Terra Nova

IMVU = There lite?

Yet another visual chat system is making the break for mainstream acceptance. This one is called IMVU. The neat thing about is it that it sits on top of a range of Instant Message clients and though its in Beta it seems fairly stable. Like many other things virtual IMVU has its own currency Avatar Dollars (AV$) and allows users to buy and sell clothing and accessories.

Team TN, well Betsy and I, have been road testing the software – see screen shot on right of our intense user test procedure in full flow.

The There link?

Well I have not been able to track down anything official yet, but if you do a whois on the domain you find that it is owned by The Will Harvey Company in CA and just how many Will Harvey’s working on vitual words can there be. Oh and the avatars floating chat bubbles are seem to be give away.

Virtual (Wikipediac) Worlds?

On Slashdot they reviewed Robert Glass' book Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering.  Fact 21 snagged by eye:  "(f)or every 25% increase in problem complexity, there is a 100% increase in solution complexity."   On BoingBoing they continued with  the controversy of Wikipedia and whether a publically vetted (open source) knowledge base can be trusted.  All this led to a few thoughts about scaling problems in future virtual worlds...

Terra Nova Welcomes Jim Purbrick

One of the fortunate few who have been able, at this early stage, to acquire both academic and industry experience in analyzing and implementing virtual worlds, Purbrick hails from Nottingham UK. Primarily a network technologist but also a designer, his credits include experiments with time-linking in virtual worlds (recording and replaying events), persistence mechanisms (the PhD thesis), and real-world projects like Dragon Empires and the now-retired Warhammer Online. In the latter, we would have been treated to Jim's version of a seamless load-balancing technology - a holy grail for us lag-tortured players.

You can see a collection of Jim's writings at this link. Welcome!

Are Virtual Worlds Blind?

In the August Popular Science you can find "Is Science Fiction About to Go Blind?" A fun and thoughtful read that claims Sci-Fi -- once the domain of fresh thinking and edgy choices about imminent possibilities -- has gone soft, safe, and docile:

...(To) imagine the relatively near-term future... is a strangely courageous act, because modern science fiction is facing a crisis of confidence. The recent crop of stories mostly take the form of fantasy (elves and wizards), alternate history (what if the Black Death had been deadlier?) and space operas about interstellar civilizations in the year 12,000 (which typically gloss over how those civilizations evolved from ours). Only a small cadre of technoprophets is attempting to extrapolate current trends and imagine what our world might look like in the next few decades. “We’re staring into a fogbank,”

Virtual Worlds 101: Draft Syllabus

The following course outline is for a upperclass undergraduate seminar on "Virtual Worlds" here at Indiana University. I'd be eager to get some commentary before inflicting this stuff on helpless students. Don't forget that they are college students, after all, and won't be enthusiastic about reading thousands of pages. Also, book purchases are to be kept to a minimum. The goal is to cover the basics without imposing too much burden. Plus I want lots of time to just discuss things. Suggestions for improvement / change of direction / more representative works are welcome.

Richard Posner & Virtual Worlds

The Honorable Richard A. Posner is a judge on the Federal Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, a renowned public intellectual, and pretty much the inventor of at least one or two entire fields of legal scholarship. He's also guest-blogging this week over at Larry Lessig's weblog. Perhaps I should have seen this coming when he said that The Matrix was his new favorite movie--but in any event, his latest post shows that he's as fascinated with the social, economic, and legal implications of virtual worlds as we at Terra Nova. Read the post, you'll see what I mean. Professor Beth Noveck, in the comments field, has told him he must come to the State of Play II: Reloaded. We agree!

Forterra = The New There

Those who read Clive Thompson's NYT Magazine piece blogged by Greg earlier this week may have noticed the new company name for There: Forterra Systems. Yesterday the company issued a press release that confirms the name change and announces a new round of financing to the tune of $14M.

Who says geeks

..can’t get a date?

Well how else are you going to explain news-fad-of-the-day: The Virtual Girlfriend from Artificial Life Inc. The business model seems to be that you buy the character stuff and, according this BBC story, ‘she’ will introduce punters “to different aspects of her life”.

So, it’s a cute Tamagotchi with a slot marked ‘keep inserting money here’?

If any one wants to send me money to reveal different aspects of my life the bidding starts at $/€ 500 per go – I promise to make something up that is almost mildly interesting.

News Links

A busy day in the digital world news cycle. Protests, digital items and donations, oh my!

First, the Terra Novans were asleep at the wheel and missed the Star Wars: Galaxies protest, covered in detail on Law Meme. Digital world protests are nothing new, but this is an interesting look into how SW:G's customer service reps handle emergent situations.

Second, Wired News has an article about earning real money in digital worlds, specifically on using cheaper, international labor. Julian is mentioned and Brock Pierce is quoted.

Finally, actually a bit of original news. Following VERTU's successful campaigns for Heifer International and EFF, IGE has now opened a donation page as well, allowing digital world residents to give their earnings to Mercy Corps. Any of the lawyers want to jump in with a discussion of how simple US charitable giving rules are :-)?

Rayne, Rayne, go away?

The game character Rayne (BloodRayne series) appears to have a full schedule: on September 18 she is to appear on MTV2 where "Rayne and crew (will) give a stunning lip synced performance to Evanescence's hit 'Everybody's Fool.'" In October she will appear topless in Playboy magazine.