August 19, 2008 at 12:46 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
When you hear somebody is working on a virtual world in 3D Flash, you might suggest how it could have been done.
Here are some suggestions:
1- A team may have produced 3D avatar models and then they render them in-house and store rendered animations in Flash movies. Every time a body is walking inside a virtual world then that means you are looking at a pre-rendered body walking towards diferent directions.
The limitation with this method is that you can not use unlimited number of avatars. Also your avatars are not really made outside your office, rather they are avatars created and modeled by your 3D modeler and animated by your in-house animator.
This is the method followed by some new virtual world start-ups. You are asked to create original faces for your avatars, but your avatar can only have limited walking and sitting animations. These faces are then attached to the various avatar bodies of your choice. However this is also not exactly the 3D that we will discuss here, since there is no way somebody else can model and animate her character inside your world.
2- A team may have produced 3D avatar models and they render them in real-time inside Flash using a 3D render engine supported by Adobe Flash player. These engines, like Papervision or Sandy are open source undertakings by great teams of people and are really getting better and better every day. These engines are coded using Action Script and are native to the Flash player session.
Using Papervision or a similar engine results in real-time 3D avatars but limited with your PCʼs CPU power. Our tests show that a decent PC can display only three-four avatars of medium complexity, that is 2000 polygons or so per avatar.
So in a virtual world setting, you can not really display ten or fifteen avatars in the same room (on the same screen) by rendering them in real-time using Papervision or Sandy engine.
There are various 3D examples made with Papervision engine and shows abilites of 3D models and animations in Flash, but so far we have not seen a multi-avatar real-time rendering virtual world.
3- A team may have produced 3D avatar models and they render them in real-time in Flash. Yet they get away with doing that for multiple avatars, 10-15 of them on the same screen. What is more: They can have as many 3D avatars as they like, be it originating from a user or made in-house, all of these avatars can be displayed with animation.
Additionally, any user will be able to model and animate her avatar, letʼs say in Softimage XSI (a popular animation tool) and then be able to export using a tool supplied by the team, and immediately see her avatar come alive inside the virtual world, in 3D Flash.
And, by the way, you can import and use other peopleʼs animations for your avatar too!
This is what Yogurtistan team is trying to achieve and I believe will be able to demonstrate at the Virtual Worlds Expo in Los Angeles early September, 2008.
July 30, 2008 at 6:30 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
We are attending the Virtual Worlds Expo in Los Angeles, September 3-4 2008. Our booth no is 126. We will be showing Yogurtistan for the first time in English.
Next, in October we are going to be exhibiting at the Virtual Worlds Forum London. Our booth number is 10 in London. This is going to be our first European display of our virtual world.
July 15, 2008 at 6:18 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
The shift from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 (or Life 3.0) is happenning. I have discussed some components of the shift in an earlier blog. In this one I want to talk about the economical aspects of the shift.
Web 3.0 has something new: It is group action. I am using the term in its broadest possible meaning. It covers, for example, the meaning contained in the term “collective intelligence”. The web 3.0 is all about collective intelligence and the power of groups.
This quote is from Baris Karadogan, from his blog: From Sand Hill Road to Istanbul.
“If Web 2.0 is about self expression, as in blogs, wikis, social networks and tags, Web 3.0 will be about group action.”
I agree with him. Let me go into more detail here.
If there is a social network of people and if they can reach the founders of the network and the founders can reach the people when necessary, then there is a possible group action lying there. If the group is large enough, let us say 2 million people of the same country, 1 million German speaking Turks etc. then you have a very valuable group. I mean the founders have something very valuable in their networkʼs database.
Who are these founders? I will come to this very soon.
This group of networked and interactively reachable individuals can have a lot power under their command. They can have reductions in the goods they order through this network for example. Suppose this 2 million people buy 10.000 cars in a year. Then the founders, armed with (the information of) a large order can visit car makers and get very good reductions for the 10K car order.
Repeat the above sentences with the following actions: buying houses, tomatoes, iPods, MP3 music, films, cinema tickets, Nutellas, electing the local government etc.
Okay, great I get it, that is a lot of power lying in there, like a giant ball of cold fusion. But who are these guys, the founders?
Baris Karadogan, whose openness I envy greatly, says:
“For this proactive actions to occur, social networks need to get organized. This requires a level of hierarchy above ‘friends and contacts’. That level will be determined by a political system within the network. Leaders will be chosen and they will use the collective power of the network to get ahead in their online lives”.
Fine. What is the leadersʼ/foundersʼ interest in getting all this ability under one database and using it? What will they do with the information for any kind of decision making, when it starts to accumulate?
