Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Blue Mars Mobile Avatar Invades Cloud Party Virtual World



I've been playing around with Cloud Party since seeing a post in New World Notes a few days ago. Cloud Party is a virtual world that runs in a browser. Second Life co-founder Cory Ondrejka is one of the investors.

Although Cloud Party is in early beta, it's very impressive. It loads quickly in your browser, there's no discernable lag and the initial feature set is well designed and intuitive to use. There's an integrated tutorial that does a fast job of introducing both general functionality and basic in-world building. You can log in anonymously, but Facebook authentication is required to establish identity and access the full feature set. I've been told that it will eventually support other authentication, which is good news for the pseudonymous avatar community.

I hope to do a walk-through video down the road. For now, here a short augmented reality clip of my Blue Mars Mobile avatar playing in Cloud Party and RL. After some trial and error, I figured out how to upload a mesh and add the BMM AR marker texture.

6 comments:

Scarp Godenot said...

The problem with a virtual world run from the cloud is who is going to pay for all the bandwidth needed.

Second Life itself tested a very good cloud web version of SL a couple of years ago, but saw then that the economics of the bandwidth required didn't work.

So although the tech is there. The economics are not.

Scarp Godenot said...
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Scarp Godenot said...
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Botgirl Questi said...

I don't think they've disclosed their business model yet. Given the experience of the named participants, my assumption is that they have something that makes sense. Assuming they can attract participants. Time will tell.

Sami Tabla said...
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Sami Tabla said...

Never mind... still earlier for me.