The Blue Mars virtual world announced Flash multimedia integration tools (provided by Avatar Reality, the company behing Blue Mars) enabling developers to provide practically any Flash-based web content to their users, including:
- Videos and TV shows – Youtube™, Hulu™ and more
- Live events – Sports, music, entertainment
- Flash video games – Tetris™ and thousands of others
- Communications tools – Voice and text chat, whiteboards, document sharing
- Stocks and financial data – Tickers and applications
- Commerce/Retail – Ebay™, Amazon™ and most retail outlets with a Flash presence on the web
- Presentations – Demos, simulations
- Educational – Flash applications
Blue Mars wants to be used for entertainment, business, collaboration, media etc.It’s exciting that they enable the integration of Flash content, Flash being a rather universally used web technology. I also appreciate the fact that Blue Mars supports COLLADA, a royalty-free XML schema that enables digital asset exchange within the interactive 3D industry.
I finally managed to bring a brief visit to this world. The graphics are very nice, but of course I had to get used to a new environment. Moving around is easy enough (pointing and clicking somewhere to get there) and chat is easy to use as well.
I missed voice in the few environments I visited (Caledonia, Beach City and the Welcome Area), but as I said, the graphics are remarkable. Something else I missed is the abundance of virtual objects one finds in Second Life, but then again it’s not fair to compare this fledgling virtual world with Second Life.
I also guess one must make a distinction between what Blue Mars as a content creation platform enables you to do, and what developers create – different developers can achieve very different results with the same basic technologies.
I wonder whether Blue Mars will stimulate the use of virtual worlds, or rather will disperse those who are already active in the more established virtual environments. Caledonia is a kind of “Blue Mars colony” of the existing community in Second Life, and it seems they have no intention leaving Second Life – but will the community expand, or will the same people have to deal with the two environments?
Another question is whether Blue Mars will stimulate Linden Lab to go faster in rolling out new features, like more web integration, enabling mesh imports etc. In general I guess competition is a good thing…
How do you see the competition between Second Life and Blue Mars evolve? Will there be a winner? Will it stimulate the use of virtual worlds and eventually make virtual worlds go mainstream?
Roland Legrand
