I got an invite into Blue Mars, and I don’t like it so far.  The UI is cumbersome, controls behave slow, and i can’t even maximize the window.  I can’t tell if I’m chatting or walking.  Walking is cumbersome with a constant audible chime that you here every time you take a step.  It also uses CHAT BUBBLES which brings back nightmares from there.com.  It’s cute but you’re gonna miss nearly everything people say if you’re not looking at them.  it’s hard to express how frustrating this game is.

Sure sure it’s BETA but but for fucks sake, didn’t any of the other MILLINONS of video games from over the past 15 years of 3D games give the devleoper of Blue Moon a CLUE as to how NOT to make a cumbersome UI and control setup?  Why does it seem like every time some developer creates a new virtual world they have to essually IGNORE how other simular games/services function?  So they have to start from ground zero and start with the most akward and cumbersome UI and controls ever.

When i was setting up my avatar’s apperance on the WEB PAGE, I sware to GOD I chose to have RED hair, and when I came into world, I was a blonde.  There are virtually NO customizations to your avatar, other than a small handful of hairstyles, and clothes.  You can’t even alter the shape and appearance of your avatar.  Everyone has exactly the same body type.  The only big-deal thing you can do is customize your face, add all kinds of make up effects, as well as draw on warpaint.

There’s this place called the “waterfall level” it’s a lush tropical island with waterfalls all over the place.  It’s very pretty.  You’re sitting in a flying craft that bascailly hovers.  Again this is where the controls fall so short that you’d think that other flight sims were never created before.  Or at least the developers of Blue Mars never played other flight sim games.

When on foot, there is no camera control, which is very there.com like.  But at least with there.com the camrea follows your avatar in a predictable way as any 3rd person game does.  In this you you can turn  and steer your avatar around the world as it walks but your camera view is fixed in whatever direction it was left in.  I’ve not tried first person yet but considering how clueless the developers of Blue Mars seem to be they will likely mess that all up and ignore status quo.  Sure it uses WASD for most of the avatar navigation, but not your camera view.

It has a lot to work to be done on to even come close to even the level of UO.  Graphically it’s nice, UI is rather ufly, some issue with text, and the controls are just gives me a headache. It’s a shame that the developers of Blue Mars seem have to ignore the features, functions, and progress already made by other MMOs and videogames, and have to start at ground zero.  If this truly BETTER than SL, then why isn’t it?

Great news for Libba Bray fans!  On April 28th Libba Bray will be hosting a virtual event on There.com, in promotion for the paperback release of The Sweet Far Thing (The Gemma Doyle Trilogy).  Libba will be doing a reading of TThe Sweet Far Thing  and chatting with other There.com avatars from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. EST on Tuesday, April 28th.

I love, love, love the Gemma Doyle trilogy.  A few of my students are now reading A Great and Terrible Beauty and Rebel Angels. They are eating them up and loving Gemma.  Gemma is a fantastic heroine and I’m thrilled my students are getting to know her. 

La majorité des personnes actuellement sont relativement sceptiques sur l’utilité apparemment “artificielle” des mondes virtuels. Ces mondes en cours ou en création devraient pourtant prendre leur place dans le futur au niveau de différents usages tout comme l’Internet ou d’autres modes de virtualité. Ce concept de virtualité n’est pas nouveau mais par contre très mal employé et parfois fustigé (second life, get a first life) finalement tout ceci est histoire de compréhension et de recadrage historique. C’est à travers une explication « historique » et chronologique que les appréhensions du virtuel sont balayées par une brillante démonstration de Alain Le Diberder. Le conférencier n’est autre que l’un des concepteurs du deuxième monde (monde virtuel français apparu avant Second Life, autonome et rentable mais dont le développement fut stoppé par Vivendi Universal). Il y a deux ans tout le monde se demandait ce que pensaient Alain Le Diberder et son frère Frédéric de leur successeur américain, or on apprend aujourd’hui que SL est pour eux une suite évidente et que notamment Frédéric est vendeur de chaussure à ses heures .

