Low prim, high fidelity architecture for Second Life - The Heretic Pixies store

This is the first in a series of posts about the design and contruction of our new Heretic Pixies store.

For most people starting out with a building in Second Life, prim limits (the number of building blocks you can permanently place on a piece of land) are probably one of the most limiting factors. With an unlimited number of prims it would be easy to create an attrctive building, but when you may only have 30 or so, your options are fairly limited. Contents is always a factor in this - you want to have enough prims left to be able to put something inside your building.

At Pale Heretic we use a process that allows us to produce high fidelity buildings by pre-rendering things like complex shadows into the textures themselves. One of our products is a single room that has less than 30 prims, but the interior conveys a sense of light and space you wouldn't normally find in a small environemnt (the box measures 10m x 20m). You can see another example of this that we are constructing at the moment - our new Heretic Pixies store.

The Heretic Pixies store is constructed from 16 prims (for the floor, ceiling and walls) and measures 20m x 15m. It's going to be our store for a new character based range of products and we want to make it look as plush as possible on a low prim budget. The first part of this is making the interior itself look as good as possible and to do that we are using baked interior textures. Doing this allows us to both get realistic graduated lighting and shadows on the interior walls, but also allows us to put murals on the walls and for them to look like they are on the wall, rather than floating in front of it.

To do this we build a replica prim-for-prim in an opensource 3D application called Blender (www.blender.org). We then pick the faces that we wish to bake textures for and they are individually textured. The textures we use for these surfaces are sourced from photographs. The key is to avoid obvious tiling of textures. Seeing a regular repeated pattern in a wall or floor will break the illusion of reality. For example, the concrete texture for the walls in the Heretic Pixies store is created from a number of unique photos, layered and mixed to create a 2048 x 1024 texture that can be used to span the longest single wall with out any repeats. Onto this we add logos and other graphic elements, then bake out the textures, so that the local lighting and shadows are precomputed into the textures and we do this so that we get a good match with the lighting that we add in Second Life.



Generally, we will create a single 1024 x 1024 pixel texture for each 10m x 10m face. This increases your texture upload costs because you need a unique texture for every face (16 for the interior of the store) but then, that's still less than one US dollar. Using high resolution textures like this, while having some impact on older graphics cards, does allow the use of text and graphics directly into the wall texture without the need for additional prims and textures for signage.

The design and build for the Heretic Pixies store has so-far taken about 5 hours, since we already had the images and photographs that were used to create the textures. Over the next few days we'll be adding more to the store interior and exterior. If you would like to take a look, you can get there from http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dangun/176/77/143/ or by searching for 'Heretic Pixies'.

Second Life ... the things we need to fix next

I'm an advocate of Second Life for a number of reasons: it's adaptability to a range of uses, the completeness of it's model and workable DRM, the friendliness and creativity of its population, and the richness of its experience.

Having said that, there are a couple of things about it that are becoming (in my opinion) a serious issue.

The first is the mature content. Now, I know everything has its place, but Second Life doesn't have enforced zoning to manage the spread of locations that include mature content or a content filtering solution implemented in the client viewer to allow you to filter what you see ... much life the safe search filtering you find in the image search tools on Google.

Second Life needs to learn some of the lessons that the internet as a whole, and the search engines especially learned a while back - people will keep on putting sex on the web, but you need to offer some workable tools that allow users to choose what they see before it arrives.

The next thing on my wishlist is some search integration outside the SL client - I'd like to see the content from within SL presented on a search tool that can be accessed directly from the SL website, and more than that, I'd like to see it done in a way that Google can index. My aim with this is that,for example, whenI search for 'IBM Training' on Google, included in the returned results are the locations of IBMs SL training facilities, and not because they took the time to add the SLURLs on their website, but because the small-ads associated with the locations are accurately indexed by the search engines.

My last wish? Proper web-page-on-a-prim. I want to effectively see the output of the browser rendered onto the surface of an object and that includes all the mime types my browser supports (flash, pdf,video etc). The one media / web page limit per parcel is too limiting. There is a huge volume of traditional web content and tools that would work very well if they could be displayed on an in-world object and have the functionality preserved ... scrollbars too.

But what I would like to maintain is that SL is very much a viable platform for us to take VWs forward - we all know it isn't perfect, but taken as a whole it is a viable, robust, well tooled and documented solution that has the buy-in of it's steadily expanding population.

Goodbye Lively...

