Boston.com has a good piece on Fritz recalling the Quest For Fame gameplay:

Players plug a "virtual guitar" into the computer to make music in the game. Fritz still owns a couple; they’re almost the same size as a real electric guitar and fairly heavy. Unlike the make-believe instrument in Guitar Hero, the Quest For Fame virtual guitar has strings, and there are no colorful push buttons on its neck.

Strings? Very cool. The whole five colored button guitar thing doesn’t appeal as much to me since I play a real guitar. And while I can play almost no songs on expert difficulty in these games I can play several songs on a real guitar. I guess this is one of those Virtual TO Reality moments where reality wins out.

I was intrigued by Quest For Fame and checked eBay to see if anybody had the game for sale. Indeed, there were two listings as of this writing with the cheapest buy it now price of $34.99, but CD only, no guitar. Apparently the guitar was sold separately with a serial port connection as gleaned from Wikipedia.

Another guitar-oriented videogame for the PC, one that allows you to be able to play using a real guitar, is planned to be released in 2009" called Guitar Rising.

Been keeping my eye on this one.

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I was interested to try this out but Firefox 3.03 kept crashing whenever I went to VTOReality.com and attempted to claim the site and customize the 3D landscape. Another day or perhaps another VTOR author wants to try this out (?)

I like the concept of making the entire 2D web available as 3D and letting webmasters create the world as time goes on, but they need to get this on Mac and Linux and shore up the Firefox gremlins. If you find this concept interesting too, then keep your eye on playce.com:

plaYce is “Making the World a Playground” by providing a 3D virtual world for games, based on the real world. plaYce’s technology reconstructs the entire world in 3D and streams it with high frame rate from within the browser, providing an immersive “Mirror World” gaming experience, without a heavy client download.

Will have to see how this turns out.

Sort of like Pandora/iLike/last.fm only with points earned for completing different tasks like (via TheSixtyOne FAQ):

• Listening to music on The Rack (+1-40 points per song, reward based on dice roll)
• Logging in daily (+20 points)
• Inviting a friend (+20 points and +50 points for each level they achieve or +100 points per level if your friend is an artist). [note: I invited my son who shares with me an affection for music. He's digging the site already]

As you navigate around the site, the songs you listen to keep playing and you can easily find out more about the current song by hovering over the floating left menu. From this menu you can also pause, skip or go back to prior song, favorite and/or ‘bump’ the song.

Bumping, similar to a digg vote, you must spend some of your points, so use for music you like and/or think will reach the front page of the site. Via the FAQ:

The primary way to earn points is by bumping music. It’ll cost you points upfront, but as songs you bump become more popular you can earn more points! If you hover your mouse over a ‘bump’ button, you’ll notice that it will indicate how much it costs to bump that particular song.

To add to enticement factor in using your points, there are some unlockable achievements like:

- “sensei of soul” first bump a song to homepage
- “lewis & clark” bump songs in under-explored genres
- “groupie” show your love by max bumping songs
- “the romantic” spend more points than you earn on songs

Leveling up by listening to music adds a little fun, but you’re limited to how many points can be earned each day listening to music from ‘The Rack’ to 50 points per day once you’ve amassed 300 points. Since you get like 90 points simply for registering for the site and 1-40 by listening to each song, you’ll reach that 300 w/50 point daily limit quickly. During the writing of this post I went from 0 points to 250.

My first bump (cost of 13 points) went to a piano cover version of Through The Fire and Flames (embed below for those not reading via RSS):

Guitar Hero players know this song to be one of the most difficult tracks in the game. It doesn’t sound much easier to play on the piano.

I’m not sure I’d label TheSixtyOne very MMO and in fairness to them, they aren’t either. The social features are fairly limited and in what MMO are you limited to how much leveling you can do in a day? I’m sure the limits are there to prevent people from gaming the system by just leaving the music on streaming all day long and getting massive points and high levels but would rather see them add unlimited points earning for people who can prove they aren’t a bot (perhaps by checking with captcha or code to earn points for listened to songs). Might be a hassle music fans don’t want to go through, but wouldn’t cap the leveling and would be more MMO-ish. 

