Tateru Nino
Articles by Tateru Nino
The Virtual Whirl: The secret sauce
Virtual environments evince a significant lack of mainstream adoption. Relatively tiny percentages of the world population are involved in them in any way online. There's something clearly missing. At the present time, virtual environments simply lack any compelling reason to exist that motivates mainstream users and might drive mainstream adoption. There's no killer app, or secret sauce that gets large numbers of people thinking "I want to get me some of that!"
The Virtual Whirl: Immersion, virtual environments, Facebook, and the conceptual hump
Second Life is an immersive virtual environment. That is, it fosters attention and a quality of focus. You might subscribe to alternative definitions of the word "immersion", but focus and attention are the sense being used when developer/operators talk about an "immersive environment". They might intend one of the other meanings at other times – the word is a pretty slippery one. The problem is that for most general-purpose virtual environments (eg: Second Life), that immersivity – that quality of attention and focus – kicks in pretty late. Only after you understand the basics of the context in which your actions, activities and experiences are taking place, do you have the satisfying sort of immersion that comes so easily to flat spaces like the Web and Facebook.
The Virtual Whirl: Vox virtualis
A change is as good as a holiday, they say. Seriously, I don't actually know anyone who says this other than myself; though I'm assured that there are some folks out there who do. With that tragically underutilized platitude in mind, then, last week I posed a question to a spread of well-known virtual environment users (at least to those that I felt would actually respond) and collected the responses. The question put to the respondents was "What's the single thing that the operators/developers could do to make you feel more satisfied with their virtual environment offering; what thing would help an operator keep you as a customer, or that would make some other operator more appealing than the one or ones you already have?"
The Virtual Whirl: Death and taxes
"Nothing is certain but death and taxes"; a rather sardonic and bleak proverb, quoted and paraphrased by a number of famous figures over the years. The earliest on record was Daniel Defoe, in The Political History of the Devil in 1726. Well, this week the death part doesn't concern us so much as the taxes. Many Americans have spent this month scrambling to get their taxes filed, and for many of the rest of us our own turn comes due in just a couple of months. With that in mind, I thought I'd talk about the taxation status of virtual assets.
Linden Lab hands down Second Life metrics for Q1 2010
Today, Linden Lab is releasing the quarterly metrics for Second Life, showing overall performance for Q1 2010, and contrasting that with the performance of previous quarters. Linden Lab claims that Q1 2010 was an all-time high for the Second Life economy. We'll drill down through the metrics and see if that's so.
The Virtual Whirl: More Marriott, less Microsoft
It's certainly taking time for people, organizations and businesses to learn how to obtain benefits from virtual environments, and it will take quite some time yet to figure out how to optimize those results. On the plus side, there are many hundreds of thousands of people working on that. Working out how to effectively operate and manage virtual environments for large numbers of people, well, that's actually taking a lot longer. There are far fewer people actually involved in the process, and the same wheels are being reinvented over and over – and quite often, they seem to be square ones.
Evans et al vs Linden Lab: The new lawsuit on the block
Just to strain our collective brain here at Massively, there's a new lawsuit that has been leveled against Second Life operator, Linden Lab. Plaintiffs Carl Evans, Donald Spencer, Valerie Spencer and Cindy Carter have applied for a class action lawsuit against Linden Lab on property ownership, misrepresentation and fraud. The plaintiffs are represented by Jason Archinaco, of Pribanic, Pribanic, and Archinaco LLC of Pittsburgh. You may remember Archinaco's name as the man who represented Marc Bragg in Bragg vs Linden Lab on similar issues. That particular case was settled, and the terms of the settlement remain unknown – but appeared to be favorable to Bragg. Another name you might remember is our second-favorite USA Federal Judge, Eduardo Robreno, who heard the Bragg vs Linden Lab case, and is now hearing Evans et al vs Linden Lab. It's almost like old home week! Glee! Robreno found issues with the Second Life Terms of Service, and with the Terms of Service likely to go on trial in this case, it could have far-reaching effects for similar boilerplate EULAs for other virtual environments and MMOGs, as well as for Linden Lab's own new Terms of Service.
Fahy vs Linden Lab: This just gets weirder
The other day we covered a lawsuit by Corey Fahy (AKA Belial Foulsbane in Second Life) vs Linden Lab, various third-party viewer developers, content creators and others. While there doesn't seem to be any case to really answer (because you can't copyright a name, method, process or algorithm, and Fahy seems ineligible for legal costs and statutory damages in any case) things definitely took a turn for the weird last week.
