Welcome to The Virtual Whirl, a new weekly Massively column covering virtual environments generally. The term 'virtual world' is slowly seeing less use, being supplanted by the more general 'virtual environment', but the world term still has a fair bit of life left in it.

Virtual environments covers a whole lot of ground. From William Crowther's original efforts in 1976 that based a game in a virtual version of the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, virtual environments have been a part of gaming, artificial intelligence and behavioral research, modeling, telemetry and process control and more.

Nowadays we're seeing Second Life, Blue Mars, There.com, IMVU and others trying to find places in non-game contexts, like content-development and prototyping, publishing and performance, entertainment and social, education and business; efforts that are met with varying amounts of success.

Continue reading The Virtual Whirl: Community guide to Virtual Worlds

The Virtual Whirl: Community guide to Virtual Worlds originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

During 2005, sociocultural anthropologist Thomas Malaby performed an ethnographic study at Linden Lab. Not of Second Life and its users, per se, but of Linden Lab itself, as a key component in the collective structure in and around Second Life.

Malaby found an organization whose actions, functions, and effects were frequently at odds with those which its employees and managers believed it to have. In the years since his research, now documented in his book, Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life, the Lab has performed a 180 in some areas, but have their perceptions of themselves as an organization, and as an agency actually changed?

Continue reading Linden Lab, then and now: Tools, policy, self-perception and anthropology

Linden Lab, then and now: Tools, policy, self-perception and anthropology originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 28 Jul 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

According to Dusan Writer, the Instant Messaging portion of the Second Life grid network protocols contains location information about every avatar who sends an IM to you. It's been known for some time that the fields designed to encapsulate that information were present (though only the estate information was available to the recipient via the Second Life viewer) but it has not been clear that the information about the location of the sender was actually filled in.

Apparently, it is -- and it isn't really that hard to get at, for anyone who can implement the protocol, use an existing library or modify and rebuild the viewer source code. This might be considered something of a faux pas, as a similar information leak a couple of years ago required considerable retooling of protocols to avoid anyone who wanted to know your business from ... well, knowing your business.

Continue reading Second Life grid protocol leaks avatar locations?

Second Life grid protocol leaks avatar locations? originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 17 Oct 2008 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Dusan Writer has spotted an HTML comment in the source for search.secondlife.com which says "<!-- placeholer page for XBOX, PS3, and iPhone versions of client when they launch next real soon now -->"

Definitely quite the tease. Certainly, Second Life can be made to run on a PS3 (and there's at least one enterprising user who has had some success on that front); the Xbox 360 would present a much more considerable technical challenge; and as for the iPhone, well, Linden Lab has been making noises about lighter-weight clients/viewers for some months.

We're not sure quite how much credence to put to the message, however, as "real soon now" is a piece of engineer slang/sarcasm generally taken to mean "Whenever, when it's ready, maybe never". However this could neatly dovetail with Kapor's "very important announcement" coming up in seven days.

Lab's teasing 'placeholer': Xbox, PS3, iPhone? originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 01 Jul 2008 02:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Dusan Writer has decided to put his money where his mouth is and hold a competition for UI designs for a newbie-viewer, offering a total L$800,000 prize-money for the top three designs.

You don't need to be a coder to participate. This is about designs, so mock-up images are what's required. If you've been foaming at the mouth about how Linden Lab can't make a decent newbie-friendly UI, this is your chance to demonstrate that you're not just full of smoke and wind. The first prize of L$500,000 doesn't exactly sour the pot, either.

We're already itching to see the results, so check out the competition rules and conditions.

Contest for newbie viewer UI originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 05 Jun 2008 23:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.