Combat veterans rarely talk about their most searing hidden emotions and thoughts caused by their experiences in battle, a reticence that can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder.
We haven’t heard much recently about so-called virtual worlds such as Second Life, in which you move around with your own avatar.
Virtual worlds have had some real problems. Google, for instance, recently shut down an animated environment called Lively only five months after it was announced. And Linden Lab, whose Second Life online community was once front-page news, has neither reached many mainstream consumers nor created an important meeting place for corporate users.
In what tech pundits at Gartner Research call the curve of hype and gloom, Linden Lab’s virtual world, Second Life, has officially entered the gloom stage. In October, Reuters pulled its full-time Second Life reporter Eric Krangel, who had written daily news stories about the virtual world’s economy for a year and a half, out of the virtual world.
Google has shut down Lively, a service where people log on to chat and explore 3D virtual spaces, after a few short months. The MBAs of Silicon Valley have a pat phrase for the arrival of a competitor on the scene: They say it “validates their space.” What does it say, then, that Lively is gone? It means that Second Life, the best known of these unreal universes, is doomed, too.
A Nashville blues musician named Von Johin has been signed to a record label, thanks to his free performances on alternate computer universe Second Life. Von Johin is believed to be the first artist signed to a contract thanks to performances in a virtual world.
Second Life may be getting more real by the day. In a post on the Second Life blog on Monday, Jack Linden describes the Linden Lab plan to better regulate the Mainland, the section of virtual land that’s managed directly by Linden Lab itself.
Here’s the metaverse mystery of the week: This strange new private island with a very familiar name recently emerged on the server grid of virtual world Second Life. Spotted yesterday by Second Life blogger Tateru Nino (and confirmed when I checked the world’s dynamic map today), we have to assume it’s an official Nintendo property. When someone buys a virtual island from Linden Lab, they also get to name it. Given Linden’s DMCA enforcement policy, it’s unlikely they’d let just anyone dub an island “Nintendo.”
Shortly after Will Wright released yet another version of his SimCity in the mid 1990s, I was visiting Maxis’ studios and chatting with Will about evolutionary system and self-generating software. SimCity was a city that built itself according to a few rules — which the player tweaked and tried to maximize. It was the ultimate nerd god-game, the nerd playing god. Will offered to give me a peek preview of his next project. SimCity was so cool, I was expecting something even more generative, more ambitious, more god-like–something like Spore.
On April 17, 2008, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office published Apple’s patent application titled Enhancing Online Shopping Atmosphere. Apple’s patent generally relates to improving the experiences that online-shoppers may have at an online Apple Store, sometime in the future. While Apple points to the obvious advantages of shopping online, such as being continuously open for business 24/7, allowing consumers to quickly use search functions to find multiple items and of course the best of all, never having to leave the house to shop. However, Apple acknowledges that they have a long way to go before delivering a more interactive experience that could match that found in the real world.
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