This limit cap is a bit deceptive as you can still earn points for a certain number of overall plays with the “listen up” achievement:

level 1 – 5 plays (you’ll get this one right away)
level 2 – 100 plays
level 3 – 1,000 plays
level 4 – 5,000 plays
level 5 – 25,000 plays

Also, you can do the standard social fare: add friends (you can add me here, if you like), share embedded songs as shown above or bother email your friends. You can also create your own playlists and earn points for people who listen to your ’station’ which I haven’t fully investigated how to do yet.

All in all, I like the creativity of TheSixtyOne but the subtitle of massively multiplayer (emphasis on ‘player’) is a bit deceptive. More like social music with a twist. Decent timing considering the music game rage, there I used the phrase. The music game rage is on.

Oh, and as for VTOR PAX 2008 coverage, expect to start reading more about what was seen there soon.

Snow instead of ocean
If snow is more your thing than water, turn your speakers down (rather off, the music is horrible) and take a ride above the snow-capped skies of the Electric Oyster. Tilt your mouse and you’ll get a different camera view. I kept trying to crash, but you can’t. Bummer, it would be more interactive that way.

Make 2D photos more 3D-like
With Make3D you can convert 2D images on your hard drive or appropriately licensed in Flickr into a 3D model. Here’s an example of a picture I took of Mount Rainier. Free signup is required to upload (email required).

Painted 3D computer monitors 3D
While talking 3D, IZ3D is sharing some screenshots of 3D painted monitors for gamers:

These aren’t available for purchase as of this writing, but they offer you a way to put your name and email (use a throwaway one, just in case) to be notified when you can buy them. Saw this one on FriendFeed, thanks Chris.

3D Web browser
SpaceTime lets you load websites in a 3D space.

I’ve written about other attempts to do 2D websites in a 3D browser and while Space Time is notable for being a finished product where others have been more prototypes, it’s not something to switch away from Firefox, Safari or Opera any time soon.

Tag Galaxy
Using Tag Galaxy you can view Flickr photos on a space-like 3D interface as well as related tags.

Just enter in a tag like ‘3D’, click the planet and enjoy. Some good visuals and nicely done.

Once logged in, I noticed a new navigation help UI (Update 8/5/08 7:18am PST: after publishing I’ve been told by others in the comments that this navigation isn’t “new” at all, it’s been around awhile) above my avatar:

And one below too:

Here’s how it looks fit together (I cropped out the right side of the screen):

As you might expect, you can adjust the camera position using these navigation helpers. I x’d out of them. I can see them being a little helpful to new folks but man is the SL UI getting cluttered. There does come a point when too much information is no longer helpful. With the client being open source anybody is welcome to create an SL-lite UI, which maybe somebody already has.

Do you find the new navigation helpers useful or did you X out of them right away too?

Ever wonder what the backend of creating video games, and video game programming looks like? Enter Alice.

It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.

Alice is free and open source. It is a stand alone application, and is available on many platforms. It uses much of the technology that was used in the making of The Sims2.

It’s used at many schools and colleges as a teaching tool. Instructions are similar to that of C++ and C# But includes a neat drag and drop interface for the actions, methods and properties. I made a short sequence myself in about 10 minutes.

Exporting to the web is a bit difficult because it requires the end user to have a lot of Java framework installed on their unit. Exporting as video isn’t functioning yet as the video’s are just too big.  You can view a bunch of Alice works on YouTube.

Here’s some more info direct from Carnegie Mellon:

Clicking the yellow prompt leads to the white popup which encourages users to check the knowledge base. Why when clicking the orange doesn’t the second window provide the knowledge base information? Have you ever visited the Second Life Knowledge Base and tried to use it to find something? I tried various different search queries to locate more details about why I was seeing this message yesterday and couldn’t find an answer.

Today the message isn’t appearing, so whatever it was, it’s been fixed. Any ideas what this message is about? Yes, I understand it’s partly self-explanatory: different versions of SL software are running, but what does that mean to me the user? How does this impact or change my experience? Am I open to beta-like problems under server version x vs. y?

Wow, Gibson now has their own island in Second Life (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Gibson%20Island/71/39/51) shaped like a guitar! I had to stop reading, jump in and check it out. Good stuff!

