PlayStation 3 users get their own free virtual world. Now that’s a move. Looks like Second Life gets some competition. I don’t know the possibilities of this world yet, but if Sony is clever, they will follow a model like Second Life does, that users can create nearly everything within the world.
13 Most Beautiful Avatars, an exhibition in Second Life’s increasingly popular Ars Virtua gallery captures the most visually dynamic and celebrated “stars” of Second Life.
The 13 most beautiful Second Life avatars can be found here.
…in Second Life. The libsecondlife group made an open source software client program which allows you to clone objects, avatars and anything else in Second Life. Here is a video showcase.
But libsecondlife did not invent the CopyBot, which is currently being discussed everywhere on the net. The CopyBot allows you to create identical copies of objects within Second Life which basically destroys the economic model of Second Life, since people create and sell virtual objects and make money from it. With CopyBot, you don’t need to buy anything anymore.
People who sold the CopyBot claim that they have the right to do so. So content creators protested within Second Life against it… the whole situation reminds of the current real world situation:
…Second Life has finally reached a place that’s more or less on a par with the Net as it is now, where arguments over digital rights management and file trading still rage. On the larger Internet, those debates generally pit larger corporations against their consumers, the RIAA and the MPAA versus, well, everyone else. But in a world where everyone by definition can, with a few clicks, become a content-creating entrepreneur…
A few blog posts ago, I have been thinking about Second Life. My basic thought was - and I haven’t been thinking deeper - that it would be nice if the Second Life server software is free, so everyone could install a server by its own and connect it together with the other people’s server. This would form a decentralized Second Life. Or a more radical thought would be that the Second Life client software is the server as well and Second Life is a peer to peer system. Well, there is actually an ambitious project going on named The Croquet Project which seems to be a collaborative 3D space in a peer to peer fashion. Anyways, it is not yet at the level of Second Life, but I should keep an eye on it.
But someone spent some energy on thinking of how Second Life could work in the near future, on a decentralized peer to peer model, implemented in open source software, letting the Lindens make money by providing something like a DNS for Second Life.
Read the article here (you have to scroll down a bit though).
