f13.net

Ya know, this has been talked about for awhile but I'm not sure I get the hype. The only way this would be interesting is if

• Someone provides some oversight so that the worlds built accurately reflect reality to a fair degree; and,
• They leverage Multiverse's ability to have a single character jump between these worlds

Stitching together a modifiable fully explorable 3D world... yea, that's cool. Cool enough to send the Flight Simer and Second Lifer's panicking? I doubt it. Unless they don't bother trying to achieve reality to chase the tens of thousands of the latter? SL itself far and away the biggest of these style of virtual worlds but by no means commanding actual numbers nor dollars to turn the serious heads.

I dunno.

I kinda wanna walk around the Forbidden city and an accurate representation of a few mountain ranges.

I think this has infinite potential if the avatars are humans. Truly one of those 'go places you've never been' situations.

I don't want style in this.

I'd like to explore Abu Ghraib and Area 51 and so forth. I doubt this will be possible....

As one of the prisoners or one of the guards?

Looking at your avatar, I'm guessing "prisoner".

I think the place has been such a consistant setting for so much real-life horror under both Saddam and Cheney, that it'd make a great "dungeon" to set a survival horror FPS in. To frivolise all the real-life suffering from there in the name of digital entertainment. You know, like Chernobyl. Set the next S.TA.L.K.E.R. or F.E.A.R. in there.

As for my avatar, glass houses and sticks and all that ;)

this makes no sense.  What does Google need from Multiverse?  Smells more like a ploy for them to be bought.  They can't have any thing proprietary long term that Google doesn't already have in house.

Actually, if you combine that idea with the crazy photosynth guys, you might just have your wish.

(http://i.n.com.com/i/ne/p/2007/screenshot3_550x408.jpg)

(http://i.n.com.com/i/ne/p/2007/screenshot5_550x401.jpg)

(http://i.n.com.com/i/ne/p/2007/MVtool1_550x458.jpg)

(http://i.n.com.com/i/ne/p/2007/screenshot2_550x408.jpg)

That is just fucking awesome in every way imaginable.

I agree with Schild.

It's awesome for like ten minutes until you realize it isn't a game.  Okay, a 3D model of a real location.  And?

Read what I wrote in my first post.

I did.  And?

I mean okay, here's a 3D model of the Forbidden City or the Taj Mahal or whatever.  Yep, sure is cool and all.  But unless people get to add monsters and shit to it, it's still just a 3D model of a building.

Sketch up is a rather accessible program for anyone not familiar with 3d molding programs... Thats a good step for any "game" the requires user content....easy to use tools (Furcadia is king of this IMO).

However, the reservations i always have is quality. I am interested in how they will, or will not, regulate it. I have seen what people add to Google earth.

There will be mods for it... there always are. There will be MMORPGs, FPS's, Stratagy games.... It's going to rock, and Google will control it all. Start buying stock now. I would if it weren't already at $600+ a share.

Or alternatively, start buying Multiverse shares, if/when they go public.

I don't see Google waiting that long.

I love the above shots. Collaberative world building. But to me (repeating here) it's all about the authenticity. I agree the lack of "game" may keep this off radars for a bit. At the same time, there's the whole Field of Dreams thing going for it. If they make a UI even slightly easier than SL, the latter's got some issues. I don't think I'm alone in thinking that if anyone could make collaberative 3D world building approachable by the masses, Google is it. Linden's trying to outsource that by having opened up their system, but they've got far less breadth of input than the various Google entities. Linden wants to be the 3D web, but they didn't approach things that way for a long enough period of time, and it shows.

Anyone know if Multiverse has a GUI yet or is it still a ghetto piece of shit?

Yea - I don't see anyone really pushing to add more things to the LL client themselves.

Three years ago was the right time to do this in my opinion. This would be prior to the emergence of other tools and other customizable 3D worlds built on similar concepts but by different companies. I think Linden got too used to being the only game in town. And even now while they're on top of that particular side of things, they're not in a Blizzard-esque unassailable position. That was due to the relative interest in 3D web... a few years ago.

How can 3 years ago be the right time when broadband in America isn't even ready today?

Linden has one thing going for it that Google won't, and it's going to make all the difference. The ability to have your avatars fuck. Sure, it's a stupid difference, but given the choice between taking an online virtual tour of The cascade mountains and then zipping over to the Green Zone or hanging out in a Gorean city and fucking slave girls and then zipping over to a fantasy sim and fucking an elf chick, and then zipping over to a post-apocalyptic/vampire sim and fucking a demon/vampire chick, and then zipping off to a hunting/capture sim and fucking some chick you catch with a net, which is going to hold more interest?

