EU considers a presence in SL

According to this article the European Union considers opening an own presence in Second Life. They’re saying it could happen in the future, but right now they don’t have enough manpower to do it, so it’s still in consideration to communicate via unusual mediums.

Hm… could be starting a new trend, that nations are entering the space like many RW companies have already done it. We’re going to see.

German criminal law and Second Life

The Netzeitung runs an article today how the German criminal law is applicable to Second Life and not.

To sum it up in short: if you’re going to make pornography publicly available there, it is applicable; also child pornography falls under it. Sex between furries – is against it. A dutch attorney is already investigating in case of „child age play“ as an act of child pornography.

Well, some new insights, it sums it up to – better don’t do anything evil and be sure with whom you’re interacting.

New things in the making

There’s been a somewhat quiter time now in Second Life, especially in terms of media coverage and company news, but now again the hype is heating on.

Here are some of those events:

  • The Germans Samwer brothers achieved a 10% share of Anshe Chung Enterprises. For those who don’t know them: these are businessmen, who first founded a German competitor to eBay, called Alando and sold it then to eBay for around 50 million US$. Later they’ve founded Jamba, the German or European (?) market leader in ring tone sales, which became vastly popular for their annoying commercials. Many still remember the oh so annoying Sweety or perhaps the Crazy Frog. This is all of their doing. Well, their company got many critics back then because of their business behaviour, especially to underages. The most famous article about their behaviour is called „Jamba Kurs“ (English via Google) from the end of 2004 in the German blog Spreeblick and got them many bad media coverage, especially because the owner of Spreeblick found out that employees of Jamba posted disguised under some pseudonyms pro Jamba comments in his blog. This article made Spreeblick very popular, and it is still today one of the most read blogs in Germany. They’ve changed later there business practics under pressure of the government. Later they sold their company for about 270 million US$ to Rupert Murdoch and founded a risk capital company. Seems they’ve invested now with this company money into ACS like they also before did into the German Facebook copycat StudiVZ. This is, of course, a good deal, since they’ve got the advantage of very cheap and good workers from China. They intend to double the employee staff to 100 persons and to open several, international bureaus. This must be also a good deal for Ailin Gräf herself in terms of money, too. Both are very successful companies and business men.
  • Second Life is in the process of getting voice capabilities. This is going to be a very big leap in the further development of the platform. The reactions about that are diverse; while some say that’s great, others say Lindenlabs should first fix the most outstanding bugs of Second Life before adding new features, that can possibly add even more to the lag situation we’ve got at the moment, others dislike it because it is somewhat disclosing about their real life persona and it can drive a somewhat rift in the playership between people still typing and people who only use voice only.
  • Ah, and the lag, our friend, we all love and cherish: the Lindens claim it’s fixed. Consider that! Wow! What was the reason for it? A saturated network link. Now I wonder how often – if at all – they’re looking at their network router graphs. This is something so obvious to find out if you only take a closer look at your network equipment – sheesh. No fame for the Lindens there.
  • CBS is financing the Electric Sheep Company. Another company getting an infusion of fresh money, this time the company that supports Open Second Life.
  • Mercedes Benz has opened up an own point of business, that seems to be still somewhat lacking. Expect there more things to come, I guess it’s intentional they’ve opened up so early to get first some experiences in handling Second Life before the real shebang of the company starts.

Handicapped people in Second Life

My experience told me normally that especially handicapped people like to experience and try to live in games like Second Life what they cannot do anymore in real life. For example it can be very nice for blind people to play in a MUD to socialize with other people, or for deaf people to play in Second Life.

It can also be very accomodating for people who cannot walk anymore and need wheelchairs to play Second Life to forget about that for a little while.

Well, but not all wheelchair users seem to feel that way; there is a usergroup of people who are unable to walk in real life anymore in Second Life who don’t want to hide this behind there avatar, quite the opposite. They’re saying this is an undeniable part of myself, of my life, whereever I am and I want to show it.

So they are going around in Second Life in wheelchairs, a very uncommon sight. I’ve seen such an avatar yesterday in the garden, it just happened by chance that I saw her and you rarely see such avatars at all. Why? Because most people want to be beautiful, want to forget about it, that’s why.

So here is a picture of this avatar, I was quite impressed by the openness of the person.

Wheelchair

New upcoming trend: raytraced computer games (?)

While it is still not available on our computers, it’s in the making at the moment: raytraced computer games engines. For the record: almost any modern 3D computer game, like Second Life, uses so called raycasting as computing method, which is a much smaller version of raytracing itself. To sum the differences up in short: raycasting cannot compute reflactions, retractions or shadows at all; raytracing can. This makes raycasting of course much, much faster, while raytracing was still slower in these days, but produces much more realistic pictures in the end. Movie productions, like Shrek for example, are all made with raytracers and big rendering farms in the background, as raytracing needs much more horsepower in your computer to work sufficiently than raycasting needs.

Popular raytracers for the normal human being are for example Blender, which was used to produce the movie picture „Elephant’s dream“ or the Persistence of Vision Raytracer, short Povray. For examples, how raytraced pictures can look like, take a look at the Internet Raytracing Competition. This competition began back in 1996, there are six rounds every year, running for two months under a certain theme, everybody can apply with his own pictures and in the end the winners are voted. Many pictures there are really artistic and it is a nice showcase to demonstrate what modern raytracers are capable of; also a good showcase to get an impression of the rendering times for those pictures, if you take a look at the commentaries. For example a picture like this one or this one could never be done with a raycaster. Period. If you want to get an impression, what animations made with raytracers can look like, take a look at the animations there or download Elephant’s dream, since it is for free and a good showcase of what Blender is capable of (a new version of Blender was released some days ago, so it can now do even more).

So, to sum it up: raycasters are the way modern 3D computer games do their work. It is the technology that has been used by good old Doom, Unreal Tournament, Quake and is also used by Second Life and many other games. It’s the industry standard for computer games. It is a subset of the possibilites what raytracing is capable of. Raytracing itself has been probably around even longer, but the CPUs were not fast enough until recently to use raytracing in gaming engines, until now, so it seems.

The University of Saarland is doing research in this field and a group around Professor Slusallek is using a new raytracing code that makes use of multicore CPUs and modern GPUs. They are going to showcase their software at the CeBIT and are claiming, that it is already good and fast enough for usage in modern computer games. There has already been a project around, called Quake 4 Real Time, that has enhanced the old Quake engine to raytracing usage. There are also many screenshots and a video on that page to showcase how such a game looks like and no, it’s not for download.

If you take in account, that they are using high end CPUs at the moment to achieve their goals, but the technology is already around and the software now, too, as it seems, then it would be not surprising to see raytracing game engines in around 3-5 years entering the computer gaming market, since until then the technology is more at the mid to low end and should be around in masses. This could be definitely the next big step in computer gaming and is worth watching it.

To sum the outcome up: at the moment a game designer has to work around the shortcomings of raycasting and its shortages. But with raytracing capable game engines this would be gone, you can build what you like, but of course you must place your light sources better.