Metaverse Launched? 283
jlouderb writes "Following in the heels of Worlds Inc. Blaxxun Interactive and Linden Labs, super-stealth project There Inc. launches Wednesday at CES. ExtremeTech has a preview of the world up,
which is characterized by expressive avatars that look like idealized humans. Backed by a long list of notables, including Halsey Minor, Trip Hawkins, Jane Metcalfe and Louis Rosetto, it's
an ambitious effort. But will the target market of Wal-Mart moms show up? Who knows, we all
laughed at AOL too. You can sign up for the public beta and find out for
yourself."
Gee (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Gee (Score:2, Interesting)
www.activeworlds.com [activeworlds.com]
Yup...exactly! (Score:2, Informative)
Oh, well, back in the day AW was a non-paying service. I even payed some time for support, but now it's completely paying and I just don't care anymore. My friends there have left anyway.
Re:Yup...exactly! (Score:2)
And remember, I started off admitting this was a dumb idea. :-)
Re:Gee (Score:2)
Or like WorldsAway/VZones, which is like 10 years old yet has better graphics? Seems like this is a tired old idea, indeed.
Re:Gee (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Gee (Score:3, Insightful)
"IM is easier than chatting in any physical space - real or virtual.
So poorly spelt, hastily typed text drained of all inflection and expression is _better_ than chatting in a physical space? I can't count the number of misunderstandings I've had with people that would never have happened if they could've at least heard my voice, or seen my expression. And no, smileys are not a substitute.
Not to mention that it's far quicker to speak than it is to type for most people.
If there were a virtual space that even picked up a tenth of what face-to-face communication expresses, it'd be tremendously useful. (Depending on which tenth, I suppose.)
Re:Gee (Score:2)
Re:Gee (Score:3, Funny)
This is like all those teen movies, but REAL!
Er
AOL (Score:2, Interesting)
And we still do. Have they taken over the world and I haven't noticed, or is there some other sinister reason to stop laughing at them?
Re:AOL (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes their service may still stink. But apparently hundreds of thousands of users all over the world are happy with them. Call them lusers if you want, but if you're still laughing at AOL I think the joke's on you.
Re:AOL (Score:3, Informative)
But apparently hundreds of thousands of users all over the world
Er, according to a recent news article [216.239.37.100], AOLs user base clocks in at around 35 million worldwide.
Re:AOL (Score:5, Insightful)
I am laughing at AOL, because their user base is eroding faster than Lake Erie's north shore, and they have all but lost relevance these days.
AOL got popular because they had (past tense) good marketing, and because they carpet-bombed North America with CDs. People had heard about this 'online' thing in 97 and wanted to try it, but with a nice pair of TCP/IP training wheels.
Everyone looses the training wheels when they learn ho to ride. Hell, some move up to 18-speed recumbant bikes. AOL was smart - they basically rooked Time Warner for imaginary money.
So, no. They had all but taken over the world, but now they are on their way to something else.. .if they're smart.
Re:Last I read (Score:3, Informative)
AOL is undoubtedly a large company, but one of the more salient criterions used to assess the health and the future prospects of a company is its ability to grow. Last I read, AOL is faltering a bit in this area.
SO let me get this straight... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:SO let me get this straight... (Score:5, Funny)
Right! You just shoot him with a paintball gun...it's much more humane.
Paintball guns don't kill avatars...avatars kill avatars....errrr...
--K.
ANOTHER brave new world? (Score:5, Funny)
So, what, we can't make ones that look like us in real life?
Shooting daggers and a very Mario-like floating heart convey deeper emotions.
"Deeper" being a relative term... How many times in one day do you wink at someone?
There expects its audience to skew more towards women than men, at least at first. Why? Well according to CEO Tom Melcher, "men will go where the women are, but the reverse isn't true."
The logic there doesn't quite work. Why not just say "The company behind There has figured out what drinking establishments have known for several hundred years"?
Re:ANOTHER brave new world? (Score:2)
I play a Female Gnome Wizard from (rare) time to time in Everquest. I'm not 3 feet tall, I don't cast damaging spells, and I don't tinker with clockwork parts to create automatons (although I'm a sysadmin, so I guess that last part is kind of close). Yet people frequently assume that I'm female in real life. So these "There" developers should just get enough guys to cross-dress in the game, that should do the trick and bring the customers in droves!
Or not.
Shame... (Score:2, Funny)
Pointless Prettyness (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, text chatting may not have motorbikes, but it's a lot simpler, and when the day is done, simplicity is important when you have things to get done (like chatting about whatever).
And the extras like the stores, etc. seem pointless to the core experience as well as making it more complex.
I'm sure that someday VR-type chats may well exist and even be useful. But I don't think this is going to be it.
