Star Wars The Old Republic (SWTOR), the new Star Wars MMO, is out. While it has a superb new questing system with real story development and the ability to have companion avatars help you along the way… it surprisingly does nothing else to advance the MMO genre.

Certain elements from the last Star Wars MMO, Star Wars Galaxies, that we also saw in Second Life that weren’t in World of Warcraft or SWTOR are:

• Pure roles/classes that don’t involve fighting (dancers, musicians, crafters)
• Houses and virtual items for sale, earn, or trade (SWTOR has ships, but eh…)

SWTOR has crafting, but you actually outsource that job to one of your companions. WoW has crafting but most people add that onto another class. In SWG you actually could be a crafter or musician… and that’s all you did. These things actually led to gameplay that was creative and outside of what the creators had developed. Uber geek confession: I once hosted a speeder bike race for about 20 of my guild friends in SWG where we raced from house to house, purchasing cheap vendor items as we went to mark progress. The winner had to turn them all in at the end. This was MMO user generated content at its best – and we had a party at the guild hall when it was over!

Other things that are easily going to make any new MMO stand out are:

• Classes you can play for free (like a dancer, musician, crafter, etc…) without playing the monthly fee – just to get you in the door; let you see and explore the worlds. This type of class would increase the social features and player set of the MMO. Diversity – imagine that!
• Mobile content – like puzzle games that could actually be played to craft items. I mean, Club Penguin has this!? Why doesn’t a major MMO? Players should be able to interact with the world from an iPad, smartphone, etc…

SWTOR does have space battles which look really boring and don’t look like they cost a lot on the processing power. I’m guessing they might actually have plans to push that onto a mobile platform. Now that would be cool.

Final gripe: Travel. SWTOR looks like a giant and spacious world. This is cool – BUT it means that the majority of game time is NOT spent questing, engaging in stories, or otherwise playing the game. The majority of game time will be spent running or traveling by speeder bike or spaceship from one place to another. BOOOoooRING! I still have nightmares in which I run from place to place in SWG, EQ2 (now free by the way), or WoW. Who wants to play something in which the majority of time is spent traveling? I know I don’t.

For some videos on the new story-driven experience of STOR see here and here. Below is a video of the space battles.

Last weekend I attended the Second Life Community Conference 2010 with my colleague and BGSU Virtual Campus Co-Administrator Bonnie Mitchell. Below you can find all 4 of the presentations we gave hosted on Slideshare.net and links to the Google Docs.

(Disclaimer: I’m not an expert or a programmer. I just see a need for better designed communication system.)

I think many people were disappointed last week when the 100k invites for Google Wave went out and everyone realized… Google Wave isn’t what they think it is. The consensus: Wave is a glorified (or confusing) email/chat system that has its own protocol for creating collaborative documents. Woo hoo.

What were we expecting Google Wave to be? I think most people expected a system that would merge email, chat (IM & SMS), with the communication of Facebook and Twitter streams (links, video, pics, and more). An all-in-one protocol for messaging perhaps?

Why it’s needed:
A number of APIs allow us to send SMS Tweets that update our Facebook feed. We can send an IM to update Twitter. We can email a picture to Flickr which updates our FriendFeed and perhaps that posts back to Twitter or Facebook. Right now these services and connections are spread out over a number of sites (and frankly, it’s very hard to keep track of what is updating where and when I do what?).

What Wave and its ‘bots’ (or programmable plug-ins that deal with Waves) could/should be is… an organizational tool for all the many forms of communication we use to interact with other people on a daily basis. Google seems to be the business ready for this, with products like Gmail, Gtalk, Google Voice, and the power of Google search. Facebook, according to CEO Zuckerberg, would love to be the number one form of communication on the planet. The first to sort out the mess that is 101 million ways of interacting and communicating, will win. It’s that simple.

