PS3 Home – Just got better

I have often been a bit annoyed by PS3 home that I did not feel comfortable with my avatar. I had a few custom clothes that were fun, but the lack of green hair just grated.
Now though with the release of the game AvP (which I have on my Xbox) some limited edition content has been made available.
There is a predator helmet and body suit (cost about Β£2.00)
So I bought it last night and whilst I cannot overlay my jacket as in Second Life it did feel just right. Odd as that may seem.
Predator home
It made posing and dancing even funnier than it has been before
It also leads to the clash of content that worries many people about interoperability
Predator home throne
I am also sure this is not seen in too many Audi showrooms
Audi predator
The models and movement and lighting are all very high grade as you would expect. Though I think it still shows the fantastic skill of Sythia Veil who created my predator AV in Second Life over 4 years ago with just the tools in SL !
predbio
Which I might add if I had not had so much time and emotion invested in that look I would not have paid to have that in PS3 Home and then written this post singing it praises. Note, there is a lot to be said for user created content and fan art!

Exploring the galaxy

I just tried to put google sky on a media surface on the inside surface of a sphere in #slviewer2
SL viewer 2 and google sky
It sort of works. Of course if you do put a web surface on the inside of a sphere and want to drive it you have to be able to click on it πŸ™‚ I think there is some scope for some interesting holodeck effects and animations though using web content.
I was experimenting with some spherical photos out on the web, as we really have a qtvr viewer like viewer thats much easier to control for people

180 ideas by 22 experts

Yesterdays quick brainstorm idea generation session for DotGovLabs was a very interesting session indeed. Ren Reynolds had invited an amazing set of people and I have to thank them all for coming and joining in.
We only had two hours to see what we could all generate from one another’s interactions. Using the tried and tested (but still quite scary) technique of crowd-sourcing with post-it notes around the subject of Games and Government everyone dived right in.
Having (over) 22 people in one session was likely to be too many, but as it turned out once everyone got going things started to flow. The lack of complete structure is not always for everyone, though many people have experienced this free form idea generation before. I had created some themed areas to help focus some thought, but in general we wanted whatever came up to be put on the board.
I was very happy when the brainstorm “rules” I had on a whiteboard that included “Wild and extreme ideas are good” was adjusted to “are fantastic”
The voting section highlighted some interesting points which then led to good round table discussions on the subject too.
There are some report deliverables out of all this which need some work to put all the various other inputs together.
I went through all the 180 ideas and comments this morning grouping and ordering them. I also had a flashback to a whiteboard session in 1998 when I put MMORPG up in a session on where we should go with the web business at the old firm. It was not high on the list of voting, but would have actually generated a lot more revenue if we had engaged with it all at the time πŸ™‚
Idea generation workshop
One thing I can share at the moment is the result of the warm up exercise.
I suggested that people write down a significant influential gaming moment and put that on the board. As we are dealing with engagement and we were in general a group of gamers it created the following list. See how many resonate with you πŸ™‚

Playing quake for England
Doom II over a serial cable for the first time
Getting the Babel fish in hitchhikers guide to the galaxy
Getting an Xbox to try and get down with the kids (Failed!)
Meeting Darth Vader in Star Wars Galaxies
Pong in the 1970’s
Choosing to be a vengeful or benign god in Black and White
Discovering I was actually evil in world of warcraft (where I thought I was good)
Galaxian 10p after 10p spent in an afternoon
Swooping in Zagawhateva on flying mount
Capture the flag (in real life)
Having pong arcade game fall on me at youth club circa 197?
Heavy Rain
Seeing the power of narrative in Fahrenheit
Portal’s ending made me cry
T-Rex on original Tomb Raider
Learning to play chess with my dad
Linking 2 BBC B together and playing Elite for days with brother aged 10
Getting 70 on Iphone Scrabble
The death of Aeris on FFVIII
Seeing the facial animations on Half-Life2 on my PC (real time) for the first time
Finding out that β€˜Hunters’ are really fun in PvP in World of Warcraft
Realizing what Stranglethorl Vale was saying
Completing Myst – No Cheats

