Its no secret I’m keen on the potential for Virtual Worlds.  Today, there is enough there to keep me hooked but I don’t think that is true for most people.  Even for me, it leaves a lot to be desired.  Here are some things I want:

Sports simulations!  I’m watching the Florida/Kentucky game now.  I’d love for 3D avatars to be playing in my 3D world doing the same thing the real players are doing.  Let me watch the game from any angle, fly above the field and hang out virtually with my friends.

Engine mechanics.  Really, I want to bring in my own 3D objects.  In my case, I have an old 82 Corvette I work with.  I hang out with some other Corvette folks on line and sometimes get their advice but doing this online can be hard. It sure would be nice to have my engine in-world and have online friends point to the part I need to fix. My son is into the old Volkswagen beetles.  It would be fun to mock up his designs in-world.

Working Virutal World objects.  Sure, we have a few of these now. We have “TV”s, and drivable cars, and sailboats but most are poor imitations of real world devices. The script I can put on my in-world object is nothing compared to the program I can put on my computer, PDA, or even my cell phone.

Real, virtual economy.  Second Life has kind of tapped into the potential. I want to be able to buy and sell services.  I want to be able to buy and sell virtual stuff. Going to the dentist might be hard, but there is no reason I can’t meet with a lawyer, or configure a car before I buy it (Yes, I know some of this has been done but it is still too primitive).  When I buy my Winnebago and start traveling the country, I want to be able to work in a virtual world like I never left.

Virtual World/Software Integration.  When I create a PPT slides, its a pain to take them to a Virtual World. In the old days, we built models. People could come in and watch you work. They could see as your design takes shape and make comments. You could work together.  Now its a solitary job.  Maybe they can look over your sholder as you sit at your computer.  When I do any kind of 3D design on the computer, I want people to be able to walk into my virtual office and see what I am doing just like they could when I was building real 3D models.

I gave a little background on where Second Life is coming from in terms of content creation. Now, let me point you to today’s debate.

If you have an issue with Second Life, you can use their JIRA system to report it. Its a great way for having open communications with the people working on the system. For my last blog, someone mentioned being able to import obj files. This is an old Wavefront technology that comes up a lot with 3D graphics systems and its use in Second Life comes up a lot:  http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1110

Now I don’t want to get too hung up on obj right now. There are other formats as well and this is just a tiny piece of the big debate. Lets come back to that later.

  Recently  Qarl Linden (creator of the sculpted prim) posted a JIRA to discuss what people wanted more, Mesh import or more inworld tools.  You can access the JIRAS here:

Work on Meshes

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-1494

Work on Inworld Tools

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-1495

Essentially there are three groups in this argument but this a bit like saying there are only 4 types of life forms-  animals, plants, fungi, and protists – look ant any one group and you will see many subgroups and there are those that are in multiple groups.

Technologists

Our first  group of content creators are those interested in Second Life providing support for much more advanced and detailed forms of geometric representation. For many of these people, this means supporting meshes, kind of a surface defined by a bunch of points (not too much unlike sculpties).  Like there are many types of animals in the animal kingdom, there are other solutions too. Some like having more analytics (more prim types like cylinders, cones, etc.). Some want booleans (ability to subtract one prim from another). There are other solutions too which I’ll talk about later.  but the the basic idea is kind of the same. Prims and scupties are way too limited and we need more expressive formats in Second Life.

Community Builders

The second group is focused more on the community than the technology. If SL supported more advanced geometry, how would current residents create them? There is the problem. If you remember, this is a minor problem with sculpties. What will happen with an even better ways to represent geometry? Would it be a barrier to current resident builders?  In-world building in Second Life is a special thing. Why would we want to force content creators out of second Life in order to create?

Capitalists/Economists

A third group are those focused on the economics. Many content creators sell their creations. CopyBot problems created a community outcry as others could copy and resell someone else design. Imagine the potential economic impact if either more advanced objects can be created or the huge amount of existing 3D geometry could be easily imported into Second Life. For many, an understanding of the economic impact followed by a plan to avoid economic problems must be addressed first. How do we protect these people’s intellectual property?

Now I have some opinions on all this.  I’ll talk more about that next blog.

There is a big debate going on in Second Life® ….  Ok, there is always a big debate going on in Second Life but this one is important  :-) . It is about Second Life content creators and what tools and technologies should be supported in the future.

One of the reasons for success in second life is that “residents” can create their own content. SL supports a set of primitive geometry types such as cube, cones, tori, cylinders and spheres. You can skew or shape or hollow these primitives, give them textures, and combine them to create some really cool designs.  Here’s a video that might help:

Now those of us in the CAD world know that this is nice but pretty limited. You can’t subtract geometry (take away a cylinder in a cube to create a hole). You can’t do too much freeform work. This was addressed a little bit with the creation of “sculpted prims” which allow you to create a kind of freeform surface by specifying a grid of points.

Sculpted prims (sculpties) looked like they had a lot of potential and do solve a lot of problems. Sculpties are different from other prims in that they can’t be created with the existing tools.  The root of today’s debate starts here (well, at least one of them.) A number of software developers created tools to create the sculpties (including myself, see Math Sculptor) or added functionality to existing tools like Blender to help in creating them. 

On one hand, this was good.  The folks at Linden labs don’t have unlimited resources. With the Linden’s creating a standard, all the creative resources of the development community could be brought to bear. There was an explosion of creative and innovative tools for SL sculpties.

On the other hand this was bad. You now had to leave SL to take advantage of sculpties (there are a few in-world tools but they can be limited).  Some of these tools cost money making it harder for the individual builder to compete against a bigger more well funded organization. Or, to compete, the builder would need to learn these external tools, some quite complicated.