How it should work:
An interactive all-in-one communication tool should:

• Be open and extensible
  • Any communication format can be sent to/from email, to IM or SMS, into World of Warcraft or Second Life (any game or site w/ chat), or translated into Japenese and sent as Voicemail, etc.
  • With my permission, any bot should be able to access certain Waves and make this happen. Right now, we grant these permissions through APIs for various sites/tools we use.
• Have algorithmic privacy controls
  • A public Wave about my recent surgery is automatically sent to only my family, close friends, and doctors. However, a Wave to my doctor is private. A link to melanoma goes to anyone interested in health (or at risk!).
• Be interoperable
  • A friend’s Wave about an NFL player comes to me because I am have that player on my Yahoo! Fantasy Football team. Another friend’s Wave about a player I am not interested in, does not come to me.
• Be verifiable
  • I should know who is communicating with me. A system that verifies identity on (at least) 3 platforms is needed to reduce spam and allow for more productive communication.

What it could do:
Besides allowing for Google, Facebook, and Twitter to use this new messaging protocol and still compete for your eyeballs on their brand/version of this one-stop-shop for communication, a system like this could be used for bigger and better things. First, I would assume that whatever system was created for this would have a mobile app on many phones, or at the very least be able to convert anything to SMS. Second, I would assume that this would be the protocol adopted and used for all communications systems: phone calls, emails, IM, chat, status updates (even collaborative docs). Again, this would allow all platforms to fight competitively about branding and front end design while still allowing users to ‘do more’ with their communications.

Now let’s say I am playing World of Warcraft and my wife is at the store. With the touch of a button I can send a /tell that will arrive as a text message on her phone. “Buy some milk”.

Someone could write a bot that would poll (Wave already has a polling bot) all Ohioans about the upcoming Issue to legalize gambling or even Obama’s healthchare plan. All verified user data could then be sent to my local representative or Senator. Talk about a powerful lobby for the people.

Add geographical locations in the mix and a 911 call about a man choking might send an SMS to a nearby doctor/paramedic and save someone’s life. “You are a registered paramedic. A man in a brown coat is choking at the restaurant next door. Can you assist?”

Hostess Cup Cakes

What’s in a Hostess Cup Cake? I’d imagine that there was flour, chocolate, milk, eggs, and sugar. Or at least, that’s what I’d use to make cupcakes. However, the actual ingredients include a lot more than just what I listed. Namely, corn starch, alkali, cellulose gum, gelatin, agar, and a variety of other things nobody understands. I’m sure a cupcake made at home using my ingredients would taste different from the Hostess one, however I settle for the Hostess Cup Cake because I didn’t have to make it. I settle for convenience.

Now if Hostess decided to make a low calorie version of that same cupcake, I think the number of ingredients would rise and include many more things I’ve never heard of. But I’d probably settle for that one too. Less calories. Less fat. Convenient.

I tend to think that as a society we seem to be consuming more things out of convenience. So I was surprised when, last week, I proposed that virtual food might actually be better for us than real food and they didn’t agree.

Of course, there is currently no such thing as “virtual food”. However, let’s pretend that in the future there will be. Or better yet, let’s take that scene from The Matrix where the awakened humans aboard the Neb are eating the oatmeal slop and complaining about it. If they could create their own version of the matrix for combat training, why couldn’t they create one for eating. They could jack into the matrix, have the oatmeal slop fed to them or get nutrition intravenously, meanwhile enjoying a steak in their mind. I have a feeling we’ll be able to manipulate our brains in the same way one day.

My students said, “but that wouldn’t be eating.”

Wouldn’t it? Did the original Hostess Cup Cakes invented in  1919 contain Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, or Propylene Glycol? I think not! But we eat them now that they do. Meanwhile, we never think about what it took to make them, how far they traveled, or the amount of damage the package does to the environment. A virtual cup cake wouldn’t do any damage to the environment or even have to be made. $0 labor, $0 shipping, $0 recycling. Yet, money would still be spent on marketing and paid for the product. In what green economy doesn’t this sound right? It’s the current model driving MP3 sales right? I’m sure it would only cost a fraction of what it now costs for the (already cheap) Hostess Cup Cakes as well.

If you said I could eat cupcakes everyday, not gain a pound, and only slightly know that it wasn’t a real Cup Cake. I’d try one. Sounds healthy. Sounds environmentally friendly. Sounds convenient.

