Journal
Human-Avatar Interaction
11 April 2008
I recently spent a couple of hours in Second Life attending a Caroline’s grand re-opening party. This was the longest stretch of time (about 3 hours) I had been in world in quite a while. Apart from the occasional customer service issue which requires me to jump in world, I don’t visit SL much any more. I’ll have more thoughts in a post marking my 5 year rez-day in a couple of weeks.
At the party eveyone was dancing and there was a central “dance ball” that anyone could touch that would animate his/her avatar. The dances were nothing to write home about—I recognized many bits and pieces that were ripped straight from old Poser 4 (I think it was 4) stock animation and combined with other “found” animation. (Test animations I had uploaded during the 1.4 Preview back in June 2004, if that tells you anything). Other individuals had a variety of different dance animations, some of which I really liked.
While everyone dancing together and listening to the same music/dj is great fun, the only difference between last week’s experience and parties we had in 2003 was the scripted dance animation. Don’t get me wrong, I think animation is great and SL 1.4 was probably one of the most exciting releases to date. And while there are advantages to pre-scripted animation allowing everyone to type and chat, I really longed for more direct interaction.
As chance would have it I was alerted to two bits of info last week which seemed to provide a possible solution to my desire for more direct human-avatar interaction. The first was a tweet from Lordfly about a project that was started back in 2006 by a dev team at LL (Cube Linden, Aura Linden, and Ventrella Linden) called Avatar Puppeteering. Please do check out some of the videos on the site for a working example of puppeteering in action. The project certainly showed a lot of promise. That is, before it was put on indefinite hold so that the team members could work on “viewer stability, bug fixing, and performance” issues. Tateru over at Massively has done a little digging and found out that Ventrella (and, yes, he was responsible for flexi-prims) left LL last year. Her conclusion is that this project has suffered perma-death.
Which is unfortunate because Mitch Kapor, LL’s Chairman, seems to have become interested in human-avatar interaction himself. According to this article Kapor and developer Philippe Bossut have been developing a hands-free, camera-based interface for Second Life. You can visit Kapor’s site to view a demonstration.
Given these projects and the success of accelerometer-based interaction of the Nintendo Wii and Apple iPhone and camera-based interaction like Sony’s Eye-Toy, some form of more advanced human-avatar interaction is coming. Will it come from Linden Lab? I wouldn’t get your hopes up.
Sculptie Tool: Plopp SecondLife
4 October 2007
New tool for creating sculpties in Second Life. Plopp: “PloppSL allows you to create intriguing Sculpted Prims for SecondLife™ easily. Both texture and model are created in one step. Simply paint the front and back side of your model and it will be converted to a Sculpted Prim by PloppSL.”
The Trough of Disillusionment
25 September 2007
Being a data junky I’ve enjoyed watching the stats for this Web site over the past couple years. I’m actually just about to hit 150,000 unique visitors which I suppose is a good enough milestone as any to reveal some statistics. Not so much as an exercise in egotism, but as a casual examination of Second Life’s popularity filtered through this site over the past ten months. I’ve had this site for over 2 years now, and prior to 2007, visits were few but steady. But as we all know, SL exploded this year with meteoric hype.
Short MetaPlace Demo
19 September 2007
Video of Raph Koster giving a brief overview of setting up a MetaPlace virtual place. From the looks of it, creating a basic “metaplace” will be just as easy as creating something like a MySpace page. Just a couple of clicks and you’re done. In addition, to visit a metaplace all a user will need to do is visit the URL in a Web browser.
If Raph and the folks at Areae can make this work as he describes, it will really raise the bar for virtual world user experience. This is the kind of thing I’m talking about when I continually lambaste Linden Lab for the poor initial user experience in Second Life.
I recently had a friend who works at Columbia College here in Chicago describe her initial user experience with Second Life and it was as depressing as you’d imagine: difficulty in figuring out how to navigate the world, little direction as to where to go in-world, a rabbit hole of sim after empty sim except for a couple cybering, and, after a couple of confusing teleports, landing in an erotic art gallery where the proprietor was none to friendly. Eventually she was trapped and just logged off in frustration. She then complained that logging in again brought her to the same place where she was trapped. And that was the end of her Second Life.
Obviously we don’t know what the user experience of navigating each metaplace will be like. To a certain extent it will be up to the individual creator. But given that MetaPlace is so integrated with the Web and Web Services, I have to think that it will also leverage existing Web UX and UI patterns. In the video it appears as if there will be “stylesheets” or templates for creating a world. This will allow novice creators to use pre-built worlds that are ready to go, which lowers the bar, well, just about as low as it will go. Advanced creators will of course be able to use Lua, Web Services, and whatever other building tools Areae provides. I imagine there will also be a healthy business for good metaplace stylesheets.
What is MetaPlace?
18 September 2007
“Our motto is: build anything, play everything, from anywhere. Until now, virtual worlds have all worked like the closed online services from before the internet took off. They had custom clients talking to custom servers, and users couldn’t do much of anything to change their experience. We’re out to change all of that.”
I’ve been reading Raph Koster’s blog for a couple years now and waiting to see what he’d come up with next. I’m excited that that day has gotten a little bit closer. Can’t wait to see MetaPlace.
Hopefully 2008 will be the start of the 2nd generation of virtual worlds and will be as much fun as Second Life in 2003 was (probably wishful thinking, but one can dream).
UPDATE: Hamlet has the most detailed information I’ve seen so far on MetaPlace over at GigaOM. Now I really want to be in the beta!
What is VastPark?
16 September 2007
“VastPark is a virtual content platform featuring free tools, revolutionary distributed content syndication and enables you to deploy your own virtual world or online game within seconds royalty free.”
Looks intriguing. More information over at Metaversed. Hop over to VastPark to sign up for their beta.
Modo 301 Released
10 September 2007
Modo 301 has been released. Boy, I wish I had time to really sit down and took a look at it. Alas, real life work involved 2D design for the most part. Still, this release looks fantastic.
Oh, and since everybody’s doing it, I’ll bend to peer pressure and follow the trend. I guess I’m pretty damn nerdy. C’est la vie!
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