Startup to provide Second Life ratings
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A startup billing itself as the Better Business Bureau for virtual worlds wants to provide a rating system for avatars &#151; players' online representations &#151; in "Second Life."
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Careful, we're armed with doughnuts Letters An anti-poverty campaign has set up its stall in Second Life, the online virtual world game that is so popular with so many. Our short, and somewhat cheeky, story on this collision of the most and least real of places to live (poverty vs. Second Life, for those only on coffee no. 1) has provoked quite a storm:â¦
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(InfoWorld) - As the number of virtual environments increases, standards and vendor collaboration will help make teleporting between different worlds a smooth experience, ensuring, for instance, that your avatar arrives in a new world still wearing the clothes it donned in your home world. Currently, Linden Research Inc.'s Second Life is the most popular virtual world, outshining a number of alternative universes such as Active Worlds and There. "A lot of people are looking at Second Life and saying, 'Let's do one of those,'" said Bob Sutor, vice president of standards and open source at IBM Corp. "The last thing you want is a lot of different ways to do the same things. You need standards for how to teleport between different virtual worlds and to bring objects with you." Besides an avatar's clothes, those objects could include the money it was using in your home virtual world as well as a presentation you might want to share with your colleagues or potential customers. Issues to consider include the mechanics of teleporting between worlds, Sutor said. If you invite someone from another world to come and visit your world, would they need to become a member of your environment or could you simply issue a guest pass? Can a person retain their home world identity in a new world? He also wondered how people will communicate across worlds, for example, via IM (instant messaging). That could be achieved by agreeing on a common service or setting up gateways between different IM systems. IBM's set to debate these issues on Friday at a virtual worlds event it's cohosting with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge. Sutor will be there along with Mitch Kapor, the chair of Linden Lab, and a variety of academics and companies including Toyota Motor Sales USA Inc. and PepsiCo Inc. Sutor applauded Second Life's move in January to make the source code for its end-user viewer application freely available. The viewer enables users to do a variety of things in the virtual world, including controlling avatars, communicating and buying and selling objects. "They've set a very interesting precedent," he said. Sutor expects that other virtual worlds will follow suit. Like the open-source movement, "virtual worlds are fundamentally about communities coming together," he added, looking forward to the establishment of a global community of developers focused on building worlds based on open standards. Sutor has been using Second Life actively since November and has been detailing in recent blog postings his virtual world requirements . That's a common experience for users once they've adjusted to moving around in a virtual world, he believes. "After they've finished walking into walls, they probably say, 'This is OK, but I really wish it did X, Y or Z'," Sutor said. "The odds are other virtual worlds have that. Looked at in total, we probably have much of what people would like implemented already available somewhere." For example, World of Warcraft, a hugely popular multiplayer online role-playing game, has many features that could be applied in other virtual worlds, he added. Businesses are experimenting with virtual worlds, particularly inside Second Life. "They're mostly translating 2-D marketing ideas into a 3-D world, which is more or less successful," Sutor said. But looking ahead, questions arise around the meaning of the retail experience in a virtual world. For instance, what kind of artificial intelligence will companies use to determine how sales assistants in virtual stores behave when a customer walks in? Will the customer be approached by the sales assistant closest to them or by the assistant who looks the most like them, Sutor wondered. Alternatively, will the sales assistants be programmed to examine the customer's avatar to determine what you're likely to purchase and therefore which assistant could be of the most help to you? Â
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Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world for entrepreneurs, is asking its 660,000 members to change passwords after a security breach may have exposed users' confidential data, including credit card numbers and passwords.
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Blog: A recap of what went on at the 'Second Life' convention this weekend in Chicago.
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My avatar's more militant than your avatar IBM's Italian workforce is set to strike in Second Life tomorrow (27 September).â¦
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Virtual 'House of Sweden' Sweden has announced its intention to be the first nation to have an embassy in Second Life, Reuters reports.â¦
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Fans of open-source programming and multiplayer gaming explore ways to bring the concept of the metaverse -- an infinitely expandable virtual world -- closer to fruition. By Daniel Terdiman.
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A free web-based tool is launched that allows people to build a virtual world in less than a minute.
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Blog: In an attempt to better organize the news coming out of Second Life, a new streaming radio station emerges to disseminate information about the oft-fragmented virtual world.
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Playground SDK to help casual game makers create multiplatform games.
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TechWeb - The company expects to fill what it sees as a market void -- Web-based software that's affordable to small businesses with up to 50 employees.
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Artificial intelligences could soon be living and learning inside online worlds such as Second Life.
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Big Blue's Grady Booch is continuing to explore ways to collaborate through applications such as Second Life.
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A San Francisco startup plans to boldly go where no game developer has gone before with an online game based on the cult TV series &quot;Star Trek.
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What the business press didn't tell you Analysis Two weeks ago, business leaders at Davos gave their blessing to Linden Lab's Second Life. They hailed the spectacular growth of its virtual economy while politicians spoke of democracy itself moving into its online world.â¦
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A few simple rules have created a surprisingly complex ecosystem of cannon plants, gridlice, and other strange creatures in the virtual world of Second Life.