In reaction to the growing rumors and daily posts such as: Apple Tablet Coming in 2010?, Will an Apple Tablet Run on Verizon’s Network?, and Apple iTablet: Will You Buy One?, I feel the need to express my ultimate desire for a computer such as the rumored iTablet, how it will help to change the landscape of computing, how it will replace all of my other devices, and make dreams of augmented realities come one day sooner.

First, tablet PCs have been around for quite a while. I remember trying one out several years ago. It was kind of heavy; not something you’d carry around all day. It also ran Windows XP, which may be the best OS ever made for PCs, it wasn’t designed for a tablet or touch computing. I’m an artist who loves to draw, so the first thing I played with was a sketchpad program that was installed. This was long before I had ever seen or heard of a Wacom Cintiq monitor.

What am I so excited about? Here’s my list:

• Any iTablet OS will have been based off of years of touch research done by Apple for the iPhone (unlike previous tablet PCs)
• It will run iPhone Apps and feed the already existing market
• It will promote cloud computing applications that take less memory and power to run on your computer (the future of application software)
• It will surely prompt clones from other hardware manufacturers (a catalyst for innovation- look at what iPhone did for touch screen phones)
• And hopefully a tablet equivalent running a Google Android OS (Google already ahead of the game in the cloud apps area, i.e. Google Docs)… Android being quite possibly the best OS for touchscreen devices

Furthermore, here’s what else will be remedied by an iTablet

• Laptotps: Have you actually tried to use a laptop on your lap lately? I’ve got a MacBook Pro and a Dell XPS (my work computers) and neither of them can be set on your actual legs for longer than 2 minutes. I’ve had to buy laptop fans every few months just to keep them cool. In other words, LAPTOPS aren’t for LAPS!
• Desktops: I like the memory and power of a desktop, but it can’t take it with me. I have two offices on campus, I commute 25 minutes to work, and I work (and teach online) from home during the summer.  I need portability.
• Smartphones: are great, but I still get dirty looks in meetings when I use it to take notes, pull up stored Google Docs, emails, or search for info on the web. I’m a hardcore multi-tasker and if one thing iTablet could do for me… take away the impression I’m txt’ing WHEN I’m really working!
  
• Netbooks: They’re small, they’re cute, they’re cheap! Did I say they were too small? Watching a netbook user is like watching an ad made by the Alliance of Chiropractors and Optometrists Everywhere. The thing sits chained to a table or someones lap while their back folds in two and they squint to see what’s on screen. The keyboards aren’t comfortable either. I thought the Pepper handheld computer got it right when the split the keyboard up on both sides. Most people text on their phones with their thumbs… evolution at its best: opposable thumbs. I think this is the way typing should be designed on the iTablet, which if they don’t design it that way I’m sure an App will be made for that! (The images included in this post taken from PC World show a keyboard across the bottom. That’s just not going to work).

So I’m trying to say that… An iTablet Mac product would BE a computer built for me. Highly portable, highly functional.

• I’m thinking I’ll be able to plug it into an play MP3s while I drive to work… No more MP3 player needed.
• I’m hoping I will be able to use it with Skype (and maybe Google Voice?!), a Bluetooth headset, and mobile carrier dataplan (tuff chance with Apple denying the GVoice app from their store. It’s the first time I’ve ever said this… “Go FCC!”). In other words, goodbye smartphone.
• And since the only hardcore applications I still need (Photoshop, video editing software, and Second Life) are almost better run on a desktop anyway… Can I say goodbye laptop? Photoshop is moving to cloud computing or being replaced by online competitors like Pixlr.com. Advanced video editing done in the cloud is only a few more years away, but simple video editing can already be done on sites like JayCut. Second Life and other virtual worlds or mmorpgs are not quite on smartphones yet and an iTablet may be just the thing needed close the gap to mobile virtual worlds and hardcore online games.

What will suck? I mean it can’t all be glorious right?