Facilitation thats what it needs. Ideas welcome

This afternoon I am running a brainstorm, ideas generation session in London (as I mentioned in this post) for Ren Reynolds and his tVPN The Virtual Policy Network as part of DotGovLabs which is an R&D project co-funded by Directgov, NHS Choices and Business Link. Initially for a small(ish) group but now a much larger one I thought I best ramp up on the equipment needed.
Pre event equipment audit
Postits, pens and stickers are the order of the day.
These sessions are always very flexible and interesting in their outcomes. There is a beginning a middle and and end but other than that …. its down to the people attending sparking up ideas.
A regular facilitator may not get overly involved in the idea generation, but I feel that as this is a session on games, virtual worlds and government I will be joining in and a few of those post-it notes will have my scrawl on them.
Fingers crossed and good luck to all the attendees.

If you want to throw any ideas into the melting pot please feel free to comment on these or any points.

The workshop will bring together Government, Industry and Academics to discuss topic such as:
β€’ Opportunities for presence in platform menus/dashboards
β€’ How can we get government in the space where gamers are?
β€’ Partnerships and placement with 3rd parties
β€’ Online communities
β€’ Being involved in storyline
β€’ Likely costs

In game advertising, Knives, Burgers and Shoes

The predlets asked me to put the “crashing game” on the xbox today. It was odd as we had not played Burnout Paradise for a very long while. It is relatively speaking a very old game but has been kept fresh with all sorts of updates. I noticed too many of my friends list were back playing it so it was all very serendipitous.
In particular was the fact that next week I am helping to facilitate an ideas generation workshop with the games industry and government (via Ren Reynolds Virtual Policy Network (tVPN) on how to engage sensibly and interestingly with the population.
So there the predlets were driving through the streets of paradise city when I saw these posters served via the in game advertising. Burnout being a network enabled game the ads tend to be dynamically served and clearly targetted as UK specific ones.
Job centre
Job centre plus for the UK
Knife crime
Knife crime
Burgers
Burgers.
So that seems to indicate that the players of video games are expected to be prone to carry a knife, be unemployed and mainly eat burgers?
There was some hope though with this one
Charity
A charity awareness movement for One Day Without Shoes on April 8th this year
This is the sort of in game placement that makes sense. The billboards keep the view of the city quite fresh, and do not detract from the experience. So apart from the implications of the types of advert targeted at the UK, or maybe just targeted at me it seems a generally good concept.
Would it mean though that coming up to a general election all parties would need enough of their own billboards in games to be representative. Would it turn gamers off to see the spitting and fighting on billboards? Lets hope we don’t have to find that one out!

Merging content with 3Dvia

I finally got to switch on my windows machine and try 3dvia scenes. 3Dvia is a collection of uploaded multi-format 3d models that has an interesting iphone app to go along with it which I had mentioned in a few posts
Now there is an extension to the web site called Scenes. This allows you to create a “room” or a place and drop in the 3d content from the library. You have an avatar based experience in the browser plugin wandering around your room, other can join you for chat and also be allowed to edit things.
3dviaplaces
This worked really well (once my flaky windows vista machine started up). So my only complaint (or wish) is that this would be a cross platform plugin like unity3d is. *Update it may well be it just did not work. The 3d model player does work (though in firefox not safari, but the places player is a .exe at the moment I think)
The content in this scene shows the variety of sources.
The character on the right is the exported version of my Evolver avatar (though it is a static 3d model in this case)
The sculpture on the left is one that I doodled on my iphone with sculptmaster
The wild animal is someone elses, I left the description panel in the picture as you just drag and drop from the search to keep the credit in place.
The figure in the centre is an animated walking moving avatar in world.
D’assault Systemes are certainly doing a good job for us in showing the ability to transfer and interact with pure 3d content.

