Category Archives: Thoughts

Quick Rant: iPhone 4 Video Calling aka FaceTime

So Apple has announced a deli­cious new iPhone. Some­thing of a feast for the eyes and the geek­dom cor­tex, which has me won­der­ing if I can jus­tify part exchan­ging my 3GS. That screen and the HD video cam­era in par­tic­u­lar have me drool­ing — it would cer­tainly be great to film mini-Aaron with as she

Initial Impressions of SL Viewer 2.0

So the next iter­a­tion of Second Life viewer has come along, and it’s look­ing mar­velous! I’m actu­ally really impressed. Here’s my quick run down of Linden Lab’s new mon­ster.
What it has…
Aes­thet­ics
The new cli­ent looks abso­lutely mar­velous. Yup I know that sounds like a fairly unim­port­ant thing to talk about, but actu­ally it isn’t. How pleas­ing a GUI

Avatars United — A Sticking-Plaster Solution for Networking in Second Life

So I guess almost every­one who’s going to read this post is aware of Linden Labs pur­chase of Avatars United and the assim­il­a­tion of it’s cre­at­ive minds at Enemy Unknown. Spec­u­la­tion is rife as to what motiv­ated this pur­chase, the grand avatar purge that counts Ener Hax amongst it cas­u­al­ties? Prob­lems with scal­ing? Chances are

Second Life Contacts are Odd

Second Life names are com­plex. Unlike the real world, an SL name is more than just a label, it’s unique to you and it makes you con­tact­able. It’s almost as if it’s your email address or phone num­ber is float­ing above your head whenever you’re out and about. Yet if someone wants to keep a

Maybe Second Life isn’t that far from Reality

A little while ago I stumbled across a very inter­est­ing art­icle in a philo­sophy journal. It spoke about an inter­est­ing the­ory of real­ity, and the pos­sib­il­ity that we are all actu­ally liv­ing in a sim­u­lated world.
I’ve heard about the sim­u­lated real­ity the­ory before and never really paid it much atten­tion — the idea that we’re all

Telepresence and Second Life Predictions for 2010

OK, I’ll be hon­est with you, I’m prob­ably not the best per­son to make pre­dic­tions. I say that because I’m not hugely up to speed with industry news. My interest in Second Life cur­rent events really only dates back to the last couple of months, whereas I stopped fol­low­ing tele­p­res­ence news back in the begin­ning

A Haiku Relevant to Second Life

I don’t know how many times I wrote this post. Maybe three, four, five times? I’m really not sure. The prob­lem is, there’s not a good way of writ­ing it. Too many poten­tial read­ers could take it to heart and be hugely offen­ded. So instead I leave you with just the haiku that inspired it

Second Life and Poor User Centered Design

Yes­ter­day I wrote a post about how copy­bot­ting can essen­tially be seen as the con­sequence of bad design, I spoke about how the design of Second Life is such that some people are will­ing to take great risks in-order to com­pensate for design related prob­lems. I think it’s safe to say that much of those

Copybotting as ‘intentional human error’

I’ve been read­ing quite a lot of blog posts on the topic of copy­bot­ting recently. For those who don’t know, copy­bot­ting is the blanket term used to cover Second Life pir­acy. Its name comes from the pro­cess where an auto­mated avatar (bot) sys­tem­at­ic­ally inspects and then rep­lic­ates an in-world item — although it now tends

A Tale of Two Avatars

I’ve made no secret of the fact that my avatar, Az After­thought, was made espe­cially for my Second Life research. His pre­de­cessor, Aaron, was born some eight months earlier when a friend man­aged to con­vince me to sign up. Since cre­at­ing Az how­ever, Aaron has barely been used at all — I still login as