While the Nintendo Wii has garnered attention from consumers and media alike for its innovative motion-based controls, Linden Lab is experimenting with a new way to interact with its Second Life virtual world with nothing more than a Webcam. Codenamed Segalen, the technology makes use of 3D Webcams, such as the ones from 3DVsystems, to track user's body gestures to let them navigate and edit within the environment.
In a YouTube video (embedded below), Second Life creator Mitch Kapor and Kapor Enterprises Inc. employee Philippe Bossut demonstrate the basics of moving around the 3D virtual world without the use of a keyboard or mouse--the traditional interface for most games. They mention that they took some cues from the way people use the Segway personal transport device to map out people's gestures and posture into a 3D world. The technology can also track facial gestures and match them onscreen in real time.
On Bossut's blog he notes that the project has only been in "real" development for a little more than three weeks. Second Life users looking to get their hands on it will have to wait, however, the 3D cameras in use for the project are still not readily available to consumers.
Similar efforts to use Webcams for gaming include the XBOX 360 and its Live Vision camera as well as the Playstation's EyeToy series, although neither had the 3D hardware capability that will give Kapor's Handsfree 3D its extra dimension of spacial control.
Philip Rosedale, CEO of Second Life creator Linden Lab and founder of the virtual world, announced Friday that he will step down from his post.
He assured Second Life enthusiasts that he would remain on full-time at the company as chairman of the board.
Rosedale, known in Second Life by his avatar's name Philip Linden, did not provide a concrete date for his change in role, only saying that the company has "decided to search for a new CEO."
(Credit:
James Martin/CNET News.com)
He continued: "This is a decision driven by my desire to best grow SL and match my job to both our needs and my passions. We don't have a specific timeline, and I don't expect my job to change while we are looking for someone."
It sounds like the company is looking for a veteran business professional rather than a futurist visionary. "I feel that the most important contributions I have made and will continue to make to Second Life are related to building both the product and the company through my direct contributions to vision, strategy, and design," Rosedale wrote in a post on the official Second Life blog.
"As we grow, the role of our CEO will increasingly be to hire and grow the right team--to lead and help the company scale--to thousands of people and tens of millions of users of Second Life."
Corporate upheaval at Linden Lab has been going on for some time now. In December, Chief Technology Officer Cory Ondrejka left the company, and leaked e-mails seemed to indicate that Rosedale had fired him over creative differences.
Second Life, meanwhile, has been going through some rough patches outside of the boardroom. A series of banking scandals earlier this year led the virtual world to effectively ban in-world banks. Issues with vandalism and political radicalism briefly shook the community, and it has still failed to rebound from the backlash that followed in the wake of breathless media hype about virtual worlds.
These days, when you hear about Second Life in the mainstream media, it's coming from dweeby Dwight Schrute on The Office. Linden Lab likely hopes to pull in a CEO who can change that.
Over on Dean Takahashi's San Jose Mercury News blog today, he reported on the discovery by a pair of security researchers that it may be possible to steal Second Life users' in-world currency.
That would be a big problem, of course, because the currency, known as Linden dollars, are directly convertible to U.S. dollars.
According to Takahashi's story, hackers Charles Miller and Dino Dai Zovi told him that they have uncovered an exploit that could allow someone to fleece Second Life residents of their Linden dollars.
The exploit is related to Apple's QuickTime software, which is used to display videos in Second Life.
"The exploit works because Second Life allows users to embed videos or pictures on their characters or their virtual property," Takahashi wrote. "When someone comes nearby and is within view of the object, the Second Life software activates QuickTime so it can play the video or picture. In doing so, QuickTime directs the Second Life software to a Web site. By exploiting the flaw in QuickTime, the hackers can direct the Second Life software to a malicious Web site that then allows them to take over the Second Life avatar.
The end result of that could be that a malicious hacker could then strip the avatar of any Linden dollar holdings.
For its part, Takahashi wrote, Linden Lab told him that the exploit is easily patched. Nonetheless, the company put up a warning on its blog Friday.
Takahashi said that Linden Lab told him, "We were alerted a short time ago by Internet security professionals that a QuickTime exploit has been discovered which may allow an attacker to crash or exploit any user of the QuickTime software from Apple. The Second Life viewer uses QT to play videos and therefore this exploit could potentially affect the residents of Second Life. This exploit affects all platforms that use QuickTime and, to date, Apple has not released a fix for it."
To date, however, Takahashi wrote, Linden Lab said it isn't aware of anyone actually using the exploit to rob anyone.
For residents of Second Life, then, the solution may be to avoid holding onto large numbers of Linden dollars.
As I told Takahashi when he asked me to comment for his story on Linden dollar security, "As one SL business owner said to me...you should always have a backup plan in case of a glitch that causes you to lose everything, because you never know what might happen. And in the case of Linden dollars, that likely means doing regular (Linden dollar/U.S. dollar) exchanges so as not to keep too many Lindens in your SL account. You can't lose what's not there."
Griefing, like this prankster's 'Super Mario' barrage, is one of the reasons behind 'Second Life's' more-than-occasional server problems. To be fair, this Mario army did not crash the virtual world.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)Virtual world Second Life, the centerpiece of this weekend's Second Life Community Convention in Chicago, has occasionally come under fire for its outages. Scheduled downtime, unpredicted outages, server crashes due to onslaughts of thousands of Super Mario graphics flooding the tubes (those are from griefers, natch)--it's a headache for newbies and avid residents alike.
But in his keynote at the convention on Saturday morning, Philip Rosedale, the founder and CEO of Second Life parent company Linden Lab, suggested that we all look on the bright side. The virtual world is active about 90 percent of the time, he said.
"If you look at our overall service performance lately, we're sort of somewhere above 90 percent availability once you include the planned downtimes for updates and you include the unplanned stuff that we seem to be doing to ourselves," he said self-deprecatingly. Then he added, "That's one nine, and it's better to have one nine than not any nines at all."
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