Category Archives: News

Matt Biddulph’s virtual 3D printer

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Matt Biddulph, the brains behind the Second Life Flickr screen and the Last.fm BBC Radio 6 hack (which I mentioned here on Eightbar a while ago), has come up with something even cooler. By way of introduction he points out that…

Many people find the creation of 3D models in SL to be rather tricky. This is because there’s no built-in way to import polygon data as a mesh of 3D coordinates from an external modelling tool. Imagine if there was a factory object that could read a list of coordinates and spit out the results straight into the world, like a virtual 3D printer.

First of all, I love the virtual 3D printer analogy. What Matt seems to propose is automatic creation of primitive objects, such as those used in POV-Ray or Second Life, from arbitrary 3D data. Doing this efficiently is pretty much the unsolved problem in this space at the moment, as nicely summarised by Troy McLuhan in a comment on a 3pointD post earlier this year.

This is something the Prim.Blender project can’t do, requiring you to build with SL-aware prims within Blender instead. My SketchUp hack gets very slightly closer, but in a very crude and limited way (so crude and limited it is still not publicly available, despite having been Slashdotted).

It looks like Matt already has something working. I can’t wait to learn more about this.

Hugo’s Life2Life project in the press

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Hugo Dalgleish and Tabatha Hegel, whose Life2Life Amazon web services project has been covered more than once on Eightbar as well as on the Amazon Web Services Blog, achieved yet more more fame yesterday by appearing in Information Week.

Congratulations to Hugo and Tabatha on this writuep. The article is great. Not only does it cover their project, it touches on Second Life and S3 and also contains a rather interesting quote from Amazon’s Web Services Evangelist (and friend of Eightbar) Jeff Barr.

More press for IBM in virtual worlds

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Thanks to both Andy and Kelly for pointing out the piece in the BBC Technology section today.

Since being grossly mislabelled as a chemist last year, I’ve been looking forward to seeing my photo on the BBC website again and a screenshot of my avatar is close enough.

Both the BBC piece and the story from Reuters’ embedded journalist were outcomes of the busy day I had last week.

After Ian made it to El Reg and Rob was in Wired, the press escalation continues. I’m betting Ian makes the first TV appearance though.

Television comes to Second Life

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Both the Electric Sheep Company and Rivers Run Red have made interesting noises about TV in Second Life recently.

The Sheep have an interesting project at the moment called Destroy Television (more details on 3pointD). I managed to get my moment of fame by making a banner and hanging around in front of the cameraperson for a while. That’s me in the Flickr stream…

It's me!

There are limited details so far about Rivers Run Red’s project, so I’m looking forward to hearing more about it.

Tired and croaky: busy day yesterday

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I’m tired and slightly croaky after a long day yesterday. As Andy already pointed out, much of it centered around NMK’s My So Called 2nd Life conference at 01Zero-One, right in the middle of Soho.

Once it got underway, the speakers were:

  • MMOs: where are they now, and where are they heading? – Michael Smith
    Michael (the CEO of Mind Candy, the makers of Perplexcity) spoke on MMOs (including Habbo Hotel, Cyworld, Second Life, Virtual Laguna Beach, etc. He also talked about ARGs (Alternate Reality Games)  and tangible stuff. Afterwards, we chatted about the growing phenomena of tangible web things. If Perplexcity is a tangible virtual world it’s interesting to see Moo‘s Flickr cards (I see they’re doing Skype cards now too!), The Friday Project which brings websites to print, Fabjectory‘s 3d-printed avatars as a growing trend.

  • Collaborative and innovative working inside virtual worlds – Andrew ‘Roo’ Reynolds
    That would be me then. I explained the impact virtual worlds such a Second Life are having on business and how some companies are already using them to work collaboratively on a global scale. My (by now fairly well-practiced) talk on what virtual worlds are and why IBM cares was just as informal and conversational as ever. I pretty much managed to forget that there was a gaggle of press in the room (Reuters, BBC, New Scientist, …). Hence, Adam from Reuters got some pretty choice quotes which sounded (at least to me on the first reading) frighteningly casual. πŸ™‚
  • The artistic, creative & entertainment opportunities inside MMORPGs – Esther MacCallum-Stewart
    An academic (but interesting) overview of MMORPGs. She pronounces MMORPG “more-peg”, which is a new one on me. I’d like to see a copy of Esther’s slides, as there was some really good theory about what makes MMOs work.
  • E-learning business opportunities inside virtual worlds – Gauti Sigthorsson
    Gauti, while enjoying Second Life, does not think it can be used for e-learning. Apparently it’s too hard and the barrier to entry is too high (“it’s a gated community due to its resource intensive nature and the skillset required”). He has a point with this stuff, and it was an interesting counterpoint to the more gung-ho speakers (e.g. almost all of the rest of us).
  • Business opportunities inside Second Life for creative industries – Justin Bovington
    Justin (Rivers Run Red) shared some of the history of business and marketing in Second Life, along with some of his interesting projects. Vodafone, Penguin books, Duran Duran, BBC, Adidas, Reebok, … quite a list. Justin said two of the major milestones of Second Life have been the BBC event (“the Woodstock of Second Life”) and the Reuters office. Both of these events have been responsible for driving up the population of Second Life very quickly.

