Right on the heels of my last post about Second Life a couple of Second Life alternatives are starting to surface. I have long known that there were alternate virtual worlds as well, but as I recall the problem lies in the fact that they are just not as big, nor are there nearly as many ‘other’ voices to enrich the experience.
That being said, Suezanne Baskerville posted a comment on my blog from this morning and like any self respecting blogger I went to check out her site. I was pleased to see she was very involved in virtual worlds, but another one I had not heard of yet… HiPiHi. I will leave you to check out her blog for more information… I just know that it is a competitor.
Then on the heels of that I read that another company, Croquet, is coming to the UNC campus to do a presentation next week. From their website:
Croquet is a powerful open source software development environment for the creation and large-scale distributed deployment of multi-user virtual 3D applications and metaverses that are (1) persistent (2) deeply collaborative, (3) interconnected and (4) interoperable. The Croquet architecture supports synchronous communication, collaboration, resource sharing and computation among large numbers of users on multiple platforms and multiple devices.
Hmmm… not sure what to think about that. Perhaps I will just have to check it out. This all leads me to ask… what other alternatives are there out there? Are any of these alternatives more focused on educational uses?
2 Comments
You might want to see if you can get a demo of Quak, the commercial project that uses the Croquet system, and see if you can get Sun to find somebody that is running a publicly accessible instance of their MPK20 system. Whne I asked Sun about MPK20 they referred me to a place to get source code to compile in order to tun the virtual world on my own server. Maybe if they get enough requests from end users for a test bed they’ll get the idea that the people that want to use virtual worlds don’t all have servers and know how or want to compile software.
For that matter, the old virtual world Active Worlds might be a good one to use for eductional systems, and the Forterra company at http://www.forterrainc.com/ might be of interest.
A good source of information for real cash economy worlds and alternatives to Second Life is http://www.rceworlds.com