Voici donc une explication exhaustive sur les nécessités de se pencher sur ces univers virtuels en devenir et qu’en somme tout cela vient de très loin.

La deuxième partie est orchestré par Yann Minh qui donne quelques explications sur l’utulisation de second Life pour son travail d’artiste.

Source : Blog des Managers Intranet

En mi insaciable busqueda de metaversos que calmen mis ansias de cibersexo relaciones virtuales, he topado con There.com, un universo virtual que vio la luz al mismo tiempo que Second Life. Lo curiosos es que mientras Second Life se hacia increiblemente famoso alrededor del globo, There.com permanecio en la sombra, aun cuando es un entorno mas completo para las relaciones sociales. El porque? En unos breves instantes.

A priori, There ofrece lo mismo que cualquier metaverso social: un mundo abierto donde concer otras personas y relacionarte con ellas. Navegamos en este mundo gracias a nuestros avatares virtuales y tenemos una capacidad limitada para alterar dicho mundo. Con una estetica mas simplona la personalizacion del avatar es simple pero eficaz y nos permite diseñar con suma facilidad a nuestro personajillo virtual. Y es que There.com es mucho mas sencillo que Second Life. La interfaz de usuario, la personalizacion, los viajes a traves del mundo… todo ello se aprende con facilidad en media hora. Incluso el tutorial, aunque corto, cumple con sus funciones maravillosamente, ayudandonos a integrarnos con mas facilidad en el entorno.Incluso las relaciones sociales son mas faciles gracias al sistema de grupos incluido dentro del metaverso. Gracias a el podemos encontrar grupos de gente que este jugando al Paintball o a los Karts, o que simplemente se dedican a charlar y a tomar el cafe.. virtual, claro.

Pero esta sencillez tambien es su mayor lacra, ya que nos limita las posibles actividades dentro del sistema. Mientras que en Second Life cualquier cosa es posible (en la teoria al menos), en There solamente podemos hacer lo que los creadores dicten.

Aun asi, considero que There.com cumple sus funciones de forma mucho mejor que Second Life, y puedo confirmar que, si, esta mejor aqui que alli.

If there’s a virtual organization for cruelty to animals searching for evidence of abuse or even a contingent of PETA zealots looking for another way of making mischief, then a trip to there.com might be worth the effort.

In a wonderful YouTube posting by Howshafern420, he demonstrates some, er, “creative” ways of having fun with your pets. It seems that virtual dogs are just as stupid as real life dogs and are happy to respond to any commands, no matter how pointless. Howshafern show how to juggle a stack of canines with no more effort required than typing commands.

Coming soon: virtual taxidermy for beginners – first, find five live cats…

I recently found this story (and linden blog post and Press Announcement) that Linden Labs has acquired two off-site SL-commerce sites where you can purchase in-game items (technically) offline. You can simply browse items online and click to buy and then they will appear in your inventory.  The two companies in question are Xstreet (Formerly SLxchange) and OnRez. The plan is to integrate these services directly into Second Life it self, no longer using a 3rd party service.  My initial guess is better security so you don’t have separate logins at these 3rd party sites that may have some indirect access to your second life avatar account.  But all of this sounds fine and dandy, but this is something they should have done 6 years ago, and There.com has been doing it since day one.

There.com world is intricately linked with the production web server. It’s the only way to really do much of anything inside the world of There.com besides doing micro transaction buying a tshirt.  It was also how you set up events, created documents (not just plain text notecards), teleported around the open world, view profiles, etc, etc. It was the use of a stripped down web browser (IE actually) which is something the SL View has recently has added in the past year (striped down mozila). There really was no real need to buy land and set up a massive mall and rent out plots to vendors like we do in Second Life. And only to realize you barely make any money doing so. There.com simply did it with eBay like auction service.

All items bought and sold in there.com can be traded, given away, or put it up in auctions sold to the highest bidder, or sold as a buy-now. Developers had special access to the auctions to sell limited new copies of their products as buy-now auctions listings.  They didn’t have to build vendos and rent a space in some mall (of a bazillion other malls in SL) and drop the vendo there.  There.com didn’t have any stupid DRM-style (no transfer) restrictions with some possible exceptions with employee made special gifts.

