I’m setting up captures for people’s avatars and we talk about meeting in-world to go over things tomorrow night and the same phrase keeps coming up: “Grid Willing”.
We’re all sinners in the hands of an angry grid.
technorati tags:SecondLife, Network, Population, Fabjectory, Make
I’ve just put a new link on the homepage:
Fabjectory is now accepting and helping people who’d like to have their virtual SketchUp objects made into real life ones.
This is really exciting as there is a huge community of people who use SketchUp and the models should be more “sane” than some of the ones we’ve been pulling out of SecondLife; so hopefully we can get the price down some.
My one disappointment in this is that I can’t just put “it’ll be X dollars” on the page. It always annoys me when I go to a web page and can’t just find out how much something will cost.
I’ve been toying with a couple ways around this:
1. I could put out a series of “volume objects” that people could import and if their object fit inside x object it would be x dollars, y object y dollars and so on. This might be possible as the plain raw materials going into a model are such a large component of the cost.
2. I could publish a “do not exceed” value that was ridiculously high, though I worry people wouldn’t read the page and just see: “$300″ and bail.
I’m still not quite sure what I’m going to do yet, but something along one or both of those lines. Any other creative suggestions or thoughts would be great as well.
technorati tags:SketchUp, SecondLife, Rapid-Manufacture, Modeling, Fabjectory, Pricing
Snowcrash is the book that is most often referenced in association with SecondLife and other virtual worlds. What I’m trying to do with Fabjectory is more along the lines of Neal Stephenson’s “Diamond Ageâ€?, where home fabricators are commonplace and being on welfare means having to deal with the slow trickle of available matter from the public pipe system.
While this day seems far off, I think it’s closer than many think. It’s my feeling that there already is a booming home fabrication industry: printing.
Sure, it’s 2d, but I think fits the same model. You create something from scratch or download text, put it together how you like and then hit a button and your “print fabricator� takes the constituent materials, combines them in the way you specified and outputs your manuscript.
technorati tags:SecondLife, Rapid-Fabrication, Snowcrash, Diamond-age, Neal-Stephenson, printing
I was actually checking out their 3-2-1 Countdown Widget (which rocks), when I found what is quite possible one of the greatest tools available for serious SecondLife and Sketchup builders: Geo-Calc.
It’s the interactive solving application for problems like: how tall should you make a cone shaped prim so that the slope of the face is 45 degreees (so you can slot it precisely against another in your model of a Soviet Era spaceship) if the base needs to be 5 meters in diameter?
technorati tags:GeoCalc, OSX, Software, Sketchup, Tools, Building
I was interviewed on last Tuesday’s “The Works with John Moe”. which plays on KUOW (Seattle NPR). They cover a range of business and technical topics and were interested in speaking to someone about SecondLife.
The interview, um, went pretty, um, good, with the exception of interrupting myself every few words to, um…um.
Few interesting facts:
If you’d like to check it out (about 80% of the interview is spent bringing everyone up on the basics of SecondLife), you can listen to it here: The Works Interview.
[tags]SecondLife, NPR, radio, interview, Fabjectory, Business, Media[/tags]
Bob Wyman has some of his own speculations as to what might contribute to the numbers disparity that SLinsider is reporting.
SecondLife is free for people to
sign up, which makes it realistic for people to keep an account to
occassionally log in with. If you’re paying $15 a month for Wow, I
think you’d be more apt to jump in-world more often.
Along with this has come a rise in one-off users. People who log in for a specific event and then don’t come back.
You think it would be cool to hear a band or live interview or
attend some product launch so you make an account log in and don’t come
back until the next time something cool happens.
That being said, Linden Labs themselves had previously stated that
they’d done some satisfaction studies on frames per second that clients
were achieveing and had found that if a user had below 10 FPS, they’d
bail and not come back.
I like FPS as metric than network numbers alone
as it reflects how a 3d client deals with both packet loss and latency.
There was also a comment on the post that “there was nothing to do in SecondLife but talk”. It’s easy to see where people would get this impresion if they’re going in thinking there are going to be quests and non player characters lying around waiting to tell them to kill things. However, at this point I’m having a harder and harder time seeing how a new person would get that impression in the first place. SecondLife requires you to bring your creativity to the table.
To badly butcher a quote: “Ask not what SecondLife can make you do, as what you can make in SecondLife.”.