Out of the Blue: Why I care about Blue Mars

With barely any content to speak of, no currency, audio, media, or voice, and a User Interface that allows for limited communication and camera movements, it’s not hard to understand why Blue Mars has its detractors. Despite all of its early Beta deficiencies, however, there are compelling reasons to believe that it holds great promise for current and future aficionados of 3D immersive environments.

Most Second Life residents I’ve spoken with don’t know quite what to make of Blue Mars,
but none appear to believe that it will supplant or even displace their virtual world, though I do sense a modicum of concerned solidarity and defensiveness. There’s this Capulet-Montague thingy going on… like, if you so much as praise one aspect of Blue Mars it’s a form of treason or something. Personally, I subscribe to the Romeo and Juliet canon: “Can’t we all just get along?” Or am I misquoting?

Conventional wisdom would indicate that Second Life, which – ironically – could be called a mature virtual world by comparison, with its entrenched communities, tons of content and hundreds (thousands?) of events a week, is here to stay… but Blue Mars, in its infancy, has not yet begun to demonstrate its gravitas. It will take time, money, and a growing community of dedicated developers and residents.


Would you feed this little bitty baby vitamins or Kryptonite?

In development

Every time I have a chance to speak with Jim Sink, recently named CEO of Avatar Reality, the company that owns Blue Mars, I come away feeling energized and hopeful for this budding platform. In a recent conversation, I asked him what they were concentrating on at the moment. “In order to create a vibrant virtual world community, we need to have outstanding content and we need to attract extraordinary developers. In a coming release, we’ll be offering the ability to create clothing, and we’re providing new uploading tools, too,” he explained.


Meet Blue Mars’ Ruth. Yes, these are default avatars created by unfashionistas at Avatar Reality, with a little fiddling I did around the eyes within the Face Customization editor. Please hurry up fashion designers, and make me something I want to wear

“At present, most of our energy is focused on laying the groundwork to prepare Blue Mars as a development platform. Of course, things like the UI are exceptionally important – we know how important this is to the community – and we’ve already begun to implement changes based on users’ feedback. There’s no shortage of things we need to do.”

Money makes the world go around (especially if you can cash in/cash out)

And one of the things that Blue Mars plans to do soon is launch the Blue Mars currency and, as Jim puts it, “the fundamentals of the economy.” I wondered out loud how musicians who depend on tips would make out in Blue Mars since only developers can cash out. To this, Jim had some very good news: “All developers will be able to cash out and anyone can become a developer, but Blue Mars requires more information and needs to know a lot more about you if you are going to be moving money in and out of the platform.“

Location, Location, Location (and putting a price on things)

Another impending feature will reside on the web-based Developer MyPages: Soon developers will have the ability to upload blocks of shops, set prices to items – including ready-to-use residences, clothing and stuff, and also real estate. Land! This is cool, but here I am going to dig my heels in the ground hard… there ain’t NO way I’m going to have a cookie-cutter home. Not here, not there, not anywhere. I once lived in a development and had the bad habit of driving right by my home because it was indistinguishable from all the others on the block. This just isn’t my thing. I don’t do it in real life, and I sure as heck am not going to do it in my virtual life. Yes, I’m that neighbor that annoys everyone by painting her house purple.


Blue Mars Betti in the kitchen? No, no, no! This isn't the kind of cooking I plan to do


Web to Blue Mars and back

Blue Mars has every expectation that they will be unveiling new MyPage web pages for end-users, too, from which they can edit their in-world profile, and purchase Blues, among other things.

Repeat after me: It’s a PLATFORM

Many of us, myself included, have been calling Blue Mars “a virtual world,” when it is actually a platform for many virtual worlds, and a staging area for all kinds of new – to me - talented people. For developers, entrepreneurs, artists it is a next-gen technological solution from which you can build your environments. For end users (the jury is still out on what we are going to be called… Residents? Martians? Colonists?) it is intended to be a destination offering rich diversity and choices.



These gorgeous photos of coming new content courtesy of Richard H. Childers, president of Virtual Space Entertainment (VSE), one of the first City developers on Blue Mars

“Scurvy-inducing 3D”

Jim Sink recently tweeted, and of course, I looked, “CryEngine isn't just for realism. Check out this amazing work that would look right at home in Blue Mars.”