Furthermore you are able to TRY OUT any item in auctions and use it in-game to see if you really want to buy it or not, and the item last about 2 minutes.  Rather than going on gut feelings when you buy something in SL, or spend 1L on a DEMO that you can’t even edit/adjust (cluttering up your inventory) to see if it suits you or not. Plus there.com has a “Secure trade” window, so when you want to trade or sell with someone directly you open a window that shows exactly what you’re getting from the other person with two levels of acknowledgment before the trade occurs. This avoids someone just ripping you off after you hand over someone money in hopes that person will give you something back.

This explains why in the past year SL viewer has integrated a web browser into the viewer, and has overhauled it’s search engine, which I found not to be much useful.  I still use the old ‘People’ or ‘Places’ tabs when searching for specific things.  Using the global search would give you links to crap you don’t need like people’s profiles or group pages that happen to mention the word you used to search that.  Plus many places will fill the description with random word that aren’t directly related to the place so they appear in search (meta tag whores).

I’m glad that after 6 years they finally got something in place to do something that There.com has already been doing for 6 years.  But then again it took there.com about FIVE years (and two different management changes) to get a hugging emote in game.  But there.com’s auction system is still a horrible mess to sort though.  It’s inventory setup is a fucking nightmare.

Another thing to point out is that sites like Xstreet allow basic members (with no payment info on file) to buy and sell L$ and bypass LindeX. I see nothing wrong with this in and of it self, but if Xstreet gets absorbed into Second Life, then this L$ market will disappear.  According to the market rates at Xstreet, you’ll get a better deal buying L$ than you would from LindeX.  Transversely you’re better off selling L$ at LindeX, than at Xstreet.  But this doesn’t take into account what percentage cut is taken (if any) for transactions, nor any other fees relating to transferring money to and from paypal, from credit cards, and bank accounts.

So is this a move by Linden Labs to create a more convenient and secure way to purchase in-world items, or are they killing off another L$ exchange market to establish a monopoly?  About four years ago there was website (sorry I can’t remember the name of it) that dealt with all forms of online currency allowing you to basically swap out your Linden$ for ThereBucks, or WoW gold, or about a dozen other kinds of MMO currency. Problem was a lot a fraud occurred using Paypal, and only Linden Labs would backup and support issues that arose. Other MMOs just didn’t care, or didn’t have the resources to deal with more fraud than they already had in-house.  So for a good while they only traded with L$.  Soon there was a lot of talk about Linden Labs and this exchange site merging up and establishing an in-world trading market for L$. But Linden Labs pulled the rug out from under them, the site soon closed down, and soon after that LindeX was established.  Bit of a stab in the back wasn’t it?

I got into the virtual world scene about 7-8 months ago and I find it kindda fun, till things went around and I found myself having a stalker and no matter what I do, reported the person and all that I just cant get rid of him, it was when I came across another avatar that gave me life back and turned my virtual world around supported me in every way, if there is something that he loves doing that is giving me gifts and helping me build my own line of designs for the virtual world coz everytime I am to put something in submission I have to pay for it and mind you its not cheap, frankly speaking this is the first virtual site that I have researched on that you have to pay for everything to make it in the world alive, from the membership to the submissions of your own designs they have to earn from you, the name of the site is http://there.com.

They got famous with help of several huge companies and it is quite a huge company on its own, but their people don’t know how to be people and from what has happened to me its unacceptable…It was the time when I left my avatar in AFK (away from keyboard) and since my office is a shop and its open to public and its near the front door, anyone can have sat on my computer at that time, we got visitors then and my computer was left running, when I got back I saw that the avatar changed its position, I got curious, I have o check on things if they are still in tact at that time my avatar is somewhere in the property of my bf (yes in that site we get to own properties and land those things), I found that account having a huge amount of therebucks (monetary exchange in the VW), so I closed it down and checked outside and asked on who got in my office, then I told the guest not to go in there and then I set my other avatar up considering that I cant get in the other one, going afk is a form of leveling up the skills in the site so people have to go like that sometimes to earn something, besides that avatar is an island guide which means its an ambassador of good will in the site, then I put up my regular avie to play again then it happened again, I was called at the other office for aout 5 min and when I got back my regular avie was a premium, I dont really understand what is going on till I found out that its our adopted cousin that has been going around my office all day and i am assuming now that he did all this confusion to me, as he placed a stolen credit card to test and the tester just happened to be my account as a result both avies got banned, for a reason I did not do, I sent them emails after emails and they wont even try to listen, they accused me, and instead of helping me they pin me down more, till I got permanently banned, is it because I am asian that they didnt listen or what? talk about racists!!!