There was then a Q&A panel session, in which we were joined by Jim Purbrick (Babbage Linden; the only full-time Linden employee in the UK). As you can imagine, Jim got a lot of questions. πŸ™‚ He said some very encouraging things about Open Source, and opening up the client (and eventually the server). Adam’s Reuters piece covered this pretty well too.

I met a lot of interesting people, got to know some people a bit better. Thanks to NMK for inviting me; I really enjoyed myself. Today I am croaky and barely have any voice left. Probably a good thing so I can shut up for a while and catch up on what I was missing having been off the net for a day. πŸ™‚

Reuters brings news from inside Second Life

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As of today, ‘Adam Reuters’ (Adam Pasick) is Reuters embedded journalist in Second Life. Keeping regular office hours at the virtual Reuters building, Adam is their virtual bureau chief.

Reuters’ island, created by The Electric Sheep Company, is impressively realistic. Having been heavily influenced by their real-life presence in Times Square (NYC) and Canary Wharf (London), it’s great fun to spot the details from their real-world locations. There’s a news HUD (Heads Up Display)to take away too, which is really worth a play.

More coverage at 3pointD and secondlife.reuters.com.

Happy Birthday eightbar

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It is amazing but “raising the eightbar” is 1 year old today. Its doesn’t seem five minutes since we were sitting around saying lets try a combined blog from Hursley. We discussed what we might write about, what content we could fall back on, what style, how we were going to stick to corporate guidlines.
A lot has happened in the past year, most notable has been the transition into having an awful lot of Second Life and virtual worlds content. Whilst it may seem a solely second life blog there are a lot of other things going on.
Either way I think we are all really happy that we appear to be providing interesting content for people, making great friends and business contacts, and remaining suitably professional with a hint of unconvential thinking.
The Raising the eightbar tag line has gradually slipped to just eightbar. We are Eightbar in Second Life, and whilst we are not trying to form a brand as such, we have some brand values and pride in what Eightbar has become, yet we are still very much IBMers doing things who happen to be from Hursley.
Who knows what the next year will bring, but this one has been a blast.

The Darren and Roo show: Day 1

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We’re still in Nottingham, enjoying the first full day of the IT Specialist Institute, 2006. Since we’re staying in the University halls, the rooms are not quite hotel-quality, but definitely not bad. Probably the worst bit (for a 6’4″ freak like me) is the small bed.

The breakfast was great though, as was the opening presentation from Sudhir Chardha, who presented on innovation and the GIO (Global Innovation Outlook). We are not giving our presentation until tomorrow afternoon (2 – 3pm if you’re attending the Institute and want to attend). Today we’ve been mainly hanging around underneath Darren’s very cool posters, chatting to people, demonstrating Second Life and talking about why Virtual Worlds are important.

Darren and his posters

There has been a fairly steady stream of conversations. We’ve also managed to add two more people to our (probably not very comprehensive) list of over 100 known IBM SL users who can access Ian’s island.

Amazonians push the envelope

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3pointD are reporting on the recent news from Supernova 2006 about pioneering ‘Amazonians’. Some Second Life users, who also happen to be Amazon employees, are exploring the potential of “a bridge between Amazon Web services and Second Life so you can go into Second Life and actually try things on there and buy them”. Interesting news indeed.

I have been wondering for a while which existing major online brand will be the first to make the move from e-business to v-business. American Apparel recently announced its virtual store, but if the Amazonians can get their company’s support might Amazon be the first company to really start the blur the boundaries between the real, the online and the virtual marketplace?

The fact that it’s “not being done under the auspices of the company” is not necessarily a bad sign either. The need for early-adopter employees to try some things out before their employer really ‘gets’ something (or can feels it can support it) is something most bleeding edge types can probably relate to.

A tool for browsing and choosing items to be sent to your home in meatspace would be the next baby step for online shopping. At its most basic, using a virtual world to act as a store and shopping cart for existing real life goods will be a refreshing change from current online shopping models, and provides some pretty interesting possibilities for a richer user experience too. In the same way that some booksellers already offer a PDF download while the dead tree is in the post, I wonder how long before Cafepress (or one of their competitors) offers avatarwear as an option for its user-designed products. Here’s my design. I need that on a T-shirt, a cap, oh and something off-the-shoulder for my avatar while I’m waiting.

Gradually, the metaverse matures.

ThinkPad tilting revisited

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Back in March we started talking about some hacks which demonstrate the coolness that can be achieved using the accelerometer inside the ThinkPad (the ‘Active Protection System’).

Thanks to Steve Farrell for pointing me at something which Mark Smith (of IBM’s research center in Almaden) has been working on; a modified version of SDL (the Simple DirectMedia Library) which supports the ThinkPad accelerometer in any game (on Windows or Linux) which uses the SDL to provide input. Using Mark’s modified library means you can tilt your way to a high score on all these games and more.