Blue Mars Launches Light Client for Mac/PC With Google Street View Feature to Put Avatars in RL Locations

My former colleagues at Avatar Reality just put out a new light client for Blue Mars for Mac and PC (as I mentioned was coming a couple months ago) and it's now available in Beta -- click here to download it. Botgirl Questi recently did, and below, shows off what looks like its coolest feature: Integration with Google Street View, so you can chat with several other avatars in real world settings. Ms. Questi chose the oddest, most oddly appropriate location:

Demo of New Blue Mars Lite: How to Visit Virtual Linden Lab from Botgirl Questi on Vimeo

The client is under 50 megs (much smaller than the original client, which was over a couple hundred), and is designed to run on pretty much any laptop (though your mileage may vary.) It's integrated with the larger full client Blue Mars experience, so you can access your pre-existing friends list and inventory from it too. As a former consultant and ongoing pal of the Avatar team (past and present), I'm quite biased of course, but overall I think it's a good direction for client-dependent 3D worlds to take. Will be interesting to see how it compares to the light web/tablet client Linden Lab announced was in development last weekend.

Comments

[Hitomi Tiponi]

That is actually quite neat. I could see this being fun as an iPod/Android app, but am not sure if it would seem that great on a laptop.

[Laro]

the video sums up pretty well the problem of blue mars and sl: ok, I am here, and what am I gonna do now? ... and jumping on a car gets boring too after 2 minutes ...

[Seymore Steamweaver]

uglies app icon ever.

Really freaking cool concept though. Cooler than walking around some imperfect paris sim in SL.

[Stone Semyorka]

Clever idea for integrating RL into the scene. Looks nice and works smoothly. But where are the avatar movement control instructions in detail?

[Eddi Haskell]

At first try, I actually thought this application was a bit gimmicky. But it has great potential. I took a walking tour around Brisbane Australia yesterday, a place I want to visit -- I could have navigated this directly on Google Earth, but somehow, watching my avatar move made this much more realistic. It also has cool social networking potential, somehow being on site in a realistic environment makes the socialization richer.

I am jumping ahead about 30 years now -- thinking about having a real life me as an avatar, or more likely, an idealized version of myself walking about a real time city scene, perhaps interacting with real world residents of the city for social or business purposes, in a holographic environment, and pressing virtual reality to its next dimension. Although this Blue Mars Client technology might appear gimmicky now, at some point in the future, it will seem remarkably prescient.