Linden seriously needs to wake up and redo their interface and inventory system though. It's getting better, but it's still needlessly complex.

Disagree.  Porn made or broke a lot of formats in previous digital media shifts because the two were exclusive, adult content skewed towards early tech adopters, strong financial incentives were created, etc.

In this case, I think you'll just see Second Life descend into an even seedier ghetto, and normal people (or at least, people not interested in getting their 3d freak nasty on at the moment) will gravitate towards google.

There were really no other 3D virtual world builders at all three years ago. Broadband is a limiting factor to 3D web, but you could have reached critical mass three years ago too if the SL UI, from the graphics to the avatar movement to manipulating objects, wasn't such a turnoff. And it hasn't remarkably changed in those three years while there's been emergence of newer better looking and (arguably) slightly easier to use interfaces.

Linden was king of the indies, but we could be entering an age of real competition. Sorta like MMORPGs before UO and then again before WoW (in the West).

This is all could, maybe, and imho :)

I think with Google, Metaplace, GarageGames, Scenecaster, IMVU, Spore, and things like Papervision3D all getting in on the action it could be getting somewhere this time around.

You know that it would be untrue.
You know that I would be a liar.
If I were to say to you.

That any of those mattered besides Google.

Depends. Google could be stupid and do some integrated Orkut vector avatar crap. I wasn't impressed so far (http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/24/google-preping-a-second-life-competitor/). They are pretty slow on the draw. They bought Sketchup 17 months ago. Why would they partner with Multiverse if they have their own thing going on? They should be the ones to do it since they have the resources and the revenue system to back it up but it doesn't mean they can get their shit together. They spammed my local craiglist with 50+ job offers.

Metaplace launching without a 3D client would be pretty dumb.

IMVU has 16 million+ user signups. Google should buy that shit and convert it to Papervision 3D.

Papervision 3D only came public within the last ~3 months.

GarageGames and Scenecaster both use custom browser plugins which is crap.

There are plenty of areas that Google enters half-assed and does not dominate. Google Code project hosting, GWT ajax libraries, Orkut social networking, etc.

Despite the Google reputation of having a million SUPER-SMART PHDS!!! they fail at much of what they try. Google search is still the only standout. Google Maps was for a while but the competitors have caught up and it's now a commodity product.

Google just does anything that may have eyeballs, and sometimes does something with it and other times just lets it sit around forever. They are still run by the engineer side of the house, so thats why you see some of this stuff picked up and then left to rot. If they follow the pattern, eventually they will be driven more by Sales than Engineering, which we are already seeing a shift towards.

From what I understand Sketch does a 3D modeling tool, not a "metaverse", so I would bet you could use their free 3D tool to make stuff for this Google Life thingy.

I'm outta touch. You're talking about this (http://www.papervision3d.org/) right? That think in fullscreen mode is going to give my youngest hours of enjoyment. Hours!

What's the underlying tech? And is that the point of it? Fully 3D cameras or something more like QTVR stitching-images?

Think DirectX7 in software render mode inside Flash. This (http://blog.papervision3d.org/) shows better what people are doing with it. Guy wrote a 3D pong clone for me using it and it was only 250 lines of code and 35k to download.

More of a remainder there's no escape from Sturgeon's Law.

I agree.  You will have to be able to do something besides walking around and looking, like drive sports cars, mug people...whatever.

(http://f13.net/media/images/vanguard_review.jpg)

It's gone up 28 dollars since you said that!

I would expect pretty much every platform to load SketchUp format models soon. (We certainly plan on it). The 3d warehouse is a great thing.

That said, that's not the only format to think about. Lots of stuff out there. That's why we want to just load as many formats as possible.

Multiverse is cool, useful, and surprisingly easy to use if you are comfortable with programming.  I played around with it a while back (http://endie.net/cs/blogs/endie/search.aspx?q=multiverse&p=1) and found it fun and easy, and indeed got enquiries from not one but two companies in the virtual worlds sphere as to whether I was interested in a job off the back of my posts.

Adding items to a world is pretty smooth and relatively easy.  It is, however, a long way away from being drag-and-drop when it comes to dictating behaviour.  And since you're having to install and run your own server etc, actually getting going takes a modicum of command-line work.