The last podcast from Metareality was in April. In this cast Kim/Gianna is saying they plan to be back doing more regular casts, back to the weekly format. You can listen to the cast here: Weak Sauce.

This is an uncensored audio. No bleeping, so there is some profane language… actually a lot.

I remind you, my usual warning is: I paraphrase what I hear and make no attempt to transcribe the audio. Listen to the audio before you react to anything I’ve written.

Index

02:00 TOS Discussion starts. Karl describes the change as the Lab becoming a co-owner in all that you create and upload to Second Life™. Karl rants a bit, not much, and I have to agree with his points. Spot on little rant in my view.

One of the points made in the discussion is the Lab made this change and no one left. We know a few did, but for practical purposes the statement is accurate. I found that a bit surprising. I expected more outrage.

Karl says a number of the creative types he has talked to, and Kim too, have said their sole income is Second Life sales. Most of the creative types feel there is nocompetition, so they are stuck with no place else to go. Consider. In-Worldz has just released the information that their concurrent user count is peaking in the 400’s. SL’s is about 60K around 2PM each day.

But, there is competition. As pointed out in the cast, Unity store is selling avatar skins for US$20. In SL we see nice skins selling for L$800 to L$3,000 or US$3 to $11. While there are likely fewer sales at the Unity store, one only needs half as many sales. There are choices even if we do not see them as real competition to SL.

From the Lab’s perspective they made the right move changing the TOS.

05:00 Karl provides an analogy using Microsoft’s Word. I disagree with the analogy. But, the point is reasonably well made by it. Would people accept such a change from MS? Probably not.

07:30 Gianna is talking about how she has out grown SL, but there is no place better.

08:30 Karl is pointing out how the TOS changes the value of the company. All our content becomes an asset and increases the book value of SL.

10:00 Karl on trust. Just try to imagine two lawyers writing a contract and one telling the other ‘trust me’ on some point. Right. That would never work.

12:00 Discussion on High Fidelity, Phillip Rosedale’s new virtual world, starts at this time mark.

15:00 Talking about the High Fidelity doing distributed processing, like the SETI project does. Gianna wonders if people would really assign their computer’s spare time to the project. That discussion could lead to endless speculation. We’ll only know if it ever happens.

17:30 Facebook Open Academy. An open-source-coding thing, which I suppose, is something like Google’s Summer of Code projects. With Facebook’s thing people will get college credits.

22:00 Play Station 4 is out. See the video above. Reed sees the PS4 and XBox1 as devices obsolete before they even reach the retail market. XBox1 can only do 720p while most users have 1024p screens. Makes no sense to Reed for them to have old tech.

25:15 Steam/Valve’s modular game machines are going to smoke other game machines. Its market is not the console market. Read: Steam Machine. The Metareality team seems to have missed this aspect of the Steam Machine.

26:50 Karl starts on PS4 and the hardware verses community. Karl uses the comparison of Apple and Samsung phones. Samsung has the advanced tech and open development community. But, Apple has marketed so well it remains the more popular phone.

31:00 Kim talks about PS4.

33:15 Discussion turns to the Steam Game Machine. 35:45 Steam Machine is the #1 development target now.

37:00 PS4 Social aspect. I suppose this is like the new Share in SL Viewers. Battle Field 4 is used to illustrate how much people want to share stuff, check YouTube for examples. There is 5+ million hits for Battle Field 4. That is a lot of sharing.

41:15 Oculus Rift discussion starts. Games will be much more scary because of the immersive quality. Imagine being completely immersed in a virtual world and looking up at a T-Rex. I remember seeing a life size and very realistic T-Rex at San Diego’s Wild Animal Park, now Safari Park (Union Trib). It was a freaky experience. I expect the final Oculus VR will be similar.

People that Karl knows have understood people are saying Oculus is amazing. But, still they are amazed and surprised by the actual experience of using it.

44:15 Simulator Sickness. Augmented reality glasses, castAR. Karl mentions Jimmy Kimmel demo’ing PS4. I think they meant Jimmy Fallon. I can’t find a Kimmel version on YouTube.

46:30 OBDUCTION – Karl used to work for Cyan Worlds, Obduction’s authors, as Technical Director. Karl figured out the special rendering for Cyan’s game Riven. There is some history given about Cyan, but no one in this discussion knows much, if anything, about Obduction.

Obduction is based in the Unreal game engine and will have Oculus support.

Obduction has funded and reached the first stretch goal. US$1,321,306.

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