Google Lively posted this today http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/lively-no-more.html

I have to say, despite my issues with what they chose to do and how they managed telling their user community about it, that I think it's a pity Google have chosen to close lively.

Whilst it wasn't the revolution that we were all hoping for, in my opinion it did have it's niche.

What I would hope is that this isn't the end of Google's interest in virtual worlds. We need another big player to step in here and create some diversity with a decent budget behind it, and no, in my opinion that doesn't mean we need another mirror world. What we need is something that can realistically compete with Second Life. Something that can encompass user created content (from within the VW engine), with rights management and a workable economy, and better media and web content integration.

In my opinion there are only a few companies capable of doing this. Google, Apple, Microsoft, and the larger games companies.

Google: please don't let one failed project keep you out of this sector for long, and if you want some advice on how to position your next offering ...

Vollee Beta Mini Review

Vollee (http://www.vollee.com) offer something entirely unexpected: Second Life via your 3G mobile phone. Sound impossible? Well, actually, no.

Vollee take the innovative approach of remoting all the processing of the Second Life client and the 3D rendering of the image itself, by running this as a shart on a remote server. What the Vollee client does is recieve a video stream of the resulting image, and map your control responses back to the remote server.

Sounds like a complex solution? Maybe. Does it work? Absolutely! I have to say, having shown this technology to a number of colleagues, this is a bround-breaking solution to providing a real answer to hi-fidelity content on mobile devices: process it elsewhere and stream the resulting display.

I have to add that I am using the Nokia E61 version of the software on my Nokia E71, and it's working fine, if a little sluggish and not supporting the phone's WiFi connection (only working with the 3G internet).

So please hurry up with an E71 version, Vollee!

Vollee mention in their press content on their website that they are interested in using this as a technology to allow access to any persistent-world type game from your mobilephone ... so this could be a future where you can play WoW on your mobile.

Now, what would be really interesting is to see if anyone gets ahead of this by launching a VNC client for PC and Mobile Phone that allows you to do this using any application of your choice and manages the image resizing (or even a panning virtual desktop) for you and maps your controls appropriately....

Pale Heretic ... As seen on SLMen.com

In keeping with how I started in Second Life, I have just launched two new mens suits.

The fashion industry in Second Life is a significant part of it's economy - given the opportunity to look like just about anything, there is a roaring trade in just about anything.

That said, the market does make value judgements about all the new products that are launched. For men's fashion items, the standard I measure my work against is http://www.slmen.com a site that is owned and operated by long-standing Second Life resident Ben Vanguard.

With SLMen, Ben consistently delivers insightful reviews of the new fashion lines as they are released, which is exactly what he has done for the latest two from Pale Heretic. Read the reviews at http://www.slmen.com?s=pale+heretic

The one thing Google Lively has over Second Life...

The number of blog posts about Lively seems to be increasing at a healthy rate, and some common themes are emerging.

A significant number (and you can count me in this group) are disappointed with Lively and what it offers. Some are glad to see Google enter this sector of internet communications and others are picking up on distinct aspects of Lively and it's emerging user base.

One of the themes that I've seen picked up in a number of places is the rate with which the sex/porn industry and it's fan base has jumped into Lively. There's no doubt that within the first 24 hours the first Lively cybersex rooms had been set up.

It's a bit of a sorry state of affairs, but lets face some facts about the history of the internet here: without pornography, games and file-sharing the internet that we use today wouldn't be anywhere near as developed and mature as it now is.

The same is true for virtual worlds as a whole, but one key factor is the relative youth of the virtual worlds market compared to the internet / world wide web as a whole. I think of virtual worlds in the same way I remember the internet about 7 years ago - more chaotic, more randomly mixed (with pornography popping up in the most unlikely of places and seeming to be 50% of the results from any web search). Second Life is a good example of this. Wonderfully creative content designed by all sorts of people and leading to some amazing experiences. Scattered in between is the virtual world equivalent of all those random sites I used to bump into on the web.

Something I noticed recently was that they seem to largely have vanished. The web seems like a much cleaner, nicer place to explore now. This is a change I'm waiting to see happen with the virtual worlds. Just to be clear, I'm not saying that there isn't a place for sex in virtual environments if that's your thing, but what I don't want to have to worry about is who's going to buy the plot of land next to my Second Life office and if they are going to build a brothel on it.

