks in the Open, Source of Frustration for OpenSim? 06.08.08 | No Comments OpenSim is open source - a reverse engineer of the Second Life platform, and while the idea is to let others build on the source, there’s also an expectation that there’s a quid pro quo at play. That’s the point of open source afterall - do what you want with it, but give something back, it’s a community afterall. RealXtend, which has received a lot of play over at OS promoters like UgoTrade, may not be giving back what it takes according to Justin Clark-Casey: Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, the amount of code OpenSim has received from realXtend so far is precisely zero. None of the realXtend developers have submitted patches to our Mantis system. Although their code has been released under BSD license and can be found on Sourceforge, it appears to be based on an old version of OpenSim at around version 0.4 (it’s hard to tell for sure). This means anybody extracting features from it without a very good knowledge of the code would often face the same uphill task as before. We largely don’t have the manpower or, as volunteers, the inclination to go and do that. Now, I want to make it clear that I have absolutely nothing against realXtend and wish them every success. After all, under our BSD licensing there’s absolutely no obligation for them to contribute code to us. And we’re also very keen to enable other organizations and individuals to build on top of OpenSim, whether their code is proprietary or open source. However, it does seem a big shame when realXtend talk about a base track to fix stability issues that none of this basic infrastructure work, at the very least, is finding its way back into OpenSim to benefit the community as a whole.
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  realXtend: Second Life's Apache?

  http://blog.no-carrier.info/archives/268-realXtend-Second-Li...
  126 days ago in Bart in SL · Authority: 3

  Gentle reader, today I want to talk a little about the realXtend project which came upon my radar recently and impressed me great lengths. Their goal is, put in simple terms, to develop the InterGrid about which Gwyneth Llewellyn spoke recently in one of her own blog posts. Well, she even mentions the project in her post. The InterGrid, put in simple terms again, is the ability to make your own region/regions/grid and take your avatar on grid A, B or C and also take the inventory of it with you. This means your avatar becomes quite more flexible, it can travel around the different grids if done correctly, but also there's quite much work to do until that goal is going to be achieved. This project is using OpenSim as their platform for serving regions, they've already enhanced it with quite much advanced and sophisticated features and also forked the Second Life viewer into an own thing, although this can still connect to the Second Life grid in a compatibility mode. The realXtend project is backed up by two Finnish companies and around 20 people working on it, programmers, content creators and graphic designers, so a good size but still small compared to the staff of Linden Lab. Contrary to the culture of Linden Lab, though, they've got a roadmap, and since they're contributing to OpenSim, parts of it overlap with the roadmap of that project, too. Having a roadmap never hurts, on the contrary, it is always nice to have and a good thing for all participating people. In a recent interview one of the driving forces behind realXtend, the CEO of one of the companies backing it up named Tony Manninen, gave us a very interesting peace of his mind and his over all vision for the project: Me: And how will the work you have done on the avatar server alleviate this problem unless SL, WoW and other cooperate on interoperability? Tony: Think of it more like the 3d web. realXtend/OpenSim is like the Apache of virtual worlds, rexViewer is the Mozilla or Firefox of whatever. When "surfing" the web, you are not constantly required to prove and change your identity when loading different pages. And this line is quite interesting for all of us. Apache is today the work horse of most web servers on the planet, its market share is around 51% in April 2008. But what many people don't know is how Apache started and how it became the king of the hill. In former times, when Apache was non existant, there's been another 800 pound gorilla of webserving software called NCSA httpd. This was back then the leading webserver under an opensource license. Apache just started as a patchset (Apache was just the nickname for "a patch" first only or more precise "a patchy server") way back then for NCSA httpd, adding features many people wanted but the maintainers of NCSA httpd were unable or unwilling to include. So over the time the patch set became more and more important, popular and turned into an own piece of software, winning big grounds against its father until NCSA httpd became obsolete and went into insignificance. So, what does that mean when talking about Second Life? Simply: realXtend could be the nail into the coffin of Second Life. So, what's in realXtend viewer and OpenSim already, that would be nice to have in Second Life, but isn't there (yet)? Among already implemented features those biggies: the ability to host your own region somewhere on a server of your choice and to connect it to the grid (many would like that since the tiers you've got to pay for Linden Lab are quite expensive), the use of a more advanced opensource renderer named OGRE, which also is going to support DirectX rendering on Windows platforms, coming with this renderer real time lights and shadows of objects, web on a prim, builtin VNC viewer for desktop sharing, VOIP client and 3d audio rendernig, meshes instead of prims - this means you can build far more advanced structures, also build stuff in normal programs instead of the client and import them, which adds to a good graphics experience quite much, but also means a slightly longer loading time perhaps, but still many would applaud them in SL and with right, quite more sophisticated avatar meshes, everything can be an avatar, e.g. also mushrooms (this example is included) or a bad snowman, Python scripting, teleports between realXtend and Secondlife, script controlled teleports, centralised avatar storage to move the avatar between different grids,multiple streaming URLs per parcel, and others, but those are the real biggies. If you also take into account that it just took realXtend to implement those features around four (!) months of time you'll really have to wonder why Linden Lab hasn't done that themselfes already! Among the roadmapped features you'll find those things: Direct3D rendering on windows platforms, support for OGG Vorbis, support for video codecs beside Quicktime, Weather support, inverse kinematics, avatar face/head animation based on live video camera data, lip sync for VOIP, cloth physics, vehicle support, the ability to hold more than 100 avatars at the same time in one region by splitting up the region on several hosts and letting them do their work, and others. So what we'll have here is a real ambitious project to build the InterGrid with nice goals, but they're not only having a roadmap, seems they've already been able so far to deliver their planned features and are going to be in the future, too, in many parts they're already ahead of Second Life quite much. To put it short: what we've got here is a major competitor emerging for Second Life and even more so on a very rapid speed! Linden Lab is still ahead of its competition somewhat, but realXtend is gaining ground and its gaining it quickly so that Linden Lab should really be make up its mind now what they're planning with the platform in the future, otherwise it is quite possible that they are going to face the same fate as NCSA httpd or Netscape: the technic will remain, but innovations are coming from other sources and the people behind the initial project are loosing the grip on it. Technorati : business, development, programming, realxtend, second life Del.icio.us : business, development, programming, realxtend, second life
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  Culture, Utopia, and the Atomic Virtual World: Philip’s Vision

