Filed under: Virtual Worlds — mike @ 11:13 am
Robert Scoble reports that an Australian company is working on a new Second Life competitor called “Outback Online” that replaces centrally-hosted servers with P2P technology to provide better graphics and more scalable islands. You can sign-up on their website for an Alpha version they plan to release this summer.
Filed under: Virtual Worlds — mike @ 7:37 am
The OpenSL Project (which is sponsored by The Electric Sheep Company) has taken the lead on open source Second Life development, being the first to release an (”alpha”) open source server for the SL client, called “OpenSim.” When SL opened up their client software in January, I predicted that someone would use the code and protocol documents to reverse-engineer a server soon. Holy cow! I had no idea they would do it in less than a month!
Filed under: Virtual Worlds — mike @ 7:15 am
Lately, I have grown disillusioned with Clay Shirky’s and other’s posts about Second Life on Valleywag. The tone of these seems to have shifted largely from objective criticism to an obsessive pursuit that demeans Second Life’s accomplishments by attempting to make it synonymous with “sex.” For those who regularly use Second Life for purposes other than sex, these rants sound too absurd for rational consideration. But, I suspect this should be expected from a publication that calls itself “Silicon Valley’s Gossip Blog.”
Filed under: Virtual Worlds — mike @ 12:16 pm
Linden Labs has opened the source code of their viewer application (or client/browser), and announced intentions to work with the public to develop white papers for their protocols. LL plans to focus development on a Second Life Grid with “clients and servers published and managed by different groups.”
Since many of the components that will make up this network are not yet done, we are not publishing long white papers or RFCs at this time — instead, we are giving everyone what we have along with a goal of producing those open standards with the input and assistance of the community that has brought Second Life to where it is now.
This is a huge win for the virtual worlds community, and for Linden Labs.
Filed under: Virtual Worlds — mike @ 12:48 pm
Technology reporters seem to be getting even more and more gullible when it comes to virtual worlds. CNet ran an article recently entitled, “Virtual reality to get its own network?” that discusses the latest replacement for the Internet, the Neuronet.
Following ridicule from the blogosphere, in particular some excellent detective work performed by Sven Johnson, CNet amended the article to indicate that this wonderful new network may not be so wonderful after all. In fact, many people seem to believe that the Neuronet is nothing more than a well-dressed scam.