Re:Pointless Prettyness (Score:4, Insightful)
However, for something to be valuable, it must have BOTH qualities (whereas improvement to an existing valued item usually only needs one quality). There's no reason doing something efficiently if there's no reason to do it, and there's no reason to do something new it if it isn't done well.
This new virtual world seems neither efficient or innovative.
Jesus Christ. (Score:4, Funny)
Thanks for the offer guys, but I'll keep not buying Nike in the real world ;-)
Re:Jesus Christ. (Score:2)
Thank you. I havent bought anything Nike for over 15 years. I did receive a pair of nike shoes as a gift about 4 years ago - but I will *never* purchase one of their products.
Re:Jesus Christ. (Score:2)
Re:well... (Score:2)
The Best Part... (Score:5, Interesting)
In Stephenson's metaverse, the "cool" people were the best programmers, they always had the coolest stuff. If someone creates an open world that allows people to use the system to build/program their own things (buildings/vehicles/etc...) inside the world (think MUSH/MUD with graphics) then we are getting closer.
The next step would be more VR, an immersive interface, etc...
But it has to start somewhere. Although (slashdot appeal to the choir) it seems like the metaverse of Snow Crash was more of a *open* thing.
Re:The Best Part...PartII (Score:4, Informative)
Metaverse? Not quite... (Score:5, Insightful)
The strength of the Metaverse in Snowcrash was the ability to program everything and everything.... it was basically a GIANT graphical MUSE (not a mud), where EVERYONE is a developer.
-Berj
Not quite so (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Metaverse? Not quite... (Score:2)
Re:Metaverse? Not quite... (Score:2)
Once approved, you pay a one-time initial set up cost to start the process for your item. You can then either buy a quantity of the item or put one copy of the item up for perpetual auction. In addition to the set up charge, you pay the per-unit cost for each product you either buy or sell at auction. If you choose to sell the product via perpetual auction, one copy of the product will be put up for auction at a specific price. When someone buys the product, the buyer will receive the product and the money will be taken from their account and credited to your account automatically. Then another auction will be created so that someone else may buy another product. This auction will stay in place until either you remove it or until the quantity limit you originally set is reached.
I don't think that's exactly what Stephenson had in mind, and that's not what the Metaverse is about. It looks like, in There you can code trinkets, not "the entire world" as the article suggests.
-Berj
Re:Metaverse? Not quite... (Score:2)
Re:Metaverse? Not quite... (Score:4, Insightful)
Their current ideas on financing the project seem to be pretty good, as you only pay for what you use, except for the bandwidth to go in and hang out. But that is their hook to get people in the first place, so it is probably best that they don't charge any sort of monthly fee. I imagine that it is going to take quite some time to fine-tune the system, but as long as most of the content is user created and auctioned to other users, they shouldn't have too many issues in that area, since it will be the users who dictate value for products and services. There Inc. collects the setup fee to implement new products and a small percentage of each transaction of those products, keeping the system running.
The only problems that I see are if they allow the world to stagnate rather than constantly updating the engine and providing new features in the APIs, and if they run out of funding before a sufficient user economy becomes established to support the project, since there won't be much going on for the first few months as they attract new users and the users get comfortable with creating new content and the idea of making micropayments for those products.
Given enough time, though, I see no reason why they cannot be successful, especially with scarcity well implemented into the system. After all, the MMOG maniacs buy and sell virtual items and cash by the digital truckload every day, and most of that stuff they could get for free with a bit of work in the game itself, as there is no scarcity except in the rare circumstance of an item spawn being discontinued. If hardware were free, then it wouldn't matter, but if they just allowed users to create and use giant multiple megabyte vehicles with a buttload of CPU-chowing options without cost, they'd be bankrupt in a matter of days.
To be honest, I don't expect much success from this project, being the pessimistic bastard that I am, but I do hope that I am wrong because I would love to see a Metaverse-style cyberspace actually be implemented. Then we'll just need the badass visual and audio devices for total immersion. Well, OK, and the groin devices as well, since pornography seems to be the spearhead of technological advancement.
Re:Metaverse? Not quite... (Score:2)
It just bothers me that this commercial product was compared to the Metaverse described in the book.
-Berj
Signup is Linux-illiterate (Score:2)
Re:Signup is Linux-illiterate (Score:2)
The other option is to answer the questions by hand, which I did. I think answering the 'Operating System' question with 'Other: Linux' probably puts me out of the running however. Oh well, back to IRC (on the rare occasions that I chat at all.)
NOT the metaverse. (Score:5, Interesting)
A true implementation of the metaverse would allow me to model my own home, in my own space, on my own server, allow people to visit it AND allow me to program objects in that space that other people could see. For example a program, that takes the shape of a radio, that when another user get within range of it, they download the part of the app that they need, that I wrote, such that they can then hear the music from the radio (streaming mp3's, ect).