  http://dusanwriter.wordpress.com/2008/03/14/friday-ramble-cu...
  177 days ago in Dusan Writer's Metaverse - ARCHIVE PLEASE REDIRECT TO Http://dusanwriter.com · Authority: 66

  Addendum: (Can you put an addendum at the beginning?) I wrote this ahead of the announcement that Philip was being replaced as CEO of Linden Labs. Philip’s initial vision has been partially co-opted by a lack of a coherent operational and marketing strategy. Enamored with the technology and with possibilities, Rosedale has led Second Life to where it needs to be in the first phases of its evolution. However, coupling this vision (and Philip will remain as an evangelist and product developer) with a new CEO who will (hopefully) bring renewed vigor to enabling key user streams within Second Life, can finally help to lift this boat before competition and disgruntled users slip into the tides. This is a test bed for a conceptual age, but it also serves diverse communities. A new CEO can not only clean up the operational issues, hire a CTO, but can also rally the troops around a vision that marries a deeper vision for the potential of virtual worlds and a compelling story and execution targeting stakeholders, external partners, developers, and the internal constituencies. Strategy includes not just technical excellence but in most books includes balancing internal and external needs, operational effectiveness and value propositions with cost and quality, and so on. Rosedale’s skill set is as a visionary and evangelist for where these worlds will take us. The timing of my original post, in ignorance of Philip’s change, now feels more meaningful (to myself in any case) than my usual pointless Friday rambling.  Rewriting the World Let’s say we’re going to rewrite the world. Visions of utopia have been kicking around since that apple, but this time we’re going to mix in a lot of tech savvy and the wacky, tripped out sensibility that only people in California can naturally muster. So we’re casting around for a model, and out in the desert find a society that gets built up and burned down every year. Burning Man. Images: Burning Man. So here’s the vision: use code to enable a society built on the idea of collaborative creativity. Make the tools rich and robust, even if it means there’s a learning curve to using them - we’re man after all, evolved from our tools, surely another evolution in our toolset will empower change? Improve the tools over time. Improve the setting for the shared creative output - enhance the water or sky, improve the physics, and work hard to remove the things that prevent a suspension of belief - get rid of the glitches and lags if we can, scale the thing up. And while we’re at it, let people own their creations and choose to sell them to each other if they wish. Not such a bad vision really. A sort of free-flowing, wacked-out carnival. Just like Burning Man, maybe the people who visit this place will go back to their home towns not just sun burnt, but enlightened. Wagner Au calls it Be Bop reality and Mirrored Flourishing, but whatever…it’s the idea that if you rewrite the world with the idea of the creative carnival it’s going to have a bit of anarchy, a lot of improv, and maybe we’ll all learn something and benefit from it. Being Digital In 1996 Nicholas Negroponte predicted the rise of the digital: The next decade will see cases of intellectual-property abuse and invasion of our privacy. We will experience digital vandalism, software piracy, and data thievery. Worst of all, we will witness the loss of many jobs to wholly automated systems, which will soon change the white-collar workplace to the same degree that it has already transformed the factory floor. The notion of lifetime employment at one job has already started to disappear. The radical transformation of the nature of our job markets, as we work less with atoms and more with bits, will happen at just about the same time the 2 billion-strong labor force of India and China starts to come on-line (literally). A self-employed software designer in Peoria will be competing with his or her counterpart in Pohang. A digital typographer in Madrid will do the same with one in Madras. American companies are already outsourcing hardware development and software production to Russia and India, not to find cheap manual labor but to secure a highly skilled intellectual force seemingly prepared to work harder, faster, and in a more disciplined fashion than those in our own country. The challenges of the digital age were tempered by Negroponte’s optimism: Bits are not edible; in that sense they cannot stop hunger. Computers are not moral; they cannot resolve complex issues like the rights to life and to death. But being digital, nevertheless, does give much cause for optimism. Like a force of nature, the digital age cannot be denied or stopped. It has four very powerful qualities that will result in its ultimate triumph: decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing, and empowering…. But more than anything, my optimism comes from the empowering nature of being digital. The access, the mobility, and the ability to effect change are what will make the future so different from the present. The information superhighway may be mostly hype today, but it is an understatement about tomorrow. It will exist beyond people’s wildest predictions. As children appropriate a global information resource, and as they discover that only adults need learner’s permits, we are bound to find new hope and dignity in places where very little existed before. My optimism is not fueled by an anticipated invention or discovery. Finding a cure for cancer and AIDS, finding an acceptable way to control population, or inventing a machine that can breathe our air and drink our oceans and excrete unpolluted forms of each are dreams that may or may not come about. Being digital is different. We are not waiting on any invention. It is here. It is now. It is almost genetic in its nature, in that each generation will become more digital than the preceding one. The control bits of that digital future are more than ever before in the hands of the young. Nothing could make me happier. Playing with Atoms One of the brilliant insights of Philip Rosedale and Linden Lab’s development of Second Life was the atomization of content. Prims are atoms allowing users to create from the smallest unit up. The choice seems kind of obvious now, but it could have just as easily been built from the perspective of a game play system, or as a “user mod” environment. Worlds and