Tateru's Monday Reality Mix

Tateru Nino's weekly take on mixed reality...

A well-known coder creates giant bacteria in Second Life, as he assesses the usefulness of the virtual world for science and scientists on behalf of Nature, the renowned science magazine. Giant 3D bacteria. How cool is that?

Also this week, hooking up with movie tickets through Second Life, a brand new spin on our mixed reality metrics, showings of New York contemporary art, car promotions, and miniaturized virtual countries; all after the fold.

Mixed Reality Science

Matt Bidulph is assessing Second Life for Nature Magazine, in deliciously empirical ways. Physical microbiology is transformed into virtual macrobiology as Matt renders individual cells in Second Life. The original data is taken from four-nanometer scans of the real cells. Bidulph works on making constructs of these cells that are large enough to walk around in and examine in detail. He also imports a quakeworld model or two for good measure.

Matt Biddulph shows off his work in a properly buzzword compliant presentation at the Google Code Jam. VRML always gets a laugh. Take two minutes to watch the video.  Extended blog post on Biddulph's SL project here.

Biddulph is working with Nature to evaluate Second Life as a useful platform for scientists, everything from collaboration and conferences to data-visualisation, as we have seen.

Mixed Reality Movie Tickets

A virtual environment, streaming video, and web-linking. It's all about getting bums on seats as is said in the Commonwealth countries. While box-office takings continue to hit new records, the motion picture industry is concerned that new media is drawing bums... err people away from the cinemas.

On an island shaped like a movie-ticket (or at least, to me, what movie tickets looked like 30 years ago), MovieTickets.com has built a large cineplex to show trailers and promote ongoing and upcoming films.

I didn't recognize any of the films on display, but I took in a trailer or two (barely, on my ailing PC) and found something interesting to consider. They've got a convenient clickable link to their website. Although I'd really much rather be able to get my tickets with L$, it's probably a bit complex to do at the present time. Besides, the whole setup is primarily USA only.

There's free popcorn and those blue/red 3D glasses, though -- because you know we've all been missing out on 3D!

Mixed Reality Traffic

Each week we build an aggregate mixed-reality metric* from the traffic figures of several notable sites, and match it to figures for a selection of "native" content (NCI, The Shelter, YadNI's Junkyard, the Ivory Tower of Primitives). Several suggestions have come in for improving the overall figures, to make more of an apples vs apples comparison between the sites.

The basic figure used is the Linden Lab parcel traffic figure which is a trap-door function. That is, while the result itself is derived from the actual behaviour of avatars, there's no way to work the number backwards to give you anything more than a relative number, and if an avatar steps outside the property line before a certain point, they may not be counted at all. It has been pointed out by keen avatar-watchers that smaller parcels are prejudiced against, and the parcel size should be corrected for.

The resulting corrected figure gives us more an idea about hold or retention per square meter. As Jacek Antonelli puts it, “A measure of how efficiently interesting the land is.”

Let's take a look at how that changes up our rankings compared to last week:

• •AOL Pointe: 85.91
• The L word: 27.39
• Circuit City: 27.30
• Sears: 17.70
• Nissan: 9.46
• Thomson training: 6.65
• Usability Island: 4.02
• Magnatune: 3.40
• Adidas: 2.11
• IBM: 2.88
• Pontiac: 1.91
• Sony BMG: 1.58
• Cisco: 0.83
• Reebok: Closed to the public

Tateru's Overall Mixed Reality Index: 14.70

• The Shelter: 725.31
• NCI: 411.65
• YadNI's Junkyard: 374.95
• Ivory Tower of Primitives: 49.18

Tateru's Native Reality Index: 390.27

This certainly paints a much more interesting picture of the relative merits of the sites - of course, using the Linden traffic metrics as a basis still weirds things up to some degree, and it is unlikely that we'll be able to get the whole picture, but this appears to work better as a measure of the actual holding efficiency of the sites.

Mixed Reality Shorts

• GHava{SL} Center for the Arts inaugural exhibition, "you are here"[sic] shows the work of various contemporary New York artists, selling Second Life prints of the same work. It's a bit of a mixed bag, all things considered, but then a lot of contemporary art can be. Still, even the most jaded and art-hardened souls can probably find at least a few pieces here, among the many, to appeal to them.
• Millions Of Us are running a competition based around the Hammer and Coop promotion - if you're outside the USA, like me - you might not have much idea what this is all about, but it apparently involves Mini Coopers. They still make those? Who knew?
• The ING financial services group is working on Virtual Holland, a miniature mash-up of the real thing, featuring art, tourism, business, not-for-profit enterprises, and - of course - the iconic tulip. There are two sims being sculpted on the map, but as yet, neither one is open to the public.

  

• Another financial institution, Saxo Bank is opening its doors, but not just for show. Saxo intends to allow people to actually use their Saxo virtual trader accounts through from inside Second Life. Initially though, they're establishing a presence, with a focus on games, information and entertainment. Integration with their Virtual Trader system is upcoming. I can't help wondering how all that is going to work. Hopefully the answer is "simply and securely". We shall have to see.

* What we're doing is taking the Linden Lab traffic figure, and dividing it by the size of the parcel. After all, a traffic value of 1000 is considerably more significant for a relatively small parcel size than it would be for a parcel that covers a full sim. Since the raw figure is based on avatars remaining within the parcel continuously for a minimum of five minutes, as well as factoring in what percentage of their total online time for the day was spent there, we use this to yield an 'draw factor' per square metre, reflecting how well the parcel not only attracts, but retains avatars. For example, the NCI traffic was 41,495, on a parcel area of 10080sqm.  41,495 divided by 10080 (and multiplied by 100, for convenience) yields 411.65 (and change). Many thanks to Jacek Antonelli and SignpostMarv Martin for helping examine the traffic metric issues from multiple angles.

All images by Ms. Nino.  Got a mixed reality tip for Tateru?  E-mail her at [email protected].

Comments

[Patch Lamington]

Mini Coopers arent the ones of 20 years ago, but the fancy new model as seen in the remake of "The Italian Job". Small sporty and quite fashionable in the UK.

Meanwhile, how about widening the net of your 'native reality index'. Basically, the four places you mention are four of the most popular and permanently busy non-sexual locations in all of SL. How about a third index - pick the last 10 sim of the week sims from Metaverse Messenger and measture the traffic that they get.
(Did I suggest this before? Ive got a touch of deja-vu)

Give the commercial boys a chance
:-)

[Tateru Nino]

Measuring an entire sim is quite time-consuming, unless we're talking about what is - essentially - a single build.

I *did* specifically single out non-profits, because whatever business or site I list is inevitably going to get a bit more exposure than ones that.. well... don't. Of course I could have easily pulled individual sites in; Canimal, Celestial Studios, Dazzle, Preen, Silentsparrow; and that might be a good idea.

I've already been on the receiving end of a hundred "Why wasn't I included?" requests.

So, sure. Individual sites (so I don't go nuts collecting data across many sites in a sim - or in multiple locations - both are already a problem), if you can think of a matching criteria that doesn't cause a lot of people to cry foul.