EA releases Spore Creature Creator

Electronic Arts, which will launch Will Wright’s Spore in September, has released Creature Creator — a module that let’s players create Spore creatures.

Technology review interviewd Lucy Bradshaw, Spore’s executive producer, about the use of procedural generation in Creature Creator (Creating Creatures).

The Creature Creator, the first piece of Electronic Arts’ highly anticipated evolution game Spore, launched Tuesday. Created by Will Wright, who’s known for the video games SimCity and The Sims, Spore begins with a player controlling a single-celled organism and progresses through various evolutionary stages until the player controls an entire space-faring race. The Creature Creator part of the game consists of a modeling interface that lets players build their own organisms from a set of highly customizable and flexible … The Creature Creator’s free trial edition is available today. A full version is available for $9.99 on the PC, with a Mac version to follow. The full version of Spore will launch in North America on September 7.

Posted in General, Programming, industry news, virtual worlds | 1 Comment »

World of World of Warcraft

Onion News Network has a funny piece on virtual worlds, taken to their logical limit: ‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft’.

“My avatar is the biggest World of World of Warcraft fan in the whole World of World of Warcraft world. … The graphics are amazing, uhh, they’re revolutionary. I mean, I mean, when you stare at the computer screen you actually believe that you’re in a dimly lit basement staring at a computer screen.”

Posted in social media, virtual worlds | 1 Comment »

Wiimote head tracking

CMU PhD student Johnny Chung Lee has done some amazingly cool things with the Nintendo Wii remote (Wiimote). My favorite is using it for true 3D virtual reality head tracking. Compare that to the thousands you’d spend for a magnetic tracker from Ascension or Polhemus. Admittedly, magnetic trackers don’t have the line of sight constraints of the infrared Wiimote, but for “fish tank VR”, where your computer screen serves as a 3D window into the virtual world, that’s probably just fine. Need convincing? Check the video out the video on his web site.

Posted in Hardware, Wii, technology, virtual worlds | No Comments »

Online virtual worlds for kids is big business

The New York Times has a story, Web Playgrounds of the Very Young, on the growth of online virtual worlds for young children. Our children live in the same environment as we do and learn mostly by watching what we do. So it’s not surprising that any significant new uses for the Internet and Web can be adapted to a form that kids will take to.

“Trying to duplicate the success of blockbuster Web sites like Club Penguin and Webkinz, children’s entertainment companies are greatly accelerating efforts to build virtual worlds for children. Media conglomerates in particular think these sites — part online role-playing game and part social scene — can deliver quick growth, help keep movie franchises alive and instill brand loyalty in a generation of new customers.
…
“Get ready for total inundation,” said Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at the research firm eMarketer, who estimates that 20 million children will be members of a virtual world by 2011, up from 8.2 million today. (src)

The story gives an example, Disney’s Pixie Hollow, that is online in a rudimentary form and set to launch next summer.

“Behind the virtual world gravy train are fraying traditional business models. As growth engines like television syndication and movie DVD sales sputter or plateau — and the Internet disrupts entertainment distribution in general — Disney, Warner Brothers and Viacom see online games and social networking as a way to keep profits growing.
…
Still, the long-term appetite for the youth-oriented sites is unclear. Fads have always whipsawed the children’s toy market, and Web sites are no different, analysts warn. Parents could tire of paying the fees, while intense competition threatens to undercut the novelty. There are now at least 10 virtual worlds that involve caring for virtual pets. (src)

There are many concerns, of course — privacy and safety, exploitation of our children, promoting consumerism, raising couch potatoes, etc.

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IBM using Second Life to build online communities

As seen on slashdot:

IBM has an unconventional take on virtual worlds for business use. Rather than strictly adhering to the laws of physics, IBM is letting its employees hold virtual meetings up in the air and under water. Employees are also being given wacky chores, such as kicking a giant boulder 1,400 kilometers. The virtual world, known as the Metaverse, has been in development for two years. Michael Ackerbauer of IBM says, ‘I’d say more people are still finding it a novelty than a business tool. But … if you build enough tools that they can use, they will come.’” IBM seems to be following a trend of involvement in virtual worlds, which we have previously discussed.

UMBC alumnus Pranam Kolarispent several summers as an intern at IBM and brought back reports that IBM was using Second Life in interesting ways.

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DC’s Newseum under construction in Second Life

Today’s Washington Post has a feature article, Is There a Future for Old-Fashioned Museums?, that has an interesting example of one new approach. The Newseum, whose new home is under construction in Washington DC today, “blends five centuries of news history with up-to-the-second technology and hands-on exhibits.”. While the bricks and mortar is being laid in DC, a second copy is being raised in Second Life.