A suggestion for Linden Labs: wouldn't it be nice if anyone running an adult site in Second Life (was required to) set a flag on their land specifying that their site fell into that category. Then in my client application, I can set an option that says "don't show me adult content" and then my client simply doesn't render any avatars or objects that are within that piece of land? Seems like a simple process and would certainly make it much easier to promote Second Life as a business and educational tool. The only problem I can see with this approach is that it lessens that need to buy an island in order to get some control over what is around you, thereby reducing Linden Labs land revenues.

This is the one thing that Lively has over Second Life. No neighbors. My Lively room is a component on the homepage of my website. If I want to direct people to it, I can send them straight to my website, straight into the room. This is a branded experience and I have control over all the elements of it.

Second Life, until something changes, will always have the risk of someone erecting a 50m tall photo-textured penis right next to my office. Oh, and that isn't a challenge by the way. My current preference is still definitely for Second Life - just or the amazing scope of what you can do and (all things considered) how well it all works. But if Lively's artist tools are as good as they *could* be, and the rumor that they are they are only 20% through their development turns out to be true...

How do I look in this?

One feature common to many Virtual Worlds is the ability to change your virtual self (your avatar's) appearance at will. But your options probably go further than that: you have the scope to change your face, shape, gender, even species, and to do so with relatively little fuss. I can't think of another environment where re-inveting yourself has quite such broad possibilities.

So, the questions that spring to my mind are: what's wrong with experimenting? what will everyone else think?

Firstly, there's nothing wrong with experimenting. Try everything out. It's an interesting experience.

More issues surround the second question, and the answers will differ depending on the environment and your relationship to the people with whom you are interacting.

I'm going to use Second Life as an example in this, but (to varying degrees) I have seen parallels in a number of online game environments.

One of the simplest ways that people will identify you as new to Second Life is your appearance. Looking like one of the default characters usually means that you simply haven't yet discovered the options to change your appearance or the ability to change your clothes. Looking new in SL seems to have a couple of effects - people (especially other new residents) will be more likely to talk to you, where as more established residents may be less likely to spontaneously engage you in conversation.

The converse, is also true. If you look like you are an experienced long-term resident, you will seem to be one of the elite to a newly registered user and they will be more likely to address a question to one of their peers. Ironically, appearing to be non-human (if your chosen appearance isn't scary and doesn't have negative associations) may actually make you seem more approachable. Wearing a cartoon chicken suit certainly stops anyone seeming threatening.

When choosing your appearance, whilst the freedom to express one's self is great, it is worth remembering that the medium is jut as important as the message ... and in this context - that of a dialogue taking place, your avatar IS the medium. Sounds like stating the obvious, but given the number of people I have recently seen pitching Second Life, in-world, to a group of very new users whilst dressed as something very obscure / disturbing / inappropriate I think it's well worth pointing out. And the best bit? This is Second Life. You can change your whole appearance as easily as you would change your clothes. Choose a suitable appearance for the people you need to address. You can always change back into the avatar of your choice as soon as the meeting is over.

Google's Lively ... a missed opportunity?

A couple of days ago I started spotting the press-releases about Google's new virtual world offering called Lively.

I have to point out that this is a Beta and so we can expect some fairly major changes before the final version.

Lively, however, seems to fall somewhat short of the expectation put upon it by headlines like "Google's challenge to Second Life" which appeared on the BBC news website. Linden Labs really don't have much to fear from what is very much inline with my expectations of Virtual Worlds a few years ago and reminds me a lot of Adobe Atmosphere.

Coming from the company that brought us Google Earth, this seems miss-targeted and limited in it's conception. The concept of a 'virtual island on your webpage' is quite interesting as a nice extension to your website or blog, but the execution of it will I think type-cast it into a younger / teen market.

The other omission is the lack of any apparent developer or content creator support, or a roadmap for the plans associated with this. Given that Second Life has somewhat set the bar in this I would have expected Google to have attempted to address the developer community about what they can expect to get from Lively over the next year.

One final point is platforms. C'mon Google. Asus launch the EeePC and cannot make them fast enough to satisfy demand. Acer, HP and MSI (and possibly others) are all producing similar platforms. What do these all have in common? They all run on a Linux based OS (although a few do offer more expensive / less well spec'ed MS Windows versions). Launching a plugin like Lively and not thinking about a Linux version (the Lively site only mentions a Mac version in the future) seems to be cutting off a significant part of your target market. To make the example - I can easily run Linux Second Life on this EeePC 900. Lively? No.

