A quick roundup of interesting articles

I was off traveling lately, at my dad’s retirement party, and of course there were plenty of interesting things happening that could have merited a blog post. Here’s some of them:

• Ypulse has an interview with the CEO of Gaia Online.  It gives out plenty of stats, and also gives some real insight into what the core of the service is: not in-world hanging out (there is a 2d virtual world hidden in there) but instead hanging out on forums. I suspect that this is probably true of many MMOs: that forum activity may well outweigh in-world activity for a substantial number of players.

• I have been wondering about the fact that there are Zwinky ads airing during prime-time TV shows already — I caught one last night at 10pm. Now I see that they are gearing up to layer a virtual world on top of their avatar system. Their avs are, well, kinda ugly, but they do seem to have had a fair amount of adoption.

•  Of course, more traditional metaverse types are probably more interested in the new feature coming to Second Life: “sculpted prims.” This appears to be a method to deform spheres using the principle of homotopy — basically, the old “turn a coffee cup into a donut” trick. No word on how you handle toroidal topologies, or more complex surfaces. These are of course mathematically describable forms that can have meshes generated at various levels of detail on the fly, etc. Really, most of the prims in SL could have been done this way from the get-go, since cones, cylinders, cubes, spheres, and so on are all topologically equivalent. Anyway — the deformation is described using a texture lookup that displaces the verts, and exporters are planned to allow generating this format from apps like Maya.

•  Back at Web 2.0 Expo I commented on the panel that cereal makers would be bigger publishers of virtual worlds than game developers. I was cheating, because I knew about Millsberry and the like…

Oh, and LOTRO is out.