Is the future of virtual worlds inside the browser, or will the rich, client-based become the dominant model for virtual worlds? Not even a week after a lengthy discussion on my previous post on this topic, some major clues arrived to the scene as to how this ‘war over the metaverse’ is about to unfold [...]

Posted on: August 9, 2008 | 1 Comment »

What do you do when you don’t want to become ‘just another player’ in the battle over the metaverse? You start by adopting the most incredible graphics engine available, create a plausible setting to put your community building efforts into context, create amazing visuals and concept art to grab the attention (a tactic commonly employed [...]

Posted on: August 6, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Some nice linkbait by Gary Hayes of the Personalizemedia blog I wanted to bookmark here. In his video “The ‘Social Virtual’ World’s A Stage“ Gary walks through some of the most popular social virtual worlds, adding visuals to virtual worlds such as HiPiHi, Kaneva, Twinity, ActiveWorlds, LagunaBeach vMTV. There.com, Habbo, Google Lively etc. Overall a [...]

Posted on: August 5, 2008 | No Comments »

From the creator of ‘The machine is us/ing us‘ comes ‘An anthropological introduction to YouTube’. A very interesting look into online communities, and what creates this online ‘bonding’. In a very visual presentation Dr. Michael Wesch explains the Library of Congress the need to rethink some of our fundamental aspects of life as the web [...]

Posted on: July 31, 2008 | 5 Comments »

While interoperability of virtual worlds, social networks and the 2D web in general continues to improve, the confusion and clutter surrounding these various worlds with different identities increases. Many virtual worlds and networks still have their own unique features behind mandatory sign up processes, each world requiring a new identity (avatar).
Of course each new sign [...]

Posted on: July 20, 2008 | 2 Comments »

Following Google’s’ Lively, it is now the Electric Sheep Company’s (ESC) turn to reveal their browser-based virtual world: WebFlock. WebFlock is completely Flash Based unlike Lively, and their business model is very different as well.
“WebFlock is an application for private-labeled Web-based virtual experiences. It provides a visually immersive environment for social interaction, media consumption [...]

Posted on: July 18, 2008 | 1 Comment »

What started as a promotional and educational project for Birmingham became a visionary application of Second Life. by using data streams and Seconds Life’s open scripting and translational properties (it is quite easy to tell a script to build display a three-dimensional object based on received data in Second Life) Daden Limited created one of [...]

Posted on: July 16, 2008 | No Comments »

The much anticipated Virtual World of Larry and Sergey & Co. has been released today. It pretty much came out of the blue for me, but it’s there and it’s called Lively. While everyone was looking at Second Life and it’s virtual world clients, Google saw more in Ralph Kosters Metaplace approach - creating browser [...]

Posted on: July 9, 2008 | 8 Comments »