Fleep's Deep Thoughts Explore the Metaverse

The metaverse ecosystem of virtual worlds continues to grow and increase in complexity and differentiation, so even though I spend quite a bit of time working in Second Life, I also try to make a point of visiting other virtual worlds as well.

This past week I visited two virtual worlds – VastPark and vSide:

VastPark held a closed beta stress test on Wednesday and I was pleasantly surprised to bump into SL friends Tara Yeats, Malburns Writer, Poinky Malaprop, and Keystone Bouchard while rolling around as a one-wheeled-arcade-game-box-type avatar.

Like Multiverse, VastPark seems to be creating a platform for users to host their own worlds or “parks” and they announced during the stress test that they were open sourcing their server. From the press release they sent to us after the stress test:

During the test, the VastPark team announced a new product: VastServer. VastServer is a software tool that can run one or more highly interactive virtual worlds. Similar to a web server, VastServer serves up IMML, an XML based Virtual Web equivalent to HTML. It acts as the message rely between all the users on the site so they can interact with each other and see what others are doing online in real time.

It can be installed on any 32-bit/64bit Windows computer (XP/Vista/Server 2003/Server 2008) with .NET Framework 3.0. “Because VastServer is so light-weight and easy to run, we’re lowering the barrier to people popping up a virtual environment that they can share briefly as a meeting room or a game environment and then stop it. It makes virtual worlds into utilities, much like Skype conversations. Of course they can run them persistently but a lot of what we, as users, do is form ad hoc events and it’s terrific if we can run rich events online whenever we want very easily,” said Craig Presti, Lead Developer at VastPark.

VastPark is clearly in an early stage of development and it will be interesting to see how they fare given how far ahead other virtual world platforms already are, but it was fun to play bumper cars with SL buddies in another world and think about the possibilities, and we noticed a clickable object inside the stress test park that linked you into a Skype chat. Hmmm. They’ll have an open beta period sometime in April, so you can take a look at it for yourself very soon.

Vside, on the other hand, has been up and running since August 2007, and instead of being intended for one off meetings or events, it appears to be much closer to a 3D MySpace. It’s hard to find any user demographics (or indeed any information about the company at all on their website) but from spending a couple of evenings roaming the world, I’d guess the average age skews much much younger than we are accustomed to seeing in Second Life.

Green Day poster on the subway walls in vSide

Some observations about vSide:

• 3D chatroom focus, with activities centering around shopping for your avatar and listening to music while chatting or dancing with friends.
• Like Kaneva, uses web user profiles and frequently breaks immersion by sending you out on the web for more information, FAQs, etc.
• Integration with AIM, can chat with your AIM buddies from within the vSide client.
• Two different currencies, vPoints earned by spending time in the world and vBux which you can purchase with USD$.
• Can buy an apartment for having private conversations and your own “space” as well as furnishings and decorations, but no user created content possibilities as far as I can tell. Some clothing and furnishing items can only be purchased with vBux (premium content?) though you do get some basic home starter items for free when you purchase a place.
• The TV in your apartment can play videos straight from YouTube or you can select from a predetermined set of radio stations.

Watching Obama’s speech about race in my vSide apartment

At this point the vSide world feels very very small, the equivalent of 4 or 5 sims worth of content in Second Life terms. It only took a few hours to explore everything on the map and about half of the content in each area is just a facade, so it becomes rather annoying to explore what appears to be a whole new city block only to find that most of it is a mock up. Still, there were quite a few people in each plaza area and maybe 20 or 30 people holed up in the apartments in my building, and from talking with some of the locals it appears they have a steady and growing userbase.

Fleep dancing with new friend Turqoise, a graphic designer and artist from LA.

While it has no where near the flexibility and creative possibilities of Second Life, it’s striking to see a YouTube video in my vSide apartment without having to go through 50 zillion conversion steps or to chat with my AIM buddy list from within the virtual world. It makes you wonder what the heck is holding up this kind of integration with the Second Life client, when are they going to pick the low hanging fruit?