| Virtual IM | 2004-04-13 19:19 2 comments |
 by Flemming FunchBBC, via Marc's Voice: A Matrix Online game is being released that includes built-in AOL Instant Messaging. That means that anyone with AIM, ICQ or iChat will be able to receive messages from inside the game in real time. Nothing technically very remarkable about that, but it is somehow intriguing. Links between virtual and real worlds. Of course one can take it further, to be able to make voice or video calls between a virtual world and the normal tools on my desktop. Would I then be looking at an avatar in the middle of chasing a monster? Reminds me of AlphaWorld 8 years ago, where I was trying to figure out how to create meaningful links with the outside world. One could use outside graphics files to paste on signs and virtual screens. So I could make "fake" graphics files that ran a program on my server, which would IM me that somebody just came by and looked at my building. And I could of course have made the picture show some dynamically generated information in return. |