So, Lively is on my things to watch list, but is something I hope will grow into something that I can use, because it falls short of my expectations at the moment.

Stitching things together - Second Life, Twitter and the web.

Stitching things together - Second Life, Twitter and the web. Second Life is a wonderful experience once you have acclimatised to it. Integrating it with your web presence is a little more tricky. The next release of the client will include the ability to integrate websites more closely with your parcel of land - more on exactly how that works when it's been released.

There are however other options for getting traffic flowing between SL and your website, tying your website more closely to your SL presence. SLURLs are a key component to this as they allow a web page URL to point to a specific SL location. This means that you can link to an SL location of your choice from your webpage. Thats a good start, but we can go further than that.

www. twitter.com is an increasingly popular mini blog (posts are limited to 128 characters) that has been designed to talk about what you are doing right now or give brief news updates. These is also a feature on the Twitter site that allows you to include your top 5 posts on your website simply by pasting in a little javascript or a small flash movie.

This makes for an interesting combination, when you add to the mix the fact that you can script a SL device that allows you to complete a twitter post from inside SL simply by typing a command into the local chat box. This is something I have been working on and I will be producing a small item that has some useful functionality packed into it. The effect is that you can blog to your twitter account directly, and easily include things like SLURLS (I have added some code that will create a SLURL for your current location) in your post so that people surfing your website or your blog can easily find the location about which you are posting. When I have a fully packaged device I shall post and let you know how I'm gonna make it available - I may charge a small amount and sell it, but think the price will be www.tumblr.com provides you with a perfect solution for blogging your experiences and the media that goes with them.

EeePC 900

I don't have a huge amount of luck with laptops. I spend easily 6 hours a day (sometime much more) using mine and I guess I expect quite a lot from it - high performance, long battery life light weight small footprint. You know. The things you pay an absolute fortune for. Only I refuse to pay and absolute fortune for a laptop. I guess £800 is about my maximum. Let's face it, if I go and buy a £2000 laptop and around about half-way through my third day of ownership, I'll drop it.

So that's why I chose my HP Pavillion DV2000. 14.1 inch, 3 hours battery, powerful enough, looked nice. Two years happy computing later and the hard drive finally dies, which was only to be expected really as I commute for between 3 and 4 hours every day, which means may laptop gets thoroughly shaken about.

New hard drive, take the plunge with Linux (Ubunbtu then OpenSuSE) and all is good. Then last Thursday I turn my trusty laptop on to the sound of random crackles from the speakers and nothing else, no bios messages, nothing. OK. Time to do two things: replace my laptop with something temporary, repair my old laptop.

A number of people I know have bought (and are universally happy with) eeePC 701s. Given my recent switch away from MS Windows and onto Linux the idea of a small Linux based laptop is very attractive. The screen was a bit of a sticking point though. A little small. But not on the 900 series. The other fact that sold me on this was the solid state disk - 20GB, no moving parts (so less prone to breaking).

One shopping trip later, and for the quite reasonable price of £329 I'm the owner of an EeePC 900, Linux, 20GB.

The initial OS runs in tabbed 'wizard' mode. I have to say this was a little uncomfortable as it makes the eeePC as easy to use and accessible as mobile phone, but makes it hard to get beyond the default set of applications. A quick search of web gives a number of pages that provide access to relatively (assuming you know a little about Linux) easy methods for switching to a standard KDE window manager referred to as 'advanced desktop'.

One thing that I did try was installing an alternative Linux distribution. Installing OpenSuSE 10.3 went rather easily, and worked exactly as you would expect it to. Drivers were easily available for just about everything, and the experience and Gnome (my preference over KDE) worked fine.
One reason has made me reinstall the default OS and use the KDE advanced desktop: speed.

A boot under OpenSuSE was taking nearly 2 minutes. I've just timed a boot and it's taking only 28 seconds to get to the point where the OS has finished loading and is offering me a dialogue asking me how I want to open the 4GB SD card I have in at the moment. That kind of speed difference seems to be consistent across all the applications starting up. I don't know anywhere near enough about Linux to be able to say why that might be, but it is enough to make the eeePC easy to use for the 1 thing I want to look up quickly, rather than waiting an age for it to boot. If I wanted to wait, I'd go back to MS Windows!

