With the recent launch of a number of virtual worlds such as Google Lively, Vivity and WebFlock virtual worlds inside the browsers seems ‘the way to go’. This poses many interesting questions, the most obvious one so far goes something like “Will browser-based worlds such as Google Lively replace virtual worlds requiring a download and [...]

Posted on: August 16, 2008 | 35 Comments »

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 »

Recently Dusan Writer challenged the community to design a new user interface for Second Life. The emphasis in the contest seems to be a ‘light’ client, for new users to find their way in Second Life during the first hours/days. Dusan reserved 500,000L (roughly 1,830$) for the best design, 200,000L and 100,000L for the 2nd [...]

Posted on: June 6, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Last week Second Life introduced HTML, allowing webpages to be displayed within the client on 3Dobjects, but It didn’t take long for the web to retaliate introducing ‘Virtual Environments on a Webpage’. Using Flash Papervision3D (No special plug-in required but Flashplayer 8.0, installed on 95% of the systems) Nike created the Virtual Hotel Suite [...]

Posted on: March 11, 2008 | 2 Comments »

Interesting months ahead for the gaming industry. The big gaming news of Q1 2008 was EA announcing its plans to release its FPS game Battlefield Heroes for free. It offers the game as a free download, and supports it trough micro-payments (you can buy in-game bonuses for real money or pay monthly fees for premium [...]

Posted on: February 9, 2008 | 2 Comments »