Games… yes! Blue Mars is flinging its doors open to members of the thriving Crytek modders community, inviting them to create their own games and content. A recent scrumptious example is Monkey Island 2, in which free-lancing 3D artist Hannes Appell first demonstrated how, with a little “voodoo,” he could enhance the gorgeous hand painted 2D concept art with a basic camera projection. Those pirates sure are mean to little froggies.



He then went on to demonstrate – just for fun - how original Monkey Island 2 backgrounds can look and feel in a modern 3d game engine, by building the sets with Maya and then exporting them into Cryengine's Sandbox editor.



Hannes is a Bavarian and now lives in Germany where he will soon graduate from the Institute for Animation & Visual Effects of the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. If LucasArts doesn’t hire him after this little “experiment,” someone sure will. This video has only been posted on YouTube for 19 days and already it’s had 329,000 views and the comments beg him to “MAKE A REAL MOD OUT OF IT.” A little Blue Mars, Hannes?

Role Playing

I’m also like a stuttering deer caught in the headlights when it comes to Role Playing, but were I an elf, Trekkie, furry, or inclined to hang out in locations that attempt to accurately portray a historical era, such as Second Life’s Roman Forum or the 1920’s Berlin Project, Blue Mars’ built-in ability to control incoming content such as how an avatar looks or dresses would make suspension of belief considerably more intense.


Photo courtesy of VSE, a Blue Mars City developer

Architecture and design

I like the way h3oworldz, a CryEngine modder group, used the platform to demonstrate how valuable a "3D realtime walkthrough" a structure or set can be to demo environmental effects and scale. They would likely be interested in hearing about DB Bailey from Second Life and his success at using a virtual world to demonstrate a real life structure to ultimately sell a real life project.

Vinyl"Club from h3oconceptz on Vimeo.

Machinima

VAM United is a German group working on a science fiction movie project using the CryEngine2 game engine. They’ve created this proof-of-concept as they prepare to produce a feature-length machinima based on a “loved and acclaimed” book. I highly recommend that you watch it here for better quality, but here is the YouTube version for you non-clickers:



What will the work of the likes of Lyric Lundquist or Lainy Voom or Colemarie Soleil look like, shot in Blue Mars?

Look at this one. Tell me, with a straight face, that you can't make use of these graphics and physics to create your vids...

See also:

• August 29, 2009: This is it! New virtual world Blue Mars rolls out open Beta
• July 31, 2009: More Blue Mars – The official roll-out dates (and some musings)
• April 15, 2009: New answers and more questions regarding the upcoming virtual world Blue Mars

This is it! New virtual world Blue Mars rolls out Open Beta on Sept 2 - Plus, news for registered users

According to Jim Sink - recently promoted to CEO of Avatar Reality – the company will be taking its Open Beta of the 3D immersive virtual world and platform Blue Mars public on Wednesday, September 2 at 12:01am HST (Hawaiian Standard Time). The first weighty contender to Second Life® in the user-generated content category of virtual worlds, delivering dazzlingly realistic graphics and unprecedented physics, has been in Private Beta for less than a month, and open only to registered developers since June.

Jim shared that he’s been impressed with the number of people registering, and expects that the new features packaged in the significant update they are rolling out with the Open Beta will come as a pleasant surprise to those who have already participated. Moreover, he revealed that all Private Beta testers had been locked at the highest performance settings, but that the new version will soon allow for each user to make adjustments to their resolution.

To prepare for the Open Beta, Blue Mars will be shutting its servers down Monday, August 31, at 10am HST during which time the budding virtual world will be offline and their websites unavailable for several hours. All charter members who participated in the Private Beta – save registered developers – will have to register again on or after September 2. However, charter members will be able to log in immediately after registering, whereas all others will have to sign up and wait to receive an invite, unless, that is, they have a friend in Blue Mars. Each participant in the Private Beta will have the ability to invite up to 3 friends who will be given immediate access – after registration - via the charter member’s “my page,” on the Blue Mars website.

I spent a few hours exploring Blue Mars and also spoke with several Private Beta participants who often commented on the sparse interface – which apparently will change dramatically in the new version – and limited features, but always ended with, “but it’s so beautiful.” It most certainly is that. I’ve been lusting after the visual ecstasy afforded by CryTek’s game engine CryEngine 2 since I first laid eyes on it, but had no interest in playing the games that use it until now. For me, it will have to be a virtual world where user-generated content is enabled or nothing at all. The debate on this last point is heating up and it remains to be seen whether Second Life’s content creators will adapt to the Blue Mars’ off-world creation model, versus SL’s prims that empower even amateurs to build and manifest their creativity in Second Life.