“For nearly 10 months, Newseum staff has been developing this virtual version of their museum. The Newseum has not yet decided whether it will bring this online version of the museum live. Organizers want to ensure that the Second Life version meshes with the brick-and-mortar museum. This digital snapshot shows the online museum’s exterior.” (link)

Museums are among our oldest types of institutions and many aspects remain unchanged since the first one, the Library of Alexandria. But the Newseum is a museum whose area is mostly about ideas and information, so it definitely opens up new possibilities.

The Newseum is not the only example of a virtual museum or even one in Second Life. See

Urban, R. et al., A Second Life for Your Museum: 3D Multi-User Virtual Environments and Museums. In J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds). Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics, published March 31, 2007.

and the associated presentation, A second Life for your Museum, by their SL colleagues Aethalides Kukulcan, Port Mirabeeau and Dingdong Bellman.

Of course, if you are a middle school student, getting a class trip to the computer lab to visit a virtual museum will not count for very much.

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Make Money Fast in Virtual Worlds?

Yesterday, I caught most of an interesting program, The Economies of Virtual Worlds, on the Kojo Nnamdi Show, a magazine format program produced by WAMU in Washington DC.

The program covered several aspects of making money in virtual words and had a good range of discussants, including Cornell business school professor Robert Bloomfield, author Julian Dibbell (”Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot”), Second Lifer Prokofy Neva, and IBM executive Linda Ban.

“It’s an emerging marketplace, worth billions of dollars, and many Americans don’t even know it exists. In virtual worlds like “Second Life” or “World of Warcraft,” members buy and sell everything from clothes to real estate for their online selves. The goods may not be “real” but the money often is. Join Kojo for a tour of virtual economies and explore the debate over whether they should be more tightly regulated.” (link)

You can listen to the show in Real Audio or Windows Media formats.

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Rumors of Second Life on Google Earth

Google Operating System has an intriguing post, A Social Network for Google Earth?, making a case that Google is readying a new application combining social networking, 3D modeling and video games. Now that’s an interesting combination.

The evidence? An un-named company is recruiting Arizona State students to beta-test a new product.

The post speculates that the idea is to base a virtual world on Google earth

“The speculation about a Google Earth Second Life started last year. “The notion that you can create objects and buildings and place them in a virtual world makes Google Earth sounds less like a mapping tool and more like a metaverse. What’s a metaverse? Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson introduced the term in his seminal 1992 novel, Snow Crash. (…) In Stephenson’s novel, millions of users uploaded customized “avatars,” or virtual personalities, and strolled the street, entering shops and exclusive nightclubs, conversing and trading with the metaverse’s other denizens.” In fact, Snow Crash .” (link)

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Security and games: exploiting online games

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) like World of Warcraft and Second Life are large, complex, dynamic distributed software systems with hundreds of thousands of users scattered around the world. A new book, Exploiting Online Games explores a range of security issues associated with these games, including topics like the following.

• Why online games are a harbinger of software security issues to come
• How millions of gamers have created billion-dollar virtual economies
• How game companies invade personal privacy
• Why some gamers cheat
• Techniques for breaking online game security
• How to build a bot to play a game for you
• Methods for total conversion and advanced mods

Tim Wilson of Dark Reading motivated it this way in his post about the book

“You’re playing an online game in which players are warriors who can only walk, jump, or run. Suddenly, another player appears out of nowhere, draws his sword, and hacks you to bits. Game over. But were you really beaten by a superior player? Or did a hacker or cheater simply rig the game?”

This book illustrates a theme that underlies the game track in the CMSC program. Studying computer games is a good way to learn the basic principles of computer science and studying computer science is a good way to prepare yourself for a career in the interactive entertainment industry.

Posted in CS, Careers, MMOGs, technology, virtual worlds | No Comments »

A coming World Wide Web of 3D virtual worlds

The Economist’s current quarterly technology report has an interesting article discussing the evolution of MMOGs and virtual worlds.

Online gaming’s Netscape moment?

Video games: Existing virtual worlds are built on closed, proprietary platforms, like early online services. Might they now open up, like the web?

The premise of the article is that virtual world game engines like Multiverse are not only making it easier to create new worlds but will also allow characters and game entities to move from world to world. They liken his to the change that happened as the Internet moved from being a series of “walled gardens” based on proprietary online services like the well, AOL and Prodigy to the Web and its standard languages, protocols and middleware.

“As with the web, the hope is that the emergence of a single, open platform will encourage wider adoption and new uses of the technology. Before the web, companies that wished to establish an online presence had to do so on proprietary platforms. The same is true today. Lots of companies are setting up shop in Second Life, but some might prefer to have their own worlds, not just islands in someone else’s world, just as they have their own websites. Multiverse says that companies are starting to create worlds for training simulations, business collaboration, and modelling disasters.”

(more…)

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