My one issue exists because I installed OpenSuSE. The 20GB solid state disk appears to be made up of a 4GB onboard unit supported by a 16GB secondary disk. I have no issue about the fact that the two are separate. My problem is that the recovery disk provided with the eeePC doesn't reconfigure this disk for you. As it stands, I have only the 4GB internal drive configured. The solution to this problem is trickier than I expected - I have created a partition, used fstab to say what it is and can now use mount /dev/sdb1 to mount it. But these doesn't seem to be any way to get it to automount. Even setting two linux gurus that I know onto the problem hasn't yielded a solution. I'll post one when / if I find one.

The eeePC offers a good enough screen and enough performance that I can do the image, layout and web based work I always have done. The screen is a little small but at 1024x600 pixels is just large enough to be usable. Gimp and Scribus work fine (if a little cramped). Even the Second Life client runs fast enough to be usable when all the settings are turned down. Thunderbird and Skype are already installed and Flock works well and is easy to install.

Oh, and battery life is over 2 and a half hours. Long enough, and longer using less taxing applications.

My next task is to find out if my HP can be repaired and how much / how long that will take. In the mean-time, I'm happy and productive with my eeePC.

Alan

Second Life and Healthcare

I've spent some time looking at Second Life and I'm left wondering: where are the Healthcare companies that should be in here, and where is the organised public health education?

There are a couple of health sites - the NHS is a very good example, but it's role is to demonstrate and gather feedback on new ways of deploying health care to the public. It doesn't provide health or disease related information. Healh Info Island has more of an informal feel to it, and while it provides a large volume of content, the the arrangement of it and its level of ineraction seems somewhat limited.

My interest in health care in Second Life is as a precursor to the next age of Second Life and Virtual worlds as a whole. I think we have now passed through our first age and the technology is now established, the user base is built and the first wave of corporate projects have entered and the majority has left. Some key corporates remain and make successful use of the environment - IBM, Cisco, Reuters and a few other are the leaders in this.

The trouble is, that for the majority of other businesses in Second Life, what happens in Second Life stays there. The in-world economy is booming. It's fashion and entertainment industries continue to expand. What is lacks is real cross-over business that has significance both in-world and in real life, and establishing these types of business will be key to Second Life (and virtual worlds as a group) moving into their new age.

I see healthcare as a key component of this. The internet is having a revolutionary effect on the public's ability to research their own health care. From access to disease area information, to details of products and the experiences of other patients the public have access to a huge amounts of information.

Second Life offers great scope for patient education, peer support and sharing personal experiences ... these conversations are already taking place in the web, but it seems that (in the UK at least) the health care industry isn't part of them.

Of course, if you think that I'm wrong and there's something I've missed please post it here!

Alan

Social Computing at Work

Roo Reynolds at IBM has the job title 'Metaverse Evangelist'. He's also very switched on about social media, networks and virtual worlds and on a recent post to his blog he has posted the IBM Social Computing guidelines.

Reading through these make a lot of sense and since I have had some rather dire, sensationalist junk (surface) mail over the past few weeks that is advocating draconian policing of (and even banning of access to) social networking in the work place, I think it is about time we tempered this approach with a little common sense. And that's what you'll find in the IBM guidelines. By the bucket load.

For any business organisation of any size, don't kid your selves, they are covnersations taking place on the internet about you. Your best approach should is to be an active, open and transparent part of these conversations and to use your educated and informed staff to do this. Ignoring the conversations is a lost opportunity to reach out to your customer base.

Social media used as an open channel to your customer base helps you to do something that I advocate as an essential element of any business communications strategy: be in your market the same way your customers are.

PH

Getting back to Second Life

I've more or less been away from Second Life for the past few months. This has been while I have focused on other things - new website, artwork, blogging and open source on the desktop.

My focus is now returning to virtual worlds and Second Life in particular.

Second Life has been getting a lot of press recently - some good, some bad. This is oddly familiar, and is a pretty common theme through-out the adoption cycles of social technologies. Think back to the first few years where the Internet and the World Wide Web became available - a lot of the same comments and condemnations where voiced then, but now we have adopted the technology and are extensive use of it through business, education and entertainment.

I fully expect to see the same from virtual worlds as a communications technology. A lot of people now understand why skype is such a good technology - multi channel (text, voice, video) personal communication, with the ability to conference call and exchange documents. Virtual worlds offer this interaction plus an interactive environment in which to hold the discussion.

