Neuronet – β€˜Worlds First’ Real-Time Virtual Reality Network

Rezzing soon to a visual cortex near you, Neuronet is preparing to launch next year.

Set up by the IAVRT – “The International Association of Virtual Reality Technologies (IAVRT) is a not-for-profit professional organization dedicated to fostering scientific research and business development in the area of Virtual Reality (VR) technology for the benefit of society.” – wants to create a network of virtual reailty spaces, which will apparently be accessible/marketable via two top level domain names (TLDs) .vr and .cin

It looks like they care about alot of the important things which need to be under control and understood for this to all work.

They will surely make good money selling domain names under the .vr domain, but I don’t know too much about .cin (cinematic virtual reality neurosites). Who knows, it might get traction eventually.Domains names from both will cost $100US .

I have recently been suggesting to people that Linden Lab contact on organisation called ‘Sierratel‘ who appear to the people in charge of selling domain names with the .sl TLD. The trouble is, this company does not seem to reply to emails, so should really look for an agent/organization to handle the job. I think Second-Lifers would no doubt swarm to these and would provide decent income in other ways than rising land prices beyong many people’s reach.

Back to the Neuronet though, I am very much looking forward to the evolution of ‘truly’ immersive environments. I have always been closely watching the rise in speed in power of home PCs and their graphics capabilities, along with the rising speeds of internet connectivity. It will be interesting to see how the fantasy of a truly global 3D VR world lives up to the actuality of it. Will it scale? Is it secure? etc. Situations which LL are constantly dealing with. It appears that you will get a ‘development neurosite’ with your domain name for $2500US a year (wow), so I wonder if this means that people will be able to host their own nerusite systems on their own servers. No idea what the requirements and costs might be yet.

Pre-orders for names (The Sunrise Period) looks set to start in February 2007, with the General Registration period, which they call the ‘Land Rush’ period (already!) starting on June 4th 2007. MY BIRTHDAY!!! Ha! I want koz.vr πŸ˜€

I will also be keeping a close eye on an Australian/UK company called Inition (with a shop in London! W00t!) as they appear to sell just about everything you could want for an immersive existence in a 3D world. Great stuff! Some of the kits there looks prohibitively expensive, but some are certainly affordable for the hardcore pixelvertex junkies out there/here! πŸ˜‰ I thoroughly recommend browsing through their huge range of products, as it really taught me alot about all the amazing VR devices which are now on the market, along with their current value. They sell kit for VR HUDs (heads up displays), headsets, glasses, gloves, motion capture kits, 3D digitizing/scanning and even 3D printing (rather like a friend, Mike Buckbee’s Fabjectory, which will ‘print’ a 3d sculpture of your Second Life avatar – amazing, and I still need to get one πŸ˜‰ )

Unfortunately, this cool little device, ‘The Monkey’ has been discontinued. If anyone else out there knows of any motion (or pose) capture desktop mannekins out there, please do let me know. Thx πŸ˜‰

It looks like 3D is not going to go away next year. On the contrary, it’s going to get deeper – much to the chagrin of many a 3D/SL-widow/widower out there already! :p

More discussion on 3pointd

Also, the rebang blog seems highly suspicious of a potential scam!

3D News with RSS

For Vista, when it comes out, here’s an app/widget from Microsoft called UniveRSS.

UniveRSS is a showcase application that demonstrates the use of several WPF features, 3D animations, data binding, and data visualization. Currently UniveRSS uses the RSS Feed Store managed through Internet Explorer 7. Later versions will allow you to manage the Feed Store from within the UniveRSS application.

It looks very nice and very much the type of thing I envisage in Second Life, when (and if) we get html on a prim surface. With all the available data bindings and communications we have at our disposal there, it should be faily easy to build this in the Metaverse.

Thanks to Dave Winer for the link.

SL Money Spent Spiked

SL money spikeThat graph looks pretty impessive huh? It shows the US Dollars spent in Second Life over last 24 hours at $1,726,930 as of 9:00am PST today (10th Nov 2006).

Well, it turns out that something many people has thought is true – the daily dollar amount which Linden Lab tout as spent is actually (simply) total transactions in world.

This ‘spike/cliff’ was caused by an anonymous resident who wrote a script which passed some Linden dollars back and forth between two avatars. After an hour of running it had generated over one million Linden dollars of transactions, but no money was spent. The avatars which this was running on ended up with the same amount they started with. Zero sum.

I’m sure this is bound to come up at the next Town Hall Meeting with Linden CEO Philip Rosedale/Linden on November 16th. Many companies that arrive in SL are doing so due to all this ‘real’ money being ‘spent’ – hmmm. I wander what they will think. People will want better figures – like the ‘over one million residents’ stat. We want to know how many unique and ACTIVE users there are. Linden record the ‘MAC’ address of your network card, so they have the data.

(Graph saved from secondlife.reuters.com )

MultiVerse Open Beta launched

Yet another virtual world to add to the smorgasbord: MultiVerse is a system of 3D virtual world clients and servers which you can build and support yourself – eventually. They have just opened up the beta for all to test.

They say:

  • Participate in the game industry’s most exciting frontier.
  • Make a complete MMOG or virtual world for less money and in less time than you ever dreamed possible.
  • Deliver your vision on-line to a large market of players.
  • Make money however you decide: subscription, item sales, and/or advertising.

http://www.multiverse.net/developer/login.jsp

Looks pretty interesting – but beyond me I think (for now). People like James Cameron, John Landau and Max Sims (of Maya fame)Β  are behind it too.

I wonder how many more virtual worlds we’ll have to tinker with this time next year? And will we be able to teleport from one to the other? Hmmmmm… iiiinteresting.

Linden ATM?

I was just looking at a list of virtual worlds and games out there and was looking at Entropia Universe‘s site. It seems like they have a real world debit card available which lets their users withdraw their in world currency as real world cold hard cash from any ATM!

I think that’s a great idea and one which I think Linden Lab should look at doing with their own Linden Dollar in Second Life. How cool would that be!? πŸ™‚ “yeah.. put in on my PrimCard” πŸ˜‰

Now that’s what I call a flexi friend πŸ˜‰

The Descendants of Ruth flock in

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2sxcW-lxHA]

On the day that Second Life reached the 1 million residents mark, the interest has apparently seen around 50,000 new signups already today! I decided to get an alt and record the arrivals on one of the Orientation islands. This one is island number 32 for arrivals!

As you can see, everyone starts off as a female! People also see this strange (sometimes gender-bending) transition from a plain female avatar to their own customised version (it can be quite amusing).

The name of this avatar is ‘Ruth’. She is an early basic model from Fractal Designs’ Curious Labs’ e-frontier’s 3d character designing and animating software called Poser, which many people use to create the .bvh animation files which get embedded into ‘poseballs’ in Second Life. She is the basic form of every avatar in SL.

So, welcome!! ‘Descendants Of Ruth’!

I think that could be a great name for a band in Second Life. πŸ˜‰

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