Category: virtualreality

Do you like sausages? How about pancakes? Sure you do, they’re awesome — especially when you have them together. And through the magic of modern food processing machinery, these two brillant foods come together and are made better when they’re attached to a stick, like Jimmy Dean Sausage-Pancakes on a stick. In fact, all kinds of things are made better by putting them on a stick: pizza on a stick; fries and bacon on a stick; spaghetti and meatballs on a stick; scorpion, seahorse, and silkworm larvae on sticks; and more! As chef and author, Anthony Bourdain, is fond of saying, everything tastes better on a stick.

That things are improved by putting them on a stick holds true in other industries too, including software. Since former Linden, John “Pathfinder” Lester blogged about it back in October, I’ve been intrigued by the idea of putting an OpenSim server on a USB stick. It seems Second Lifer, Ener Hax, has been experimenting with the “sim-on-a-stick” idea for several months now and has gotten to the point where she is now sharing the fruits (on a stick) of her labour with the world at simonastick.com. (Who is Simon Astick? It’s a mystery.)

Today, having a bit of time on my hands, I decided to give Ener’s Sim-on-a-Stick a try, so I downloaded the zip file from simonastick.com. The setup was amazingly simple: you just copy the files to a USB stick (or to a folder on your hard drive, as I did) and run the various components. Within a few minutes of unzipping it, I had a single-region grid running locally, and had logged in and rezzed this cube:

The possibilities for applied use are intriguing. If I can find a way to export my content from Second Life and import it into OpenSim, then there’s a chance that I can take Abbotts Aerodrome and all of my creations with me should Second Life or its economy falter. Because it’s hosted locally, and therefore private, I could use OpenSim for simulations, demonstrations, and presentations for work-related projects.

Sim-on-a-Stick makes OpenSim approachable to an average user. It requires little in the way of technical skills to set up, and it’s completely self-contained so that it can be easily carried with you on your keychain. Everything really is better on a stick.

Having noticed a bit of Twitter buzz about Kitely, the latest Second Life spin-off, I decided to investigate. Unlike the other spin-off worlds, Kitely targets Facebook users by letting anyone with a Facebook account create a single-region, SL-based virtual world. My impression is that if you want more than that, you’ll need to start buying up their virtual currency to pay for it.

Arriving at their site, I clicked the link to “log in using Facebook”, which is essentially adds Kitely as a Facebook app with full permission to access all of your Facebook account. If you’re at all concerned about privacy or identity theft, this is a point of concern already. Any app to which you hand over the keys to your personal info can essentially mine your data or post on your behalf. However, since my Facebook account is largely free of info that I need to hide, I went ahead and agreed.

The next problematic step, after creating the world and naming it (in my case, it’s named “Terra”), is that to enter the world, you need two things:

• A Second Life client installed on your computer.
• A “Kitely plugin”, which is an installer that you download and run.

That you need a Second Life client isn’t a problem for anyone already in Second Life, but that’s a big step for a lot of casual Facebook users. Also, there isn’t an obvious link for users to download the SL client, but maybe I just missed that.

The Kitely plugin is an installer for a small program that launches the SL client to connect to a particular Kitely world. Now, if you’ve ever connected to a grid other than the default Second Life grid (“Aditi”), you know that you can do this manually at the SL login screen, so the “plugin” is simply a convenience to users who are less technically inclined.

I did have strong reservations about installing this plugin, but mainly that’s a trust issue. As in, do I trust Kitely enough that I’m certain there’s no malware in the plugin, for example. I installed it despite my concern, because there are no instructions on how to connect to a Kitely world without the plugin.

Once in my new world, Terra, it was perfectly familiar. I had an avatar, a male one, though I hadn’t been presented with any choices there, and a tiny round island in a vast ocean. It looked like my world was ready to be terraformed and filled with goodies.

The first thing I tried, of course, wasn’t the inventory, but the physics. I rezzed a cube, turned on physics, and dropped the cube from a height. The result: not good. It rubberbanded a few times while falling and bouncing, and oddly ended up in the exact spot where I rezzed it. At a guess, that kind of physics time dilation is a sign that they’re hosting way too many sims per server, and the physics engine is simply overloaded.

Next test: I put a simple airplane flight script into the cube. I encountered a couple of odd bugs in the script editor, where it wouldn’t let me paste overtop of existing text, but I worked around that and compiled successfully. Great… time to fly. I sat on the cube, which gave a status message, as my script should, so that meant the script was running. So far so good.

Touching the throttle, though, led to my avatar being mashed into the sim corner underwater with the camera flailing all over. Standing didn’t work, and teleport home resulted in an error message. So that was my first encounter with Kitely. Technically speaking, the performance falls well short of where it should be to be a usable SL-based VW.

But beyond the technical issues, I have to question the purpose of Kitely. What advantage does Kitely offer a user over Second Life? Certainly, Facebook users can log into Kitely with an existing user ID, but is that really much of a convenience? The Second Life sign-up process is easy and free. Where Kitely seems to suggest that you will eventually have to buy Kitely currency to use their service, you never need to drop a cent in Second Life unless you want to buy land or content.

And this brings up another question. Where does the content come from? Second Life’s user-created content is rich, vast, and arguably matured. While it is possible to upload an entire region based on an OAR file (an entire region ripped from an SL-based VW and saved to a file), the vast majority of Facebook users will arrive to their new virtual world with nothing but the virtual clothes on their back. In this area, Second Life seems to have the clear advantage.

Privacy might be an area in which Kitely offers an advantage, in that you can control who comes in, but Second Life offers that ability as well, albeit only to estate owners.

In the end, I’m unconvinced that Kitely is a viable product. It technically falls well short of Second Life itself, but in fairness, maybe the performance issue will be rectified with more money for hardware, and if it’s used for purely social reasons, like standing around chatting, I’m sure it would be perfectly adequate. And bugs can be worked out, given time. The key issue is that it fails to address any specific user need that Second Life doesn’t already provide or exceed. And for that reason,  I think that Kitely just won’t fly.