Some folks like Rock Vacirca believe they will and others like Phaylen Fairchild think it's not possible. I'm still on the fence.


Aussie digital media consultant Skribe Forti has been cranking out video tutorials about Blue Mars

Jim’s most recent tweet informs us that he “just finished installing the new build of Blue Mars on my iMac,” and when I asked him about it, he said it was running “great,” and that "Just because CryEngine doesn’t run on OS X doesn’t mean that it’s a big deal to dual boot using Boot Camp,” Apple's free software that can boot Windows on your Mac natively.

That Blue Mars will deliver spectacular fidelity, physics and scalability that 6 year old Second Life might not ever be able to attain unless it's rebuilt from the ground up is not under discussion, but I can’t help but wonder if it will be able to catch up to the amazing content and growing user-base that SL’s residents have come to expect, along with the attending friendships and social, educational and business experiences.

Either way, I am welcoming Blue Mars with open arms. While I applaud the efforts of the open source OpenSim community and want to encourage them to move forward, I will never have enough options, and Blue Mars is exactly that: A very viable option.


See also:

July 31, 2009: More Blue Mars – The official roll-out dates (and some musings)

April 15, 2009: New answers and more questions regarding the upcoming virtual world Blue Mars

Avatar movie is ahead of the curve, and you usually are, too, Vanity Fair

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

This is a gentle rant brought on by Vanity Fair magazine's twitter: "@VanityFairmag Don't Be Fooled by Avatar's Lame Trailer http://is.gd/2s7YX #Avatar" a couple of hours ago. For like forever, I've been known to say that if I only had access to three magazines to keep up with the state-of-play, smarter, faster, better-informed intelligentsia, I'd pick Vanity Fair, Businessweek, and Utne Reader, and that selection still stands, but it's teetering. Vanity Fair, don't make the same mistake that Chris Anderson and his Wired made in 2006. I forgive you, but hurry up and realize that avatars are ahead of the curve. Like you. In fact, your readers are mostly going to embrace their avatarhood and evangelize about it within the next three years, and that "lame" Avatar trailer and movie are going to have something (if not a lot) to do with it.

~*~

It was 1997 and opening night. I recall whispering in the dark to my companion that if Kate Winslet's aged character "throws that damned necklace into the sea, I'm going to have to leave the theater." And she did. And I did. To this day, I have never seen the ending of James Cameron's Titanic, the all-time highest grossing film at the box office. So yes, I have questioned and even suffered visceral adverse reactions to Cameron's work.

Yesterday, I watched the teaser trailer for Avatar, slated to hit theaters this December. I've spent the better part of the last two years traipsing around virtual worlds as an avatar, so I'll confess that the poor trailer was in trouble even before I hit the "play" button. My overlayed cynical filter was as thick as the bottom of a glass Coke bottle and I fully expected to loathe it.



But I didn't hate it. Turns out that I can hardly wait to see it, and it made me want to learn more about the plot, the script and how and where it was produced. It looks as real as the island of Kauai does, which stands to reason because that's where most of it was shot.

I don't play games in virtual worlds. As Metanomics puts it, I'm all over the serious aspects of three-dimensional persistent, immersive, massively multi-player online "games," such as art, architecture, business and education. I've put up with an awful lot to be an early-adopter avatar, including lag so bad that my "character" couldn't move, umpteen flying penises and banana phones (annoying griefing devices employed by sophomoric idiots), communications so shoddy that my text chat never made it to the person or people I was trying to speak with, and hundreds upon hundreds of *crashes,* to mention only a few of the ways that I have been inconvenienced.

Things are picking up for avatars though and at a high rate of speed. Stability, scalability, tools for user-created content, communication, and collaboration are all vastly improving. The number of choices an avatar has on how to spend a quality hour consistently overwhelms me in much the same way selecting an art film to screen in Manhattan does. And just this week, industry analysts at Piper Jaffray released their forecasts for virtual goods, indicating that 2009 US revenues are expected to hit $621 million (134% over 2008), and $2.5 billion in 2013. Global revenues from virtual goods should exceed $2.2 billion this year, and climb to $6 billion by 2013. I'm old enough to remember when total online (2.0 web-based) revenues were lower than that, and how so many detractors doubted they'd rise significantly for decades. Heh.