• Apple: Control and politics. I don’t own an iPhone but I know how tightly Apple controls what works and doesn’t work on the iPhone. I only hope that an iTablet would have as much open development and free products as OSX.
• $$: It’s not going to be easy on my pocketbook to personally get one of these. Even at the rumored $600-800 pricetag, that’s more than I was planning to spend on anything else this year. For someone who has never bought an iPod or iPhone but loves the idea of a device like this, I wonder if I’ll be able to afford the extras (Apps! Car charger, mobile re-charger, etc.) I’m sure the first extra I buy will be a string to carry the thing around my neck at all times, lol! But I’m serious, I’ll never put the thing down.
• Mobile Carrier: The worst thing about the iPhone is AT&T right? Whoever Apple partners with to carry data plans for this thing had better be prepared! They made a mistake picking AT&T as their phone carrier and have had poor coverage and customer service ever since. Will they make the same mistake twice?
• First Generation iTablet: It seems the smartest people in tech (on a budget like me) are always saying, hold off and get the second generation… It works better, faster, with less bugs. I’m so geeked about getting an iTablet, there’s no way I’m waiting. So bring on the bugs.
• We haven’t seen or heard any of specs yet. Memory? Speed? Camera? Video? Heck we don’t even know what size the thing will be. If there’s one thing I would expect, it’s that it has every bell and whistle of the latest generation iPhone. The one thing I would request: A video/camera on BOTH sides of the display. Hold it up and shoot a picture of what’s in front of me while also broadcasting webcam video of my ugly mug to a site like Ustream.tv at the same time. Dreamy.

Finally, until they develop a set of glasses that augment reality (and eventually nanites), an iTablet would again close the gap between what is the ideal future of computing and what is capable right now on mobile platforms; giving more power to the augmented reality devloper… A current hot topic. I think apps like the one in the video below are just the beginning, an iTablet would make augmented reality a reality sooner.

I’ve been working hard all weekend to get the Animations loaded into our new dynamic media players on the BGSU Virtual Campus for the SIGGRAPH SpaceTime Exhibition. You can watch over 32 animation and videos of interactive works at the gallery.  I just put up a post about it on the BGSU Virtual Campus blog. Read on here…

Here’s the SLURL to get right to the gallery: http://slurl.com/secondlife/BGSU%20Creation/164/180/28

Over the last week my students have been working on an assignment in which they were to find an inspirational work of art and create a work in repsonse to it (read assignment here). The first meeting class of this week, we held in-progress critiques of the work. The set-up for this included teaching students to upload images into Second Life (my tutorial here), build a primitive or object to put them on (tutorial), and then how to put the image on the prim (tutorial).

Here are some image of both critiques. View more here.

The most exciting thing was the amount of feedback each students received from other students. In a studio classroom the comments usually come from only a handful of students. An Instructor often times has to play a significant moderator role to coax quiet students into speaking. I’m not sure if it was because this is NOT a studio art class with non-art majors OR if the text chat mode of communications allowed students to speak more freely, but the amount of feedback per image was really wonderful!

This summer I am teaching Art 101: Intro to Art online in Second Life. It took about a week to get the students up to speed on how to use Second Life. I am using some of the info at the main SL wiki, but mostly my own tutorials at the BGSU SL Help Wiki. My students are keeping blogs to reflect on what they see/do in class, document what they discover on the web and in Second Life, and also as a place to display what they create. Our second week, most of them blogged about our trip to the Sistine Chapel re-creation on Vassar Island (SLURL).

Last week the students were given an assignment to research an artist from a list I had presented them with. Then, they were asked to modify their avatar to look like that artist or one of the artworks that person had created. Finally, the students roleplayed those artists in a conversation in front of the class to present their findings. Click here to read the assignment. Watch two example videos below or see more examples here.

Jackson Pollock & M.C. Escher

Sol LeWitt & Henry Moore

Overall, I would say that the assignment was a success! Some students were able to modify their avatars better than others but the creative choices was easy to spot. Some students were unable to use voice chat and therefore held conversation in voice chat. This made the exchange between the two avatars move much slower and the immersion felt by the audience less present. However, students were still able to present their information in a timely manner.

Early on in Second Life, you could find a “Gate System” that used replica’s of the Stargate to link one location to another. You never knew where you were going to end up when you stepped thru a gate and it was a great way to explore (plus, I’m just a big Stargate fan!).

Over the past few months I’ve noticed users in the virtual world Metaplace had started the same trend.

From Vitrual Worlds

It turns out that Metaplace is “officially” making this feature part of their virtual experience. I think link worlds is a great idea and another way to connect communities!