5 posts tagged “3d”
The study is based on the (I assume, email) interviews with 250 respondents and some analytics of the SL usage statistics. The results will not surprise anyone who has minimal exposure and experience with SL, and I believe will not be able to change the opinions of those who don't.
- About 70% perceive Second Life to improve collaboration and communication
- More than 60% perceive that it improves cooperation between people
- People are using Second Life not to change their identity, but rather to visit new places and meet new people
One of the findings, or rather its description, is really funny:
- 56% of respondents perceive Second life as easy to use
The articles compares the look & feel of the new app with MS' Vista, but judging from my (albeit quite short) experience of working with Vista, this should not be seen as a compliment. No doubt, new Vista's window stacking feature impressed me very much when I tried it first time - cool, slick, elegant. It did impress me when I tried it second time too.
But after a while it starts to really annoy you, because of not adding anything useful besides 'coolness' and 'slickness' yet forcing you to learn new way of interfacing with information. It looks like a half-finished job at the moment - a move in the right direction, but because of its incompleteness presenting rather a burden than a benefit.
I somehow have similar feelings about SpaceTime new tool; but perhaps it's indeed too early to say.
But the thing presented in the movie, a C-Dragon image processing engine, is an incredibly cool application, which can potentially change entirely the way we take pictures and look at them (and in fact the whole purpose of this exercise.)
I was always fascinated by how one image can 'interact' with the another one, either by looking similar, or having certain common elements, or somehow else. Back to my days with Livejournal, I was one of the co-founders of a community called Rhyming Pics where members were reacting to the posted pictures with their own images, trying to 'rhyme' visually.
The ideas behind MS' PhotoSynth (who acquired this innovative team) are of course very different - yet they also somehow resonate with this 'rhyming' principle. I can even imagine what kind of 'visual poems' can emerge from such an environment.
According the BW, the Sl is already soooo last century, and a bunch of new (or not so new) 3D worlds are 'new black'. One of them, ActiveWorlds, is particularly praised for its better fit with corporate worlds and 'good netiznes' (compared to 'perverse', 'libertarian' and in general anti-corporate community of SL.)
The paper was widely criticized in many blogs, to the extent that BW's opinion on the matter was descibed "as inconstant, and meaningless, as a teenage crush". However flip-floppy the attitude of BW is, one good thing about the article is it presents an overview of possible alternatives to SL (perhaps, not the most complete but interesting enought to have a look; it lists the following 3D worlds as the 'next possible futures': Forterra Systems, Protospheres from ProtonMedia, Multiverse Network, Qwaq, Habbo Hotel and other 3D solutions from Sulake, and lastly ActiveWorlds.
Despite quite a provocative tone in general, the article honestly admits, that
"Second Life shows no signs of fading away any time soon — in fact, the number of corporations in the online parallel universe has risen to about 50 [way higher, in fact], and the number of Second Life residents has grown nearly seven-fold to nearly 7 million [well, way lower in fact] in less than a year."
This is how our first space in Second Life looks like just before the launch ( I also announced it in the second-lifers, one of the SL communities in Livejournal.) As I wrote there, this is not yet our real company space, but rather a first platform we can use to learn more about this world and to invite people to our creative experiments.
And this is how this space looked last Friday, when we opened up and threw our first party there!
To our pleasant surprise, there was quite a lot of people there, interesting and sympathetic to what we try to do in this virtual world. Lot of new 'friends', interesting conversations and - fortunately - no griefing or other unpleasant things. And it was a good party - on both sides of the screens! I was so busy talking with the guests that forgot to take the in-world pictures, quite a rare case for me :)
The place is on, and nice gifts and freebies are still available (and the subscription to our 'friends group' is still open for those who want to participate, later on, in our creative sessions and workshops in the future; here is the sladdress.)
We even got some first positive feedback!
Potentially very interesting writes Mark Wallace in this 3pointD blog.
I still have to figure out how to work with the sources outside of Vox; for example, in Livejournal I would simply syndicate this interesting blog and keep reading it in the Friend-List of my own journal (analogue of the Neighborhood here). Not sure if something similar exists here as well. Any hint is very welcome.
My Groups
-
Photography Updated: 29 minutes ago
-
Photographers Updated: 39 minutes ago
-
Life and Photos Updated: 2 hours ago
Neighborhood
Explore friends, family, friends & family, or entire neighborhood.