Just two days ago I finally got around to downloading the client for the new virtual world Blue Mars that's in private Beta until... sometime real soon now (maybe in a couple of weeks?), and I can only say that I was overcome and dazzled by the life-like graphics, the rolling ocean foam, the exuberant vegetation and shadows that behaved the way real shadows do. In fact, it looked a lot like the trailer for Avatar.


Virtual Space Entertainment is just one of the developers rushing to create content on Blue Mars' gorgeous CryEngine2 platform

So wait, Vanity Fair. Please tell us why the Avatar trailer is lame?

More Blue Mars – The official roll-out dates (and some musings)

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

I don’t think anyone expects it to be a Second Life® killer – hundreds of thousands of avatars have too much invested there in friendships, land, content and businesses already - but Blue Mars is the first solid contender to enter the skirmish for dominance in the user-generated content category of virtual worlds. And yes, I did just say user-generated content, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

Jim Sink, vice president of Hawaii-based Avatar Reality, the company that owns Blue Mars, shared with me last night that they plan on rolling out their first registrations to the “many, many thousands of players” on their waiting list on Monday, August 3, and open Beta for all is scheduled for August 31st. So this is it.

I reported on most known aspects of the coming free-to-play platform in depth three months ago but I’ve been giving it a great deal of thought since then. It has already won me over on several counts:

• Gorgeous and photorealistic graphics thanks to the ultimate game engine available today: CryEngine 2.
• Serious control over what enters your City. Three little words: No Flying Penises. Likewise unwanted scripts, “prims,” and inappropriately (or offensively) dressed avatars. These safety features and checks are boons to businesses, educators, event organizers, Role-Playing Games and advertisers.
• Deep control over your content. Since every item that is imported into Blue Mars gets an encrypted and dated watermark, IP dangers to creators such as copybot dissipate dramatically.
• Scalable to thousands of simultaneous users per region. - Can’t attend that Coldplay concert that’s taking place 3,000 miles away? Why not hear and see them stream live into Blue Mars?
• Marketers will be keen on the fact that player activity can be tracked and reported on in real-time.
• Using a CAD program plus Blue Mars’ import tool, you can bring in your 3D assets… an intriguing opportunity for anyone who wants to demo objects, large or small.
• A simplified and easy-to-use interface in the universal language of symbols.

Musings and mumblings on USER GENERATED CONTENT

Blue Mars loses important points in areas that are critical to me, not the least of which is the fact that amateur content creators will have no place there. On the surface, quality control isn’t a bad thing, but when I consider that so many – MOST! - of the creators I most appreciate in Second Life came from non-artistic backgrounds only to discover that they could make marvelous things, I begin to mourn the loss of that particular magic. On the other hand, and to be fair, I wonder what professional artists will begin to work in virtual worlds (that I can inhabit) because of this environment.

And I’m unhappy that my Mac friends can’t join me there unless they are using Boot Camp, and I want to fly everywhere, thank you very much. No bloody waiting at virtual bus stops for me!

I’m “iffy” on what sounds like extreme homogenization. While the robust safety and marketing features appeal to me, the endless variety and idiosyncrasies that I mostly find charming in Second Life will have no place in Blue Mars. Or will they? The funny thing is, it turns out that what I dislike about Second Life is also what I like about it. The ugly content makes me value the beauty all the more. But you know what? I bet Blue Mars will have its share of yucky, or mundane and mediocre bleah stuff, too. After all, just cause it’s pro doesn’t make it pretty, does it?

And here is something I really want to share with you…

Jim spoke about user-generated content in Blue Mars last night in such a persuasive way. He asserted that ANYBODY can be a registered developer. He stressed that Blue Mars’ tools are free and so are 3D model creation tools like Blender and Google Sketchup.

Hmmm. Nowadays, many leading Second Life content creators are working off-world and importing their sculpties already. And what’s more, it’s been almost a year since I spoke with Aminom Marvin about the next big thing in virtual worlds that support content creation: 3D mesh objects. We’ve been speculating and hoping that Linden Lab will introduce them later this year. Well, it is almost “later this year” now. So how is all this different from people working off-world and importing their content into Blue Mars? And why would we moan and groan about an environment that actually protects creators’ intellectual property in ways that Second Life is technologically incapable of? I have so very much to think about.

I’m thinking… I just may have to have a foot in both worlds. THREE LIVES. Oh boy.

