Getting Virtual

[robinturner]

my "virtual worlds" course continues to take shape slowly. When I first got the idea, I was motivated in part by laziness and time constraints, so a course that would enable me to recycle some of the best bits of my previous courses sounded like a good idea: a few texts from my "games" course, a few texts from my "Matrix" course, a few articles about Second Life, a few pages scanned from William Gibson and Bingo! a course. No way. It's widening out in all directions as I realise that there are elements of virtuality in everything from 3G phones to FaceBook (this latter prompted by an excellent post from tsenft).

Anyway, after messing around with various online applications, I've decided that it is high time someone produced World of Second MyFace.

Comments

VRML

[hfx-ben.livejournal.com]

SGI pulling away from the virtual world in ?what? '99 or 2000 was the death-knell, but what really slowed it was processor speed: back then 233MHz was screaming fast. With clock-speeds now, woooof, many many frames per second is no problem
Thing is: VRML is way easy to write!

Re: VRML

[solri.livejournal.com]

I never really looked into VRML/X3D but yes, it does look pretty straightforward. Writing online 3D apps is now within anyone's reach, but writing good ones - now that's something else. I mentioned before how I liked the idea of Second Life, but was totally unimpressed by the world's performance, whereas I've just started playing Guild Wars, and it's awe-inspiring. OK, that's partly because SL content is user-created by people with varying levels of skill and taste, whereas GW has a unified feel provided by talented professional artists, but even on the technical side, most non-game VRs seem to be very weak. Still, these glitches will be ironed out with time, and I don't think Idoru is a long way off.

Re: VRML

[hfx-ben.livejournal.com]

None of my machines have the umph required by such as 2ndLife (all three are 300MHz) so can't say, but can imagine: as with everything else, you get 80% of the buzz with 20% of the effort it would take to push it all the way, so few entities commit to realization of potential.

Funny you mention GW: a friend (arohanuijust yesterday introduced me to a D&D wiki and, looking through related resources (I've never played D&D) came across a GW site ... impressive!