Croquet 2 Play

The song Paradigm on George Clinton’s recent CD How Late Do U Have 2 B B 4 U R Absent? closes with the statement “The virtual is real”.

As hard as this may be to believe, there is real money changing hands among the players in these games, Bowen reports. An estimated $1 billion worldwide is spent by users buying and selling virtual goods, such as furniture for virtual houses and clothing for their avatars. But it’s paid for with real-world credit cards — at Second Life alone, $6 million a month.Is Virtual Life Better Than Reality?, Living Online — With Dream House, Job, Friends — May Be Preferable For Some - CBS News

It shouldn’t be so surprising that people are making money in virtual economies. People buy things that are outside the human sense of touch all the time. People pay for MRIs and satellite radio signals and Wall Street is a virtual world where people trade in “financial instruments“. All of these have the same real existence as goods in virtual worlds - bits on a disk. Physics agrees with this. A bit on a disk is as physical as your fingers, it’s made up of the same atoms bound together with the same laws of subatomic physics. As the song says - “let the shakin begin”.

“We’re really interested in the (’Second Life’) platform,” said Justin Schaffer, senior vice president of new media at Major League Baseball Advanced Media. “When the Electric Sheep guys approached us, we were initially skeptical of the technology. But once we got into it, it seemed like a tremendous tool to build community.”

Take a look at this video of a live jazz event. It takes place at a place called Clyde in Second Life. In it you’ll see people in the audience dancing - you don’t dance at web sites …

Soon after logging in, I realized that Second Life could be a venue for live music performance, and my career in Second Life, as musician Astrin Few, took off. I have been performing twice a week in Second Life ever since, playing acoustic guitar/vocal jazz on Tuesday nights and jazz/pop/rock at hired gigs on Sunday nights. In February, a sax player in Miami named Brian Tervo (”Flaming Moe” in Second Life) and I performed a duo concert in Second Life - I send my guitar/vocal stream to him, to which he adds his sax before sending it out to the public. You can view a video and download the CD from that concert or read a review of the show. Many other musicians have begun to perform live in Second Life in recent months.

Note that these collaborative technologies have nothing to do with the Web. As our friend Preston Austin of Clotho Advanced Media summarized recently at an Accelerate Madison presentation describing an exciting new 3D collaborative technology called Croquet: “the Web sucks”.

Internet Collaboration & Application Development, Chicago, IL
Back in October, says Flaming Moe, “I searched Events for ‘jazz’ one day… and found ‘Astrin Few, Live at Clementina’. I had to check it out to see if it was some sort of joke or the real deal. Sure enough, he was streaming live at the park and sounded great. He even took requests!”

Moe and Few shared notes, honed their chops, and two Sundays ago, debuted an in-world first, from a forest-shrouded stage in Clive*: a live combo performance, with Astrin in the Midwest, Moe on the East Coast, and their sound engineer Catja LaFollette in Canada. The show was attended by a capacity crowd dressed in their night life finest. A striking redhead named Nethermind Bliss whirled alone for awhile on the dance floor, but was quickly joined there by some dozen jazz enthusiasts, including a green-eyed panther in a tuxedo.

MOE, FEW AND THEIR CONTINENTAL JAZZ COMBO

This kind of event happens regularly in Second Life but like the early web browsers it’s just scratching the surface of what people will ultimately do with Croquet.

GridBlog » That’s nice.
Once again there’s word of gigantic corporations trundling into Second Life, using it as a very expensive 3d brochure.

A nice comparison of recent movie and record promotions.

With online social networking at an all-time high, the music industry increasingly is turning to the next stage of the user-generated content phenomenon–the virtual world.

“MySpace is about promoting who you are to a broad community to find people with similar interests,” says Courtney Holt, head of new media and strategic marketing for Interscope Records, who greenlighted the Pussycat Dolls Lounge. “This is the next step–take those people that have found that common interest and give them another level of communication. Once you’ve committed to being a fan, how much deeper are you going to go?”

Holt and others in the music industry hope it will be deep enough to buy products…. The lounge is not alone in the virtual world. Last year, a similar community called the Habbo Hotel began hosting virtual visits by such acts as Gorillaz, Ashlee Simpson and Bow Wow.

ZDNet: Virtual venues create real dollars

In 1995 when Warner Bros. Black Music Division was about to release The Gold Experience CD by The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, I was hired as an outside consultant to develop their website. I wanted to use Virtus Walkthrough(developed by David Smith, one of the Croquet architects) to implement a virtual world architecture I’d previously implemented in Smalltalk/V for Windows, but there wasn’t room in the budget or schedule to bring that off. With help from The Graphics Artist Still Known As JC we were able to implement a virtual space with a club, a church for gospel music and the [insert unpronounceable symbol] Cafe. Given the politics of the time, the Cafe ended up isolated from the rest of the Black Music Divsion buildings - see low-res image I was able to snag from the web archives:
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Nevertheless, we learned a lot from that um experience which when combined with what’s being done in MMORPGs and Second Life could be quite valuable especially for folks thinking about dropping $25K - $3M into virtual world development:

1. Virtual venues as marketing gimmicks won’t really work - they need to have deeper integration with business processes.
2. The economic upside isn’t in selling more records, tshirts or other stuff, but rather in creating the compelling, thriving locations for user-generated content.
3. There are important relationships between real world locations and those in virtual space