New answers and more questions regarding the upcoming virtual world Blue Mars

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

I learned considerably more about Blue Mars last night, which is not named after the science fiction classic by Kim Stanley Robinson, despite the fact that its founder, Henk Rogers, is a big sci-fi fan.

...

By the time he left his secure job where he’d been managing business development for the division, nearly 28 million units of Microsoft’s X-Box 360 had sold worldwide in just over three years. The global economy was imploding, and still Jim Sink packed his belongings in rainy Redmond, WA and hopped on a flight to Honolulu where he would become vice president of business development for Avatar Reality, the company that has been developing Blue Mars since December of 2006.

There, he joined interactive game luminaries Henk Rogers (creator of Tetris, Blue Lava Wireless and founder of the Blue Planet Foundation, among other things), Kazuyui Hashimoto (formerly vice president of technology at Electronic Arts) and 21 others, all working at breakneck-speed towards the Beta launch this June of a new virtual world.



Until recently, not much has been known about Blue Mars except that it will be significantly different from both Second Life® and OpenSim in that it will be powered by the bleeding-edge game engine CryEngine 2 that boasts unparalleled and nearly photorealistic graphics, and that end-users will not be able to create content in-world.

Many Second Life die-hards consider this last point to be a deal-breaker since user creativity is at the very core of Second Life’s raison d'être.

More information became available last week regarding the free-to-play and free-to-download “massively multiplayer virtual world”:

* The world was built for Vista-based machines.

* The company is confident that many thousands of users will be able to simultaneously log into a single “city.” If a particular server gets so popular that it reaches its limit and performance begins to suffer, they can “shard” the server. (More on this later)

* Software Development Kits (SDK) are available for download to registered developers for free so that they could begin creating Blue Mars-compatible content offline. Both the development kit and the preview editor are WYSIWYG.

* Despite rumors to the contrary and in regards to performance, the company stated that most 3D cards on the market today will be able to run Blue Mars, and that even ATI 4850 cards that go for about $120 after rebates can “deliver a strong performance.”

* There is no geographic continuity between places in Blue Mars. Each place or city is a node in the Blue Mars network. Each place is usually around 2x2k. Places can link to one another but you can't fly across a contiguous space above a certain size. When you move from place to place, there is a loading screen.

* “Easy to program” artificial intelligence will be offered to developers who are interested in having conversational NPCs (non-player characters/bots). Avatar-Reality has created an AI gateway to allow third parties to link to their own AI servers. They hope to catalyze the development of game AI by “providing a platform for people to integrate their AIs in an affordable high fidelity real time online environment.”

* The Blue Mars Dollar (pegged to a fixed rate against the US dollar) is a single integrated currency system that “lets developers easily and securely charge for items and subscriptions.” End users can buy packs of currency through the Blue Mars client or through a web site. They can use a credit card, Paypal, or retail Paybycash cards to buy Blue Mars currency. There are no refunds on Blue Mars currency and end users can't cash out. However, if you are registered as a developer or vendor with Avatar Reality, you can charge Blue Mars dollars for goods and services and get paid in US dollars or your local equivalent currency through Paypal.

* Gambling will not be allowed.

...



I spoke at length with Jim Sink last night.

Your business model is that of providing a platform to developers so that they can turn around and create their own Cities, RP games, or sublease land to others. What about government? What are your Terms of Service? Will each developer rule his or her fiefdom? Will each developer be responsible for newbie education in that environment?

We’re still working out the ToS, but yes, developers will control and set content rules for their regions. There are two ways that developers can get started: they can manage their own City/game server in the Blue Mars network or they may choose to sub-lease land from an existing City developer, which could be a City block, for example. Avatar Reality charges a setup fee and monthly fees to keep your place online, but rather than set our fees based on land size, we charge based on concurrent user capacity (CCU.) It works like the minutes plan on a mobile phone. Our promotional pricing is available under NDA and our public pricing will be available later in the summer.



In August 2008, Avatar-Reality announced that Virtual Space Entertainment, Inc. (VSE), led by the much celebrated artist and concept designer Syd Mead for films such as Blade Runner, Aliens and Tron had become a third-party developer.

Will users have access to voice at launch?

No. We’re working on that and realize that it is important. When rolling out a complicated platform like this, we need to first make sure that it is stable and secure.

I understand that Blue Mars was built for Vista based machines. I’m working off of Windows XP. Will I be able to run it? And what about Mac users?

