digital_nation: life on the virtual frontier

digital_nation: How the networked world, the virtual identity and friendship are changing our life, our society:

A documentary, aired 2009-02-02 on frontline.
(via Fleep Tuque)

Virtual Worlds 2010+

Office Hour canceled today!

Hi there,

Unfortunately we have to cancel the usual office hour tonight (Jan 7th) at 20:00 CET. We are always available on Google Wave and on the contact page, though.

Cheers,
Torrid

Opensource/Free Virtual World Platforms

Awesome collection of Virtual Worlds platforms and engines:
Part1
Part2

… Success

virtyou Opensim is up and running again since 23:00 PST / 05:00 GMT.

Major Update

We will be installing a major update tonight/this evening (Interface Version 6), so the Grid will be down from 15:00 PST / 23:00 GMT, for about 2-3 hours.

Cisco Review of a Virtual Worlds Event

Short article, mostly positive review of a Cisco Virtual Meeting. It seems, Virtual Events attendees are both older and younger than the average (broader spectrum), and are highly interested in later in person meetings. So VW meetings function as a low cost teaser for RL conferences?

Megaregion

Just some photos of our first Megaregion on virtyou. This is a 4×4 Region: 1024×1024m = 1 square km!

What is the MetaGrid?

This particular question popped up on Twitter: jemand eine Idee zu MainGrid und MetaGrid von @virtyou? haben es nicht vestanden. (@StartupScouts) [Someone has an idea to MainGrid and MetaGrid by @virtyou? We haven't understand that]

Beside all Marketing blabla, here’s the answer. The MetaGrid is an engine of Servers, DataBases, FileStorages UserDirectories (we call them Slots) and currently running Instances of the UGAIM/UGRM and Region servers.

The Idea behind it is just that: We have a bunch of Servers, and we want to run the Asset Servers and Sims on them, without getting stuck in configuring them by hand. So I created an abstraction layer and database model to describe what we have, Grids, Sims, SimOwners, ServerSlots and so on.

This engine creates the configuration files for all Regions, Opensim and UGRM instances.

And when we get a new server, or want to put a high load sim on a faster machine, or deploy a certain update, we just type it into the Web frontend, send a stop or restart command to the affected instances and everything behaves nicely.

So that is MetaGrid: A container for Opensim Grids. Btw, I usually don’t call it MetaGrid, my codename for this project is: SimPLE (Sim Persistance Layer Engine).

Another Perfect World

Another Perfect World is a feature about Virtual Worlds aired on British TV Channel4 on 2009-06-23. It’s an amazing documentation about the current state and perspective social aspects of Virtual Worlds and MMORPG. Unfortunately it was taken off the net only one day after I found it.(Or, If I understand it right, it’s only visible for UK residents.)

Here’s at least a good half of the documentary on youtube, in great quality and resolution, although the most important part of it, the dawn of lawsuits within VW and Raph Kosters approach of giving the Avatars in his world Metaplace as much freedom as possible, instead of restricting their rights with complicated Terms of Service, is unfortunately missing. Nontheless: Have fun&insight!