We just released “Zebra Presenter”, a presentation tool for use in Second Life that just hits the nail on the head in so many ways. It’s as easy to set up as drag/dropping some textures, can have as many display screens as you can rez, can flip back and forth to the parcel’s video stream, and it’s secure so some click-happy audience member can’t play with it while you’re giving your epic speech. Oh, and it’s free, GPLv3.
We made it look like a laptop. We could have made it look like an oval with cool glowing effects and the textures in a raised hologram-style interface, but instead we bit down on our wilder ideas and kept to some basic principles: keep it simple, and keep it familiar.
Why?
There are people who are ready to give the most compelling presentations, but they usually work in this crazy alternate universe called “the real world”. We put them in the awful situation of having to give a presentation in a virtual world they’ve never even seen before presentation day. On that day, panic is the enemy. We need them to get as comfortable as possible to concentrate on the matter at hand. That means familiar settings, familiar interfaces, and familiar metaphors.
Yes, I know, it doesn’t have the feel of “pushing the boundaries of what virtual worlds can do”, but it most certainly gets the job done. With more “creative” ideas, we’re not so sure how quickly fresh eyes will pick up on the nuances of the design. Best not to experiment on our guests.
Having said that, if you’ve always wanted an oval-shaped presentation tool with cool glowing effects and textures in a raised hologram-style interface, now you can make one! Zebra Presenter is open source, meaning that not only is it free but you are encouraged to pull out the scripts and remix it. Show us what you can do!
Yay, a new social content platform came out today! It’s called BricaBox! How random! Woooo!
What’s that?
Oh it’s… like… you make your own Flickr, YouTube, Wiki, link-sharing, whatever mashup social website of your dreams via a simple drag and drop interface. Free! (Insert blinking red and yellow “FREE” animated GIF here.)
Hate reading? Of course you do! Here, this picture explains everything:
Still confused? Don’t worry, this video explains everything so clearly even I can understand it! Hahaha, I mean, hahah, that’s gotta be pretty clear hahaha!
What? Don’t have TIME to watch a one-and-a-half minute video? Well of course you don’t, what with these crazy times we live in! Here’s an even better idea: go to BricaBox.com right now, sign up for (Insert blinking red and yellow “FREE” animated GIF here), and you’ll be on the fast-track to the cutting-edge of social webby technological whatchamacallits! Wait until mom finds out!
This is a post for non-Second Life residents, so don’t go sending me flames about how “obvious” I’m being k?
Many people don’t have a clue what I’m talking about when I say “I had a meeting with a few people last night” when they know full well I was just sitting alone in my office. Here are some examples of three recent meets:
In each of these examples we’re typing to each other in chat, or speaking in a voice conference call that’s automatically put together by the Second Life client. It’s actually quite a bit easier to do this in Second Life as opposed to some kind of conference-call tool, and having our avatars sitting together (no matter how unreal the setting) gives us a sense of propinquity that makes it easier for us to have meaningful exchanges.
It’s probably worth mentioning that this is all free as well.
Yesterday I went out and got my hair cut. It was very strange.
For the past month I’ve been hitting the keyboard pretty hard, although you really can’t see the fruits of my efforts in publicly yet. I’ve been trying to get Zebra Corporate out of the way and the vBusiness Expo rolling. This means 10 hour days in Second Life, sporadic late night meets, a six day work week, and then a mad rush around the house to get dishes done, do the laundry, and apologize to my wife for forcing her take care of all of the “outside of the house” stuff.
She’s been a saint through all of this, really. While I’ve barely left the house in weeks, I’ve been able to temper my cabin fever with the knowledge that at least the fam is doing well.
Still, not everything can be taken care of by the wife. Going out to get my haircut was something I had to do myself, obviously. So, for the first time in a long time, I went somewhere apart from the schoolyard across the street where I drop my daughter off.
It was so weird. The chairs, first of all, were really strange. I mean they were just generic plastic things I’ve sat in a dozen times before, but I haven’t sat on anything but my office chair and couch in ages. It felt like I was holding my body in some kind of unnatural position… I kept thinking someone would notice.
The sound was wild. All of these conversations floating in the air, some music overlaid on top of it, the skittering of the receptionist’s keyboard, scissors, water. It was a little odd because I couldn’t turn any one part of it up and there was no mute on any of the audio streams, but the loss of that control was kind of thrilling too.
Soon I began to get drunk on the sheer novelty of the experience. The way light played off of things. Focusing my eyes on distant objects rather than just Alt-zooming them closer for a better look. They handed me a glass of water while I waited and even the fine particulate matter left on the outside of the glass by the cleanser they used held a certain fascination to my fingertips. The echo in the room, too – something I had never noticed, or been able to notice before.
The world had leapt back into focus and, as I left, I knew that I had changed a little. I knew how it felt to circulate blood, to breathe, and to deal with gravity.
Then just today, as I put 30 minutes aside to follow up on my news reader, I catch an old K Zero post about Second Skin:
I think, after watching this, I need to make a promise to myself to get out more no matter what. The plain truth is that while virtual worlds are an incredible communication medium, and most of my friends are there, it’s still not tangible.
CC Chapman brought this to my attention. Watch the video, it’s pretty hilarious. For those of you in a hurry, I’ll sum up: Overlay.tv is a video player that lets you tag any video anywhere on the web with clickable commentary. From Managing The Gray:
In the demo we pulled in a video of a trumpet player from YouTube and tagged his t-shirt to go to Amazon to buy a similar one. Anyone can take any video and place overlays on it. The process is quick, easy and powerful.
Here’s an example of the tool in action on Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
Omg. Thriller. Roflmao. Anyhow…
This is a winner for two reasons:
You can embed the player in a blog post, which means that people will be using this to annotate any number of videos all across the web. It’s fun!
You have to log in to tag, which encourages you to surf Overlay.TV to watch videos instead of any other video source. I can see people getting emailed a YouTube video and asking: “I wonder if there’s an Overlay version up yet?”
Very cool stuff, although I’m curious as to how they’re going to combat a million people wanting to put “liar” tags over every politician’s face and “loser” over… well… everyone else’s. We’ll see.
