Metaplace Stress Test

Want a sneak preview of one space-shooter games made with Metaplace? This one is entitled Uberspace, and you can see it in another stress test of the Metaplace platform to test scalability, bandwidth, and instancing within a multiplayer space.

Stop by their website at http://www.metaplace.com on Saturday, March 8 at 12:00pm (noon) PST to challenge other players in a space shooting game and help them out!

Metaplace Developer Chat

For those wanting to know how did the Metaplace Developer Chat went, you might want to read this two links:

http://smallr.net/metaplace-chat gives you some nice screenshots and talks about the event itself.

http://smallr.net/metaplace-transcript has a chat transcript.

More news about Metaplace... tomorrow

Metaplace [1] is basicly a platform to easily create a Virtual World. The aim is to make it easy for anyone to create a simple Virtual World (like, for instance, create just a virtual room and put it in your MySpace profile), but also an extensible framework that lets you make real complex stuff. Theoreticly - at least - it is flexible enough to make exactly the kind of VW you want, putting the limits just in your imagination. An alpha is running for a while for a few selected people that had to sign an NDA - so we don't really know much about it. In less than a week, 10,000 people applied to that alpha (including me), but only a selected few had access to it. Now, some questions are arising, including:

• When can we expect Metaplace to reach beta phase?
• How soon do Areae expect that a new round of Alpha testers will be let in?
• When will the NDA be lifted allowing the alpha testers to tell us all the good things they know?

These, and more, are going to be answered in a "Developer Chat" tomorrow at 5:00pm PST (9:00am GMT), in... a Metaplace :-) I'll try to be there [2], and you?

[1] - http://mindboosternoori.blogspot.com/search/label/Metaplace
[2] - http://www.metaplace.com/

OpenAvatarID

When I heard about Raph Koster [1] creating Areae I got excited. When I heard him talking about it I got more excited. Then, when I heard him talking about his more deep insights about the future of Virtual Worlds I got... scaried. No way a guy with such a vision would make such, in my point of view, mistakes. But he did: in the middle of awsome texts he would drop here and there something I wasn't liking. So, when I knew that Areae was announcing its product, I was extremely curious and yet afraid that it would come something I would not like. He announced Metaplace, and I got the feeling that, after all, he was doing well - heck - I badly want to try it. It was exactly I was looking for! Since it is in a closed beta stage, I can only but read everything I find about Metaplace, but today I got... disappointed. I'm not going to dig into that issue this time, since this isn't a post about Metaplace (I'll leave that to a later time), but some things he said that was just shocking to me. For instance, Metaverse's default client (the one they provide) communicates using telnet [2]. Hello? Communicating credentials and conversations via telnet from a Flash app (client side, you know?) to your servers? Have you never heard about encryption? Anyway, in the same day I posted about "one avatar to rule them all" [2], where I talked about companies like Linden Lab and IBM that believe that virtual worlds should be capable of accepting visits from other worlds' avatars, if they owners want, I read this interview to Raph Koster where he says that, among other companies, folks at Areae think that virtual worlds shouldn't be capable of accepting visits from other worlds' avatars.

Since there are so many arguments from one side and another, I just want to have a clue (tho' the data retrieved will not have revelance...) of how many people think one way or another...

So there's a poll: do you think that virtual worlds should be capable of accepting visits from other worlds' avatars if they choose so?

Please vote by following this link: http://www.polldaddy.com/p.asp?p=118953.


[1] - http://www.raphkoster.com

[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telnet

[3] - http://mindboosternoori.blogspot.com/2007/10/one-avatar-to-rule-them-all.html

Areae is Metaplace, tomorrow

For those like me that are expectantly waiting for Areae's [1] release, tomorrow might be the day: Metaplace is going to be announced tomorrow [2], and soon we'll be able to know more about the virtual world Raph Koster is talking about for so long...

[1] - http://www.areae.net
[2] - http://www.metaplace.com

Predicting the tech-future

Following my yesterday's post about predictions of the tech-future (one predicted a Dystopian world controlled by Linden Labs in 2016, the other an overall controll of the tech-world by Google in 2017), now here's a link to an article talking about an upcoming paper that represents the result of a summit and they will "define/predict" a "metaverse roadmap". Yes, I know, having a bunch of folks in the industry "decide" a roadmap for such a thing is, well... ahem, anyway, the article is quite interesting, and gives us some food for thoughts. They predict that we'll have such a world and metaverse (first self, second self and mixed self) in 10 years from now (2017). They think that the upcoming tech-world is going to have four basic metaverse kinds:

• dubbed augmented reality
• lifelogging
• virtual worlds
• mirror worlds

For starts, I really don't think that you can apply the world metaverse for any of those items but the third: virtual worlds. The concept of metaverse appeared with the excelent book "Snow Crash", and defines a Virtual World with certain characteristics, but it is a virtual world.

But let's talk about those four items there.

Dubbed augmented reality is a concept where technology enables you to have an allways-persent body-widget that lets you know more about the reality that envolves you. Think about Plazes on steroids, in a allways-present device (like the eye-screening we see on GiTS), that enables you to have any kind of info about where you are, realtime. You can enhance the concept and think about stuff like getting info about people as you look at them and that sort of stuff. Possible? Yes, even probable, but that isn't a Metaverse, it makes me recall more other aspects in Snow Crash...

Like lifelogging. Remember that guys on Snow Crash that did something like wearing a full-body gadget-suit that was used to stream images into the future version of YouTube? Well, consider that lifeblogging with a little of the previous item (correlation between video footage and the people in that footage, and stuff like that).

On virtual worlds, it seems that what's been talked is about a more immersive version of Second Life, as the previous predictions also talked about. On a side note, while the previous prediction talked about Linden Labs (the company behind Second Life) buying google, in this event the general ideas were on whether would Google create GoogleOS and Microsoft would buy Linden Labs, positioning Google as the developing mega-softwarehouse with the future of Operating Systems, and Microsoft as less a technological company and more like a big pocket of money available to investiment, which isn't really surprising if you notice that we have really nothing innovative from Microsoft for years (the Wow from Vista is a big pile of FUD about a defective Operating System with nothing innovative compared to the alternatives). I intend to write soon more about my own visions of the future of Virtual Worlds real soon. And no, I don't believe that Second Life will turn into the "final and perfect VW", as much as I don't think that WOW (not Vista's Wow but World of Warcraft) is to be the ultimate MMORPG. Oh, and the nobody-knows-what-this-is extremely-hiped areae isn't going to have persistence, which is a big no-no for me (even if I usually agree with his vision on VW's.

Last but not least mirror worlds, which makes me remembers this list of Games on Google Maps. Mirror worlds are defined as virtual worlds like ours, with places like ours: a real representation of the "first world" but where people are only virtually, without meshing virtual with real people. I really don't see this happening unless you're trying to do something like Idlewild.

The final article is yet to be released, but I'll surelly be a reader of it.