Saturday, January 28, 2012

Many thanks to Wade Schuette for keeping us informed of Everything New in Virtual Worlds


Our audience can taste Second Life via the Web!

From:Wade Schuette
Date:Thu, 26 Jan 2012 at 8:28pm
Eric Hackathorn posted in Virtual Worlds that a number of OpenSim and Second Life regions have been replicated in Unity and can be visited over the web.
 
Full news item
Click here to visit several locations originally created in Second Life and OpenSim on your web browser. You don't need an SL/OS client to view them, and though they use Unity 3D to display, now you don't even need to download a Unity plug-in, because the latest version of Flash (standard to nearly all web browsers) has Unity's display code built in. This is the latest, nearly consumer-ready version of technology created by Tipodean, from ex-Linden Chris Collins, with the help of SL/RL architect Jon "Keystone" Brouchoud, which I wrote about earlier this month. Now the demo comes with a menu and many locations to select from. The one you're looking at above is a web-accessible version of NOAA, which was originally developed in Second Life for the US government branch. As I noted this week, OpenSim is not apparently growing its userbase. Unity, however, has been growing by leaps and bounds, with a user base in the tens of millions. So if OpenSim (and for that matter SL) wants to grow beyond the smaller market for client-based installs, something like what Tipodean is doing with Unity probably a fruitful way to go.
Related to this, Tipodean also just launched the Archtech Engine, which uses Unity to generate web-based 3D spaces with avatars -- and can do so with SL and OpenSim locations. Chris and Jon and I recently hung out in an early, military-themed demo, see below:

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