On April 12th 1961 Yuri Gagarin, a Russian Cosmonaut, took the spacecraft Vostok into Outer Space. Twenty years later, April 12th 1981, NASA’s first Space Shuttle was launched. Celebrations of these events take many shapes and forms.
Yuri’s Night is very much part of those celebrations and even goes boldly into virtual worlds, Second Life and Kitely are two virtual worlds you should be familiar with.
Diana Budds has published an article over at Fastco Design; The Future Of Shopping Is . . . Second Life On Acid? The article features the work of British designer and filmmaker Allison Crank, who is based in Eindhoven, which is in The Netherlands, not Britain!
The basis of the article is that e-commerce is trumping the mall and therefore, the social experience of the physical mall is being lost. Allison Crank suggests that one way of bringing back the social side of the mall is to introduce virtual reality.
Crank calls it “a new third place for the public to meet, perform, indulge, and play in immersive environments.” I call it Second Life on acid. The designer envisions her concept working with augmented reality devices like Microsoft’s Hololens or Magic Leap to superimpose this virtual world over our own. For example, if someone were commuting, he or she could strap on an augmented reality headset and participate in the Reality Theater.
The major problem I have with Allison’s idea is that we’ve seen malls in Second Life, lots and lots of malls. We’ve seen malls with impossible physics, we can teleport in Second Life. However, malls in Second Life have been undone not by a future more immersive product, but by the ease of point and click shopping that the Second Life Marketplace offers. This isn’t unique to Second Life by the way, I’ve seen people in OpenSim asking for web based marketplaces, indeed Kitely has a web based marketplace.
People love the ease of shopping that web based marketplaces provide. This isn’t to say that Allison’s idea is dead in the water, far from it, but it is a warning to people who think virtual reality shopping is going to be a popular tool of choice compared to a web based shopping experience.
If you’re read my other two posts reviewing then there’s nothing new here in this one, it’s just a merging of the two posts to make it easier for future reference. This means it will be a long post, with pictures, videos and probably some errors.
January
January started with a look back to 2013 and the number of private region losses. The scores on the door from Tyche Shepherd displayed a slow down on the number of regions leaving the Second Life grid, something that would continue during 2014.
2012 Net Private Region Losess – 2865 (12.0%)
2013 Net Private Region Losses – 1719 (8.2%)
The virtual world of Kitely moved to a different pricing model which largely did away with the pay by the minute options as these had not been popular.
The Blackened Mirror Poster
Season 2 of The Blackened Mirror was taking a mid-season break but would return by the end of January. The show was recorded in Second Life.
Linden Lab were Raising The Roof : The HTTP Project. This project, which had started in 2012 was aimed at improving HTTP communications to improve the end user experience. Linden Lab would continue working on improvements during the year.
Second Life users were getting frustrated by tax and account information requests from Linden Lab. They would continue to be frustrated by these requests throughout the year despite Linden Lab improving their communications and information on these issues.
Then came the storm to warm up many a chilly January evening, Cloud Party announced that they would be closing their virtual doors on February 21st.
This was quickly followed by even more news to warm up January, Aston Villa fan and Linden Lab CEO, Rod Humble, was leaving Linden Lab. This created a Twitter storm.
In this post I will review 2014 from a largely virtual world perspective for the months January to June. This is part 1 of 2 as part 2 is still a work in progress but will hopefully appear tomorrow. I’ll combine both posts into another post for easier future reference once they are both completed. These posts will miss lots of big and interesting stories because the nature of the beast demands some brevity. These post may well look longer than they actually are at first glance because of images and pictures. The aim of posts such as these are to give a brief overview of the year, rather than an in depth review. An in depth review is too long for a blog post, it may make for an interesting book.
Anyway, on with the show, as they say.
January
January started with a look back to 2013 and the number of private region losses. The scores on the door from Tyche Shepherd displayed a slow down on the number of regions leaving the Second Life grid, something that would continue during 2014.
2012 Net Private Region Losess – 2865 (12.0%)
2013 Net Private Region Losses – 1719 (8.2%)
The virtual world of Kitely moved to a different pricing model which largely did away with the pay by the minute options as these had not been popular.
The Blackened Mirror Poster
Season 2 of The Blackened Mirror was taking a mid-season break but would return by the end of January. The show was recorded in Second Life.
Linden Lab were Raising The Roof : The HTTP Project. This project, which had started in 2012 was aimed at improving HTTP communications to improve the end user experience. Linden Lab would continue working on improvements during the year.
Second Life users were getting frustrated by tax and account information requests from Linden Lab. They would continue to be frustrated by these requests throughout the year despite Linden Lab improving their communications and information on these issues.
Then came the storm to warm up many a chilly January evening, Cloud Party announced that they would be closing their virtual doors on February 21st.
This was quickly followed by even more news to warm up January, Aston Villa fan and Linden Lab CEO, Rod Humble, was leaving Linden Lab. This created a Twitter storm.
We here at Ciaran Laval …. hmm might need to change that title in the new year! Anyway, we here at Ciaran Laval (*Editor*pssst there’s only one of you these days/*Editor*)….. Then who are you? Wait wait wait! Back on track.
We here at Ciaran Laval would like to wish all of our readers a very merry Christmas and a very happy new year, even those of you who don’t like us. (*Editor*It’s just you!/*Editor*).
We would like to wish Linden Lab, High Fidelity, Inworldz, Kitely and OpenSim a very merry Christmas too. We definitely want you to prosper in the new year (*Editor*I resign!/*Editor*). Obviously this is because this blog depends upon these ventures prospering!
