Virtual Worlds: Pass, Present and Future

So, last saturday I talked in a conference about "Virtual Worlds: Pass, Present and Future", and, as promissed, I've now published the presentation online (in Portuguese): http://noori.abismo.org/VW.pdf. Soon enough the organization will publish a video from each presentation, and I'll let you know as soon as it is available.

Curiously, while travelling on train, returning to Lisbon, I decided to read some of those papers we usually download to read later but never find the time to do so. The choice couldn't be better: www.mud.co.uk/richard/makplac.pdf is a Richard Bartle paper called "Making Places", which argues that building Virtual Worlds is like making places, and justifies it historicly, from text-based virtual worlds to 3D worlds of nowadays (somewhat like I intended to do, but he's good doing it ;-)). The only thing that I don't agree with him is exactly in the conclusion: while I totally agree with him that the conceptual differences between text-based virtual worlds and 3D VW's is the existence of sprites and instances (that appeared to solve some representation issues, well described in his paper), Bartle thinks that this new concepts (sprites and instances) should be explored in which ways can they be explored. My oppinion is different: we should focus in researching ways to avoid the need of stuff like instance'ing. Would you imagine Second Life with instances? Surely not, because it wouldn't feel right. There's something there to fix, not to exploit.

SLTalker is out now!

One thing I've decided to this weekend was that I wouldn't have "dead times", so everytime when the presentations were not that interesting, or if I thought I could listen to it and do something at the same time I was with my laptop managing some stuff or coding on SLTalker, my project that aimed to create a talker interface for Second Life. When I realized that there were so many talks to be done that there would be no time to do the Hack Hour activity I was hoping to see there, and since, unfortunately, the rooms where presentations were given were really hot, I also skipped some presentations, giving me the time to finish SLTalker's "first release", meaning that nowadays you can actually connect into SLTalker.

So, that's it - enjoy, and remember you can allways chat with me there (.tell Noori Foss hi there!), and please report any bug that you find.

Next step, besides fixing SLTalker bugs, is trying to close these bugs on Debian, which will greatly help me to enhance SLTalker.

Oh, and please go easy on the server, SLTalker uses lots of resources and the server where I'm running this is quite slow for the job... Of course you can allways offer me a better place to host SLTalker, but I would need to have root access to it and it must be a Debian box, so I don't really think that there's someone willing to provide me a better host than this one :-)

Monday

Yet another monday, I think I allways manage to do more or less 52 of these every year. Mondays have something special, but I'm not really into that "monday of hell" that seems to flood many workers around the world. No, mondays have something special, but also tuesdays, wednesdays and every other day in the week.

I guess that the thing that make mondays special is that mondays are usually full of happenings - lot's of non-brain activity, even if that activity involves using brains. Today I had a full monday - a monday in its plenitude, full of happenings, happenings of all kind. I got happy, sad, excited, tired, irated, peacefull, felt fulfilled, but at another time with a powerless feeling, I had good conversations and bad conversations, it was full, and I'm tired.

With all this things - as usually happens with me - I had a day full of stuff I would like to blog about but I'll probably never will. But there was a sentence that I chose to highlight from this day: while talking with Nuno at lunch time, he said to me something that got me surprised: something in the line of "the thing that is missing on Second Life is a text-based client". Thank you Nuno: you might not have made my day, but you surelly gave me more will to keep on some of my personal projects. So today I'll skip the reading I was intending to do and instead I'll hack some more on that messy libsecondlife code. I just wonder... why do you feel that way and yet you're not into Talkers? You know, mine has an open door and you just gave a good reason to make me push you to go there :-)

I'm in a weird mood - ine of those times where I feel like drinking a glass of Oporto's wine while doing brain-activity stuff, staying waked up late until the body can't resist anymore, and then finally fell on the bed, just to wake up in the middle of the following afternoon. I can't: I have no Oporto, and besides it's monday - and tomorrow's another day at work. But it's decided already - one of the first things to buy to my new flat when I finally move on is a good bottle of Oporto's wine.

Text-based virtual worlds podcast

Quick yet awsome news: Alan Schwartz decided to create a podcast about text-based virtual worlds. From what I've already listened it, it is great. And now, sorry, I'm going to stop typing and press "Play" again...