And at first I'm sure the place would be mainly populated by programmer and techy types, eager to see what they can code, and how they can push the technology. But I would assume, just like in the www, that as the software gets fleshed out the masses will come, and they will have an already existing base of freeware objects and models to pick and choose from, as well as commercial products.
Of course there would be security problems that would have to be overcome, and different systems to be compatable with, plus a streaming model format. But I think that with a combination of something like java and open source clients and servers, the only parts that would need to be "official" would be the hooks for the in game software, and some kind of central property authority to keep track of how different properties (individual servers) interconnect and where they exist on the x/y plane of the the metaverse.
THEN there is the whole bandwidth issue, I don't think this would work very well on the current crop of cable and dsl modems. but hey, the www as we know it know it today wouldn't exist unless people before had pushed the bounderies of technology.
Re:NOT the metaverse. (Score:3, Interesting)
But that would not be programming, it would be architecture design. You don't need to be a programmer for that. In the end, you are always limited to what the software running in the server and the clients can do. For instance, a cool thing would be a river with a waterfall in my garden. Assuming the existence of a proper API to represent that, how many other people would have the necessary hardware to see it?
Re:NOT the metaverse. (Score:2)
I thought it would be a good idea to take an open layered approach:
Layer 1) floor plan geometry
2) basic 3d geometry
3) basic shading
4) more detailed 3d geometry
5) more detailed shading
6) even more detailed geometry
7)
That way a slim client could just get layers 2 and 3 and be able to render the world. People who's computers can handle more detail would get the higher quality versions (well, the highest offered) and render them at that level.
Otherwise you're right, not everyone has (or will have) the latest greatest computer.
Travis
Degrading gracefully (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems that the solution to the bandwidth problem is to have some kind of 3D markup language that can degrade gracefully, in essentially the way HTML works today. Don't have a GeForce10e32 ? You get lower quality versions of the textures, simpler polygons, etc.
The only issue is how much bandwidth is required to receive a minimal scene--and that might well be above what we have right now. Has anyone actually tried to implement such a thing, or at least gotten the preliminaries done so we have some data to work with?
It also seems like a true Metaverse (ala Stephenson) would require a better interface than we have right now. I doubt the general public is going to go for a world where they have to type to speak all day; some kind of voice system is necessary (perhaps incorporating something like Rojer Wilco would help, but most VoIP solutions today are a bit raw...) Plus some of those goggles Hiro wears in Snow Crash would be pretty nice ;)
I like the idea of a property server--it sounds a lot like DNS today, and it could be distributed across multiple servers in the same way; you'd do a lookup of the coordinates, and get an IP back. If the IP's down, it would appear as a fenced in "default" property, otherwise you'd connect to their server, and grab their object information.
Anyway, I've babbled enough. The point is, I think that with a proper 3D language, we really could implement something like this today, though it might be slow as hell for a while, and only really be useful on large LANs (colleges, anyone?).
Re:NOT the metaverse. (Score:2)
No, they were not. The client rendered the avatar. That was evident because the people who connected from the cheap public terminals looked grainy, pixelated and black & white, whereas the rest of the people could have a much better looking avatar. Bandwidth wasn't much of a problem either, unless you were on a wireless connection.
One of the coolest places in the metaverse, The black Sun owed much of its appeal to the fact that normal restrictions didn't apply there, so an avatar could have a luminous hairdo that extended to the roof, for instance.
Hey I dig it (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd really dig a whole snow-crash-ish house, and who ever builds the first "Black Sun" will be instantly cool with the other geeks using this setup.
I don't see if they charge for the service or not, but if they don't I imagine a lot of people will check this out.
I can't wait for someone to build a slashdot world and I can slap the shit out of CmdrTaco myself
Re:Hey I dig it (Score:2, Informative)
The Sims has this locked up (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been tried so many times before, and has never been met with more than a cursory glance from the public at large. These companies need to realize that you need something compelling in your virtual world; furthermore, it needs to be compelling enough to get around the 3D nature of the place.
Anyone remember the Magic Desk system for early handhelds? It was organized like a room in a house. You walked out the door, went to the library to get a book, etc. It sucked because you had to virtually 'walk' to each location, which was totally unnecessary. How about those 3D window managers? Giant pain in the ass, total form without function (and this from a Mac geek).
3D is great for spatial orientation and tasty graphics, but as we all know here it actually hinders you as an interface (compared to our perfectly-suited 2D metaphor for our 2D screens and input devices).
The Sims Online offers a fairly rich 2.5D world that gives you a reason to go - it's a game, and you can chat, wander around, shop, etc. Add the customization bit and it's the only real Metaverse going, IMHO.
Re:The Sims has this locked up (Score:2)
Thank you. I was beginning to think I was alone on this.
