Yantrakaal

I am often asked a question on whether it is possible for SecondLife to be a source of revenue and my answers is simple : depends on what you do there. Like the Web, SL is a platform and a platform does not make money. There are websites that are a source of revenue and there are websites that are purely informational or educative and SL is no different. I believe that one of the biggest sources of revenue in SL could be online games. Games are a worldwide industry that draws billions of dollars of revenue and the popularity of this industry lies in the fact that Microsoft, with XBOX, Sony with PS3 and Nintendo have developed specialist hardware devices for people to access these games. If you look closely, the fundamental architecture of the games that run on these platforms is very similar to the 3D Virtual Universe technology that is the backbone of SecondLife. It is all a matter of positioning and moving 'solid' artifacts through a virtual space and making them interact wi...

After all the murder and mayhem around SEZ and the obnoxious quota regime, there is a ray of hope that things can improve for the better in India. First of course the news Infosys and its 50% growth in quarterly profits. More than Infosys, it is a great sign that things are going well for outsourcing industry in general and the IT industry in particular. But IT adds only 5% to the GDP and touches perhaps 3% people in the country. For the other 97% there is a bigger ray of hope as well thanks to two initiatives taken by the Supreme Court. First : They have tried to free the police from the tyranny of the local party bosses. Policemen are corrupt but not all ... there are some honest law enforcers still left but the moment they do anything good, they are transferred out of the jurisdiction by party bosses whose toes have been tread on. With the formation of the police board in each state, this should be minimised to a large extent. The Home Minister and his cronies will not be able to ...

My last post of of 2006 had proposed ( 'predicted' ) that if SecondLife has to thrive and become the defacto standard for the Virtual Universe, then there is no option but to take the open source route. Proprietory products, especially when they are so very useful, cannot stand up to the tide of popularity that sweeps in with Open Source products. I am not sure if someone in Linden Labs heard me or read my blog ... or perhaps it is that fools seldom differ .. but I am delighted to note that earlier this week, the Second Life client has been put under open source GPL. Anyone can download and modify the product and if their modifications are good and useful, everyone else, including Linden Labs will use it. This is stupendous news. This is now like the browser and the way it has become an open product. Now we will have hundreds of developers working on enhancements and no other Virtual Universe product will have the werewithal to stand up to this tide. Which is wonderful. As this...

The SEZ policy is a prime example of the crony-capitalism that hides behind the pseudo-socialistic facade that hangs over India. However it is not something that can be wished away. How can we make the make best use of it. But before that, a quick analysis of the genesis of the current mess. Special Economic Zones were dreamt up by the Indian bureaucracy as a way to emulate China's success story and had two design points. (a) India's notoriously rigid, inflexible and anti-market labour laws will be relaxed so that the nation could compete with China's manufacturing muscle. (b) Tax exemptions will be allowed to make India's companies more competitive. However, bureacrats propose and politicians dispose and so the first casualty of the policy was the labour laws. Faced with the implacable ire of the miniscule, but politically significant organised labour lobby ... the idea of relaxing the labour laws was summarily thrown out of the first available window. That ...

2006 is the year when the idea of Virtual Universes went mainstream. Massively Multiuser Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) like Everquest has been around for about three years and three dimensional virtual reality, whether with physical devices or with technology like VRML, has been around even longer, but it had always been a niche market -- at best adopted in the gaming community. However with the advent of Linden Labs and the release of their SecondLife platform, the concept of a virtual universe has now become the defacto platform of the future. What the World Wide Web was in 1996 is what Second Life is in 2006 ... and this time, the rate of penetration and adoption is even faster. Describing SecondLife is an exercise of (a) redundancy and (b) futility. It is redundant because almost every magazine and journal has now described it in great detail and Reuters has a full time bureau chief reporting regularly from SecondLife. It is also futile because Second Life is an experience ....

As the year 2006 draws to a close, it is interesting to take stock of things that happened and speculate on how these will impact the year ahead .. and in this exercise the one single thing that stands out is SecondLife - The Emergence of Virtual Worlds. Milestones and signposts are seldom recognised when we whiz past them on the highway .. it is only when you have traversed some significant distance, do you realise how important that fork in the road was ... both for those who have taken the right fork and for those who were left behind on the wrong one. To appreciate, the enormous significance of this tectonic movement, one must go back to the year 1995-96 when Netscape went public and the Internet, for all practical purposes was born. The world had not been wired up as comprehensively as yet and we in India got wind of this techTsunami in 1996 when the first few intrepid cybernauts in India set sail on a voyage of discovery. It was voyage of discovery as well as a voyage of faith. V...

MMORPGs in general and SecondLife in general has now become a hot favourite with relatively large parts of the population. As a concept and technology it has few peers and there is no doubt it is at the vanguard of a new wave that leads to the 3D Internet. What next ? The clue lies in the word 3D ! SL is essentially a 3D world that avatars live in, but the limitations of the computer console / video display unit means that 3D has to be represented as 2D grid of pixels. But today, we have technology that can display artefacts in a real 3D format. You can look up the following websites .. http://www.sharp3d.com/products/ or this website ... http://www.research.philips.com/newscenter/archive/2004/3d-display-cebit.html there are other technologies that support such technology .. for example see this http://www.seereal.com/en/index.php These are monitor based 3D technology which can enhance the SecondLife experience signficantly. Moving forward, laser based technology like the one from AIST...