Some press has been given to documenting criminal activities in Second Life. I can't deny that these elements are there, but at the same time I think it is also quite likely that there are criminals out there who are using mobile phones and sending emails, and the fact that they are will not prevent me from using either. Again, this is consistent with the adoption of the internet. The criminal elements need to be dealt with and we all need to see the technology for what it is, and not allow it to be tarnished by the actions of the few.

Second Life has uas reecently updated to include a couple of siginificant technology milestones: VOIP (Voice Over IP) and Webpage-as-texture. This may not sound that dramatic but they are of the final elements that I've been to glue your second life onto the rest of your internet communication strategy. What this also means is that in-world information can be managed and updated from outside, and this can be done using the tools that your content managers are already used to.

Second life is now able to become a serious content delivery channel, integrated with and displaying common content from your existing web presence.

PH

The narrative of now

Whilst a colleague and I spent 3 hours on a tube journey to and from a client meeting that never was (that's a whole other story on why you should virtualise project meetings...), we got into a discussion about car based games, and specifically about licensed vehicles.

It's fairly standard practice that if you make a car based computer or console game, and want to use a real-world car you must pay a significant (tens of thousands of pounds) licensing cost to be able to reproduce the shape and detail of the car and the brand identity of it and it's maker. This practice is understandable from a brand control point of view – you don't want your car brand associated with a game that's going to give you negative publicity. It's common practice for the can manufacturers to insist that no damage is shown on their vehicles, regardless of how they are driven , so that they always appear in pristine showroom condition.

A side effect of this is that it effectively shuts the smaller developers out of a this sector of the market for one simple reason: games that don't have licensed real-world cars just don't sell anywhere near as well. There are a few notable examples of this, the Burnout series being one.
This led the conversation to the obvious next question: Why does it matter is the cars are copies of real world ones?

My opinion is that society and the media does a very successful job of fostering materialistic desire for unobtainable things in most people. For example, I would dearly love to own a Ford GT. I know this will never happen – they only made a hand-full of them and even if I did have the money, I know there is a long list of more rational and immediate things that the money would be spent on.

As I've mentioned, I play games. One of them being Test Drive Unlimited by Atari. It's a driving game with some really unique elements, but the relevant fact it that one of the cars that a player can save hard-won in-game cash for is the Ford GT. When I eventually had enough cash I bought the car and it was a great pleasure to own and drive.

The question again is: Why?

My theory is that this all comes back to something that is innate to all of us, since a large amount of our communication is based upon it: stories.

From the way I describe to you now, what happened on the tube train yesterday, to how I might explain the fall of the Roman Empire or how an alpha channel on the surface of a nerve cell contributes to that nerve firing, each is encapsulated in its own story, described from the 3rd person.

This brings me to immersion and player emotional investment in games and social environments like Second Life. I'm invested in my virtual Ford GT, on it's virtual island of Hawaii. I worked hard to earn the cash, it's a wonderful design and it out performs a lot of the other virtual cars in it's class. It satisfies the desire for the unobtainable, and is a significant milestone on the story of my experience in an environment that, lets face it, isn't real. But I do have to say when talking to someone who plays the same game, the discussion about what's in our virtual garages is exactly the same as if everything where real. We project ourselves into the virtual, willingly adopting the parts we play in the game, comparing our progress, our status in an imaginary world.
I find it very interesting how easily people settle into a text based social environment. Just looking round at the people I see working, tools like Skype have gone from being relatively rare a couple of years ago to be on the majority of desktops now. Then there's SMS.

When conversing in these types of environments, we begin to insert narrative elements where they are missing to complete the experience. LOL is a prefect example. I may have laughed out loud, or just thought it, but in the shared narrative of the conversation, from your point of view, I laughed. This evolved from early text chat users adding in descriptive elements to replace the missing visual and tonal cues about their emotional state whilst chatting. These then where reduced to acronyms for ease of typing.

This becomes more apparent in visually represented worlds like Second Life or MMORPG games like World of Warcraft. People having conversations in it find that the conversation becomes more and more embellished with narrative detail, echoed by the animated gestures of the avatars. This isn't just the stuff to provide the missing social cues, but additional narrative. This all leads towards better immersion, more emotional investment, a better conversation and the people in that conversation retaining more of it for longer.

These are the stories of now. Narratives communally written about what is being discussed right now. Adapting to changes of focus and projecting the emotional state of the co-authors.

