MBC Weekly News 9/29/2008

The latest MBC Weekly News with Dousa Dragonash and Recka Wuyts. The team looks at web in 3d Exit Reality, the Financial Crisis, SLART vs Linden Lab and more.

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Metaverse Week In Review - 28th Sept

A packed show this week.



In Part One we look at Roland Legrand's interview with Philip Rosedale at Picnic last week, plus a look at the preview at Eduverse and the regular guest slot from Crap Mariner. Also, some news from Nortel.



In Part Two, Dizzy Banjo reports from inworld at the Burning Life builds, we welcome Clubside in a guest spot and take a look back at the Virtual Worlds Expo.

Election 2008

A bit of light relief (or wishful thinking) while we do our best to ignor the farce in the organic sim.

"Swift Kick Moms for Truth" is a one-minute “machinima” video featuring virtual versions of Obama’s grandma and McCain’s mother scolding the candidates for their deceptive ads. Lead-in by virtual Tom Brokaw. Created in the Second Life® virtual world by Machinima by Silver and Goldie, with voice artist Mark Winston.

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Second Life Book Display

Second Life Book Display
Originally uploaded by Librarian Avenger.

In case you were in any doubt, people do seem to be writing a lot about Second Life these days.

Now there's also "Second Life For Dummies" and ... etc!

Good to see a library or bookshop display like this though - maybe the skeptics will see the interest and think twice.

MBC Weekly News 9-22-08

The latest news from inworld TV channel MBC.

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Philip Rosedale @ Picnic

A video interview with Philip Rosedale, Chairman of Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life.

This interview by Roland Legrand and Sarah Godard, journalists working for Mediafin, the publisher of the Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo.

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Our Hangout in Hangout

Our new web based meeting room. Only on Windows right now and best in Firefox or 3B browsers. It's fast and furious running under Flash instead of VRML or Java. Voice and video enabled. It does need a small extension download, but is painless we think.

View Mal's MetaHub in 3B!

Even better, this is the MetaHub on the web using 3B. 3B is a combination of virtual spaces viewer and a customised Firefox browser. Mode toggle is simple and easy based on the portals displayed as walls. You can jump into our "Hangout" from here (see above) or view websites. I have put experimental screens for inDuality, Ajax Life and other metaverse portals in place and they seem to work fine too.

Who needs Lively? (It won't even install for me anyway!)

The nice thing about these two is that they provide an interactive destination we can give to regular web users (via standard Urls) and that graphical screens will provide access to other fully-fledged metaverses like Second Life through SLurls etc.

I will be running a session at the start of Orange's "Innovations" week in Second Life starting immediately after Monday's Metanomics show.

MarkTwain White's Journal #2

The second installment of the MTW Video Journal takes us to Virtual Worlds Expo in Los Angeles where MarkTwain was joined by ZATZAi Asturias. ZAT's great commentary and video footage are featured.

Week In Review - 21st Sept

Yet another full show this week as we switched to Blogstar - loads of back-chat and hitch-free broadcast.



Part one with news resume and current clips.



Part two - more clips and discussion, plus a short feline tribute and yet another experimental viewer.

Week in Review Re-Run

We returned to our old home Operator11 for Sunday's show only to find glitches in their studio system still remain.



We actually got a fair way into part one before losing sound, discussing the week and showing a few clips. You'll need to excuse the mess at the end though.



A few minutes later we were back with part two with a quick switch to Blogstar's studio. A look back and SLCC and other goodies. We will almost certainly do next week's show at Blogstar until Op11 gets it's act together again. If!

MBC Weekly News 9-14-08

The latest bulletin from the inworld news programme.

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Second Life: A Virtual Frontier

Drew Carey takes us on a guided tour of Second Life, a virtual world.

Metaverse Week In Review

It being the midst of SLCC and our problems with Operator11, we didn't expect much of a turnout for this week's show. We were wrong. A hasty switch-over to the Blogstar site and things were up and running without a hitch.



Part One with news updates, Slim Warrior's new video and a look at "Spore" with Dizzy Banjo.



Part Two with more chat, clips and a whole lot of back-chat with the studio audience.

SLCC Feed

Scott Merrick is providing one of the most reliable audio/video feeds from the convention. May be live above right now.

In Here

The video for "In Here", the latest single by British musician Slim Warrior, filmed inside Second Life by Angelico Babii. Sublime!

VastPark announces becoming an open source platform with the release of Immersion, a web-based virtual worlds’ player.

Los Angeles (September 3rd, 2008) – VastPark, a white label virtual world platform company, announced their new generation web-based virtual worlds’ player called Immersion today.

VastPark announced that the Immersion player will be open source from its first release.

The Immersion player will enable virtual worlds created using VastPark's open specifications to be embedded into websites and explored, using one of the major web browsers. Web-based virtual worlds have gained a lot of interest with the recent release of Google's Lively and other platforms.
"We think that virtual worlds will start to become more utilitarian: you can create a room in minutes and decide to have a VoIP based meeting in there. This will lead to many businesses wanting to host their own micro worlds just as they host their website. We want to make that easy, low cost and provide an open source and a commercial white label software choice." says Bruce Joy, CEO and founder of VastPark.

VastPark's current Browser and Viewer technology will be merged into the Immersion player.  The first release will be a desktop version with the following release being a web-browser plug-in that is aimed at all major browsers.

"It will feature the scriptable PowerPoint-style controls that made the Viewer's 3D presentations work so well" says Craig Presti, Lead Developer.
"This is an exciting step towards VastPark becoming a true open source alternative. We have previously announced that the core of our server code would become open source. Today we've finally put the VastServer Core source code online for anyone to download and use. Now we're announcing that our new client software code named the Immersion Player will be open source as well." explains Bruce Joy. "It was always my hope to have a mix of open source and commercially licensed tools that use the best available open royalty free specifications and the best proprietary middleware."

The source code developed by VastPark will be released under multiple licenses. "Our intention is to release under both the GPL 2 and the GPL 3 as well as under a simple commercial license. This means we hope to satisfy both the needs of open source and commercial developers." says Bruce Joy.
Steve Eagle, VP of Strategy and an investor in VastPark explains, 'I'm excited about this, because, for the immersive Web to become mainstream, we need to strike that balance: specifications and code should be open source and the end user software must include the best games technology. It must keep pace with top quality games and work on a wider array of computers and devices without great rendering technology. Lastly we need to really enable the developer community to sell proprietary 3rd party add-ons in a truly open eco-system. Otherwise we're still talking about a controlled garden like CompuServe or today's Apple AppStore. The Web must be open!"
“VastPark is built for developers, by developers”, explains Craig Presti. "The whole system is easily extended by developers creating plugins that can remain proprietary or be open sourced at the discretion of the developer. We’ll continue to release binaries under an entrepreneur friendly end user license. That's much better than being essentially forced to open source your widget or your plug-in by the GNU GPL. We think there's a middle way."

The outcome will ensure that there will be more companies able to run their own immersive online meeting, training and demonstration spaces and embed them right into their websites. The immersive Web is one step closer.

VastPark is presenting its software at the Virtual Worlds Expo in Los Angeles and can be seen at booth #317.

The Late Show with Angelico Babii

Today's edition of Angelico's "Late Show" from MBC, with guests Space Junky, Michael Buckley, Natasja Schumann, and Ransome Ansome.

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Second Life competing with Cisco Telepresence? | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

Joe Miller of Linden Labs talking to CNET today.

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Hurricane Watch

Dedicated to the weather watchers who monitor and warn us of approaching storms.

Filmed in Second Life at NOAA's site Meteora.