platforms that have followed either take Linden’s lead or are being constructed from different paradigms - over at Metaplace, it’s all about standards and the interoperability and “plug & play” that the “HTMLing” of virtual worlds would provide. Other environment are constructed from a social paradigm, emulating a Facebook for virtual worlds, or creating media/socialization platforms like Kaneva. Over at RealXtend, they’re attempting to append the atomization of content with a more robust avatar system. In Second Life, new users become confounded because they’re expecting a social space with all the tools they’ve come to expect from mySpace and instant messaging. Or they want a game environment, with clear levels and pathways. Educators struggle to find course management systems and tools that at least look something like Blackboard or Moodle (thank goodness for Sloodle and NMC). So, maybe there’s stuff that’s familiar but then there’s a lot that’s unfamiliar as well, and the ‘rules of the game’ are held in those little atoms, and the joining of those atoms with others, and a strange cascade of content which is disguised as a building, or commerce, or buying a house. But there’s something deeper going on in those atoms, and for the users with the patience to stick around and figure it out, they start to see hints of those deeper things. At its most pragmatic, they might stumble across the Wikitecture project and find out that a group of SL citizens have designed a health center for a village in Nepal: And then they might dive a little deeper. What’s Impossible This is an avatar: So is this: According to Bettina’s interview with their creator, these avatars are developed with reference to astrobiology. Yoa Ogee comments that “Our avatars should enhance tolerance and should be available for everybody. I know as an alien: humans are a very cute and friendly species… sometimes they just forgot it.” This is dance, and it crosses over from the real to the virtual: What’s important about these things that aren’t possible is that they’re both thought streams arising from the atomization of content. In building the world from the prim up, the creative classes of Second Life are re-imagining the world and slowly making new concepts, about everything from identity to science, possible. A Nation of Shopkeepers But those are just tiny streams in a wider culture. And in the wider culture people shop, they fall in love, they buy, rent or build houses, dance, chat, argue, and live. They’re a Neko for a night or a furry. They create communities. They shoot at each other in the City of Lost Angels and engage in deep role playing on Sci Fi or Gorean sims. And inevitably, they make stuff. There’s lots of stuff in SL - billions of objects. But sometimes you just can’t find the specific thing you’re looking for so you make it yourself. And then realize that there’s probably someone else out there that wants the same thing so you set up a vendor and you’re in business. And before you know it, Second Life is a living example of The Long Tail - there may be a few “top sellers” but the economy is driven by a lot of little niche transactions - objects with a few buyers, a massive micro economy, and a few aggregators like SLExchange helping to mop up all the little bits of content and make it easy for the masses to buy and consume. I Am a Node In this atomic universe the users are the stars, clustering together around slices of experience, riding the waves of data and shared environments, connecting and swapping content. Map the connections. We’re probably a few dots apart. The clusters as tribes and someone’s keeping track - we’re leaving footprints in the digital sand, and we’re starting to get worried about whether we can erase our tracks if we take a wrong turn, or who’s going to own the maps in the first place, whether it’s such a hot idea that Google is managing medical records, or whether we’re happy about using Linden’s age verification service. I wrote about tribal versus territorial morality and then ran across this quote from McLuhan:“Modern man - that’s us now — feels obligated to be punctual and conservative of time, tribal man bore the responsibility of keeping the cosmic clock supplied with energy. But electric or ecological man (man of the total field) can be expected to surpass the old tribal cosmic concern with the Africa within.” We’re becoming electric man, and Second Life is the test drive. Recreating the universe one atom at a time, and then stepping out and finding ourselves dislocated. Have a look at what happens when we try to port our old ideas and paradigms into the new space. Last time I checked, CSI New York was relegated to a few lonely and disheartened looking sims. In the meantime, content creators within Second Life are finding their businesses at risk as the latest rash of copybots devours skins, prims and entire avatars. The Grid is electric, the Grid is digital, and as Negroponte pointed out 12 years ago, content theft, piracy and plagiarism just become way too easy. But coupled with the dangers to content expression and ownership are the opportunities. As he pointed out: The crisp line between love and duty will blur by virtue of a common denominator–being digital. The Sunday painter is a symbol of a new era of opportunity and respect for creative avocations–lifelong making, doing, and expressing. When retired people take up watercolors today, it is like a return to childhood, with very different rewards from those of the intervening years. Tomorrow, people of all ages will find a more harmonious continuum in their lives, because, increasingly, the tools to work with and the toys to play with will be the same. There will be a more common palette for love and duty, for self-expression and group work. Computer hackers young and old are an excellent example. Their programs are like surrealist paintings, which have both aesthetic qualities and technical excellence. Their work is discussed both in terms of style and content, meaning and performance. The behavior of their computer programs has a new kind of aesthetic. These hackers are the forerunners of the new e-xpressionists. This doesn’t condone acts of theft. Theft is still theft. But there’s a fine line between flexibility, hacking, and theft. In a community whose very purpose is self expression and collaboration, the object economy was always an add-on to an atom-based universe. Maybe a deeper palette, as Negroponte suggests, is needed, something like what’s expressed in the Creative Commons which “provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.”" Append it with ‘number of use’ rights, include the ability to allow a specific number of transfers or copies instead of just blanket use, and maybe you’d start to see a deeper IP environment. The Conceptual Age I was called an augmentationist, looking for the killer app of Second Life. It’s strange because I don’t feel like one. But maybe I’ve been misinterpreted because I talk about the real so much, and talk about how the real and the virtual co-mingle. But I talk about these things because virtual worlds, and Second Life in particular (for now), with its atom-based platform, give the first deep glimpse into the meaning of being digital, into the emergence of McLuhan’s electric man. For business, it extends Web 2.0 and The Long Tail into a space where the line between producer and consumer blurs to the point of being indistinguishable. Even the most talented content creators in SL are finding that it’s not enough to sell objects, they’re tasked with creating environments, experiences, and with attaching community, social and brand values to otherwise copiable, digital artefacts (although I’m not arguing that objects should be easily copiable, but I am arguing that that these higher levels of creativity are what are required to truly thrive). Businesses can’t just open a store, spritz in some buy-inducing smells and music, and watch product fly off the shelf. This is a new economy in which even the smallest niche has value, and in which those small niches vastly out number the larger ones, which are vastly out numbered again by the gift economy. For individuals who live and play in virtual worlds, there are new lessons about how the digital world starts to shift social norms from territorial morality (what’s mine is mine, and the protection of my ‘property’ is sacrosanct) to a tribal one (our shared good, including the shared protection of our collaborative creation, is sacrosanct). Whether a good thing or bad, virtual worlds clearly show a shift towards establishing tribal connections and maintaining social norms, whether its on Facebook or Caledon. These aren’t just IP issues. Or code issues. These are the early indicators of an emerging cultural, economic and conceptual shift, one that’s already washed over the Web, but whose full significance is being played out in virtual worlds, walled gardens whose walls are starting to crack. But the collapse of these walls doesn’t mean that I believe the significance is in letting the real IN, the significance for me is in letting the virtual OUT. Back to Paradise Brad Warner wrote in Hardcore Zen: The world is better than paradise, better than any utopia you can imagine. I say that in the face of war and starvation and suicide bombings and Orange Terror Alerts. The world is better than Utopia because - and follow this point carefully - you can never live in Utopia…Maybe you can go to a paradisiacal island, far away from your boss and your bills and anything else you want, but pretty soon you’ll be complaining that you’ve got sand up your ass, or the snack machine ate your dollar, or hermit crabs stole your thongs. You can’t live in paradise - but you are living right here. Make this your paradise or make it your hell. The choice is entirely yours. There’s no ideal society out in the desert at Burning Man. Sure, some people come back enlightened, but some also come back with sun stroke or needing a month of sleep to recover from the drugs. But as he points out: You’re alive when you’re sitting in your bedroom cleaning wax out of your ears. You’re alive when you’re at the supermarket wondering whether to go for the Hostess HoHos or the Little Debbies. You’re alive right now. Just be what you are, where you are. That’s the most magical thing there is. The life you’re living right now has joys even God could never know. This journey into virtual worlds, the rabbit hole, the strange loop, the magic circle - call it what you will, it’s damn strange in here. It’s a universe being built up atom by atom, sim by sim, house by house and even the thousands of hairs on your head were carefully constructed. Philip Linden told Wagner Au that he harbors fantasies of immortality through the code. He imagined a day, I suppose, when we can swim not just through landscapes of malls and beach houses and ethereal sculptures and all the stuff that isn’t possible in real life, but instead swim through an aggregation of information and ideas, concept maps built from prims appended to and sharpened by those who follow, mirror worlds and augmented ones, and the footsteps left behind make us immortal - electric man, awakening the Africa within. Maybe so. Maybe this reconstruction of the world is also the reconstruction of our very mortality. Time will tell. Past Atoms For now, the question is what happens when we extend this universe of atoms up the chain. Our new user danced a little. Bought a slice of land and went shopping. Visited an art installation or two. Talked to people. And started to FEEL things - love, sure, but also other things, strange dislocations. Started digging into those atoms a bit more and realized that some of them were being assembled to make virtual cars and clothes, but some of them were being assembled as tools for collaboration. Some of them were challenging our beliefs about identity. Some of them were even being turned into intelligent life forms. We’ve heard a lot about education and business collaboration in Second Life - the next “wave” according to Rosedale (who has been famous for his inability to predict what would happen every time he introduced a change to SL). In the meantime, there’s people who don’t care about virtual classrooms, but are looking to create objects with embedded learning algorithms (sort of extended versions of the SL Browser that capture more than just tags), or to extend the Wikitecture into conceptual development rather than just physical, or who are embedding SL environments with RL data streams like IBMs Virtual Networks Operation Center. In creating the world from the atom up, Rosedale thought he’d end up with Burning Man, and although the carnival is always on, there are other streams that have been unleashed as well, rivers of thought that leave behind our attachments to the concepts of property and purchase that continue to explore how powerful this idea really is - how far we can push the prims, and how many sacrosanct beliefs we can overturn on the journey.
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  Metaverse platform gambling 2