For those who clamour for a 'new and improved' interface - I like to call it the Raskin Effect - seem to forget that the radically new point-and-click interface in 1984 (mainstream) came with a radically new pointing device, the mouse. The mouse is 2D, as you said. There's no real utility for a 3D interface until we have 3D screens and input devices.
Of course, I've been waiting for my gloves and goggles for awhile now. Hrmph.
This isn't new. (Score:3, Funny)
I can see ho wthis may appeal to women .... but .. (Score:5, Interesting)
HOWEVER,
The bottom line of all this rambling: This company COULD make quite a killing since this game will obviously appeal to the market of women (a market that is realatively untapped in the computer world
(* prepares to dodge all of the fireballs and weapons that will be thrown my way from those junkies *)
Just my $0.02 cents
Re:I can see ho wthis may appeal to women .... but (Score:2, Insightful)
bkr
Re:I can see ho wthis may appeal to women .... but (Score:4, Funny)
I know one, but I keep her locked up in the house coding away and only let her out once a day to tan.
Sucks to have Radeon VE. (Score:3, Informative)
I don't do 3d gaming. But I do super-high resolution (1920x1200 32bit) display, video playback (mpeg2 decoding functions built in), and some TV output with my video card. (It isn't a 3d screamer, but it is a decent card. AGP 4x, too.) It has been so many years that I've been excluded from something by my video card that I forgot how exclusionary some of these online environments and 3d games are.
Re:Sucks to have Radeon VE. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sucks to have Radeon VE. (Score:2)
For you cynics. (Score:4, Interesting)
And they got one thing right: "Well that was certainly fun. The most interesting aspect of the avatar chat mode is the way words are communicated. Instead of opening a chat window underneath the main screen, There uses cartoon style bubbles that pop up above the avatar's head. There claims that this keeps your eye more on the avatar, and the facial expressions, rather than just turning the entire experience into a text chat.". Guess how almost all MMORPGs have implemented speech. With a g..damned IRC-like interface which makes all conversation a rather impersonal affair!
Except one... Ultima Online, like "There" also floats the speech text over the avatars, and I must say it works very well. Being able to see your partners, and to see quickly who says what, makes it very easy to converse with others in that game. I even have had a business meeting with three colleagues in Ultima Online, as an experiment. Our alternatives were ICQ, E-mail, IRC or a conference call. Meeting "face to face" in-game was by far the most effective of these options.
"There" may well be a success, if properly marketed. If they have any brains they'll try and hook up with big ISPs like AOL and the like, and have them distribute the software with those free CDs we all know and love. They do, as someone pointed out, face competition from the Sims. The Sims is different but they aim at the same market segment.
So, try and run a real meeting. (Score:4, Insightful)
Great, now who's the poor soul who has to type the transcript of this whole meeting. How are they making sure they get things in the right chronological order. (Certain comments won't make any sense unless they follow the comment they were built upon.)
This sounds like a usable interface for 2 or 3 people working together, but it'll break down real quick as the numbers increase.
(Also, one of the joys of IRC was that you could go AFK to take care of something quickly and then go back and read the 'conversation' that happened while you were out.)
Re:So, try and run a real meeting. (Score:3, Informative)
This is precisely whay you would run these kinds of meeting via a computer interface (though not necessarily the one described in the article which may not have features 1 and 2 below)...
1. Everybody can be presented with a view that includes *all* the other participants on the opposite side of the table if desired
and
2. There is no need for a human to "type the transcript" because, guess what, the server already has the transcript and its in the correct chronological order!
Re:So, try and run a real meeting. (Score:3, Interesting)
I can see where watching 20 people at once in a first-person view will be all but impossible. Does "There" have a 3rd person view? UO does, one can easily put 20 people around a large table where everyone can see everyone else, thanks to the isometric overhead viewpoint.
Ultima Online has a neat solution for overlappen texts of multiple persons speaking at once. If two texts overlap, the one typed in last moves to the foreground, the older text moves to the background and fades a bit. You can bring the other text forward by moving your mouse over it, but even with two or three texts overlapping, it is often quite possible to read all three. If it isn't just move your mouse over the text that is obscured. This system works surprisingly well even in busy areas, and I am surprised no other game or program has copied it.
"Great, now who's the poor soul who has to type the transcript of this whole meeting. How are they making sure they get things in the right chronological order. (Certain comments won't make any sense unless they follow the comment they were built upon.)"
As for minutes, Ultima optionally keeps a log of all text you see on your screen, even noting who said what. Instant minutes! This should be easy to add to "There" and I suspect that users will ask for such a feature at some point, just as they already have IRC and ICQ logs.
"This sounds like a usable interface for 2 or 3 people working together, but it'll break down real quick as the numbers increase."
I have held meetings in Ultima with as much as 15 people, not business related but about in-game matters. It was a proper meeting nonetheless and proceeded very smoothly. Of course all participants were used to the interface already, which helped.
