I think I’ll have to start doing these general “Stuff You May Have Missed” news roundups on a regular basis again. There’s just too much good stuff out there!
Disclaimer: As with everything on my blog, the opinions expressed here are mine and do not reflect on Clever Zebra, the vBusiness Expo, my friends, my family, my blip channel, any of the other “Jack of All Strange” stuff that I do, etc etc etc… k here we go:
UPCOMING: Monday, March 1st at 2pm Pacific – Anders Grondstedt, President of The Gronstedt Group, as he tells us how Schneider Electric and IBM have found a strategic planning solution in Second Life. Attend the live event here.
Linden Lab re-conceived its Second Life viewer (finally!) and created a new product. There is a lot of information about it, but here’s the short version:
Interface Cleanup: The old interface was a disaster. There’s no other way to say it. For new users it was like being threatened with the edge of a broken bottle, daring them to try to figure that nonsense out. This is much better. Well, not perfect, but better than a broken bottle in the face.
Current Location Easily Accessible: Just like in your web browser, your location in Second Life is now at the top of your screen. Copy/paste it into a document, send it to a friend, or paste locations up there that you want to visit. Now if they could find a way to make them shorter and more memorable…
Places To Explore: The worst part about entering Second Life for the first time, apart from the interface, has been the complete lack of direction for finding something interesting to do. While some will inevitably whine about the “preferential treatment” these destinations are getting, this was a critical change.
Improved Avatar Customization: Its still way to complex for new users, but they’ve made it much easier than it was before.
You can buy a house!: In the real world you can just buy a house and furnish it, and now you can in Second Life too. Thank goodness. Before you had to buy some land, make sure it was big enough for what you needed (which, as a new user, you have no real clue about), then find somewhere that sells houses, and figure out the build tools to deploy it correctly. Forget all that now: just go buy a house. *whew*
Webpages On Walls: A game-changing feature. Watch YouTube or run other Flash-based applications on your wall, no problem. Even bigger: users can just click the surface to automatically zoom in on it properly. Genius!
I’m usually loathe to give the Linden Lab crew too much credit for development of new features as it all seemingly comes at a glacier’s pace, but this was a huge leap forward for them. New users might actually get through an entire orientation without smashing their keyboards in frustration! Well done guys.
Now don’t stop here; keep it up!
Video Resources
A general overview of the Second Life 2.0 interface.
Web content on walls parts 1 and 2
(called “Shared Media” because they just can’t help but make up new terminology for you to learn… aren’t you grateful… )
You can buy a house. (“Linden Homes”)
The full set of in-depth tutorials covering every little thing in the new interface.
A short 2 minute clip describing what you need to know to go to a meeting in Second Life. I created this video for Clever Zebra with simplicity in mind: just cover the basics, and worry about extras like avatar customization and flying after people have had a meeting and perceive that learning more is worth the extra time.
As of right now you can’t even buy the development kit for Web.Alive. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t start getting ready to build there!
Firstly, why should you bother?
I took a tour of Mellanium‘s environment again today, and what really struck me was the level of detail visible. I was looking at this highly detailed model of the Titanic with textures so good I could zoom in on the knots in the wood. That’s impressive, but what was even better was that I could glance across the room and see a fully rendered locomotive and old fighter plane.
The interface was obvious. Fixing up my avatar was easy. The voice just worked. Full-screen mode just worked. We could easily hand files to each other, view PowerPoint and fully rendered web pages with Flash support, and snap privacy settings in the room on and off with a click. All of this right in the web browser.
So its a beautiful thing, tested with up to 90 concurrent users and it runs on your mom’s laptop. While things with Avaya’s buyout of Nortel make things a little shaky, this isn’t a platform to be underestimated.
At the beginning I promised information on how to get an early start. Its simple: buy a cheap copy of Unreal Tournament 2004. It comes bundled with UnrealEd, which is all you need to begin building environments right now. Import your static meshes from Maya or 3D Studio Max, and you’re just a step away from publication.
Now we just have to wait for Avaya to release the dev kit. I’ve been lead to believe that good news is on the way, but beyond that we’ll just have to wait and see.
I was reading something about how a small cadre of vocal power users can skew the development of a virtual world platform, and it got me thinking about the kinds of things corporate clients I’ve worked with have asked for in the past. Oddly, these are things that don’t even seem to be on anyone’s radar – and they’re not very difficult to implement either.
Whiteboard - Being able to sit in a room with a bunch of other people and talk online is great, but being able to pop notes up about what people are saying and draw quick sketches (without having to learn to build please…) would be a game-changer for many people.
PA System – Just being able to designate certain people as temporarily “holding the mic” would make large meetings much more feasible. Having no session controls over voice has caused a number of calamities and driven more than one client to other applications.
Separate the 2nd Floor – This means establishing separate audio channels on top of one another; say, one for the 1st floor and one for the 2nd. People want a lobby downstairs and an office upstairs, and they want their conversations to be private in both places. The lack of functionality here means some strangely stretched out designs.
Real Names – Face it: the naming convention was a cute idea in the beginning, but it just seems idiotic to corporate users. Let us use our own names over our heads.
File Transfer Between Avatars – People have files. They want to share those files between each other. PDFs, PPTs, and VCFs are the most commonly requested that I hear about. Let us pass files to each other without breaking immersion and fiddling with email. It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate, just a simple drag/drop http transfer call would do. Integrate a little of the existing browser code with a spot on the option wheel for “Send File” and you’re good.
I just had to spend three minutes removing “this is huge”, “obviously”, “why isn’t this already done?”, and “please!” from the entries… cut the blog entry’s length in half.
And no, I’m not going to the Jira and there’s no possible way I’m asking my clients to go in there. The Jira is a nice bug tracker, but that is not how an enterprise-level piece of software gets designed.