  http://metaxlr8.net/index.php/site/metaverse_platform_gambli...
  188 days ago in metaXLR8 - acceleration in the metaverse · Authority: 13

  In the article on Metaverse platform gambling 1 I have described the three open source “official” next generation immersive education platforms selected by the Immersive Education Initiative: -Second Life in its open source OpenSim version, Open Croquet and Sun’s Java-based Wonderland - Darkstar platform-, as the best candidate Metaverse platforms available at this moment. This was correct: all three platforms have made significant advances in the last few weeks. In the image above my Second Life avatar is watching my Qwaq Forums avatar in a video presentation of Qwaq Forums (in Spanish) produced by metafuturing and Innovex4G, a Spanish company specialized in business oriented applications of VR technology. This is only a video streamed from our server and shown in Second Life, but it suggests the forthcoming interoperability of platforms. Qwaq Forums, a business oriented value added layer based on the open source platform Open Croquet, advances steadily by introducing some new features in each release and is a very useful tool for professional collaboration in geographically distributed teams. Voice and text chat, collaborative web browsing and drag-and-drop importing office documents from the desktop permit very productive business meeting in QF. The New Media Consortium, a consortium of nearly 250 learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies, has announced its Open Virtual Worlds Project, an effort that is aimed at making it easier to learn, work, and exchange ideas in virtual space. The project will develop a range of standards-based, portable open-source educational spaces, content, and objects, and use them to extend Sun Microsystems’s open source Project Darkstar and Project Wonderland virtual world platforms. The collaborative editing of documents in the virtual space shown in this NMC presentation video has been compared to Qwaq Forums. A comment to this article describes the differences between the two approaches and the superiority of the P2P features and licensing model of Open Croquet. However, it is clear that the Open Virtual Worlds Project will permit important advances also in Sun Microsystems’s VR worlds technology. OpenSim, the open source version of Second Life, is where the most interesting recent advances have been announced. The project has reached its 0.5 release, that has beed described as an important milestone. Independent OpenSim based metaverse operators like Central Grid are beginning to make headlines. IBM is exloring (also) this platform and has built a 3D data center application in OpenSim. Aimed at IT professionals, the application should let them monitor data centers more effectively over long distances. IBM presented the idea of a 3D data center in Second Life last year (see video below), but the new OpenSim application should allow more security with privately hosted environments. See also the articles of Tish Shute and Gwyneth Llewelyn. Perhaps the most interesting recent OpenSim news come from the Finnish company RealXtend, see Tish Shute’s articles Evolution of OpenSim: RealXtend joins OpenSim and RealXtend’s Vision for Avatar 2.0. So what is the best bet? At this moment I tend to agree with Tidalblog: “It’s too early to predict the winners and losers in all this—perhaps there won’t be any. SL continues to break concurrency records (64,300 most recently) as the service stability improves. Those keen to capitalise on SL skills are presumably going to be tempted either to stay or to go down the OpenSim route”. Yes, SL is still there despite the bad press and, perhaps in a new OpenSim based incarnation, will probably continue to be the best choice to reach wide audiences in the Metaverse. While Qwaq Forums and other initiatives based on Open Croquet may be more attractive for the high-end corporate and educational markets.
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  Hollywood Reds, Metaversal Blues

  http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/03/ho...
  188 days ago in Second Thoughts · Authority: 125

