Van Gogh and the User Generated Content buzz 7
Inviting you into a metaverse without user-generated content would be a little like inviting Van Gogh to a paint-by-numbers party. Individual creativity is the key to a thriving, evolving online community; it’s also the lifeblood of a virtual world, even a young one. Of course Just Leap In will support our users’ content; the big question is how we’ll do it, and how we plan to set ourselves apart.
In our Just Leap In world (the InVerse) UGC can take many forms, ranging from personalizing spaces and props with pictures, textures and video (as we currently support) to the ability to leave comments and communicate with other community members (coming soon).
Then there is the deeper form of UGC where people can create original 3D geometry and textures for their use, or to share with others. It’s this last aspect I’m posting about today.
In the near future, we will be releasing a set of tools to a small beta group that will allow 3D content creators to add new assets into the JLI world, and we’ll do it in a way so that we’re not building a walled garden. Our direction is to leverage open standards and existing professional tools and skillsets—not to create yet another set of modeling tools and techniques for people to learn.
By using industry-standard tools for data transport and shader visualization, we can enable creators to be quickly productive at a high level of quality and use their familiar, mature commercial 3D authoring products or free/OSS packages. Following this path also allows content created in other contexts to be easily adapted and imported in to the JLI world.
Ultimately, as we roll out our pipeline over time, it allows us to focus on the creative new features for users in the JLI world, and not writing expansive 3D tools and reinventing wheels.
Our published toolset will be a twin of the tools our internal artists use, which means content creators will have the same ability to create content that we do. Since we are all using the same tools, we will be more responsive to fine tuning and expanding our users’ productivity and keeping them up-to-date as the tools they use evolve.
For the technically inclined, our first release of UGC 3D tools will include a set of XSI properties, RT shaders, a custom fbx exporter that adds some JLI ‘sauce’ and a Mac/PC JLI viewer, with full documentation. Users of Maya/Max/Blender/etc. can tap into our fbx pathway to create JLI-compatible data as well. In subsequent releases, we’ll be considering adding Collada support, which in combination with fbx will further broaden the number of 3D packages that can be supported. We are also open to collaborating with third party tool creators to broaden further the abilities for our users to create.
Let’s continue this conversation in the comments. Let us know your thoughts, and what you’d like to see.
-Nereus
Director of Visual Development | Leap In Entertainment
Debutante week roundup
Woman: Larry, you must meet our daughter, the debutante. She just came out.
Rodney Dangerfield: Whoa! Put her back in, she’s not done yet!
- The Simpsons, “Burns, Baby Burns“
Thank you so much to Consiliera (“No learning curve at all – anybody can create anything with it in minutes”), DigitalFemme, WangXiang, UniversVirtuels, Mal Burns (“This is what we consider closest to an actual metaverse “inside” the web”), The DDM Collective, Mondes virtuels, and everyone who’s taken some time to embed a space or comment on their site or blog during our debutante week. We’re so grateful to you, and we’ve learned a lot from your comments already – the good, the bad, and the ugly. :)
Watching the tweets, friendfeeds, and other microreviews our first users have pointed us to, we’ve learned a lot. We’re getting a heartwarming response from some quarters:
Exploring Just Leap In and um … wow.”
Gaby Bekwitz a.k.a. Consiliera writes:
One week old, no customizable avatars, no multi-user fuctionality yet, but the graphics are excellent, fast, with realistic lighting, physics and much more…and it all runs in any normal web browser as a lightweight plugin. No learning curve at all – anybody can create anything with it in minutes.
Mal Burns writes:
This is what we consider closest to an actual metaverse “inside” the web. Although we believe the web will ultimately be viewed from “inside” a metaverse on your desktop, “Just leap In” displays the graphic wealth of places like Second Life even at this alpha stage.
At the same time, we’ve got a ways to go. We’ve seen several comments from users who aren’t running our supported/majority browsers (Firefox 2/3 and IE 7 on Windows and Mac) and aren’t getting a good experience – or any experience! We know that you’ll be waiting for multiuser avatar support – we’ll be putting more controllable avatars into the live beta within a few short weeks. And we know that at least a couple of you are seeing 3D hardware issues, and we’ll be working with you to sort them out in the next Player updates. Like any early beta, we really appreciate your patience.
On the visual side, we’re basking in having a bit of a Flickr presence out there. And that YouTube video is still pointing in the right direction.
Until later!
o_O leapfrog
Beta update
The first week of the expanded early beta is going great! We’ve been checking out all the interesting spaces people have been building with JLI, and hearing some great feedback from the community. So far the response has been very positive among our rapidly growing group of beta testers. We’ve even seen more than 1000 hits on a YouTube video about JLI:
It’s a very exciting experience for us, watching the rubber hit the road for the first time. We’re very happy to see people having fun with all the stuff we’ve put in our toybox over the last several months. We’ve also been pleasantly surprised to see people using objects in ways we hadn’t thought of to achieve effects we hadn’t foreseen. That’s what’s so exciting about this kind of project; the community is always ready to innovate and help us create something bigger than the sum of its parts.
We’re also happy to be weathering the new load on our servers without any suffering any major earthquakes. We’re adding accounts everyday as we increase the size of the beta test, and busily working away at the list of upcoming features:
- - Multiple spaces per user
- - Controllable human avatars (followed by full customization and other enhancements)
- - Comments and “notes”
- - Total custom surfacing for objects & spaces
- - Uploadable audio
- - Deep social network integration
- - The obligatory “much more”
In the future, we will also be integrating 3D user-generated content – with a commitment to open standards – and looking for contributions from third-party developers. If you’re interested in testing these particular features when they’re ready, please get in touch.
The user AngryBeth posted this image on flickr yesterday. Well, gosh. That’s how we feel about you, too.
Thanks to all of you for helping this beta go so well. Great things are still ahead.
“Infirmo”
Community Guide
Just Leap In
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