Over on Social Times I have a story on ResLive, an upcoming virtual world developed by Adam Frisby (known as Adam Zaius in Second Life), a major developer in SL and OpenSim. Now in early Beta, the post includes special invite codes for a live show at 3pm SLT, so if you're around, you might want to give it a try today. It uses Unity 3D for the graphics (which are pretty impressive, for the web), and OpenSimulator as a backend, and as I note in the article, ResLive seems to solve a lot of the problems that have bedeviled performers and fans of live music in Second Life.
Here's what Adam says when I ask him what ResLive offers Second Life users in particular:
"[L]et me preface first with a 'We're still really really early on -- what you are seeing is a work in progress!', BUT:
- Bigger events -- we built this out of the event we did with Long Range back in 2006 in SL. We want to get crowds of hundreds if not thousands at a single event.
- Shinier regions (this isnt so much visible just yet I know), but our engine supports a lot of very fancy tech which we're slowly putting into practice; graphically we'll be somewhere around Blue Mars in a couple of months (just a matter of completing the art and polishing it to an acceptable degree.)
- We're working on a lot of stuff specifically designed around the needs/wants of live performers, and their audiences; in-world visualizers, better dance animation possibilities (such as multi-person animations, which are hacky at best in SL.)
- High quality acts -- we're not closed to anyone, but because of the people we are associating with, we're able to put names on our roster which are recognized globally; which we hope will also bring in some fresh faces and people who havent touched a virtual world before."
I just spent the past hour dancing at ResLive and I must say it was pretty cool. They have a great UI so it's easy to figure out how to get around, dress, etc. Plus it's built upon the Unity platform which needs no introduction. I think Adam has a hit on his hands. I can see it quickly filling up with Indie bands once the word starts to spread.
Posted by: Tinsel Silvera | Friday, August 20, 2010 at 03:30 PM
Wow. Live music specialty grid on ResLive, 45k prims on a sim in Inworldz for a fraction of the monthly tiers, and ooh..... Philip is offering us nothing really with music, meshes maybe in a year and display names to go with cartoon voice morphing.
Wake-up Gilbert. The Lilliputians are getting out their knives and forks...
Posted by: Exuberance LaFleur | Friday, August 20, 2010 at 09:03 PM
The sharding is a logical solution to doing a broadcast-style performance to hundreds or thousands of people. But here's a thought -- there's no reason the 'shards' have to be identical. You could have the same performer or band performing simultaniously in hundreds of different venues without ever leaving the studio.
Heck, with a bit of tweaking, I bet we could scale the avatars down to the point where they could perform in little box stages in people's living rooms.
Now that's what I call 3D TV.
Posted by: Arcadia Codesmith | Monday, August 23, 2010 at 06:50 AM
I don't think he owns much inSL anymore - they used to manage Azure Estates but that was a few years ago
Adam was a huge core developer of OpenSim three years ago and this current venture looks pretty interesting
Posted by: Ener Hax | Sunday, July 01, 2012 at 02:03 AM