Opensim – Page 7 – Ciaran Laval

February 8, 2014

One Small Step For An Avatar, One Giant Leap For Virtual Worlds, One Black Hole Still Exists

On the 10th October 2007 the Reuters news agency in Second Life published a news story : IBM, Linden Lab seek open borders for virtual worlds.

IBM and Linden Lab said on Tuesday they will work on ways to let people use a single online persona in different online services.

Interoperability is emerging as a key goal of the nascent virtual world industry, which attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in investment on the hopes that video-game graphics and rich 3-D environments will supplant flat Web pages.

The idea was that you’d be able to create an avatar in one virtual world and take that avatar to other virtual worlds. This was an extremely interesting development. There’s a quote in that article from then Vice President of business at Linden Lab, Ginsu Yoon:

“When you talk about avatars going in and out of virtual worlds, we truly believe that expands the market …..It’s not a situation where there is a fixed pie and everyone is fighting for slices. It’s really key to making the market bigger.”

So Linden Lab were interested and within a year, further exciting developments would be unveiled. On the 8th July 2008 … I think .. American dates are arse about face, yes I’m sure they mean 8th July 2008, anyway on this date, Hamilton Linden revealed that a major breakthrough had been achieved in Virtual Worlds :

This is a historic day for Second Life, and for virtual worlds in general. IBM and Linden Lab have announced that research teams from the two companies successfully teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid into a virtual world running on an OpenSim server, marking the first time an avatar has moved from one virtual world to another. It’s an important first step toward enabling avatars to pass freely between virtual worlds, something we’ve been working toward publicly since the formation of the Architecture Working Group in September 2007. These are still early days, however, so amid all the excitement, we thought it would be helpful to clarify exactly what we’ve done — and what still lies ahead.

There was even a video, directed by Torley. The existence of the video of course led to accusations that the whole thing was faked, that the OpenSim grid landing never really happened and people pointed out that a flag was waving when it should not have been as there is no air in the OpenSim atmosphere. Others suggested that there should have been a crater or at least some imprints from the landing from one distant virtual world to another. However I disagree with the conspiracy theorists, this really happened and here’s the video to prove it:

Continue reading “One Small Step For An Avatar, One Giant Leap For Virtual Worlds, One Black Hole Still Exists”

November 26, 2013

Fourth Annual Opensim Grid Survey Reveals The Flaws With Surveys

Maria Korolov has posted the results of the fourth annual opensim grid survey over at HyperGrid Business and the results are hard to make much sense of due to the small number of participants. However this doesn’t mean that the survey is worthless, but it does mean that the results should be taken with a pinch of salt in some areas.

654 responses were received by the survey and you need to bear in mind that most of the questions were aimed at people talking about the primary grid they use. That’s important because it means people are talking about something they are familiar with but it’s also likely to bring a large amount of bias.

I’m not going to go through the results in great detail, the linked post above has all the details you’ll need but I will discuss some of the results.

How do you rate this grid overall?

Kitely
AviWorlds
Zandramas

I’ve listed the top three there, Kitely came out on top with a score of 4.93 from the 84 votes cast for Kitely. However AviWorlds in second place only received 16 votes and third placed Zandramas received just 10. Now those vote numbers are not what put those grids in those places, but the average score from those vote numbers did, hence why the margins of error here are going to be quite large. Kitely is a product I’m very keen on and I wish I had more time to spend there so I’m glad to see them getting such good feedback.

This theme of low numbers of votes and therefore large margins of error is a theme throughout the survey, although to be fair to Maria, she doesn’t hide this fact, talking of the community results Maria says:

“The startup social grid Zandramas ranked best for community but — with only 10 responses — this rating is also the least definitive.”

However parts of the survey were most definitely useful, one being the number of grids that are around being surprising to me.

