Archive for 'Building a Better VR'

The Messenger’s Message: There’s A New Newspaper in Second Life

No, the Herald hasn’t gone to a broadsheet format. The picture above is cropped from the positively newspaper-sized new entrant into Second Life’s fourth estate, the Metaverse Messenger, which launched today. A weekly that will start at six pages, the Messenger is the brainchild of Katt Kongo , an SL avatar with RL journalism experience [...]

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Sheeeeit! 1.8 billion for online game development in China.

Terra Nova and several other sources are reporting on a story in the Shanghi Youth Daily the Chinese government is about to invest $1.8 billion in on-line game development. I’m not sure what kinds of virtual worlds those efforts will yield, but if the result are some robust online worlds, and we turn Anshe loose [...]

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Goodbye LSL, hello Mono

In case you weren’t paying attention (like I wasn’t), Linden poobah Jim Purdick Purbrick (aka Babage Babbage Linden) has announced (and it’s already in the Wikipedia so it must be true) that in version 2.0 of SL is going to move from the much malaigned Linden Scripting Language to the open source (yet a bit [...]

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Teledildonics Comes to SL!!?

Tired of typing with one hand? Well, maybe this is another teledildonics hoax and maybe it isn’t (I’ll ask our ever vigilent readers to do the requisite research) but Slashdong.org claims to have introduced hardware (and requisite interface software) that will maker your SL Sexy Skybox cybering liasons more… well, more vibrant and penetrating. Since [...]

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Why the W-Hats *Really* Came to Second Life

Various W-Hats may have been up to something awful in SL lately, but the Something Awful crew, from whose bosom the W-Hats sprang, provided a trenchant critique recently on other online worlds, shedding some light on many of the things that no doubt drove the goons to Second Life. click image for more

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Commodify Me! Chapter 2

Thanks again to Clickable Culture for reporting on this little gem — A breakdown of the way Massive Incorporated‘s in-game advertising works. Seems that not only are the ads placed in the game, but the marketers collect information about the amount of time the ad is viewed by individual players, the size at which they [...]

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Talking about Talking

Cindy and Prok As the flap over the board banning of Prokofy Neva degenerates into a series of thoughtful and productive discussions, you might think the Herald would lose interest. Well, ok, we have, but that doesn’t mean we stop posting (i.e., it’s a slow news day). Prok called upon Cindy Claveu to lead a [...]

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Uri Chills with the Salonistas!

A Future Salonista shows us what we will all look like in 2020. Last night’s Future Salon had its usual share of technical snags, but it was interesting – more interesting for me perhaps, because I had an opportunity to be on the other side of the discussion. It certainly gave me lots to think [...]

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Anniversary CelebraFICation Leads to Coco’s Party Protest

Coco and friend protest FIC display at 2nd anniversary celebraFICation. One would think that an anniversary party would be a time for everyone to come together, but this being Second Life, and our benefactors being the Linden’s, the SL Second Anniversary Party appeared to be in no small measure a celebration of the Feted Inner [...]

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Games, Learning, and Second Life

Terra Nova has a preliminary report from The Games Learning and Society conference, with notes from the talks by Henry Jenkins and James Gee. Almost on cue, there is an interesting related post by Zero Grace on Clickable Culture. It does seem like games are promising environments for learning, but Second Life seems disappointing in [...]

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