  Some day, somebody will be freer from the ideological constraints of our Cold War and post Cold War ages, and be able to do a very good comprehensive critical study of Hollywood and the Reds that will show just what kind of effect on society and mass culture people with a certain set of beliefs had on the public and on their age. They'll be free, because they won't have to look over their shoulder 10 million times at the repressive antics of McCarthy and the devastation of blacklisting, nor genuflect about 30 million times to the ideas of Cold War, anti-Cold War, anti-anti-communism, blah blah. They'll be free, because they won't have to spend huge chapters of their book earnestly telling you that some producer or actress was *not* a Communist at all; or proving that they were Communists, but of the Lite variety, or the kind that definitely weren't for the invasions of Hungary or Czechoslovakia, you know, sort of 9/11 Pataki voters and McCain Democrats. They'll just be free, just to look at the content of the beliefs and creeds and thinking of the producers and actors and critics, and see if it had any effect. They could ask the question: well, what *did* they believe, in any kind of organized way? What sustained it? Did it matter, in fact? Then they will conclude, re "Communism" (which will turn out to be a very varied collection of social ideas by that time) that a) it did matter, but not much so; b) it had a profound effect and therefore we should b1) worry about the spread of Communism or b2) encourage Communism or c) it was utterly irrelevant to anything because basically, it all comes down to whether you can tell a good story or not, and people will figure it out themselves. In the same way, we could look now -- instead of waiting for future historians -- at the GDC stuff of Raph's ("God, we're irrelevant") or this utterings of a person I'd never heard of before who makes me shudder, Jane McGonigal (thanks to Ugotrade for picking this out of the flogosphere "I’m not mad at game designers. Compared to the rest of the world, we have it all figured out. Our medium kicks all other media’s ass. We make more people happy than any other platform or content in the world. (If you don’t believe that, you’re not paying attention to what’s happening.) We’ve won. Games have won. As an industry we’ve spent the last 30 years learning how to optimize experience. Brains, bodies (recently), and hearts are all engaged. That’s the good news. The bad news is we rule the virtual world only. Reality is broken, and we’re not fixing it, we’re offering alternatives to it. We offer better experiences, better socialization, in virtual experiences. That needs to start changing. If reality is broken, why aren’t game designers trying to fix it? It’s our responsibility to design systems that make us happy and successful and powerful in real life? We have the power and the responsibility." *Holds up cross*. Look, this is pretty awful stuff. Can somebody please make sure this gal isn't allowed anywhere near, well, massness? Media? You know, influential stuff? If you don't see the stretched membrane holding back a giant mass of stupidity about to let loose, and aren't breaking out in a cold sweat like I am, well, I guess you must be...stuck playing in a game or immersed in a virtual world or surfing the Internet or something...I'm afraid I'm finding it still GOOD news that games ONLY rule virtuality. If you were wondering about what it will be like having game designers "fix reality" (*shudder again mightily*), then you have only to read Castronova, which I've blogged about here. It's too bad we don't have that critical study on whether the Hollywood Reds broke anything essential about our reality -- or whether it didn't matter because they were good story tellers or weren't even Reds. Because now with the Metaversal Blues -- I think of them as blue in electronic Internet media, somehow but this may be a mere artifact of synethesia -- we're about to see what it's like to have game-gods start to influence stuff in a bigger way without anyone getting to ask whether there's any legitimate scare, or getting to form a congressional committee, good or bad. The horror.... You know, I can't help thinking of Kurtz in Apocalypse now: "I remember when I was with Special Forces--it seems a thousand centuries ago--we went into a camp to inoculate it. The children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us, and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile--a pile of little arms. And I remember...I...I...I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out, I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it, I never want to forget. And then I realized--like I was shot...like I was shot with a diamond...a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, "My God, the genius of that, the genius, the will to do that." Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they could stand that--these were not monsters, these were men, trained cadres, these men who fought with their hearts, who have families, who have children, who are filled wi th love--that they had this strength, the strength to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time were able to utilize their primordial i nstincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment--without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us." What we have with the makers of games are people who, without judgement -- and with strenous demand on all of us never to judge! -- can enable human beings to hack off little innoculated arms. That about sums it up, eh? And perhaps someone would like to pretend that the war in Iraq or tragedies like Virginia Tech are completely unrelated to media and games, but as I said, we await that future critical study free of the ideological constraints placed on the critical and open thinking required to look at just what it means to have young males especially learn how to maim and murder creatures and humans millions of times over since the age of 8, for many, many hours a day. Yes, I realize the politically correct thing to do is to pretend it has no effect on the human heart and soul. But, I've never suffered from any problem of being politically correct. Why does Raph Koster ask about Darfur? Why does Jane McGetigan talk about the need to fix reality? Shouldn't they look deep inside their own games and fix those first? And I don't mean the lag. Leave aside the question of whether socializing in games and worlds is "better". One could easily argue that it is worse, and not do damage to upbeat studies about people passing game-funded "academic" studies about gamers being happier and more adjusted to...their game-world relationships. What we have to realize about the entire game and virtual worlds industry, which is still in its childhood, is that it has the relationship to critical study now that, oh, Big Pharma has to studying the effects of say, seroquel on children. Not clean. Not without an agenda. Not thorough. Not enough. Not compelling. Not understood widely. Much of this "thinking" is beautifully