OnRez on CSI: NY
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 10/24/2007 - 19:54
This evening, millions of viewers will watch CSI: NY and be invited to solve a mystery in Second Life. Many will click on the CSI: New York Virtual Experience web site, set up an avatar, download the OnRez viewer and enter Second Life. How well will the grid handle the influx? We can only wait and see.
How good is the new OnRez Second Life Viewer? Well, you can download that now and start playing with. I did, and here is what I found.
It appears to be based very closely on the current Second Life viewer. The keystrokes all seem pretty much the same. You can even go into debug mode by press Ctrl-Alt-D and turn on and off the all the extra images with Ctrl-Alt-F1. This is exactly the sort of thing that Electric Sheep hopes the standard newbie in Second Life doesn’t do. It will confuse them horribly.
Yet Electric Sheep has done a great job with the new viewer. In the lower right hand corner, there is a friends button that makes communicating with your friends in Second Life much more like communicating with your friends via other instant messenger programs. They’ve added a nice navigation bar, similar to web browers to go to your home page, or in Second Life, your home region, as well as forward and back buttons to go to places you have recently teleported. They’ve added the section for ‘My Stuff’, ‘Shop’ and ‘Buy L$’. This should make the Second Life shopping experience easier and more pleasant for the casual user, so who knows, it just might help the Second Life economy after all.
Connecting via OnRez also brought up a box for CSI: NY. ‘Happening Now’ the message reads and encourages me to make sure that I’ve visited the White Rabbit crime scene and completed the orientation experience. It also provides links to crime scenes and of course shopping malls. Monkey Canning is offline right now, but I’m sure that when he gets a look at this, he’ll be trying to find some angle to get all these new Second Lifers to stop by at the Virtual Stock Exchange and by some Atlas Venture Capital stock or perhaps pick up some shares of Dawes Financial Corp or Springboard Publications currently in IPO.
It actually makes a lot of sense. Given the failed banks and corporations in Second Life, the allegations of fraud and so on, I’m sure CSI: NY could have a great episode about people hunting down notorious financial avatars like Jasper Tizzy.
So, for the casual user, it makes the experience much more enjoyable, without detracting seriously from the experience of the frequent user. For the hardcore geeks, there are some interesting tidbits. First off, the OnRez client appears to be based very closely on the traditional Second Life client, perhaps a little too closely. When I tried to install OnRez while I was in Second Life, it told me that OnRez was already running. When I shut down my traditional Second Life client, the OnRez installation resumed.
I’m running OnRez on an old Laptop running Windows 2000. It runs fine, although it requested that I load DirectX 9 and Quicktime 7.1. I have older versions of both which work fine for me, and I’ve been having difficulties getting DirectX 9 or Quicktime 7.1 for Windows 2000.
With OnRez up and running, I decided it was time for the next level of testing. Could I connet the OnRez viewer to an OpenSim? Fortunately, I have an OpenSim Grid running on my home network, so I fired up OpenSim with the –loginuri paramenter and sure enough, there was my OpenSim avatar in my OpenSim grid, ready for me to move it around.
I decided to push the envelope a little further. Could I run OnRez connected to the OpenSim grid and the traditional Second Life viewer connected to the Second Life main grid? Sure enough, they ran nicely next to each other, at least for a little while. Next thing I knew, I hit a blue screen of death. So, you can do it, but if you’re running on a flaky old Windows 2000 based laptop, you might see some crashes.
When I started up OnRez again, it gave me a message about how the last time I had run OnRez, it had ended abnormally. It was essentially the same message I’ve see too many times from the Second Life client.
So, I’m running the OnRez client. I’m going to keep my eyes open to see how Second Life and CSI: NY get along. To paraphrase Rick Blaine, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Aldon, if you read my 2 blog
Submitted by Prokofy on Thu, 10/25/2007 - 03:00.Aldon, if you read my 2 blog posts on this at secondthoughts.typepad.com, you'd be able to reflect my concern about "the hit to the economy". Let's say 4,000 or even 20,000 joined tonight, and even 100,000 might join in the coming weeks (i've posted that I doubt even 4,000 were on at any one time becuse the islands ranged from empty to no more than 6, except for 3 big OIs). Each and every one of these new people is using a browser to access CSI that buries the existing classifieds and search where 80 percent or more of all sales take place inworld, with a Sheep-made browser that has SEARCH ALL as the default turning up a very poor list of confusing search results populated with people's names, parcels, group names, objects, etc. unlike the classifieds and places which are tabbed and organized. This will have a real crippling effect. '
Instead of an open market place where people can compete to advertise by either paying for the top slot, getting the top traffic by game or merit, or merely having the niche product somebody wants, there is now a closed marketplace dominated by one company that is not printing the Yellow Pages for all, but doling out ad space/eyeball space.
People will shop at the handful of stores close to the Sheep represented at the CSI islands; they will shop at the SHOP button for OnRez. So...everyone not lucky enough to get in on that windfall is left unaccessed potentially by these new people that you imagine flying all over and buying, renting, banking, etc.
I never opposed the free accounts, and I never opposed bringing in even one million TV viewers and even on a browser that guides them only to one shopping site. That's to be expected. But what I do oppose is crippling the rest of the world, not by difficulties in logging on, but by blanking them out of the viewer -- every layer the viewer imposes, every click, is a lost sale, and obstacle.
Sure, businesses can try to target ads cleverly, name their parcels Clue Club or offer discounts to CSI clue searchers, etc. etc. but...where do you think those ads will be visible? If you study the advertising space and capacity in SL, you'll get the problem -- nowhere.
It's not the beginning of a beautiful friendship, no. It's the beginning of the end of the draining out of the inworld economy, and a move to corporate-run sims with prefabricated experiences that create an outworld economy for a select few paid by those corporations or allowed to display their wares on those corporate sims. It is no longer free enterprise.
The end or the beginning?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 10/25/2007 - 12:37.I find your analysis interesting and I have a different take on things. Unfortunately, I'm on the road today and can't post a detailed response, but I hope to do that later today or sometime tomorrow.