I think that these stories exist and work because they are presented in textual form. The medium naturally encourages the reader to use their imagination as they read each line. But here comes VOIP – Voice over IP ... a relatively new technology being deployed to allow users to chat using microphone and speakers to hear the voices of the people they are conversing with.
This has two effects. Firstly, making it harder to break the bond with reality and become immersed in the world with which you art interacting (finding out that the eight foot tall Orc you have been adventuring with has the voice of a twelve year old American kid, doesn't help the suspension of disbelief). Secondly it adds back in all the social cues that have been missing in the typed conversations, making for a more genuine social experience.

There are other considerations in this that I won't explore here ... one is the ability of people using text based chat to hold a number of parallel conversations, often with a number of people in each conversation. The fact that the communication is typed text allows this to happen. I also read a something on a blog recently that was saying that people using a virtual environment like Second Life, and VOIP so that they could hear each other talking, found that they got a better sense of being somewhere together than using web cams with VOIP to have a video conference.

Text chat will I think continue for quite some time alongside technologies like VOIP – it offers too many features that are not available with spoken communication. Just as it suffers from the things that are missing, but I think we are very good at finding ways to fill the gaps and immerse ourselves in the virtual environments we use.

Pale

The magic first half-hour

Over the years I have spent quite a bit of time (probably a little too much) playing computer games of one type or another. The experiences from them vary widely, but there is one common element that in my view either makes or breaks that experience and will set a lot of the tone for the next 100 hours.

'The magic first hour' is the experience of how a new game – a new world – caters for your arrival, manages the suspension of disbelief at the same time as explaining to you exactly what it is you are supposed to be doing.... and does this in a way that makes you want to continue.
Car race games don't need to make a great fuss about mechanics and controls at this point and have the freedom to focus on backstory and plot. Fantasy games and MMORPGs (Massively Multi-player On-line Role Playing Games) in particular have a much more complex player interaction as well as (usually) a deeper and more convoluted story. It is this type of game that offers us some of the best examples of how to bring a new user to an environment that can be difficult to master.
World of Warcraft (WoW) is a great example of a good strategy for doing this. They player starts and makes as few permanent choices as possible and well placed in-game pointers and pop-up help continually adds new information and help for the player. As the player progresses, in-game characters reveal more information, choices and instructions. This ensures that the player starts with a relatively small amount information that they need to retain, and that this is expanded in line with their growing experience of the game. Both the plot and the geographical area that the player is exposed to grow in the same manner.

It's the start of this learning period that I'm calling the magic first half-hour.

Over the past couple of years there has been an explosion of the number of free-to-play MMORPGs that are available, and I have played a number of them. Some follow a model similar to WoW an lead the player in, carefully expanding their knowledge and experience, helping at every stage. Some however don't. It's all to common a sensation to be dropped into game, with little clue how to use the game or what to do first. It's these games that I don't go back to and are right on the top of my 'things to un-install' list.

The message I think is true beyond just games - either progressively help the new user or risk losing them very quickly, regardless of how good your product actually is. If they don't feel supported and don't engage with it, they won't use it.

I also think that the actual duration and format of this exchange varies. For a web site, the duration is down to below a minute. The exchange is subliminal – a good, well presented design makes it apparent which elements of the site are navigational, or projects the right air of intrigue that the user will feel encouraged to explore the interface to find the content and navigation for themselves.
When first starting to use a new application or device such as mobile phone or mp3 player, the interface is critical to your comprehension of how to use it. For the majority of users of this type of technology (ones that have used something similar before) a well designed product should be intuitive. And these days it's pretty well true – use one mobile phone you can use them all, some fairly minor trial-and-error. But think back 10 years to how easy it wasn't to set the timer on your VHS recorder.

I'd also apply this to things like Second Life, which does a reasonable job of starting you on the path to learning how to use the interface, how to interact with the world itself and your avatar and how to communicate. Having introduced this technology 20 or so people in the last couple of months, they almost all agree that what happens next is the problem. You complete your training, know how to go places and chat with people and are dropped off in-world with little guidance of what to do next. It's an experience a bit like showing someone who has never seen the World Wide Web before and and sitting them in front of a web browser and saying “here you are .... go explore”.Providing starting points would be a great idea.

The same is true for visiting some new locations in Second Life. Bad design leaves me feeling unsure as to where I'm supposed to go, where my introduction is, what I should expect and what this place is all about. The next thing that usually happens is I move on and explore somewhere else – the poor arrival negates my desire to explore: if the start is uninspiring will the rest be any different?
Don't forget the new user experience. I've worked on a lot of projects where the induction for new users is one of the last elements to be added in – often because it relies on the finalisation of all the other elements. The key is not to rush this, to think about the range of your target audience and how to lead them into the experience you have crafted for them, in a way that they will readily understand.