Mashing up web and Second Life Viewer 2

We have always (as land owners) had the ability to set video parcels in Second Life. This has of course been a bit of a pain with only one video stream, or web page display allowed per parcel. Now we have new media sharing abilities. This has already been implemented in some of the other platforms, but most of those are less user generated in their content.
I tried a few extensions out to ideas, in particular powered by the fact that SL will play interactive flash now not just flash movies as before.

http://www.text2mindmap.com http://www.duckfeetdesigns.com/flocking.htm and Β http://www.habbohotel.co.uk
I used a mind map tool on the web and mashed it with wearing a sphere for a presentation. i.e. you can wear interactive web applications now
I dropped myself into a flash based flocking display where I controlled the direction of the fish.
Finally I popped into Habbo Hotel.
There are of course a few issues and gotchas with interacting with flash. The experience is not totally shared. The browser URL is shared, but not all the interactions. This is only to be expected. I am not complaining, but I know that this will confuse some people. A web interface is inherently single user even if there are multiple users of a system.
Loggin in and personalizing your view of a system is not going to change others views unless the controlling website knows whats going on with this virtual world and multiple users hitting it in context.
There are a lot more things we can do now though, website based HUD’s(I have a transparent twitter hud on right now), textures stored off world (though we are limited to 8 player surfaces at the moment so this could get clunky).
With the combination of SL being able to create HTTP Server objects too we have quite a loop of connectivity.
This is very exciting stuff as many of the projects over the years that I have been involved in move data around and in and out. Things got a whole lot easier I think.


Posting from Second Life Viewer 2

As we were all given access to Second Life viewer 2 just now (not sure why I missed out on the closed beta, but no matter) I thought I would try the full web page on a prim.
This picture I took from within world of me tweeting on the side of a prim whilst also browsing this blog
Postcard from Second Life.
In fact I wrote this post on the side of a prim. So it works(I posted it live from a normal webpage, it should have worked but just dropped into draft πŸ™‚ nothings perfect)
# slviewer2 is very exciting stuff once you get past the chat window moving around!
**Update I also sparked up habbo hotel on a prim and that worked fine (as its just flash). Its a pity Metaplace isn’t there as we would have had some interesting cross media experiences there too.
It has made the interacting with existing content very very easy. Whiteboards, brainstorm tools, videos, etc. All very powerful.

Happy Birthday Feeding Edge

Today it is 1 year since Feeding Edge started to take a bite out of technology so you don’t have to.
feedingedgelogobirthday
I have to say that my first year as an entrepreneur not and intrapreneur has been quite learning experience, though at the same time a familiar one.
There have been lots of interesting meetings and conversations, ideas for projects, requests for help. There has been an awful lot of doing things that needed doing without an obvious and direct payback. Out here in entrepreneur country relationships and helping one another is even more important than in corporate life.
Equally out here you are not a role or a professions. You are whatever you need to do, whatever you feel you can do, you just get on and do it.
The things I have done have crossed many technical platforms and boundaries, much of it cant be shared (which is a pity). Everyday brings a new challenge, whether that is having an idea and seeing if it is possible or talking to people and providing some insight and support to discussing funding of a project.
Do I miss the corporate life? Well after 20 years its hard not to be institutionalised. I miss the good people I worked with, the things we did that mattered in spite of those that had their own more selfish and closed agenda. We all need flags to rally around, I now have Feeding Edge, for which I have a comfortable affinity for and a multitude of projects, customers and collaborations that orbit it.
I miss the paycheck, a known entity every month, and without my wife’s support whilst we build the business and the various revenues streams (listen to me! revenue streams πŸ™‚ ) then this year would not have been possible.
A huge thankyou goes out to all the people who have offered support, talked to me, asked for help and suggested projects.
To all my fellow metaverse evangelists we still have a way to go, but I think we can get where we need everyone to go πŸ™‚
I figure whatever you do you always “work” for someone or something. Family, a cause, a team, shareholders. Finding the thing that sparks your brain, makes you feel engaged an interested really is the key. I have always loved what I do and that’s not changed.
So onward and upward πŸ™‚
If you need me just come and say hello, wherever or however suits.
Linkedin
Twitter
Facebook
epredator potato in Second Life
epredator [at] feedingedge.co.uk
etc. etc. πŸ™‚