Showing posts with label gizzy electricteeth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gizzy electricteeth. Show all posts

28 June 2007

In the Middle of the Road...

Two major themes on this blog are free software and virtual worlds. So I'm grateful to Danté Jones for pointing out LA Second Life, which sits neatly at the intersection of the two:

This site is here so that people can see what the Linux Australia members are doing in-world as well as a resource for Linux users interested in Second Life.

As well as those handy resources, the site also flags up news about the Second Life activities of Linux Australia's members, among whom we find Gizzy Electricteeth, whom I had the pleasure of meeting virtually a few months back.

One issue that the site has just raised concerns SL's new voice feature:

Is being mute better than a voice without freedom?

Linux users of Second Life seeing voice currently being supported in all but their Viewer, are posed with that question.

Reading through a job logged in March in the SL JIRA issue tracker titled 'Support Voice on Linux', two things become clear;

1) Linden Lab have licensed Vivox to provide propriety code for Voice.
2) If they ever do support the Linux viewer it will be with a closed 'binary blob'.

Judging by their past actions, I'd say that Linden Lab would love to get this code fully open and cross-platform, but are taking a pragmatic route towards that. Here's what Linden's CTO Cory Ondrejka told me six months ago:

Certainly, there is the question of proprietary code. We may be able to do exactly what we did on the client side, where we are distributing binaries. In six months, when this [move to open up the client] is successful, it may make for very interesting conversations with folks. We can say: Hey, look, you are the leader in this sector, you should open source, here's why we did it and it worked. And I think the fact that there aren't any proof-points of that is maybe part of what scares companies from doing that. I think we're going to be a very interesting test case.

As well as encouraging other software houses to open up, I get the impression that Linden would also be interested in dropping in open source replacements for proprietary code. Time for Linux Australia to get hacking, perhaps.

18 January 2007

There is a There There

I had occasion to use Second Life in anger the other night, by which I mean I made a serious, business-related use of it. Taking up the kind invitation of the splendidly-named Gizzy Electricteeth (SL name, of course), I went to visit IBM's recreation of the Australian Open, which I had written about earlier (and which Gizzy had spotted).

As I had surmised when reading about it, this is an impressive virtual construction, not just for what it is, but mostly for what it portends. The ability to capture a ball's path in real time, and then recreate it in Second Life - and a rapidly-moving ball at that - means that other, more sedate sports like football and cricket will be even easier to reproduce in this way.

As a result, fans of those sports (I'm told there are one or two) will not only be able to watch matches as they happen, but also replay them, watching from different angles. They could even join in - for example, taking the viewpoint of the umpire/referee, or one of the players (even I found myself "playing" tennis, with balls careering towards me at high velocity - and magically being returned).

I think this alone makes IBM's work important, because it may well be enough of a hook to get couch potatoes off their sofas and staggering towards their PCs (until, of course, somebody produces set-top boxes for TVs specifically designed for Second Life.)

But impressive as all this work was - knocked up in less than a month by a small and clearly dedicated team including said Gizzy - what really struck me most was something quite different. This was the fact that I was engaged in this immersive experience while I sat at my computer, late at night in a wintry London, as Gizzy sat at her computer, mid-morning in Australia, in the summer, and while both of us "met" in that somewhere land we call Second Life.

Whereas my previous experiences of SL have been purely of an exploratory kind - and hence retained an element of being "there" only in a shallow, unengaged sense - my visit to the IBM site, which involved me being myself, a journalist asking questions, as I do in ordinary life, was far truer, far more real. Not because of where I was, or what I saw, but because of what I was doing, which was a seamless extension of my life in another place that was neither here nor there, but simply was.