"(Also, one of the joys of IRC was that you could go AFK to take care of something quickly and then go back and read the 'conversation' that happened while you were out.)"
Ultima also has an on-screen log window that will store a few minutes' worth of babbling.
The concept of virtual meetings with avatars is sound, I'd say, and I am speaking from experience. Whether or not "There" will measure up, I don't know.
Re:So, try and run a real meeting. (Score:2)
In THAT, UO is king (at least in felucca.)
Re:So, try and run a real meeting. (Score:2)
What the hell kind of company are you working for?!
Re:So, try and run a real meeting. (Score:2)
The real beauty of the metaverse, as someone else noted, is that everything can be programmed. Much like the web is today, anyone can sit down and write their own software to do whatever they want. Hopefully this project will go the same way with open standards.
Travis
Re:So, try and run a real meeting. (Score:2)
The interface is shit because it's tricky to type a transcript of conversations? Do you really believe what you're saying?
Oh, wait, this is satire. Has to be.
Re:For you cynics. (Score:2)
I suppose that there's no real reason not to use "avatar" icons instead of just nyms, but I don't really see the point. (And I know women who fantasize that they are horses, or dragons, or unicorns, so I don't see the point of limiting it to human forms, either.)
Can you imagine an easy way for the icon to display the flashes of emotion that you feel during a conversation? That would add depth. Otherwise it's just... glitter.
slashdot advertisement (Score:2, Interesting)
i havent even tried the sims online, but i know it sux. avatar chat was old when theparty was around and everyone had 900 images of tiny aliens stuck to them when they were all 56k....
i'll stick to irc and being stared at in the mall, thank you.
It's actually interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)
Err.. back to the topic on hand: The exciting thing about this, and what sets it apart from pretty much every other MMORPG/virtual chat out there is that ability to create new parts of the world and have them accessible to others. As people log on and start making that world their own, that's when things get interesting, that's when the whole 'Metaverse' concept starts taking hold. This is the only concept like this I've seen that holds any promise of becoming even partially what we all imagine the 'Metaverse' to be.
As a side note, take a good look at the people who are backing this project. It reads like a who's who of online and gaming celebs in a way. It makes me curious to see how this develops, as I find it hard to believe so many of them would back it to the tune of $33 million if they didn't see a heckuva lot more potential in this than just another virtual chat room.
insightful (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:insightful (Score:2)
my understanding: the whole idea is for There to build an infrastructure and a "planet" (to start with) and a really cool island on it, and to leave the rest of the "world" as a huge frontier for there's user/developer base to explore and develop. so it's got to be attractive/compelling enough codewise AND licensingwise AND userexperiencewise (no I'm not German but I speak it and let it inform my chatgrammar) for geek types to really get excited about... here's hoping!
-chris
ps wrt Lain, I got the dvd set for christmas and finished the first 3, looking fwd to finishing soon... good stuff!
Re:It's actually interesting... (Score:4, Interesting)
It remains to be seen how "open" the APIs will be. And most importantly, under what license...
At my new company (Mekensleep [mekensleep.com]) we are working on something quite similar to "There", except that the engine we are using, called NeL [nongnu.org], has already been released [slashdot.org] under the GNU GPL.
In addition to our new -still secret!
>I find it hard to believe so many of them would back it to the tune of $33 million if they didn't see a heckuva lot more potential in this than just another virtual chat room.
On the other hand, I vividly remember how much money was burned on idiotic business plans during the
So I think I can safely say that the amount of money invested in a company is not necessarily the best way to measure the quality of its project...
Target market? (Score:3, Funny)
Wouldn't that be made up of Target shoppers and not Wal-Mart shoppers?
where's There ? (Score:2)
Give me a bar, restaurant, hot/sunny vacation spot or a skiing/fishing/outdoors expedition with some friends over a computer simulated social experience anyday.
We geeks all need *more* real-life interpersonal interaction, not less.
Now, if you don't mind, I have to get back to playing Vice City.
Go Open Minded (Score:5, Informative)
I'd try it, but (Score:2)
The Bali Bar and Grill? (Score:2)
PSO anybody? (Score:2)
and iChat as well, with the bubble thing.
Wouldn't the MetaVerse be P2P? (Score:2)
Beyond that commercial concerns could setup "real estate" and rent out space for buildings and stuff if you wanted real persistence when your machine is off.
Whoops, I think I've just described another set of web servers and a new browser. Maybe we should work with the Mozilla people...
This certainly seems to kick ass (Score:2)
Entropia, anyone? (Score:2)
-Berj
Fundamentally Flawed? (Score:5, Interesting)
What I would really find interesting to see is how such a world would look like when there is no scarcity. How would population centers look (usually city center means $$$).
