Archive for 'Building a Better VR'

Teleplace/QWAQ Liquidated By Financial Singularity?

But transhumanists rejoice as open source software immortality saves Turing Church Online The assets of Teleplace are being liquidated after the business-oriented 3D virtual meeting place hit a financial singularity which prevents the venture’s continued operation, according to a mailing sent to potential creditors – including the Alphaville Herald’s own part time typist/technical advisor Mark [...]

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GE and NBC Place Bets On Vivox

by IntLibber Brautigan The venture capital arm of General Electric and NBC Universal, aka "Peacock Equity" has invested $2 million in Second Life voice chat provider Vivox. Vivox provides voice chat services to 30 million users, with corporate clients CCP Games, Nexon, Linden Lab, Sony Online Entertainment, and many others. Vivox will use the new [...]

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New Scientist’s Bitch Slap Turns Men Into Girls

New Scientist reports that men can be now turned into virtual girls – or at least experience some body transfer illusion – through a simple virtual reality program.  A research subject wearing virtual reality googles first explores a virtual room in which a Nelly Furtado video is playing and a woman stands next to a [...]

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Virtual Vigilantes – Eggheads Are Watching the Watchers

Over at at Henry Jenkins blog and MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media site, part one of Herald founder Urizenus Sklar’s think piece Watching the Watchers: Power and Politics in Second Life traces the evolution of both the online world griefing phenomena and the virtual security operations that have emerged to counter griefers.  Posting the [...]

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Metaplace – Pools Closed Due to Lack of Traction

by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk Tizzers Foxchase got in the last word in Metaplace Central -  “POOLS CLOSED DUE TO AIDS” – and seconds later Raph Koster’s user generated virtual world creation service closed permanently last weekend. What went wrong – and how did the end of the virtual world affect the community? Informed [...]

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Try All Your Chance – Banlink Passwords Were An Open Book

Rainbow tables, SQL injection, and why you want to use a different password for e-mail by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk The new Try All Your Chance blog details the frightening extent of the BanLink security problems that led to the Second Life ban list sharing site's apparent demise – and suggests that BanLink user [...]

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Is ToToM the Metaverse Soundtrack?

Balancing creator, mixer, and consumer rights by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk While I was visiting Soviet Woodbury Saturday, the resident communists took time away from building their new workers’ paradise to rez a brightly colored dance floor and an impromptu worker’s dance party took place to an audio stream from http://www.maxxhitsbootlegs.com – a French [...]

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Metaplace Worlds Now Embed Into Any Web Page

1.) build a world    2.) add it to your web site    3.) profit? by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk If the name of the game in MMOs is to grow the user population in preparation for an eventual IPO, Metaplacetook a significant step forward this week by allowing Metaplace spaces tobe inserted into players' web [...]

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Browser Based 3D Worlds: Are the Pieces Finally Falling in Place?

by Urizenus Sklar, Contributing Editor Raph Koster is expressing a kind of jaded been-there-done-that-saw-it-coming attitude about what he is seeing at the Game Developers Conference this year, and I’m not surprised. One year you are the crazy nut describing the future to an audience of twelve other nuts, and the next year the room is [...]

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Wikipedia Helps You Create Your Own Bots — For Free!

Wikipedia links to ready-to-use Copybot V4 download by Kris Dibou, part-time bot   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CopyBot – external links section includes open source copybot So you've visited some of the big stores in SL, and noticed the models who look exactly like avatars, but never say anything; in fact, they may even have a tag over their [...]

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