Croquet 2 Play

For folks who don’t want to follow the physics or the money or George Clinton, here’s more “evidence” …

After all, when you’re in Second Life, you’re just looking at computer-animated figures on a screen– how could it possibly matter where they’re sitting, or how long they’re looking into each other’s eyes?
New World Notes: THE SPACES BETWEEN US

The researchers being referenced concluded that …

… many patterns of physical interaction in the real world carry over into the virtual world. In other words, our insistence on embodiment in virtual environments structures social interactions in these worlds in ways that we may not consciously be aware of. On the other hand, this implies that virtual worlds may be useful platforms for studying things even as visceral as the rules of physical interaction.

Terra Nova: The Prison of Embodiment

The post also mentions a book coming out this fall which says:

Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture

One can shrink the distance between the music and the technology even further by examining the relationship between the Dead and Funkadelic, and more significantly the influence jazz had on those two particular bands and counterculture movement in general. Read more

Actually I should say real in another way since the atoms that make up the bits of data stored and displayed by a computer are very real.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, which oversees such well-known hotel brands as Sheraton, St. Regis and Westin, will launch its newest chain, Aloft, in the online society “Second Life” in September.In the brick-and-mortar realm, the plan is for the first Aloft inn to open sometime in 2008, catering to active, urban 30- to 50-year-olds. But the real-world lodge will be preceded by a 3D cyberversion designed to prompt feedback from virtual guests and help guide the earthbound endeavor.
“We think the SL world is a specific community of early adopters, of tech-savvy people who like to voice their opinions,” said Brian McGuinness, vice president of the Aloft Hotels brand.

Aloft will be the first hotel for “Second Life,” which has already incorporated businesses from Wells Fargo to Major League Baseball. Marc Schiller, CEO and founder of ElectricArtists 2.0, a marketing services company, approached Starwood two months ago with the idea of a virtual debut for Aloft. Starwood then purchased an island in “Second Life,” and construction began on the hotel a month ago.

Second Lifers get first look at new hotel chain | CNET News.com

There are several nice screenshots of Aloft.

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”.

Future Boy: Google moves into virtual worlds - May. 12, 2006
Online virtual worlds are a hot topic, as gamers spend more and more time playing online and virtual real estate turns into a real market. Now Google (Research) is getting into the business — and if its plans come to fruition, the virtual world will never be the same. In fact, it may look more like the world we know than futurists ever imagined.

“I would expect to see someone using Google Earth as a virtual social space by the end of the year,” says Jerry Paffendorf, research director of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a futurist organization.

…Google Earth is the most likely candidate to become a metaverse. Just add avatars, they say, and the possibilities are endless. …
There are, in short, many more opportunities in a virtual version of the real world than in an entirely fantastical world like Second Life — or indeed Stephenson’s original vision of the metaverse.

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