Pale

Why put your business into Second Life?

Second life, the internet virtual world operated by Linden Labs, has enjoyed growing exposure in the press over the last year, every week I seem to read either a book review or an article on it. This is reflected in the continued growth in the number of people registering a Second Life account - now numbering over 11 million, with a minimum of 35 thousand of them logged in at any given point in time.

So what is Second Life? It's official website is at http://www.secondlife.com . Second Life is a virtual world whose content created by the people who use it. Every building, object, item of clothing ... when Second Life launched it was a blank rolling countryside. It is now populated by all manner of buildings and creations from offices to shops, space stations to beaches. The thing that makes Second Life unique is it's approach to copyright: the users who create an object, what ever it is, retain ownership and copyright of that object, and can sell their object to other users for currency that can be easily converted into US$. The same is true for the land itself: it can be bought, owned and resold by the users – Second Life has it's own property market.

Driven but this built-in concept of user ownership, Second Life has an expanding economy and over US$ 1.2 million changes hands every day. I have recently read that the economy in Second Life has been estimated to be worth US$1 billion.

The world is displayed in 3D on your computer using a viewer application that is available free from Second Life's makers, Linden Labs. Registering an account to use the world is also free, although features like land ownership require a higher level of account that has a subscription fee.
Second Life offers a lot of the features that you would expect to find in any real time communications tool – text based chat tools, in-built VOIP (Voice Over IP – essentially the ability to talk and be heard over the internet), user profiles, the ability to exchange landmarks (like bookmarks, but pointing to a specific place in the virtual world) and comprehensive search tools.
Having said that, a business starting up in second life should not expect to immediately find a new revenue stream. The biggest benefits of virtual world technologies is as part of the social networking mix and they present and opportunity for a business to communicate with it's existing and potential customers in a new way that offers an experience that is not readily offered elsewhere. Your business can also benefit from the increased exposure and marketing that you base around your new adoption of this technology.

Translating your business and your brand for use in a virtual world may need some adjustments to the kind of voice you use. In the same way that writing for a printed publication differs from writing for a website, the content that you choose for use in Second Life must be adapted to suit the way it is going to be presented.

One key concept to remember, and this is something that was missed by some of the first businesses entering Second Life, is that having a Second Life office is not the same as having a website. Websites are a part of the communications mix that is still very much a solitary, user driven experience. As a representative of your business, you probably have no current data about how many visitors are viewing your website right now, or a mechanism where you can start a conversation with them.

Virtual worlds offer a more social way to browse information and to share the experience, both with a representative of your business and with other customers. Offices in Second Life are much the same as real world offices in this respect – they benefit from being staffed. It is also worth noting that there is a difference in the way that people will interact with your virtual office compared to your website. It is well documented that a new visitor to a website will remain for only a very short period of time (less than a minute) and will be unlikely to explore any links from that page if they don't quickly see something that sparks their interest. People visiting locations in Second Life tend to spend longer exploring, especially if the location has been well designed, and tend to retain more of the experience.

So what should I actually use Second Life for? Second Life is a tool for communication, collaboration and shared exploration. Uses include:

• as a venue for conferences, seminars and meetings where the participants are geographically separated
• as demonstration environment for collaboratively exploring 3D mock-ups (for example, taking a client through a replica of the show apartment in a new development)
• as gallery and exhibition spaces that offer a similar experience to their real world counterparts
• as explorative spaces (for example a fitted kitchen company could use the space to offer a try before you buy experience for it's customers and allow them the ability to switch units and groups around to see which options the prefer).

Are there any other worlds? The future seems bright for virtual worlds when you consider the total number that are in use every day. When you include all the games, like World of Warcraft, that are being played (essentially themed virtual worlds) the the total number of registered users is in the 100s of millions. Soon to launch for Sony's Playstation 3 is Home. A social networking environment designed for players to meet, interact, share experience and start on-line games together. So far, however Second Life is the only world to offer user generated content and content ownership.

Second Life is not a replacement for your website. It is a key part of your communications mix, in the same way that email newsletters and using myspace.com are both valuable channels for reaching clients. Second life also provides a unique user experience which can be tailored to carry your brand and your message which can be reinforced by direct interaction.

Pale