Recent Comments:
Practical Marketing - Top 10 reasons you should not consider marketing in Second Life
Second Life Insider
Sep 11th 2007 1:25PM In response to SqueezeOne Pow - I think SL is the perfect place to try and learn marketing for the virtual worlds demographic. It's the only one where one can hope to get any ROI by learning how to market in a bustling and competitive economy.
If if a business comes into sl and can compete with the natives in any way whatsoever then they've developed a robust model for how to engage their customers, and can expect to do a lot better than their RL competition in a few years when virtual worlds start forming a significant demographic. There's not a lot of currency in being "just another first" in VR marketing.
The other opportunity for marketers in SL is to catch all those high disposable income folk in the highly attractive 25-35 year old demographic. These folks traditionally get most of their brand awareness delivered with their entertainment. They started replacing television with the internet several years ago, and are increasingly shifting from the net to virtual worlds for their entertainment.
It's been many years since RL brands got the idea that computer games were valid marketing, and happily licensed out their pontiacs and such to racing games. In sl - a terrible platform for cars by the way - pontiac is synonymous with them due to their engagement of the community. The mere idea that they managed to corner car culture in a world with such poor physics is a triumph of marketing. I'll never buy one, but I know their name, and I'll bet anyone with a genuine interest in cars in SL wouldn't take long to find them. More important even than their traffic in the sim is the chatter between people about the sim: "i might buy a car - you been to pontiac? they got a lot of types there." Bingo, the brand name is being shared.
As for stability... sure that's an issue, but the bad weather effects all. You could get stable brand your own VR like MTV did, but isn't that just preaching to the converted? Nothing happens in those potted worlds unless you make it happen. In terms of ROI it seems like spending a lot on content when you need to manufacture a whole world for your product.... and you know... make stuff happen so it's not dull. I guess it's stable though.
Hang on... if you go for a potted VR then you have to RL advertise your world to get people to download the client and get in to look at your stuff.. They've looked at your website already, why do you want them in your world? Is it just you know, the entertainment carrot again?
Truth is, sl is currently the most active virtual economy outside gold farming. In the grand scheme of things not a huge ammount of money changes hands. They mostly spend their time having fun and ignoring your other serious marketing channels. Yet they have enough money for reasonable pcs, broadband and most importantly of all, they are people who are willing spend real cash on things that don't even tangibly exist. In a way they are the kind of demographic marketers dream of.
So SL may not be a huge market yet - but if you can crack it you have a future in this business.
Molotov's Dispatches on HBO
Second Life Insider
Sep 8th 2007 2:06PM Where's the actual animation? More goes into this than you imagine. Molotov had folk sourcing and hiring avatars that new how to move and animate themselves convincingly on cue. I know at least Heather Shortbread was employed to do custom avatar animations for actors. Camera control scripts were employed, digital sets built. Within the technical constraints of SL a lot of tricks were pulled. So despite the realtime aspect of filming and the use of actors the approach was much like animation.
Secondlife's animation tools are not unlike the toolset many new digital animators use currently for producing commercial work - there's not a major production house doing it that doesn't use some canned elements in their workflow, or cheat by using motion capture or somesuch trick. Even southpark is fake paper cutouts pulled out of digital libraries these days. While unusual in approach is unusual in Molotovs work I think it really counts as a form of animation, albeit highly unusual.
Bad News Week
Second Life Insider
Aug 27th 2007 4:42PM Wired has always run using an editorial policy of saying stuff before the others then getting out of the conversation before they have a chance to be cross-examined on their facts. The demographic they're after, early adopters with disposable income they love disposing of on the next big thing laps it up. If you want a potted version of this policy just read their "wired vs tired" lists for a few months - anything that appears as "wired" them soon enough flips over to "tired" regardless of merit. It either proves their hype wrong or becomes mainstream and they need to disassociate with it lest they lose their cutting edge chiq. Tis a pity - they started out so well. I still have the first mag they put out and it reads very different from today.
Immersion versus Augmentation
Second Life Insider
Aug 24th 2007 11:39AM Nobody bothers to talk about augmentationists vs immersionists on facebook or myspace. Even so - those pages are your online avatar. We're conditioned though in such a way that we view folks who present themselves using such a web based curiculim vitae as representing themselves: immersed. The augmentation aspect is all that friend network and posty stuff. It's obvious from a browse that many peoples myspace is more about their ego and who they wish to be than who they are, yet few bother to pontificate about that. We prefer to get into debates about how fake or real our puppets are than our photo albums and friends lists, or for that matter real lives. Really it's quite absurd. The function of a masquerade is to allow folk to drop their masks in other ways under the shield of anonymity. That virtual worlds provide that shield is no evidence that fantasy and subterfuge are either the primary defining qualities of virtual interaction, nor that they don't represent truths in themselves. Immersion versus augmentation is a debate that still hangs over from nineties academia, when folks used the word "cyberspace" a lot and saw early adopters as the "dreaded collective them" - Canny untrustworthy propagandists, like commies with the future magic. That debate ceased to be relevant the day your mom got an internet profile. The only virtual thing about virtual worlds is the, well... worlds. The people are real. Seeking to define them as to how they interact in VR as type x or y is an insult to the complexity with which people interact in real life. VR is not somewhere else you escape to - its your lounge room. In the words of buckaroo bansai: remember, wherever you go, there you are.
