So I spent some more time in my newly created room in lively but I don’t seem to warm up to it (whereas second life was love at first sight for me). I figured out how to move around, I even figured out how I could move my furniture but I don’t know yet how I’m supposed to search for other people, or how I can find their rooms, how to make snapshots (yes, I like to document my life), and what I’m supposed to do, besides chatting around. I wonder if google really wanted to present the second life follow up because if that was the plan, I don’t see much resemblance so far. I have gotten to know second life as an inspiring place where creativity is pushed forward. In lively all I see is limitations so far. Where in second life I have always felt I could expand my personality, in lively I just feel Im using a fancy chatprogramme. I know there are people who also consider sl to be exactly that, but I’m not one of them. What I do find interesting however is how apparently some well known sl users have already found their sl names used in lively, and not by them. That’s interesting, no? I wonder who would be doing such a thing, and more importantly why. Does it tell us something about the expectations some people may have? Another thing that’s basically just funny to see is how many sex rooms are already available on lively. One of the bigger issues when sl was hyped was the enormous amount of sex related stuff that could be found, mostly even without searching. Nice to see that just wasn’t an sl thing after all, but mainly just human nature.
metanomics
It was about time I wrote something about metanomics. I’m not exactly sure what to call it, is it an organization? Is it a project? A talk show? Conference center? What is it? Fact is that mr. Beyers Sellers (rl name Robert Bloomfield) started something that is turning out to be a pretty succesful endeavor in sl. On the faq page of the metanomics website I read the following:
”Metanomics’ refers to the study of the business and policy aspects of the “metaverse” of virtual worlds. Metanomics can focus on issues arising within virtual worlds, such as how developers manage the economy of a game world (like World of Warcraft), or how residents of virtual worlds manage and regulate business. Metanomics also includes the study of how real-world businesses can use virtual worlds as part of their strategy, and how real-world law and regulation might apply to virtual-world activities. Finally, metanomics includes the use of virtual worlds as laboratories in which to study real-world business or policy issues.’
At the moment metanomics has a regular in-world talk show / discussion on monday nights (european time, its noon slt) with usually a pretty much filled up room. I have been present a few times now and it has always been busy. In fact, this week I couldn’t get in because the sim was full, which is when I found out about the partnersims. Such a nifty thing! Together with some belgian journalists I was able to follow the whole thing in another sim on live screen and read all chatcomments from the other sims due to another smart thing called chatbridge. Real nice. Last monday one of the sl-art-scene-celebrities Bettina Tizzy was on.
I must say, it was not that I heard so much new things but she took the words right out of my mouth when she spoke about commercial companies in sl and how they still can’t seem to find a suitable and effective way to present themselves in sl. You can see the video of last mondays metanomics session here (which btw I can recommend, and unless you are considering a career in wedding planning you can skip the first part). And so there it is, a pretty succesful metanomics, an alive-and-kickin-sl-art-scene, struggling-with-virtuality-rl-companies and google presents us…lively. Off course I felt obliged to at least take a look. So I did, and honestly? To me it seems like a pimped chat programme for teens. But I must say that until now I have only spent one hour there, and I have not yet figured out how to move around. Ahum, sl eye-hand coordination is playing tricks on me. Two big differences, and I think essential ones if you compare lively and second life, are the fact that lively is not so much a world but more a collection of visualised chat rooms, and the fact that users cannot create in lively. Up until now, that is. And there is no economy, up until now as well. Anyway, for anyone who wants to know, my lively name is vivermicelli.
walkie talkies 2.0
As part of the augmented reality exhibition in The Hague located organization Tag, Sander Veenhof further developed his walkie talkie walks (see also this & this post). He made a few changes for the better, I think. This time the movements of the rl people, moving around in a selected area of The Hague made Sanders avi, called Overig Solzhenitsyn, move around in second life. He positioned himself in a sandbox and dressed himself up pretty neat, in a nice cardboard advertisement
board saying: TALK TO ME! Our rl text messages, sent to a given mobile number were then displayed in second life and answers, given by second life avi’s in sl chat were then sent to a mobile phone we were carrying with us in rl. And we had live contact! Unfortunately we couldn’t understand a word they were saying but in a way it also didn’t matter to me much. In fact I think it gave some extra flavour to the whole experience, it being very much the sound of a different world this way. Im not entirely sure how he did it but Sander made it visible for us to spot the locations of the sandbox avi’s on the google map of The Hague
so we could actually walk towards the (in the rl streets non existent) avi’s to speak with them. So in the pics below you see us, on the streets of The Hague with a laptop, gps device, mobile phones and a crappy megaphone…trying to move Overig around in a busy busy sandbox and trying to decipher martian textmessages. real fun it was anyway!
sintetika
I’m waaaay too late with this post. But here it is anyway. There’s a new club in town. Or maybe it’s an old club, I have no idea really. It was new to me however. In a useless attemp to clean up my inventory I came across the sintetika landmark. Intrigued by the name I hopped over and liked what I saw. Little waving words all around me, made by no other than miss Strawberry (Holiday) herself. Such a nice surprise. Unfortunately strawberry’s words are no longer there, the concept of the place being a changing design monthly (by different artists, designers), or regulary anyway. I had the pleasure of being surrounded by strawberry’s words twice. Once just by myself, checking out the place. The other time I landed in middle of a great party, fab music! Some more pics:
DEPOT 