And when they see free guitars, they mean at least a dozen different guitars, including the current 2008 Guitar of the Month, the Slash Les Paul and Angus Young (AC/DC) Les Paul. This is most exciting build I’ve seen in Second Life in awhile.

Definitely take a few minutes right now, fire up your SL client and TP over to Gibson Island.

My pictures don’t do the gorgeous build justice.

Oh, and of course there is a Gibson group to join (just load this in your SL chat window: secondlife:///app/group/6546f4d7-6ece-7186-de91-6d2704bc5976/about or do a search under groups)

Free Gibson t-shirts, tables and chairs too. And guitar amp and guitar bags aplenty!  They are also promising live entertainment from time to time. My only minor disappointment is that the newsletter arrived too late for me to be able to check out the live entertainment they had all day on Wednesday. Hey, maybe I’ll catch the next live line-up. Rock on!

Yesterday, I looked at two new virtual world launches. The first one I’ve already blogged in a separate post that will be published either later today or tomorrow. The second and more interesting to me is Lively by Google which allows any Windows Google account user to quickly and easily insert a 3D virtual room into a web page.  Here’s an example inline embed (RSS readers, you may want to click into the post to actually see) of the underwater room I created from a free template in less than five minutes below.

Fellow writer Darius, also a fellow Mac user, noted that this does not work with the Mac yet. It does work in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Lively is fairly limited at this time. From what I could see you can’t create any objects yet, only add objects to your room what’s already available.

In the screenshot above you’ll see my underwater room has only three chairs because that’s all that were available. I didn’t see how to be able to sit in the chairs, so unless that’s possible somehow, these objects are merely window dressing. Update 11:11am PST: Lestat figured this out and shared. You just double-click on the seat cushion to sit in the chairs

In its current state, Lively is like IRC in 3D. You can meet your friends in a room and chat with bubbles over your head. I’ve seen many attempts to do this type of thing over the years but the only one that comes to mind as being a big success is Habbo Hotel.

Some bloggers are already stating this as a threat to Second Life, but that’s giving Lively way too much credit at this point. Sure, if Google gets behind this and continues to improve upon it, maybe someday but Lively in its current incarnation is no threat. When there is an ability to actually create original objects (can’t do yet), stream audio and video (can’t do yet), interact with objects (how can you do this?), then we can entertain this possibility. Linden Lab already has their own Lively room, BTW, called Linden Lab in Lively.

This coming Friday’s radio show perhaps we can demo this with a bigger group and see what we can break. For those who don’t want to wait, can join one of the popular rooms like the chess room which resembles a gigantic chess board and has had thousands of visitors as of this writing.

I’m going to try and keep this running in a separate window today. Feel free to stop in and see what we can break. I like the underwater seascape, but I’m not sure this will ever be any replacement for IRC to me. Not in its current state. What do you think?

I haven’t been active in Second Life for months now and figured I’d check up on it again. When I was reading other blogs I found a link to Opensim which is an open source project working on their own server similar to Second Life. In fact with every grid I checked out I used the Second Life client to connect. The servers I tried weren’t very busy but I was really only checking out how it compares to Second Life. There’s plenty of stuff that is missing and they are maybe years from getting everything to the level of Second Life.

Just by copying the shortcut for second life and adding some parameters you can log into one of these servers easily. Changing your appearance isn’t explained very well. You start off with a basic female avatar. You have to create a body, eye, skin and hair parts so you can wear and change them. On OSgrid you can play around with web pages on a prim! The most interesting thing I found was when I read articles about how they want to hook these grids up to Second Life and be able to move your avatar from one grid to another. It also seems like Second Life have plans of something like that too. With IBM and Microsoft interested in this project it looks very promising for the future.

After I played around with the other servers I decided to see if I can start a server of my own on my computer. I tried building with the source code but I got errors. Didn’t want to figure out why so I downloaded the already built server file. Got a server running on my windows system in minutes. Logged in and could walk and fly around a small island. To me that’s impressive and if these servers get more popular it could be very competitive to Second Life.

Fantastic article of the history of the open source grids
Wiki Page for OpenSimulator

Some of the active servers:
• DeepGrid
• OsGrid
• OpenLifeGrid
• CentralGrid