The Virtual Whirl: A virtual environment user's bill of rights
This week, in The Virtual Whirl, I'd like you to join me as I take a stab at a virtual environment user's bill of rights. It's a perennial topic given that service operators have a very unbalanced power relationship with users. I don't believe that users should make unreasonable demands or boss their VE providers around, but certainly there's a list of things that I believe are important to look for in a general purpose virtual environment, and that the lack of one or more of them should certainly get you thinking about alternatives.
Fahy vs Linden Lab: No case to answer?
Last week, on Thursday 8 April, Corey Fahy in Philadelphia filed a lawsuit against Linden Lab and more than 25 others, in the Pennsylvania East District Court (case number 2:2010cv01561, assigned to judge Joel Harvey Slomsky). Fahy alleges that an algorithm in one of his Second Life products has been subjected to copyright infringement, accompanied by the usual requests for damages, statutory damages, ten times damages, attorney's fees and all that. Where do we even begin? We'll spare you most of the cruft and go straight to the heart of the problems that we can see with this particular lawsuit.
The Virtual Whirl: You know that guy
This week, in The Virtual Whirl, we're looking at people, worldviews, stereotypes, public perception, technology angst, and ... most importantly, we're looking at that guy. Trust me, you'll know the one.
The Virtual Whirl: The emperor's new terms
This week The Virtual Whirl virtual mailbag is stuffed to overflowing with queries about the new Second Life Terms Of Service (TOS) that launched slightly behind the new Second Life 2.0 viewer. The new version has grown from 7,500 words to more than 30,000 words across no less than 18 separate documents, all of which you must agree to in order to use the service – and golly, it has raised some questions.
Second Life 2.0 goes live today
As we previously predicted, the Second Life 2.0 viewer is going live today, meeting the originally slated release target of Q1 2010, if only by a few hours. The 2.0 viewer has been in public beta since 23 February. In addition to the new viewer, its rearranged user-interface, slate color scheme and slick Shared Media implementation, today sees the launch of two new Orientation experiences and a selection of new starter avatars to select from (we wonder if any of them are blue).
The Virtual Whirl: Cornered!
This week, in The Virtual Whirl, we're looking at a major business pitfall, and one which afflicts many virtual environment and MMOG developers/operators at one time or another.
Linden Lab axes Vivox SLim Second Life client beta
Back in 2008, quite a big thing was made of Vivox's lightweight voice/IM client for Second Life, called SLim. That buzz continued through 2009, with the announcement of voice fonts, SLim-to-SMS, and client-side recording (all scheduled for the second half of 2009) and conference calls, group text/voice chat (via SLim) and browser-based voice applets on the Second Life Web-site (scheduled for this year). Yesterday, the news came down in a mailout from Linden Lab about the status of the SLim beta. "The program has been a great success," said the Lab and, "we have decided to end the SLim beta program, effective immediately."
Second Life third-party viewer policies get an update but still fail to do the job
Last week, the promised update of Linden Lab's Third-Party Viewer (TPV) policies crept out onto the Second Life Web-site with little fanfare. After the fuss caused by the tangle of legal incompatibilities, muddled terminology and ambiguous phrasing in the first version, the Lab said it would go back and address the problems, and get the policy document fixed. So, you'd think they'd have gotten it right this time around, right? We certainly did. We were wrong.
The Virtual Whirl: News of the Whirl
This week, in The Virtual Whirl, we're having our monthly roundup of news items. Things that got missed, things that didn't make the cut, things that got buried, and things that really should have gotten your attention anyway.
Second Life script limitations to prejudice against Mono?
In a sense, script memory limitations aren't coming to Second Life; they already exist. What's going on is the process of Linden Lab making those limits predictable, and setting things up in such a way that script memory usage doesn't cause simulator processes to thrash madly (from paging memory to and from disk). There's some interesting side-effects emerging from the overall prototype implementation, however. Mono (and, eventually C# when or if it becomes implemented as a scripting language) look like the losers.
The Virtual Whirl: Why virtual environments?
This week, in The Virtual Whirl, we're asking "Why virtual environments?" – Not why are they anything specifically, but just why. Depending on your definition of virtual environments, people have been building them and using them for decades now, since before the Web; since before the advent of the personal computer. To make a virtual space from a real space, or to fabricate an entirely original virtual space from whole cloth – what's driving that and where is that going?
The Virtual Whirl: Questions from the virtual mailbag
This week, in The Virtual Whirl, we're going to take a selection of reader questions that we've received in comments and in the virtual mailbag and do our best to offer up some useful answers. Join us as we whirl through the mail. Not surprisingly, the two most frequently asked questions involve the demise of virtual environment, There.com.