I posted about Tateru’s marketing post and gave my opinion on why it has changed so much in: Dwell On It: Marketing. Next I see Honour posting about Contrast & Diversity in Second Life. She points to the bias being taught in Mississippi and the ignorance of a woman (girl?) thinking she could only get pregnant if both she and her lover climaxed at the same time. I think both of those show a lack of education… at very different levels.
Honour also has a good post up on changing the appearance of water for photos in Second Life™. See: Playing With Water in Second Life.
Machinmatrix.org, the maker of AvaStar, has a list of their contest winners up: The winners of the Week (29-Mar – 4-Apr 2014).
Metareality has a podcast out on the Facebook purchase of Oculus Rift. See: White Hot. In early January they put out: Year in Review. In late January they put out: B-A-L-L-S.
Their conversation points out to what may happen with Facebook. They think FB will make its own virtual world and that it will be competition for Second Life. That is probably a good bet.
Karl thinks FB will have to make pretty content and shove it down users throats. (40:00) Isn’t that sort of what Blue Mars tried? FB may be able to make it work. But, making huge quantities of content has already bankrupted more than one game. I doubt it will bankrupt FB, but at some point the cash flow will be seen as going the wrong direction and something will change. There are reasons user made content is the goal of many gaming companies this decade.
Philip Rosedale was speaking at Silicon Valley Virtual Reality…
Jo Yardley has an article on it with her thoughts. See: Philip Rosedale shows High Fidelity progress. The video is long: 1hr 40munites. Philip starts speaking at time mark 42:00 minutes.
A friend and I were chatting recently as to why Second Life didn’t join the OSGrid and the metaverse in general. “Why oh why are all of my inventory items stuck in Second Life? Why can’t I just jump grids and have my inventory everywhere?” The purchase of Oculus by Facebook, I think, is the glaring answer. How easy would it be for FB to “absorb” content from other worlds and incorporate it into its own, thereby eliminating years of research and development costs? FB doesn’t have the creative talent to create a virtual world so they will have to do to Second Life what they did to MySpace – take as much as possible while doing as little work as possible – and buying the rest. If simply by being a walled garden, Second Life/Linden Lab is staving off encroachment by the likes of Facebook, well… that alone justifies to me why SL doesn’t “play nice with others.”