Yes, no problem for XP, but Cryengine doesn't run on OS X, so no support for Macs. Boot Camp works if you want to dual boot, and server-side rendering services like Online should help expand our market to netbooks and Macs.

What about integrating the web to your world, such as HTML access? Any unique offerings in that area as compared to Second Life?

We can’t render HTML pages natively, but there are multiple ways to work with the web. You can display Flash-based content and the data can go in both directions, so you can update a page out world with content that is going on in-world and vice-versa. When people want to draw from a database, in other virtual worlds it has to go through the hosting service. In Blue Mars, the client can connect directly to the data source and doesn’t have to go through our servers. For example, a movie that is screening in-world is not streamed by Blue Mars; that movie is pointed to an external server. Video will be handled using Scaleform, a flash compatible middleware package that we use for all our UI.

What about scripted objects? What language will you use? Can developers introduce their own scripts?

Yes. LUA-based scripting and our own Casual Games API to give developers a head start.

You say that Blue Mars will be scalable for thousands of simultaneous users per region, and that you have the option to shard a server if it gets too popular. Please describe, in lay terms, what “sharding the server” means?

If it got to the point where 10,000 simultaneous users got to be too much for that region - and we won’t know until we get there - we will probably want to mirror that region (make a duplicate of the region).

How easily will people be able to rejoin their friends if a region gets sharded? What if people are having sex or giving a presentation, teaching a class, or waiting for a purchased item to be delivered? Will they be separated from their friends? And while we are on the topic, will you allow sex in Blue Mars?

We haven’t decided yet on the sex question. As for sharding, it wouldn’t work like that. The developer could instance the entire server and call it “New Honolulu.” You would add that server to a list of several Honolulus. We would never split it and take half the users one way and half the other way. We will also integrate messaging tools so you can join your friends in the different shards of the single server.

We’ve heard about developers, RP gamers, and shoppers from you, but are you also targeting business?

Businesses tend to be excited about Blue Mars for a few reasons. A lot of people in real estate have all these terabytes that are stuck on their hard drives. Instead of creating a new way to build 3D assets, we’ve created import tools. Using a CAD program, they can bring those terabytes into Blue Mars with very little effort and then show off model homes and model communities in an interactive environment. As for advertisers, much depends on building a critical mass of active users.

How about educators?

We will be providing a safe and controlled environment with deep scripting and monitoring support that will give developers the ability to test and track actions and choices made in their region.



You tout robust security and content management. How will you protect developers? Content theft is a significant issue in Second Life and OpenSim.

Anyone who would say you never have to worry about content theft doesn’t know about history. What you do is build methods for the eventuality of dealing with it. Everything is encrypted in our world, and we’ve made it very difficult for people to reverse engineer the system. Say you create a new dress that you want to offer at your store. Every item, when it is uploaded into the system, gets a unique registration stamp and a time stamp. Even if someone just copied an item “visually,” the original creator can submit their code and comparing it against the time stamp, we can determine if it is in violation of the system.

Will there be an approval system for each piece of content before it can make it into the system?

No approval process.

What, in your view, is the special allure for Second Life content creators, assuming of course that they are already competent with the Blue Mars-compatible software and not just working with prims? Will they have to cozy up to the game developers to adhere to their planned environments? Let’s say you make a living creating furniture in Second Life. How might this translate to Blue Mars?

By the end of this week, there will be two editors that Blue Mars provides: A full-development environment that is completely free, though we are limiting the number of people we’re offering it to at this time. We are also releasing a streamlined sort of “sandbox” that would be ideal for a furniture creator. They can take the model that they created in 3ds Max or Maya, for instance, import it into the sandbox editor, and see exactly what it will look like in Blue Mars.

From the get out, the platform has been created with an ear to content creators and artists. “Why can’t we just continue to use the tools we normally use? I don’t want my stuff copied.” They want a reliable system to monetize their work and a universal payment system. Most digital content creators don’t work in prims. They didn’t want to create proprietary content with creation tools like prims or have to relearn how to create content.

After June, we will be providing templatized shops. Developers will sub-divide land and sublease it. Create a space, fill it with your furniture and offer things for sale. Most people will want to set up shops somewhere that is popular. We will probably be offering a limited number of sub-divided parcels to give to developers and operate a test “Demo” City in the beginning where we can roll out new features and offer a limited number of spaces in that city for people to experiment.