An interesting quote I found in this Wired article [wired.com]:
These little economies raise big questions, therefore, and by no coincidence, they tend to be the big questions of the economic age. How, for instance, do we assign value to immaterial goods? What defines ownership when property becomes as fluid as thought? What defines productivity when work becomes a game and games become work?
Are we so used to the notion of scarcity that we wish to reproduce it in cyberspace? Would we not rather move beyond this idea?
Another interesting aspect to think about is how copyrights relate to this. Say I write a piece of code that represents my design for a Castle in such a virtual world. If I copyright it nobody else can legally build the same castle as me. And so the idea of scarcity is reintroduced. But it is only relevant as long as there is no rich public domain from which people can retrieve equivalent items. So hopefully there would be tons of castles available under a Creative Commons [creativecommons.org] license.
Re:Fundamentally Flawed? (Score:2)
The scarcity in There seems to be a voluntary tax. Especially if There doesn't charge for the software or charge a monthly fee (IMHO they shouldn't), they need some way to pay for the service. Letting people choose to pay $.60 for a dune buggy or a jacket or $2 for a dog seems like a reasonable way to pay for the service. And it's voluntary: if you don't want jackets or vehicles or dogs, you can free-ride.
It gives rise to an alternative business model: pay $20/mo to be a "high roller" and have unlimited Therebucks. Both models could exist at once: people can choose whether or not to buy there way into an existence free from scarcity.
Re:Fundamentally Flawed? (Score:3, Interesting)
What I'm wondering about is how they are going to implement micro-payments. Charging for services is all very well, but if credit card charges are twice what the service costs, then something is dangerously wrong with the model. (I suppose that they could take a deposit, and then insist that the user keep a minimum balance in his account... or let him put it on the tab, and insist that he settle at the end of the month.)
Re:Fundamentally Flawed? (Score:2)
Want a new set of clothes? 2000 therebucks. Hoverboard? 1000 therebucks. Admission to an event? 500 therebucks. The exchange rate of therebucks to realbucks isn't set yet (and is probably subject to change depending on the popularity of the "game"), but the current rate for the reviewer was somewhere around 1600 therebucks for $1.
The "game" keeps track of what you spend and at the end of the month your credit card is charged. In essence, the micro-payments are stored up and charged on a monthly basis - something you can get away with easily in a closed environment like this, but which is much harder on the open web.
Speculation: There will probably be a minimum charge, and if the game isn't free then you'll no doubt be given a starting fund that is more or less equivalent to the amount you spent on the game.
Look at the developer section of the website. They keep control over the system. They have approval rights on everything you make and you essentially have to pay them a fee for each item you create. You can recoup that fee by selling the item to other therepeople, but it still fits into the overall economic system.
Speculation: there will never be an unlimited usage fee as one person suggested. Reason: it would flood the market. If i have unlimited funds then why wouldn't i buy 1000 hoverboards and give them away like candy? I suspect the game will always be you get what you pay for - no less and very little more.
Speculation: I'll bet the exchange rate will always be hundreds of therebucks to the dollar to make the money seem less real and more extravagant. If it's hard to do the conversion in your head and therebucks seem cheap, people will be more likely to buy and buy without keeping a running total of what it's actually costing them. On the other hand, if you're spending 1000 therebucks like it's a few cents (which it is) then it makes you feel like a high-roller. (Unless you think about what you're actually getting for the money, which is nothing really.)
Still, sounds interesting. You don't have to worry about peeing, working, studying, etc. - unlike life and most other mmorpgs. It's pay for play pure and simple, but with lots of possibility for different styles of play. I'll definitely give it another glance when I can.
Re:Fundamentally Flawed? (Score:2)
So what you're saying is that the item prices should depend on how much performance it costs? The buggy is more expensive than the bike because it has more polygons and four wheels cost more CPU power than two?
That would definitely make for an interesting economy. I'm not satirical, this would be a very interesting idea.
Re:Fundamentally Flawed? (Score:2)
Your interpretation... that would make for a very interesting economy. And would make sparkling "3-D" gems expensive. (Appropriate, no?)
A "long list of notables"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Someone stop them before we get another torrent of empty-headed buzzword-filled "articles" describing how this nth attempt at a failed idea (god, how is Blaxxun even still around?) is now suddenly going to "change the world"...
What were they thinking? (Score:2)
* Unstable Economy - with so much money, couldn't they hire an economist? The economy in this thing is like a bad version of "former soviet Russia" - there is no connection between the price of an item and the manufacturing cost. It is like EverQuest - a +1 sword costs the same to make as a +50 sword, so the company has to constantly interfere with the price of an item, create artificial scarcity, etc. At least they have auctions...