In the end, most people found the negatives about sculpties were not that bad. Today, you can still create impressive builds without them and the people that absolutely needed a solution to the original analytical prims had one.  Part of what has reduced the debates is that that Sculpties still have a many limitations.

It is today’s discussion on the next set of improvements for content creators that is triggering today’s far more substantial debate.  More on this next post.

I don’t mean this to be a blog about blogging. Eventually I’m move over to talking about all things 3D.  However, right now, I’m still setting up.

I have started tracking visits to my site and it is growing but I’m a LONG way from anything professional.  My work blog gets WAY more hits.

I’m not looking to become the next big name in blogging (frankly, I’m pretty boring) but I would like to get my URL into the hands off the 0.5 % of the population that might find me interesting. I wonder how you do that.

Ariel Atom

Most of my career, I’ve had one foot in software development and one foot in engineering. There are some differences between the two. The obvious one is manufacturing where it cost almost nothing to take your software and make a few thousand copies. Contrast this to the huge cost when manufactoring laptops, tires or ships.

On the other hand, product design is very similar in both worlds. Whether you are designing a new piece of software, a tire, a boat or a cell phone, we all have many of the same design issues to think about.  Below are some quotes from the experts that are always good to think about.

Know the user, and you are not the user” – Arnie Lund 

” If the user can’t use it, it doesn’t work” – Susan Dray

” …pay attention to what users do, not what they say” – Jakob Nielsen

” Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works” — Steve Jobs, 2003

” The joy of an early release lasts but a short time. The bitterness of an unusable system lasts for years — unknown

” Bad news travels fast. A dissatisfied shopper tells around 10 other people about the shopper’s bad experience” – Albrecht & Zembre

” ‘Intuitive’ interfaces are easier to build when designers have a deep understanding of the users” – Jared M. Spool

” Customers always know what’s wrong. They can’t always tell you what they want, but they always can tell you what’s wrong” – Carly Fiorina

” Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose” – Charles Eame

Want more quotes? Check out this web page: http://uxquotes.tumblr.com/

I’m continuing to set up my blog. The technology is probably more fun than the blogging for me. Ricky Jordan  recommended I get FeedBurner for my RSS feeds. I’ve done that and you should now see the little orange RSS icon off to the side.

I also picked up a new polling plugin and added to my site.  Eventually I’ll do a poll but I’ll probably wait until I get more than three readers

If you have a blog or regularly read them, I’d love to know of any other useful widgets of plugins for my blog. Leave a comment, or send @burhop a tweet if you know of something.

One of my favorite presentations on social media is called “What The f**k is Social Media”.  Its makes some great points but is a bit too edgy to put on a work blog. Since this is a personal blog, I can get away with a bit more.

Here you go:

I’ve been blogging, twittering and tumbling on various sites. What I haven’t done is set up a serious blogging platform until now. I figure I’d start my first blog on this while it’s all fresh in my memory.

This isn’t totally new territory for me.  I’ve been reading blogs from a number of friends and even helped others set up their own page. I’ve created blogs on Blogger, and wordpress.com and tumblr.  If you JUST want to blog, these are good places to get started. What I was interested in was something more serious.  If you do too, here are some steps.

Step 1.

The first step is to find a good service to support your blog.  I’m using startlogic.com and have friends that have recommended bluehost.  you can do this very cheaply.  I’d recommend a couple sites for finding a good deal:

• Hosting Review
• Host Critque

Step 2.

You need to find a good domain name. One service that help you with this is NameBoy.  It not only checks if your name is available, it will also make suggestions for alternative names. Often, you get your name registered as part of the hosting service’s fee. Otherwise, GoDaddy or many others will do this for you.

Step 3.

The next step is to install blogging software. Wordpress was recommended by most of my serious blogging friends. You can try it out on wordpress.com but its limited in what you can do. I started here but later moved onto this blog.

You can get the software at wordpress.org but you might first check if your hosting provider already provides it for you. Some have “one click” installs.  If not, you will need to upload the software using FTP and also set up a database.  The good folks at Wordpress will tell you how to do this.

Step 4.

Since you are setting up a “serious” blog, you probably don’t want the default theme. You can find all kinds of themes on the wordpress.org site .  There are also many other themes if you just search for “wordpress themes”.  One thing you want to do is get a “widget ready” theme. This will allow you to add all kinds of cool stuff to your page.

Step 5.

Find some Plugins. These are heavy duty tools you can use to make Wordpress do whatever you want.  In my case, I got the Disqus plugin to mange user comments and allow users to post Seesmic video comments.  I also got a plugin for twitter and another one for Flickr. Lastly, you might check out Addthis.com which lets you provide a simple way for readers to add a link to your blog from there Del.icio.us, Facebook, twitter or other social media application.

Step 6.

Pick your widgets. find more. Some widgets will come with your Wordpress installation. Others you can add as is done with the plugins.  Widgets usually show up in the sidebars for your theme. These might be calendars, your own HTML text, RSS feeds, lists of comments on your blog, whatever.  Many plugins will create their own widgets so you can place them where you want.  For example, my flickr plugin works this way.

step 7.

you probably want to know how much your blog is being accessed, what posts are good and from where people are coming to view your blog.  Google Analytics provides a free way to do this.  All you have to do is insert a bit of code into your blog  (I added it as a “Text Widget”) and each day Google will prepare a nice report with more information than you could ever want.

That is it

 You now have a very powerful bloging platform that can do just about anything, is dynamic and atractive, and integrated with other social media applications.