Virtual worlds in your browser
You probably remember Google’s Lively. It was around for about a year and then Google shelved it. But did you know that they have been working on a browser-based 3D plugin for a while?
It’s called O3D and was posted here last April.
Now there are always things being worked on that never quite make it into day-to-day living, but today’s post on Chrome OS puts the virtual web-in-a-browser a bit closer to a reality.
What does this mean? Maybe websites will have virtual worlds within them?
Imagine amazon.com’s home page as a 3D store you can enter. Maybe go to an aisle of books on Second Life and see that other people are there and strike up a conversation about what books they like.
And what does this mean to things like Second Life? Who knows, there could be many outcomes.
Maybe Linden Lab stays closed off to the rest of the hypergridded world and turns into an AOL type debacle. Certainly with the new SL in a Box, the thought of them staying isolated seems to be the case.
Linden Lab is working on browser-based plugins, but how successful it will be is anyone’s guess.
OpenSim (like our latest venture into Reaction Grid) is built to hypergrid to many other grids. This certainly seems more like a model that all of us understand in regard to real business and the web as we know it today.
The iliveisl team is heavily vested in Second Life, both in money for sims and with our inventories. The money is one thing, and while a large investment, the issue of our inventories are the biggest obstacles for us entering open source grids built with OpenSim.
However, our desire to help business and eLearning has led us to our own OpenSim grid with Reaction Grid. The obstacle of leaving most of your inventory behind is simply outweighed by the possibilities of hypergridded OpenSim worlds.
The politics are much less, the focus sharper, the cost much less, the performance significantly better, and the options seem to be what we had hoped Second Life would have been.
We have three years in Second Life and fortunately all our skills are 100% transferable to an OpenSim grid.
Things change. Second Life has changed. Viable alternatives are appearing.
Google’s O3D may be one of those turning points like Flash was in 1999.
reposted from the iliveisl blog
Top 99 workplace eLearning blog?
Call me fast on observation, I just noticed that Tony Karrer listed this blog as one of his top 99 workplace eLearning blogs!
I guess that means I need to step it up a bit!
I have put blogging about eLearning on the back burner after a whirlwind of conference and online speaking invitations (8 in six months). These were directly tied to using Second Life as a tool for eLearning development. Part of the reason for stepping back was partly due to the difficulty of getting Linden Lab to answer a question on proper attribution for a college textbook I wanted to write.
In the meantime, I have been putting efforts toward growing the online presence of our Second Life endeavors. Mainly in the form of virtual real estate. With 12 sims and the transient nature of virtual land ownership, making a strong online presence is vital.
The social networking has been fun to do and the results are very good if you set ip up properly. Fortunately, I discovered Maki at DoshDosh and follow much of his advice. It helps leverage your time effectively.
iliveisl and it’s spokesperson, Ener Hax, enjoy good SEO mainly from daily blogging (5 contributing authors), Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook.
But, as serendipity tends to have it, those efforts have led full circle. If you are immersed in Second Life, you could not miss the unfortunate handling by Linden Lab of one of Second Life’s biggest eLearning and education proponents – Jo Kay!
Thankfully, there was an upside to this news. Reaction Grid offered a great alternative to Second Life for education and business use and Jo Kay let the world know.
Reaction Grid is strictly PG in nature, can be private, firewalled, or hypergrid connected to a large number of other OpenSim-based grids.
The Reaction Grid team is incredibly passionate and supportive. I have already had a few Skype classes with the CEO and CTO.
OpenSim has been recompiled and is far more efficient than Second Life’s server code. You can have 45,000 prims per sim (vs. 15K) and prims can be made as large as 256 metres (vs. 10).
And Reaction Grid is far more economical! Four sims for $75 per month versus $1180!
So look for renewed eLearning posts about using Reaction Grid as an elearning video tool and as far as the honor of being in Tony’s list? I am deeply humbled and am tiny in the shadow of Tony’s outstanding blogging and resources.