Continue reading “Fourth Annual Opensim Grid Survey Reveals The Flaws With Surveys”

October 25, 2012October 25, 2012

Bring Your Own World

The in thing in the workplace these days, the big headache generator for IT Support departments is bring your own device, or BYOD as it is affectionately known, or pain in the arse bloody devices (PITABD) as it is unofficially known. I was in a meeting this week discussing how wonderful it is that people want to link their own devices to our work network, how cost savings can be made on our own hardware purchases and how we need to have a list of policies as long as both arms to deal with issues such as data leakages, insecure devices, unprotected devices, authenticators to login, acceptable use policies yadda yadda yadda .. several cups of coffee later I came away with a headache and a feeling that the more control we seem to pass to the user, the more control we need to get back by investing in even more security and polcy documents

Which brings us to Second Life and what some see as it’s insular approach to the wider metaverse. Hypergrid Business is a great site to get the lowdown on other virtual worlds, collaborative projects between owners of different grids, sims. There are examples of great business and education projects using worlds other than Second Life. However I can appreciate why Linden Lab have been reluctant to join the party. The wider metaverse has been discussed at Linden Lab, Robin Linden discussed others joining the Second Life grid back in the day when she was here and running office hours. However controlling access is a problem and the bottom line really is, Second Life is not the right project to join other grids. However that doesn’t mean Linden Lab could never engage.

Continue reading “Bring Your Own World”

April 5, 2012April 5, 2012

Kitely Adds Teleports And Additional Viewer Support

A couple of weeks back I was in Kitely, when CEO Ilan Tochner arrived to say hello to me inworld and we had an informal off the record chat. However, some of those off the record features that Ilan told me about have already been implemented! Oren Hurvitz blogged at the end of March about the new features, including world to world teleports and making the choice of viewer you use a less scary feature.

Oren blogging is nice to see because Ilan is the person most recognised by people outside of Kitely and nice as Ilan is, it’s also worth pointing out the amount of work that Oren Hurvitz is putting into Kitely, Oren is the VP of R&D as well as being a co-founder of Kitely, meaning he’s a very important person! There’s a team behind Kitely and it’s good that their work as a team is recognised.

The new features have already been covered eloquently by Inara Pey, indeed Kitely added a choice of viewers for Kitely based upon Inara’s excellent viewer reviews and roundups. I’m not eloquent like Inara, but I have taken a dabble with the new features and they work rather well, although one does need to remember that Kitely is very much in beta still and in many ways the publicity for Kitely arose earlier in the process than they would have liked, having said that, I’m sure Oren and Ilan aren’t complaining!

Continue reading “Kitely Adds Teleports And Additional Viewer Support”

March 2, 2012March 2, 2012

Kitely Now Offers Email And Twitter Signup Options

Kitely, the Amazon cloud based virtual world running on OpenSim have announced that you can now signup with a Twitter or Email account. This is a welcome development as some people, myself included, refused to signup with a Facebook account … well I don’t have a Facebook account! Not a personal profile anyway, I have a Facebook page.

The details of the changes can be found in this blog post. I have signed up via Twitter and it was an extremely smooth process, I also have two hours access a month and an Island to play with on the free account model, if I find Kitely engaging then I’ll look at the other pricing plans but in terms of trying it out, this is a good model.

Kitely has a pay as you go pricing plan, although you can opt to pay for visitors to your Island if you choose, I don’t think that will be the model most follow, however as I said, on the free account you get two hours a month anyway. Five bucks a month gets you twenty hours a month in Kitely plus a second region, whereas USD$20 gets you around 83 hours a month and 10 regions to play with, USD$50 a month gets you 200 hours a month and 30 regions whereas USD$100 a month gives you unlimited time in Kitely plus a whopping 100 regions to play with. However these are personal minutes, so you can see why for some, the Kitely model isn’t appealing.

Kitely owner Ilan Tochner has updated me in the comments about the pricing model to say that initial minutes are available due to people receiving Kitely Credits on the payment plans, so here’s a correction:

$5 / month = 25 hours / month (in Minutes+KC)

$20 / month = 100 hours / month (in Minutes+KC)

$50 / month = 250 hours / month (in Minutes+KC)

$100 / month = (unlimited Minutes + 5000 KC) / month

However if you want to see a decent use case for Kitely, there’s a post over at Hypergrid Business about an architecht selling his prefab sims.

Continue reading “Kitely Now Offers Email And Twitter Signup Options”