Here is where Baris and I have differing views: He says:
“They will collect taxes from advertisers and build their online countries with very real impact to their physical lives”. (Second “their” refers to who? Leaders or the people?)
There is a catch! Baris says, these group action leaders (founders) will collect tax from advertisers. Nice idea, but this is not likely to happen. Let me tell you why.
The advertisers are not nearly as powerful as the founders, since the founders own the networkʼs consent. They are the ones who manage the wish list of the people. So the sales people of the manufactured goods are powerless in comparison to the founders who represent millions of networked and informed consuming humans. The power is not with the sales people, let alone their advertiser! (please see my advertising is dead blog)
So, this information is not going to tax the ad guy, it will tax the goods/services producers! And selling this information will take away all its power.
And finally, why are the founders in this thing for? They are in this business for distributing the accumulated wealth of information back to the people. The founders, will and should give it back to people after cutting a small percentage for running the house. Otherwise the Webʼs DNA will eliminate them.
Why did this vision had to wait for the Web 3.0 and did not popped-up earlier with a Web 2.0 web site, like facebook? I donʼt have an answer to this.
July 15, 2008 at 6:10 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Many years ago we were designing the first corporate web site of Turkey, for a major bank. Our client was the ad agency of the bank and the agency creatives were clueless about the web. Mind you this was mid 90ʼs and the world wide web was seen as a wild notion.
At a critical moment I was answering the head adman, the question of how the people out there was going to find the bankʼs web site, I said, “the site will be there but no one will be able to know that it is there”. The adman went mad and said:”Why? We should be able to paint the web with our site address, we have plenty of money.”
This was the moment I learned classes and courses of a lesson. Oh, every web site has a unique IP address and my stupid web site “www.sillyboy.com” was at equal distance from everybody as “www.thebigbank.com.tr”. And there was no way with all the money of the bank to “paint” the web as they used to fill the Turkish TV with ads. At the time the bank had long minutes of advertisements on all major channels.
The world wide web DNA is simple: Every web page has one IP address and all pages are equidistant to the user.
This DNA, as simple as it is, has been belittled by Yahoo and in return Yahoo has been severly punished. Google followed the DNA and has so far flourished. If the Ford company (home page has only one IP address) wants to climb in the list of the search results and for this pays Yahoo real world money, then the DNA punishes both. Lesson two.
Real-world money canʼt buy you user credits on the web. Web works with real and present information, not with data shadowing, fact clouding etc.
Advertising is the art of three things:
1- informing people about a product or service using communication media.
2- clouding or emphasizing this or that aspect of a product through the creation and reinforcement of its brand image.
3- making 1 and 2 intelligently so that the consumers will not feel abused with the message or its frequency.
The last two are against the DNA of the Web and the Web will be truly global one day. Therefore, sorry for advertisement.
And the last part of the question: Why is it hard to see that advertising is bound to disappear? Because the reality about the future of advertising is intelligently clouded.
July 14, 2008 at 2:59 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Somewhere between Web 2.0 and Second Life… I dare to talk about Life 3.0,
These days everybody is talking about virtual worlds, some are building virtual worlds and the concept is evolving. There is definitely a paradigm shift occuring and I will try to show the ingredients of this shift.
Second Life may be seen as an example of the 3D Web. Second Life is an artistic self-expression tool and a very good one at that.
The 3D interface of Second Life (SL) is directly coming from the 3D games world. World of Warcraft is a good example of that interface and many people have the WoW type of 3D interaction in mind when they talk about 3D Web. This however may or may not be the accepted 3D interface for the future worlds of the web.
SL is not browser based, that is, it is not universally distributable on the web. You have to install special software. Also, SL is very complicated for the daily web user. I am not even talking about the SDK for creating SL content, which is very difficult to use.
SL has a few things that we have to notice though: First of all, people have seen a different, non-form based interaction with SL. They have not always been into SL but have read or heard about it from other sources. So the hype of SL as a real-world like web interaction has caught on.
Secondly, SL has shown the importance of physical presence of the others. I mean, when you see some avatar walking on your island, you are sure that it is another human being, online and happenning there synchronously with you. That physical presence thing has been mostly ignored or not very well understood I think.
These two differences that Second Life has highlighted in comparison to the “old” 2D web, are to me the most important ones. In SL, your avatar is your symbol and your artistic self expression tool, so you spend a lot of time on her. However, for the 3D Web, your avatar is not so much a self-expression agent as it is a reminder that you are physically there. (You can of course have a very cool looking avatar that is so you, and that is perfectly fine.)
More on the other differences of 2D and 3D web will come…