choreographed and produced, like a Hollywood show! -- at large game conferences funded by game companies or media or technology companies, and they're hardly going to be expected to study themselves very critically, now, are they? I remember one of the Pet game makers at VW07, I believe it was NeoPets and not GoPets but I'd have to research this. In a way, it doesn't matter, because most game gods believe this way, too. Somebody in the audience asked something about why there couldn't be custom content or user-made content, and he got an indignant reply. The pet guy basically ranted a story that summed up this way: if you let in user content, you let in pedophiles. What's more important, the safety of children or the "rights" of child predators? He also implied that if you had RMT and open economies, the child predator was the end of the story, too. Because all kinds of people would have now an economic motive to enter the world, and that would mean danger to kids. It was far better to have a world where "everybody could be on an equal playing field" than to have some people rich in real life be able to win because they could buy more stuff or get ahead financially. So the beatific vision of the utopian egalitarian world. You felt as if for this guy, exposing the kids to competition and capitalism could be on par with the horror of child pornography, such is the allergy to commerce you find among the game-god set (except, of course, their own commerce -- the old "no business but my business" ethic of Second Life). These are the people you want to fix broken reality? Please, keep parliamentary democracy and a mixed economy in analog reality, anything but virtuality! Of course, the catalogue of stuff that game-gods believe politically, ported from real life, include all kinds of stuff, whether it's about the dangers of Global Warming, the need to vote for Obama or the lack of proof of adverse effects from Video Games. It's all a very clustered and predictable set of ideas -- an ideology. It may not have "Moscow Gold" and a Soviet Central Committee to maintain its uniformity, but it doesn't have to: it has Twitter and GDC. This massive conformity among software manufacturers hooked to the ability to massively affect consciousness of course is a barking horror that few people think about or realize because they don't see the old dinosaur media lumbering away. Old mass media has ceased to be able to affect consciousness in meaningful ways to act -- or at least, has saturated it, and more cannot be expected. For example, take the photograph on the cover of today's New York Times of a burned Darfurian village, torched by the Janjaweed in their scorched-earth tactics, and the quotations drawn from diplomats and humanitarian workers. (Oops, the picture of the aerial photo of a village is on the hard-copy paper edition; the online edition puts this way "below the fold" and puts a more fun thing appropriate to the morefunness of online, which is something about an SNL comedy.) If Jerry and Raph were correct, just getting this picture and getting these quotes "out there" would be "enough". This picture is in every deli, supermarket, train station, suburban porch and corner news stand in America and much of the urban educated world. Is Darfur going to change tomorrow? No, and I can give you 20 reasons why if you ever want to have a serious discussion about it, but it has to do with all kinds of reasons, ranging from old ANC politics, the effects of Soviet Communism on Africa, to Islamicisim and the influence of the Arab world to the Chinese need for energy. What if you could broadcast that picture into every game, every world, every log on message for 40 people tomorrow? Would that change it? No. Fixing broken reality isn't about awareness, which is shorthand for "making Bush do something or getting Obama elected". Fixing broken reality has at least a gadzillion moving parts that all have names like "fix ANC influence in Africa" and "fix role of Egypt in the AU" and so on, among which, sure, there's "fix gulf between State Dept and National Security Council reporting and debating on Darfur" or whatever. Trust me, reality has a LOT of moving parts! Fixing one often breaks the script in another and delays that Wednesday patch. What's good about Jane's *shudder* speech is that she isn't mad at people who make fun stuff, the way Raph is -- or even guilty. But you could argue that both might be better off sticking to games. They aren't elected. They don't have editorial boards. They don't have constitutions or bills of rights. There is absolutely no mechanism in place anywhere, least of all in their games, to make them accountable to anything, even their own games. Here's where you have to answer one of Henrik's time capsule questions about what's wrong with Metaversal technology with a simple answer: "There's no no vote on the JIRA". There isn't any real democratic participation. Look, you have to pay attention to these things and how they unfold, and to do that, you really do have to look at Second Life, which in a way, some would say is turning out worse than a UN bureaucracy with a tax policy set by the EU's concept of VAT; an art and culture policy set by Germany's and Belgian's pornography police; a banking and gambling policy set by the United States; and design that ranges from concepts of the Stalinist Soviet Union to Suburban Denver; and a crime and peace-keeping policy set by post-Dayton Albania. But...maybe that's ok. Maybe that IS fixing reality. Perhaps you can tell I've been reading PJ O'Rourke's Eat the Rich, which chapter by chapter, is just like Second Life. Seriously, before powerful game gods lurch around with their powerful influence machines and "fix reality," I want a whole lot more to say about their games, and their plan for reality. To demand that accountability isn't to fuel a "Red Scare". It's to make people who have the resources and capacity to influence "the masses" to abide by the rule of law over themselves, so that they are not unaccountable and abusive. If they do think they can just drop ideological memes into the pool, they will find themselves facing something far harsher than a blacklist, given the equally powerful capacity of the Internet to go in the other direction away from their liberal memes. The hysteria of HUAC and the damaging of people's careers profoundly scarred the nation for many years to come and ensured many good protective laws -- often threatened again now in post 9/11 Bush's America -- laws against witch-hunting or ideological vetting. What doesn't emerge from the Wikipedia or popular non-fiction books, however, is the basis for the "Red Square" in the broken reality of the Soviet empire -- mass purges and atrocities, which both the domestic and international media lied about, or didn't cover. Will ordinary people already softened up by becoming addicted to their favourite online game and becoming skill slaves and loot grubbers adapt to whatever ideological meme the game gods dictate to them with their new-found "consciences"? I guess we're about to find out?
• 