I still have a lot to tell my readers out there but this is just the first part of the bad things I got being in that site called there.com, I do this for people to know what they are going to go through just in casethey log in there.

IMVU a annoncé aujourd’hui le lancement de IMVU, Musique, qui permet aux utilisateurs de découvrir et partager leur musique dans un environnement 3D sociale. Contrairement aux mondes virtuels existants et les services de musique en ligne, IMVU permettrait aux membres d’acheter des morceaux, créer des listes de lecture, et de les écouter avec d’autres membres IMVU.

IMVU

Source : IMVU

Plutôt qu’une fiche et 3 photos, demain ce sera peut être l’avatar sublimé ou personnalisé qui présentera dans son monde idéalisé ou miroir, ses activités, ses hobbies, sa panoplie multimédia réel en disposant ses flux twitter, ses vidéos youtube, son wall à la facebook, sa vidéo perso en réel et sa machinima, sa playlist ou en music live jouant en streaming à la second life, son agenda, ses lieux de vie / voyages thématisés ,speed dating et autres applications… selon les styles.

Croire que les univers virtuels n’interessent pas les sites de rencontre est faux sinon je n’aurais pas vu le leader mondial et le leader européen en rendez vous… il manque un effet de masse et une simplification des outils pour qu’ils fassent le premier pas. Il y a donc une place à prendre pour un projet ou une start up qui prendrait le risque de s’aventurer sur le futur de la rencontre.

Lire l’article : Les sites de rencontres sous le charme des mondes virtuels (les echos)

article en relation: les sites de rencontres francais se faisaient trop rares bizarre

This is the 1st blog of an exciting new blog! every week we will be reviewing and posting a new Insider Review of a virtual world/ Massivly Multiplayer Online Game.

So the first one we reviewed is no other then There.com And amasing virtual world with vivid graphics and infante possibillitys! in the amasing 3d world you can Chat, Explore the more then 50 islands, Explore space and beond, Make custom designer clothes, vehicals, and whatever you can imagine, make groups host partys etend partys, Own a neighborhood community or buy a lot i a community, And Much Much More! 

Check it out: research by Northwestern University professors Paul Eastwick and Wendi Gardner says that racist assumptions and norms in real life follow us into virtual worlds.  In their recently published article, “Is it a game? Evidence for social influence in the virtual world” (Social Influence, vol. 4), Eastwick and Gardner used two tactics (foot-in-the-door and door-in-the-face – see more on this at the Arstechnica review of this research article). They attempted to get avatars in There.com to show reactions to their ploys of asking for help – from avatars that were purposely created very dark or very light — a strategy that they describe in the article abstract as ”targeting both self-perception and reciprocity norms.”  Ultimately, the article abstract states that ”the race of the avatar requesting help impacted the success of the door-in-the-face compliance technique, raising the specter that real-world racial biases may also emerge in virtual environments.”  One of the most wonderful parts of this project is that the researchers involved undergraduate students in the discussions of their findings and thanked “Doug Medin’s Psychology 423 class for their insightful comments on earlier drafts on this paper.”

When Bella Yan wore an African skin for several months last spring, I got the impression that her large stature made an even more powerful statement in the gatherings in Second Life.  Certainly, her presence made an impact on those who observed her, but I did not get any particularly pointed comments or experienced any slights as a result of her new skin. 

I just finished reading the forums at There.com and saw an announcement about the next client update!  

Here is the text of the announcement (with some of my own notes thrown in, in blue):