Moshi Monsters is a free online game for kids, in which they adopt a monster and look after it. Kids whose parents give us their approval can become members on our site, and can adopt a Moshi Monster. Kids care for their monster by solving puzzle games, which earn their monster virtual rewards called Rox. Kids can spend Rox on virtual items like food, furniture and other treats and toys for their monster. Over time their monster will increase in level, be able to visit new locations in Monstro City, and earn all kinds of in-game rewards for playing. Monster owners will also be able to make friends with other owners and leave messages on their pages.
It’s claimed that the ’solve-to-earn Rox’ puzzles make the game “educational” - do you agree?
To provide a faintly serious side to this post(?!), how does Moshi Monsters address issues of child safety and parental control? What is the Moshi Monsters line on advertising on the site, compared to its ‘thematic rival’, Neopets? To what extent do you think Moshi Monsters is simply providing a vehicle for selling Moshi Monsters branded goods?
How does the parental advice offered by Moshi Monsters compare with information for parents provided on other child-friendly social networking sites such as Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin or Barbie Girls?
If you’re after 5 minutes of *really* educational fun (?!), why not have a go at Typeracer…
The game it to type a quote out from a book, movie or song lyric faster than the people you are competing against…
Of all the 3D virtual worlds that can now be found on the internet, Second Life is arguably the one that has received the most popular press attention.
If you have ever been in to Second Life, then you will be familiar with the sort of things it can offer. If you have not visited Second Life - or indeed, never been into a 3D, avatar populated immersive world - here are a couple of quick tastes of what life is like “in-world”.
The first is a presentation about Second Life that has been uploaded to the social presentation sharing SlideShare - “An Introduction to Virtual Worlds: Second Life and Beyond. Even if you have been into Second Life, quickly flicking through the presentation may point out some features about it that you didn’t notice at the time.
The second is a user-generated movie about Second Life that I discovered YouTube…
How does Second Life differ from 3D worlds like Google Earth or Virtual Earth? How does it differ from 3D game worlds? In your opinion, is Second Life a game?
Now watch the following clip about the game “The Sims” (IGN Review) - what similarities and differences are there between Second Life and The Sims?
The most obvious difference to me is that in The Sims the player takes on a third person, God-like role, controlling the actions (to some extent) of their player characters, whereas in Second Life, the “player” becomes (or actually is) the avatar.
In the Sims, the game world is a self-contained fiction: the aim of the game, such as it is, is to help the player characters live out their lives in the Sims world. To a certain extent, there is an element of ‘progression’: players must look after characters within the game world that are dependent on them and help them keep up with Joneses - get a job, and education, a house and so on (every time I have tried to play the Sims the session has ended with my characters’ house burning down!)
In contrast, Second Life just provides a canvas for creativity and social interaction - Second Life is an online world (in contrast to the desktop or console bound Sims) within which you can chat and socialise with other people from all over the world.
Want to know more about Second Life?
We’ll look at worlds like Second Life again in later posts, in the contexts of community and making money in virtual worlds…
In the meantime, the following video replays a Google tech talk, recorded in March 2006, featuring a presentation from Glimpse Inside a Metaverse: The Virtual World of Second Life. Even though Second Life has moved on since the presentation was recorded, if you’re interested in hearing about Second Life from the insdie (including some insights about the techie stuff!) it’s well worth listening to:
However, as we’ll see in further posts, there are plenty of virtual worlds other than Second Life, many of them popular with different age groups (Second Life is largely for the over-30s!). So don’t feel as if you have to join Second Life to experience a 3D virtual world - as you’ll see in the next post on this topic…
For the sake of completeness, as much as anything, I thought I’d just complement the Our World in 3D… post with a brief reference list of interactive online media and desktop applications that you can use to explore the night sky, and the objects contained within it.
There are several applications around that let you observe the night sky as if you were on earth, as well as letting you explore it in a 3D navigational way…
Star viewer: a mashup based on Google Sky, that provides an interactive map of the night sky that includes embedded images and videos that offer a useful extra level of detail, or commentary, about celestial objects we can see from Earth.
Wikisky: similar to Star Viewer, but more comprehensive.