* Wasted Graphics - they say they are going after women and emotion, but then they talk about graphics, interaction, etc. First off, the graphics are better, but not enough to make a difference. The interaction (driving around, etc.) is fun for a game but has nothing social about it. If you look at all of the various avatar chat products released over the years, after the initial excitement wears off, people just make the graphics window as small as possible or turn it off completely and focus on the text. It isn't because the graphics were bad - it is just that they are not necessary. The only reason these companies keep going back to graphics is that it makes your $33 Million price tag seem more justified.
* Immersion factor - one of the reasons that IM has trumped all of the other chat products is that it does not require immersion!! Hello, you can do it while doing something else, or chat with multiple people at the same time. IM integrates into your life, instead of forcing you into its world.
Nowadays, online social interaction is pretty well studied. The people with the checkbooks should read some of those studies.
- davevr
It launched! Finally! (Score:3, Informative)
The point of There, technically, is that it's supposed to scale up to planetary size. One big, seamless world. No "shards". No picking a server.
It's extensible in several ways; you can repaint objects with Photoshop, design new ones with gmax, and add new play with C++. There's some editorial control, to prevent the world from going downhill.
I'm a bit disappointed that There supports dialup. Supporting dialup forces a whole range of design decisions, all of which make the world worse. Broadband penetration is high enough today that broadband-only is commercially feasible. Half of all online people time is on broadband; the heavy users have already migrated.
I have absolutely no idea whether this will work as a business. Or whether it will work as a virtual world, which is even harder.
OMG... Not again... (VRML-Chrome-Web3D-???) (Score:2, Interesting)
We bought a small Russian company called Paragraph for some ungodly high amount that had some 3D chat environments. We had clients like Sony, we had $20MM from SGI to make the company stand on its own (it was after all a spin off of OpenGL technology that SGI had developed, except it was SGI's attempt at testing the waters of PC software), and it died a miserable death. granted part of the issues back then were related to the fact that no one had the computer horse power to spin 30MM filtered, lit, and textured triangles, Cosmo was built on OpenGL which M$ was doing it's best to kill with D3D/Farenheight, and the plug in was like 14MB to download, oh, and no one had broadband. Other than those few things, I'm SURE that VRML would have been a raging hit...
There has been so many attempts at this stupid idea that's it's not even funny.
If chat is the application, there's no need for 3D AT ALL. Period. The people that are drawn to chat are generally clueless about how to navigate a 3D world. I've done the focus groups. It funny as hell to watch Joe Six Pack staring at his avatars feet all day because he can't figure out how to navigate a general 3D environment with a 2D input device.
If 3D is what people want, fucking buy Quake x, Half-life, etc.
I never understood the stupidity of people that were willing to shovel buckets of money into this crap when if 3D chat was truly compelling, then all you have to do is whip out a Quake mod!
At least under a Quake Mod then we could get a little closer to the idea of the Metaverse where people are free to develop their own reality.
At least then you can shove a rocket up some lame ass looser when he pisses you off.
Maybe I can find some suckers to give me a few MM to hire some Quake hackers to do just this. Any takers? Apparently this idea has not died, maybe we can get some for us!
Last month I think Computer Graphics Magazine did a thing on 3D web stuff. Total example of someone who did not know or understand history and is doomed to repeat it.
This is another stupid idea that will die.
I didn't laugh at AOL! (Score:3, Interesting)
Not everyone did, at least at first. I was like 13 or 14 when the AOL 1.0 disk (a floppy) came to me out of the blue. I knew about the Internet, and I had even experienced it through a BBS-email gateway (FTP over email was ... interesting). The problem I was experiencing was this: while I could find magazines and books and other materials that taught me about the Internet, an actual dialup connection (we're talking pre-WWW here) was horrendously expensive where I lived in Oklahoma. IIRC, the materials that came with the AOL disk advertised some really good rates compared with the other local rates. Of course, they had neglected to install an access number in my LATA, so I never gave them any business. But I didn't begin to associate AOL with newbies for quite some time.
I *think* I'm NDA free... (Score:3, Informative)
Sounds OK to me. So.... I was a contractor doing QA at There for a very brief period. I'd also been involved in a focus group for them prior to that.
Currently, I've been doing beta testing but my Windows box isn't up to spec, video card-wise. I think the vid card requirements are gonna kill them, unless they align with the folks that sell them and offer *massive* discounts. It was known over 16 months ago that these cards were required. I think that the "graceful degradation" solution should have been a priority.
Requiring IE for registration during the install and registration is just dumb. I haven't tried the second "private beta" yet but in the first Netscape, Moz or anything else on Windows just failed. It took a phone call and downloading IE to simply get registered. That's odd, because I remember a LOT of the folks (including QA) working in Linux, or at least using CLI stuff.
Lua is a nifty language, but requiring developers to learn something new is going to be a pain. I'd like to see (again) the API and SDK very soon.