Plastic Duck ... Our Hero? A Case for Megaprims
Second Life Insider
Aug 23rd 2007 7:54AM Erm - megaprims do stop rendering if they're x meters away from the camera - that's one of the problems - draw distance: the prims you see are only ones who's center is inside your draw distance. Even so the things you bump into are handled on the server side and it knows about these big prims (as anyone who's walked into a house that hasn't rezzed knows.)
That creates a problem for big prims if you have a low draw distance - you may be standing on top of a prim, the center of which is further than your draw setting. You would be standing on a prim you couldn't see. A good example of this is the greenies home sim I worked on. We advise people who enter to set their draw distance to 300m on entry due to the use of huge prims. (Pop in to greenies home and play around with draw distance if you want to see some of the issues.) The prims that make up the walls for example are actually centered in the middle of the sim - so at short draw distances, the closer you get to a wall, the more likely it is to disappear (as you are getting further from the logical center of it).
It took a lot of testing to get the physics, draw problems, and all the other issues sorted. Allowing prims of any size would have significantly reduced our burden in this. Using these large prims (due to the constraints of havoc i believe) is not for the faint of heart. A tweak of a single percent in one of the cuts on these prims and everyone in the sim would float through the roof and off into the clouds due to physics engine glitches.
Even so, without Plastic Duck's prims we wouldn't have been able to make greenies at all. With just over 60 megaprims and maybe 40 regular prims for the main structure we did the job of about 1296 regular prims. That significantly reduces bandwith and geometry for the client (if you consider each cube has 6 surfaces that's over 7000 polygons the client doesn't have to think about. With careful texturing and optimization it's now the avatars that are the largest rendering load in the sim.
So my hat goes off to plastic duck for providing these. Though they are dangerous and can be used for griefing, so can a microphone or any old 3 line script. I heard a rumor though that the lindies have a filter to ban anyone who tries logging in with a megaprim attatched to their avatar - so maybe the less grief in future. Who knows.
Anyway, hopefuly with new havoc (one day) we'll be able to get the arbitrarily sized prims that builders, architects and cad folk have been waiting for. One of the main barriers to import conversion of cad models is the prim limits.) Though hopefuly restricted in use to the parcel owner or building group. (Like a tick box in about land>options for "can place prims over 10m in size")
"The naked truth is always better than the best dressed lie"
Second Life Insider
Aug 19th 2007 4:36AM Ok well they lost me already by overusing the vague loaded term "cyberspace" in their abstract, placing them theoretically somewhere in the academic milieu of the early nineties before anyone really "got it". Considering that avatar based worlds are predominantly peopled by people who engage in RP on some level, substituting "roleplayers" for "deceivers" and you really do end up with a "water is wet" kind of abstract. Does anyone want to quote some meat out of this study? I really don't want to buy the article. This looks like another one of those that compares two completely different domains and tries to qualitively compare them - like are people more anxious about being deceptive at a masquerade party or in written correspondance? Oh well.
Crescendo and Catalyst announce merger
Second Life Insider
Aug 17th 2007 2:32AM When we usta get an article like this we'd just charge them and put a tag on the corner of the page that said "PAID ADVERTORIAL". It's amazing they advertise themselves as a PR and marketing firm. From that press release I wouldn't trust them to spin my laundry. I guess now we just "sit back, watch & learn", and I'm sure we'll garner valueable lessons for future marketers entering SL. :P
Just Askin': Lies, damn lies and Internet behaviour
Second Life Insider
Aug 16th 2007 4:39AM I think half the reason 3d worlds are getting this kind of rap is that they are a new (comparitively) communication medium, and admittely one that looks a lot more like a game than say MSN or Yahoo chat. We've now many years with text based communications in the mainstream.... long enough for people to stop acting like idiot noobs and establish their online personne. In SL though (and other online worlds) most people are still in their early adopting phase, and yet to learn through repeated faux pas what their avatar is really about. Given time, when folks feel comfortable in that skin, they won't feel as comfortable hiding behind it. Remember when everyone you knew has some "cybering" horror story about reality meeting fantasy and them not meshing well - it's all fun and games till it starts to seem real, then people normalize.
Just Askin': How transparent is Linden Lab when there are problems?
Second Life Insider
Jul 30th 2007 2:43AM In my experience I think LL's transparency is proportional to how many clever folk they have on the job to respond at any time. When they're busy elsewhere or everyone's off for the weekend, communication gets clogged. Unfortunately this leads them to telling us less about what's happening when we need it most - such as on the weekends when concurrency is high or when there are subtle ongoing annoyances and anyone who could give us an indication is busy head scratching over code and database logs. Well that's my theory.
Just Askin' - the value of social networking tools
Second Life Insider
Jul 19th 2007 2:01AM The biggest problem with social networks for me is that they invite excitable people to friend the heck outa people they don't even know. Social networks based on actual interactions (read as metrics based reputation system) might be useful in extending networks but that needs to be within a narrow focus (or have some focus at all). Firefly - now defunt but i think bought up by microsoft and amazon for their recomendation system, was a social network based around musical tastes, and by cross comparing listening patterns you ended up friending people who's taste in tunes was similar to your own. That kind of social networking adds value, whereas the usual implementation relies on the community to act in a sane manner. Bitter experience implies that this is hardly ever the case.