Visit one or two of the online applications, or download one of the desktop applications. To what extent do you think that the power of interactivity brings the idea of the scale of the universe home, compared to descriptions one might find in a book, for example?
[The videos referred to in this post are available in the compilation Splashcast video show "Our Heavens in 3D" on the Digital Worlds Splashcast video channel.]
In the series of posts on alternate reality games (ARGs), we saw how ARGs could make use of ‘real world’ technologies to help engage the player in a game , by creating “real”, fake company websites, for example, or contacting the player, in context, via SMS.
In this post, I’d like to briefly explore the extent to which the real world is using user interfaces that are reminiscent of 3D games to recreate a version of the real world in virtual space. To set the scene, if you aren’t familiar with 3D services like Google Earth to Virtual Earth, might I suggest you have a quick read of Friday Fun #9 Gaming in Google Earth and Virtual Earth 3D and follow a couple of the links from that post, before reading this post any further…
You might also care to listen to Building a 3D Model of the Globe, a presentation from 2006 by John Hanke & Brad Schel, the Google Product Directors at the time.
Although only a few years old, the origins of Google Earth are already confused by the mists of time. In Notes on the origin of Google Earth, Avi Bar-Zeev of research and development consultancy Reality Prime, and one of the people involved in the development of the software application now known as Google Earth, writes: “So we seem to have a few diverging memories on the origin and motivation behind Google Earth. One co-founder says it was Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. One co-founder says it was the famous Powers of Ten flip-book and movie.”
Whatever the origins of Google Earth, the pace with which it - and other tools of its kind - have been developing means that it may not be too long before it may take on the role of a virtual world. Avi Bar-Zeev again (Google’s Virtual World, Redux): “GE already is a virtual world. It’s a virtual earth. It has all of the features of a virtual world (spatiality, point of view, presence, information modeling), minus a few we’ve come to expect from a game or socially-oriented space (seeing yourself, seeing other people, and directly interacting tog[e]ther). … The thing about GE is that it’s a so-called ‘mirror world.’ The whole point was always for GE to accurately and compellingly reflect information about the real world.”
In that article, what does Avi Bar-Zeev claim are some potential applications of using Google Earth as a virtual world? Five points to the first person to post a list of them back here as a comment ;-) What other applications can you think of that may be missing from that list? If you think of any, post them back here as a comment, or maybe write a blog post summarising the original list and then adding your ideas for further applications too.
It has been possible for some time to import ‘artefacts’ (or objects) into Google Earth and Virtual Earth. But whilst objects in Sketchup Warehouse may have been intended for use in Google Earth, ‘real’(?!) virtual worlds, they can also be used in real unreal virtual worlds(?!), as this example from Scenecaster shows:
Support for Google Sketchup Warehouse models has also been announced for use with the Multiverse virtual world platform, as this CNET article describes: Google tools to power virtual worlds.
What is the Multiverse “Architectural Wonders” project described in the CNET article? The article itself was recent some time ago (can you find out when) and attracted quite a lot of attention when it was announced. See if you can find out what the current state of the project is, whether it was dropped, or whether it appears to have transformed into something else, and comment back here with the latest news you can find…
From 2D to 3D
Creating 3D models ‘by hand’ is not the only way of generating them. Traditional 2D photos can now be processed so that “3D views” of them are possible, hinting at a future where you’ll be able to import a model of your house into a mirror world simply by photographing it…
Unfortunately, the Fotowoosh website is no longer available - it will be interesting to whether it reappears as a fully fledged service over the coming months…
When People Roam the Virtual Earth…
Google Earth and Virtual Earth already provide the opportunity for anyone to explore a virtual 3D version of many real world cities. To what extent do you think the experience would be different if instead of the current ‘any point you like’ birds eye view camera positioning, the camera view was over the shoulder of your own personal avatar? How and why do you think the experience might feel different?
If you are interested in knowing some of the technical details behind an early implementation of Google Earth, How Google Earth [Really] Works tells the tale from the horse’s mouth…
If you did listen to the Building a 3D Model of the Globe presentation, see if you can find out how much has Google Earth moved compared to the description of Google Earth given in the presentation. What predictions were made in the presentation about the future of Google Earth (as stated in 2006) and to what extent has the current version of Google Earth met, fallen short of, or exceeded those predictions?
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