There are some extremely talented people there. I wish I'd stayed. I wish I could go back, frankly. It wis a cool product, and visually and functionall stunning. And that was from a demo and testin 16 months ago. It has indeed gotten better since. I want the jet pack back. Hell with a hoverboard.
I wasn't too pleased with the internal alpha process (junior high kids) but it just might make it.
-jim
Re:what? (Score:3, Informative)
If you look at the front page, you'll see a lot of so-called "links" for this story. Click on them, and you get more information! It's amazing what technology can do.
Yes, actually reading the damn thing could be quicker than posting and waiting for someone less lazy to reply...
Snowcrash references (Score:3, Informative)
[audible.com]
Snowcrash by Neil Stephenson, the same guy who wrote Cryptonomicon. [amazon.com]
In the described virtual world, there was a virtual bar that was highly exclusive, and everyone wanted to hang out there. It was named the Black Sun.[*]
Just as 2001 served as an inspiration for developing communication satellites, Snowcrash's "metaverse" served as the inspiration for the development of VRML. The first company to try and make a VRML world into a commercial venture was, not surprisingly, named "Blaxxun Interactive" in honor of the bar in Stephanson's book.
[*] The protagonist of the story, Hiro Protagonist, was a pizza delivery guy/hacker who wrote the code for much of the metaverse, including the Black Sun bar.
zanshin (Score:2, Interesting)
As an example, consider the description of a virtual sword fight[*] in the Black Sun. Before going into the actual fight, there's about a one page aside where Stephanson says that kendo is an attempt to take a chaotic and violent practice - sword combat - and give it rules and regulations. Stephanson then goes back to describing the fight. In this description Stephanson talks about how the opponent, a very formal Japanese businessman, faces faces off with Hiro and moves forward
displaying perfect zanshin. He then explains that
That's not an actual quote (i.e. it is from memory) but you get the jist. The description of the method of movement is just what a kendo person would do. The terminology explains to the swordplay nerd that the businessman has years of practice, so much so that he moves effortlessly without conscious thought. Saying he has "zanshin" gives the swordplay nerd the idea that this person could move through an entire fight without even thinking about what he was doing, that the businessman could simply watch Hiro's actions and let his body respond to them without any conscious effort.
All that implied level of skill is lost on the non-swordplay nerd because they don't know what zanshin is. However, they still laugh because of his description of a highly trained martial artist getting cut off below the knees because their sport doesn't teach them how to block down there.
Stephenson is a master at doing this; i.e. he can tell a good story containing inside jokes and still have 80% of the people who are outsiders laughing. That's far preferable to Mark Fabi [amazon.com]'s approach of telling a good story full of inside jokes and then stopping the story to explain the joke to the outsider, thus destroying both the inside-ness of the joke and the flow of the story.
[*] The character Hiro protagonist always carried a katana and shoto, both in real life and as an avatar in the metaverse.
Re:Snowcrash references (Score:2)
Just as 2001 served as an inspiration for developing communication satellites, Snowcrash's "metaverse" served as the inspiration for the development of VRML
Err nice try but no. VRML served as the inspiration for Snow Crash. The idea was out there in one form or another for a lot longer than Snow Crash has been around. Neuromancer, Shadowrun, the Verner Vinge (sp?) story that I can't remember the name of... all older.
Re:Snowcrash references (Score:2)
Vernor Vinge's True Names. It's a little strange to read now, as it's sense of an internetwork and it's vocabulary is different than ours, but a seminal work in Artifical Intelligence and cyberspace nonetheless. It was written in 1979-80.
Re:Snowcrash references (Score:2)
Re:Umm... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Umm... (Score:2, Insightful)
"Of course my social life is online, no one would believe me a woman to see me" - unknown
Re:Umm... (Score:2)
On the other hand, surreptitiously turning up the volume on your mp3/CD player or Walkman does the trick nearly as well.
And something good, say, Holst's The Planets, makes even the most boring yammerhead's flapping lips seem closer to the sublime.
Of course, it's more discreet and polite if your hair is long enough to cover your ears, and earphones.
3dslut.com (Score:2)
Re:cheesy graphics (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What type of software is it? (Score:2)
Re:Not fond (Score:3, Insightful)
What about people who can't go outside? What about people with disabilities that prevent them from walking, running, playing, driving a dune buggy, flying etc. etc... What about people who want to explore their inner sexuality - that may be at odds with their external sex? What about people who just want to be freaks - granted this game doesn't allow you to be a strange creature - but, I think you get the drift by now.
Another thing: why would I want to be around people in my real life environment, particularly if there is no one compatible with me within 500 miles? Much better from this perspective to spend more time meeting people in the VR environment. Why settle for talk of beer and cars - when I can login online and talk with folks about things I really care about?
I agree its not for everyone. However, I wouldn't chide anyone from spending time inside of a VR world if it makes them happy.