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.

So, as you may recall last week Linden Lab responded about what appeared to be Second Life advertisements that capitalized on the recently-released James Cameron film, Avatar.

Linden Lab implied (though didn't actually state plainly) that the advertisements were not intended to cause confusion between Second Life and Avatar.

Since about Christmas (just after previews showing the blue-skinned Na'vi began to become available to the general public) IMVU started running some blue-skinned ads of its own.

It was when we saw the blue-avatared IMVU advertisement that sprung up during the same period that we inevitably started thinking about Sea Monkeys.

There's more similarities going on here than just the visible, so let's rummage around and see if we can't find one of the old advertisements in our files.

Continue reading The Sea Monkey experience of avatars

The Sea Monkey experience of avatars originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 18 Jan 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Google's Lively presents us with an interesting scenario. It was literally a checklist of what critics have been saying that virtual environments such as Linden Lab's Second Life absolutely must have in order to make it.

A simplified user-interface, embedded in the Web-browser, content designed by professionals rather than (mostly) amateurs, a 'room' (or contained space) model rather than a widespread world. While it was touted as having no requirement for a separate downloadable client, that wasn't actually true -- it did actually have one, though it was relatively painless to download and install.

In short, it was the perceived holy grail of virtual environment 'must-haves' for success, as so frequently touted in media articles which lauded its simplicity and accessibility. Also, in short, Lively was a failure -- a spectacular one. Spectacular, but not without educational value.

Continue reading The death of Lively and some lessons about complexity

The death of Lively and some lessons about complexity originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 02 Jan 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Open to the public just today, it seems hard to believe that Google's new Lively service is the much-vaunted virtual world product Project Snowcrash aka MyWorld that has been in secret beta-testing for some time.

Lively is a series of web-embeddable virtual spaces (think Metaplace) that function as a series of otherwise disconnected chatrooms (think IMVU or Twinity). You download the browser plugin for Firefox or Microsoft Internet Explorer (both Windows only, sorry folks), sign in with your google account, create a room or join one and you're ready to go. Just make sure you've signed into the Lively website at least once -- otherwise you'll have the Joining Room message forever.

A selection of 'hip' human and furry avatars are available, along with an assortment of clothing. There is no user-created content at this time. We'll have some more impressions for you once we've given this a once-over around the office, so stay tuned.

Google's Lively: Live public beta originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 09 Jul 2008 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The Daily Grind: Should MMOGs and virtual worlds be separate? originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 14 Jun 2008 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Cepstral

Cepstral brings text-to-voice to IMVU originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 08 Feb 2008 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Actually there's quite a few reasons that there's little competition to Second Life in existance or planned - at least the sort of competition that a Second Life user would think of as a competitor to Second Life (hint: They don't think TSO is, or Kaneva, or Red Light Center, or Project Entropia or IMVU. Many don't count Active Worlds or There as competition either).

One of those reasons is that even people who think they're in the same industry or who are pundits and commentators on the industry don't have any idea what Second Life is. They don't use it, so they don't know what people are getting out of it. So when they come to build a 'Second Life Killer', they build something that does not (as far as the average user of Second Life can see) have much of anything that competes.

Continue reading Without a clue - why there isn't more competition for Second Life

Without a clue - why there isn't more competition for Second Life originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 06 Nov 2007 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.