Will you have a web-based sales model like Second Life’s Xstreet?

Not at this time.

What about artists? How will they benefit from creating sculptures, for example?

If it is just a matter of a public space where they can share their work, they can lease the space from a City developer and put their content directly into that City. They deliver their data file to the City director and it will be up to the City developer to determine how frequently the content updates will take place, which will not be as frequent as they are in Second Life (real-time). Some might do it every day, while others might update every two weeks. Each city is condensed into a pack file that includes all the geometry and textures. The file they deliver comes in a single pack.

I realized then that we were thinking about two entirely different things. Jim talked about a coming Art Competition that will launch on April 20th. He spoke of fashion, furniture and other practical items that might be exhibited - in addition to paintings, sculpture and particles - with each participating artist receiving a 3m x 3m x 3m exhibition space in a shared virtual gallery to display their work. I described how the mixed-realities Brooklyn is Watching gallery/art-critique space in Second Life had begun with a small land parcel, thinking that all of the art would be rezzed directly on the ground, only to learn that the artists would ingeniously go underground or have their art pieces begin at ground-level and soar as far up as 3,500m in the sky. I told him about ZeroG SkyDancers and how the choreographed dancers wear cascading costumes that are many times larger in size than the avatars wearing them as they move about the sky. (More on art later).

Oh, you won’t be able to fly for the most part.

Won’t be able to fly!?

If a developer wants it, their avatars will be able to fly, but the standard locomotion is not flying. You can get into a vehicle and fly but the framework for people to locomote isn’t flying.

So each developer would have to introduce the animations and fiddle with the physics? What about teleporting?

Teleporting is a balancing act for us. Teleportation to any place at any time is a mistake for a developer. It reduces the potential for the social fabric of a place. You don’t want to make people walk everywhere though. If I want to get from point A to B there are several options beyond walking or running. If I need to move two kilometers away, it is silly to have to wait for a bus. If you have a home, you will be able get there. People will experiment with a lot of different methods.

What news have you for musicians?

People will be excited to use Blue Mars for music, a place for self-expression and community. You want to be able to create events that will draw a crowd and not have the appeal of the event be diminished by the crowd itself. The Blue Mars platform scales to support thousands of simultaneous users per region, so if you are spinning music or creating a place for people to congregate, this won’t be a concern.

Will real-time jams between musicians from all over the world be possible?

They will.

Any advantages for virtual architects?

CAD will be importable, but of course, the further you are away from 3ds Max and Maya, the more steps you will have to take. Keep in mind that you don’t need the plumbing geometry for a real-time rendering. The bottleneck isn’t the polyganol count, but the textures that are the problem. The rendering will be perfectly accurate.

I understand that you will have real-time analyses of player activity. How will marketers be able to use this excellent information?

Each City developer will set some policies. We’re not sure yet how the implementation will run out but we do know this: If it happens in world, it can be tracked and reported on in real time. How many people sat down in Toyota’s new car, for instance, along with any demographic information the users are willing to share.

That raises a number of questions regarding user privacy. Can we assume that you will protect each user’s personal information?

Yes.

Speaking of demographics, what about men playing as women, or folks who prefer not to be gender-specific? How will that play out?

It will be a matter of how they registered. We aren’t going to verify gender.

What about alts (alternative accounts)? Will you allow that?

We haven’t decided yet.

Will developers be able to limit what users can take from their City to another, or what can be introduced to their City?

You can limit what can be introduced. If you are Sony Pictures and creating a virtual Monaco and it is a black tie-only space, when a user gets there, the system can prompt that user to let them know that this is a black tie-only area and provide information about the only costumes that will be available in that region. You don’t want people running around in Speedos in your James Bond world.

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UPDATE: Soon as you're done here, you might want to skedaddle over to Dusan Writer's blog where he has an interesting discussion going and his initial analysis on Blue Mars... plus he called me a Goddess! Well, he can't be right all the time. :)

Blue Mars limited Beta to begin in June

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Blue Mars, the upcoming virtual world that will use the bleeding-edge game engine CryEngine2, is slated to begin its limited Beta testing in June, according to Jim Sink, Avatar Reality's vp.



The virtual worlds community is concerned that Blue Mars has been built for systems running Vista (!) and that only select developers will be able to create content in-world, but we are hoping against hope that we will be able to persuade them to make some significant changes before launch.