Virtual Worlds – Page 123

August 23, 2014

Tony Parisi Joins High Fidelity As An Advisor

The summer season of The Drax Files Radio Hour has had a few repeats and this week is no exception, it’s a repeat of the excellent interview with Tony Parisi. This is well worth a listen because Tony talks of the challenges of client downloads and how they turn people off as well as lots more excellent commentary from a person who has experience in virtual worlds and beyond. Tony also thinks the 3D internet is right around the corner, but confesses he’s been saying that for many years.

However this interview becomes even more relevant with the news that Tony Parisi has joined High Fidelity as an advisor. If you don’t know who Tony Parisi is then I suggest you read his bio. He was also involved with the virtual world Vivaty, but you can hear about that in The Drax Files Radio Hour. However a snippet from his bio :

Tony is the co-creator of the VRML and X3D ISO standards for networked 3D graphics, and continues to innovate in 3D technology. Tony is the co-chair of the San Francisco WebGL Meetup (www.meetup.com/WebGL-Developers-Meetup), a founder of the Rest3D working group (http://www.rest3d.org/) and a member of the Khronos COLLADA working group creating glTF, the new file format standard for 3D web and mobile applications.

High Fidelity are assembling an impressive looking team, it’s a shame Jeska left, but hopefully that was the right move for Jeska. As for Tony, not only is he an advisor for High Fidelity, he’s also involved in some top secret stuff!

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August 22, 2014

Hurricane Iris Whips Up A Picture Storm

It started innocently enough, Janine Hawkins (AKA Iris Ophelia) penned a piece for Paste Magazine : 10 Best MMOs. At number six in the list sits Second Life. However this wasn’t the villain of the piece in this article.

No the villain of the piece was the initial image the editors of Paste Magazine used to represent Second Life. This was not Iris’ call, so don’t hound Iris about this. However this also raised a wider issue, one of whether Linden Lab provide news outlets with decent pictures in the first place.

This is a very good question, and one that to be fair to Linden Lab, they did address. This also raised the issue of using Flickr to use images and when images are or aren’t fair game for usage. As you can see, this is far more complicated than it should be.

Draxtor Despres pointed to the Second Life Flickr pool as a repository for images the press could use. However this is the unofficial pool and those images have different rights. Draxtor realised this and then pointed people to the excellent SL Is Looking Good Flickr Pool. However that has the same issue with regards to rights. This is why Linden Lab decided to setup their own Flickr pool. This pool has a terms of service that spell out that LL can use these images for marketing :

As a participant of the Program, you hereby grant to the Company a perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable, and cost-free right and license to use, distribute, or sublicense (through multiple levels), and otherwise exploit in any manner whatsoever, all or any portion of your Submissions, for the purposes of marketing, promotion, and/or outreach for and about the Second Life virtual world.

That was an issue of some controversy when the group was created by the way. When you think about it, it’s strange that Linden Lab later went on to make their own terms of service for Second Life even more controversial because they had feedback on those terms that people weren’t happy, but that’s an aside.

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August 22, 2014

Skill Gaming Ventures Start To Get Approval

On August 13th I blogged about the problems both Linden Lab and Skill Gaming applicants had experienced with the application process : Skill Gaming Applications Appear To Be A Skill Game In Their Own Right. In that post I highlighted the moving goalposts of the application process and how they were proving challenging to applicants.

Linden Lab had initially set a deadline of August 1st for this policy, that was later pushed back to September 1st. In my post I felt that September 1st was looking a little problematic, indeed I said :

I’m firmly in the camp that believes that this deadline will need to be pushed back again, but that in itself is no bad thing because we can see that this is a learning curve for Linden Lab and applicants. The important thing to do is to get this right.

Days passed and my opinion did not change, there were no signs on the public wiki of any approved games or operators. However it seems that I was wrong, something I’m not afraid to admit, because approved operators, regions and games have started to rear their heads, as we can see if we look at the public wiki page : Linden Lab Official:Second Life Skill Gaming Approved Participants.

Whereas there are a number of listed Skill Gaming Operators, I’m not sure they are all different people, here’s a current list :

MooTownGames SLSGO
SushantDiesel SLSGO
SushantYing SLSGO
SushantLecker SLSGO
EchoBlaylock SLSGO
PokaMachines SLSGO
PIGamesResident SLSGO

At this stage I’m not sure if all Skill Gaming operators will have SLSGO after their name or whether this is indicative of this only really being one applicant. The same applicant certainly appears to have more than one operator licence because the contact email addresses are the same in some cases, or extremely similar in others.

There are a number of listed regions associated with each operator, but again we see some regions listed next to more than one operator.

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August 21, 2014

High Fidelity – Una Paloma Blanca

The High Fidelity website is currently a strange beast. The site looks visually more appealing on my Mac using Safari than it does on my PC using Chrome. The whole layout is different, I’m not sure whether this is a caching issue or not. However I’m generally more of a content over pretty type of guy, with some exceptions, Microsoft Office 2013 being a glaring exception to that rule but I’ll move swiftly on from that. Another issue is that the top two links to the blog posts don’t work on Safari, the two links below do. However I don’t have that issue on Chrome because the layout looks different on Chrome.

However I’m not here to talk about website layouts, I’m going to talk about Paloma Palmer. Who is Paloma Palmer I hear some of you ask … someone? Surely? Anyway, Paloma Palmer has spent the summer as an intern at High Fidelity and whereas Paloma is far too young to be a cider drinker, she is certainly not too young to be involved in Javascript projects, as exemplified by the blog post : Paloma’s Javascript Project.

Palom has been coding for three years after taking classes in BASIC language and Java. This started in her Freshman year, I have absolutely no idea what a Freshman year is. I’m also surprised BASIC is still being taught, is this the same BASIC I’m thinking of?

10. CLS

20. Print “Ciaran Was Here”

30. Goto 20

That BASIC? That brings back memories! Anyway, Paloma explains why she finds coding interesting, it’s literally learning a new language and Paloma compares this to learning French. This is a point oft missed by people who are adept at spoken languages such as French but think code is scary. There are some major differences with application but some of the principles are very similar. The same goes for coders who shy away from learning foreign languages. Paloma also explains that coding is good for solving puzzles and applying maths to a situation.

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August 20, 2014

Foxes, Games And Bitcoins

An odd article has appeared in The Economic Times Of India : A Tumkur start-up VentureNext earns Rs 10 lakh a month by creating virtual creatures. The article is odd because it starts with a headline about how a startup has been selling virtual creatures in Second Life and making a living at it, diverts in the middle to a discussion about online gaming and ends by suggesting that Second Life is dwindling and that business people are turning to new ventures, such as Bitcoin.

The virtual creatures in question are Fennux, which are a breedable creature within Second Life. I’m not sure how popular these have been but they have been around for quite some time. Indeed I can recall that back in 2013 their adverts managed to find their way to the Second Life forum :

However Sathvik Vishwanath. the name behind Fennux is taking his company in a new direction , they are moving into bitcoin territory :

“I’m not able to constantly develop new things for Fennux because of my new startup. I’ll keep it running though, When one door shuts, others open, That’s just how the Internet is.”

According to the article, his new startup UnoCoin, raised $250,000 (Rs 1.5 crore) from Barry Silbert’s Bitcoin Opportunity Corp. That’s an interesting change of direction.

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