Tag: secondlife

Wikitecture

I’d love to see an object that many people could modify in some way, which could be rolled back to earlier versions or have individual modifications ratified somehow by the group. Turns out I’m not the only one. I recently noticed an interesting discussion on The ARCH, an excellent blog on virtual architecture, about the possibilities for collaborative design mechanisms in Second Life (complete with transcript). “Is true Wikitecture and collaborative asynchronous design possible in Second Life? If so, what kinds of tools, scripts and rules might be necessary? Some exciting ideas are already beginning to surface.”

collaborative architecture?

Mobile Second Life

Comverse has developed a version of the virtual world of Second Life that runs on a mobile phone. It sounds like the technology is imperfect at the moment (as is SL itself) and requires a PC to be running Second Life at an intermediary position, but it’s an interesting and potentially exciting step toward opening Second Life up to yet more uses.

still fairly primitive

The Art Of War

There are, obviously, no police inworld. Sometimes, self-defense is all you’ve got. Before now, I’ve had to draw a weapon and blow people off my land to discontinue attacks. Look at that sentence again. It makes me sound like I’m living on frontier land, or, perhaps, like I’ve become a mad farmer with a shotgun. Is there a case to be made for Second Life as the lawless digital Wild West, where sometimes a man has to slap leather to defend his person and his homestead from the badmen and the road agents? It’s more than a little absurd. On the other hand, being ejected out of the world is a little more inconvenient than some freak running his mouth on a messageboard.

the state of SL weaponization

Social Animal

Adam Brokken’s also working to make Social a fully-realized artificial intelligence, a creature that can better pass the Turing test. “I am also working on a method to have the bot remember conversations, adding more animations based on responses, etc. Whether he will ever live up to his last name, time will tell.” (That is to say, this.)

Adam recognizes the controversies that have swirled around reverse engineered avatars. “I know there has been much drama concerning ‘bots’ in Second Life, and they still do give some ill effects such as texture spamming. I myself have been hit a few times.

NPC are coming to SL. luis called my attention to this: basically eliza in a new package. based on AIML, pretty much the standard these days for AI chatterbots

libsecondlife

This thread over at the libsecondlife forums describes a Second Life server built by a user, a single sim that can be accessed using the standard client software. As near as I can figure, the server was built by examining the client code (and/or reverse-engineering it) along with the information that is passed between client and server in order to get an idea of what the server code would need to look like. What’s more, an early version of the server code has already been made available as an open-source project.

a tiny tiny step towards a distributed metaverse