  L’inventaire universel (vWWW part 2)

  http://m.tyas.free.fr/?p=22
  190 days ago in mtyas. com - music, art, video, machinima, virtual worlds, e-learning · Authority: 4

  Après l’avatar universel, il est indispensable de penser au concept d’inventaire universel. Pour passer de monde en monde, en gardant toujours son inventaire sur soi, il faut toujours avoir au minimum ses objets hébergés quelque part sur internet à un moment donné.La solution idéale pour gérer au mieux tous les problèmes de bande-passante unidirectionnelle (d’un seul serveur), serait d’avoir tous les éléments de ces inventaires disséminés à travers l’internet, tel nos fichiers actuellement. Les textures peuvent être hébergées sur des serveurs ftp ordinaires, et seraient associés, grâce à leur url, à l’inventaire de l’avatar. il va de même pour les vidéos, animations et objets 3D. On pourra utiliser les mêmes url pour les sites en 2D que ceux en 3D (One File Serves All), et passer par des services d’hébergement de photo, de vidéo et autres contenus hébergés (y compris les applications). Il reste a définir un certain nombre de standards pour les objets 3D, mettre en place des applications en ligne de création / hébergement de fichiers 3D, et travailler sur une nouvelle façon de gérer les droits sur ces url En fait les mondes virtuels finiront comme un grand navigateur web 3D, à travers une multitude d’objets, d’applications, et de services divers. La seul chose de plus, qui sera déterminée par le coté serveur du monde virtuel, c’est le nombre simultané de personnes qui pourront être ensemble, la prise en compte des moteurs physiques et des scripts, ainsi que la prise en charge de services supplémentaires optionnels tels que le VOIP. Je pense qu’il serait également pratique d’envisager une répartition des charges en fonction de la concentration d’avatars, et non de la surface. Ainsi un serveur servant à faire tourner toute une île vide, irait donner ses ressources à un serveur populaire en manque de puissance. Bref, un subtile mélange entre P2P, UGC mais à tous les niveaux, en gardant tous l’acquis de nos réalisations web 2.0, et en rajoutant peu à peu la valeur ajoutée bientôt incontournable des univers immersifs multi-utilisateurs. UPDATE: Interview à lire sur le blog d’Ugotrade Published by Original source : http://xfruits.com/matthewtyas/?id=37294&clic=1904… Share This
• 

  Hapiness

  http://zeitspur.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/hapiness/
  192 days ago in zeitspur · Authority: 7

  Jane McGonigal said: I have spent the last year doing research on happiness. Instead of trying to figure out what’s broken, these people are trying to figure out what makes us happy. Every positive psychologist has found the same thing. Happiness is 1) having satisfying work to do, 2) the experience of being good at something, 3) time spent with people we like, and 4) a chance to be part of something bigger than ourselves. UgoTrade » Blog Archive » RealXtend’s Vision for Avatar 2.0 Blogged with Flock Tags: happinessinsight
• 

  RealXtend’s Vision for Avatar 2.0

  http://opensocialhowto.com/2008/02/27/realxtend%e2%80%99s-vi...
  193 days ago in Open Social How To · Authority: 7

  Tony Manninen, the CEO of LudoCraft games studio (the client side development division of realXtend) who has being doing all this amazing recent development on OpenSim, has a vision for Avatar 2.0 that he is bringing to OpenSim. The possibilities for the future integration of realXtend features (that include meshes and the ability to import proper 3D models) with Second Life is currently under discussion - more on this soon. We have tried to keep the rexviewer as compatible as possible. We t Original post by UgoTrade

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