Under Ball State’s terms of agreement with Avatar Reality, the university will begin to fully operate Blue Mars for non-commercial purposes, expand upon the source code, increase its research and academic initiatives, and enhance the community of Blue Mars. In addition, Ball State will continue to deliver original content on Blue Mars as it has done in the past.
“I am really excited about the future,” Phil Repp, Ball State’s vice president for information technology, said. “Through our division of Hybrid Design Technologies, Ball State will further our position as a national leader in hybrid worlds and their applications to mediated learning technologies. Our reputation in this discipline is such a perfect fit to our institutional history of innovation in teaching and learning.”
The Blue Mars platform, valued at $10 million in research and development, will be used by Ball State University for 3D simulation and research projects beyond the world of gaming.
Since 2009, Ball State’s IDIA has been a leading developer for Blue Mars, employing the virtual platform on projects such as digital laser scans of a centuries-old Buddha and the creation of the Virtual Middletown Project. The project, which ushers visitors via their computers into the world of the early 20th-century Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing Co., is one example of the cultural heritage work possible with Blue Mars. Another is IDIA’s simulation of the 1915 World’s Fair in San Francisco.
It isn’t clear what founding company Avatar Reality Inc will be doing, with less than a dozen staff members left, I imagine that the company will be subsisting on licensing fees, or working on mobile projects.
Let Blue Mars forever be a lesson in not chasing buzz words for the sake of chasing buzz words. It did cloud rendering, augmented reality, became the ‘first 3D virtual iPhone user-generated’ mobile app, and whatever else AR and others called it in its time.
Its a shame because with entry price points of $5, $30, and so on dollars to own much more land for creativity than Second Life, it really showed a lot of promise. But whoever called the shots for some reason abandoned being a Second Life competitor and just went haywire making Blue Mars everything except a Second Life competitor.
My slight bafflement was eased when I discovered the Ball State University is in Muncie, Indiana, and is named for the Ball brothers, local industrialists who put a lot of money into the place, a century ago, when it was the Indiana Normal Institute, training schoolteachers.
So I wonder where this leaves all those who still have a commercial interest in the Blue Mars platform?
That is an excellent question, Fogwoman, but one which I do not yet know the answer to.
The “Sell Currency” link is still in the developer control panel. I don’t have any BLU left to sell but hopefully for those that do Avatar Reality is still going to honor BLU and cash out to everyone’s PayPal. If Blue Mars is going to exist purely for academia now with no commercial activity then it seems BLU is dead and settling that has to happen.
The wording of this acquisition is a bit weird with phrases like “acquired rights” and “partnership”. This seems a tad different than an outright acquisition and Avatar Reality having nothing to do with Blue Mars anymore, but I guess that’s the case more or less.
It’s clearly more complex than a straight sale of the company or the business.
[...] Read the rest at over at the superb dwellonit.taterunino.net AKPC_IDS += "3313,";Popularity: 1% [?] Filed Under: General News Tagged With: blue mars /* [...]
I guess I will find out soon what will happen to the BLU$, as I have 58,000 of them sitting in my account, and I cash out monthly. All my recent sales have been on the iPhone app, but the content hosting is intertwined with the PC virtual world version.
Blue Mars was initially promising but in many ways they replicated all the follies and shortcomings of SL. They never fundamentally understood the metaverse either. As Ezra aptly said, they mostly chased buzzwords. Before Avatar Reality, I didn’t think it was possible to be more indecisive than Linden Lab.
In terms of this transaction, my read on this is simple…
BSU was already heavily invested in BM — they spent a lot of time and money on their builds there which became gone-to-the-world when BM shut down its primary operation. IMO, this agreement was simply a process for them to be able to turn those builds back on for their own internal use since the work they did was already in the can and, for their purposes anyway, ready to go. I note that the announcement came from BSU not BM/AR. I think they mostly wanted to let THEIR donors and supporters know that they have recovered the dollars they directed towards the university’s foray into virtual worlds by getting control of their builds for non-commercial purposes. And good for them for finding the recourse for their constituencies.
As adverse as I am to publicly admitting “I don’t get it”, I never have really understood Blue Mars. The only consolation I receive is that it seems a lot of other people didn’t either.
I tried Blue Mars several times. The interface was even more clunky and non-intuitive than SL. I explored a few “exhibits” and for the most point found them pointless. The whole experience seemed to consist of trying to walk around and looking at pretty builds someone else had made.
I’m sure I missed something there somewhere. But it seemed the entire project just barely got off the launch pad and then just hovered there, engines burning but going nowhere. Then they decided to semi-scuttle the launch, go with phone aps instead, and turned the rocket into a biplane. That’s where I totally lost track of it, as I’m one of those archaic individuals who uses a phone to make phone calls, when I can’t avoid doing so.
I majorly wonder why an institution would spend millions of dollars to obtain such a platform when OpenSim… a much more powerful and viable product… is free. It seems the choice of educational institutions and has a vast complex of support agencies. Blue Marks strikes me somewhat like the Mars space missions: interesting, but… why? It never really succeeded commercially, so why would anyone consider it worth millions of dollars as an investment?
It is a puzzlement. Someone please enlighten me, because as much as I’m usually able to read between the lines and draw a conclusion… I don’t even see the lines themselves on this one. ;D
Having spent a fair amount of time with a lot of SL-based content creators on the Blue Mars project, I think the primary selling point for those who created goods for sale was the IP protection aspects. At the time Blue Mars was being developed, there were a lot of issues going on in SL with copybotting that were not being addressed by LL.
Vehicle and critter creators were excited by the potential demonstrated by the games running the Crysis engine for being able to have very realistic flight, sailing, driving, etc experiences without dealing with sim crossing issues.
For those of us interested in creating events and experiences, the ability of the engine to handle much larger regions and higher avatar loads was very appealing.
All that said, it wound up being a project that was realistically released to the public while still very much in Alpha. Without the ability to make working vehicles, or even give inventory like a notecard to a visitor, anything besides dress-up dolls became a very clunky proposition. Trying to develop a game for Blue Mars visitors that worked within the parameters made event planning in SL look like Sunday in the Park!
Don’t get me wrong, it was a great learning experience for many of us. Most of us lost a bit of money and some of us lost a lot of money, but I think we all learned something
@Wayfinder
OpenSim isn’t “much more powerful”. It and Second Life lags behind Blue Mars. At least as a development platform which is chiefly all it’ll be now.
The list is long, but because Blue Mars leveraged CryEngine and other well-known bits of tech it got a lot of things right that Second Life and consequently OpenSim plain don’t handle as well.
For example, there’s no jury-rigging prims together with floating text to create HUDs; Blue Mars uses Scaleform and alternatively Flash.
There’s no importing animations via .bvh files, a format that only few common animation packages support out the box. Blue Mars uses animation data from .DAE files which is much more widely supported. .
There’s no invented LSL equivalent; Blue Mars uses Lua, something there’s a chance of new developers actually knowing when picking up the platform.
And a lot of things we’re fighting for in Second Life like the mesh deformation are things that existed in Blue Mars 2 years ago..
In short as a development platform, Blue Mars is something that prior curriculum applies to for content creation whereas Second Life necessitates a unique education all of its own on due to invented machinations like LSL, sculpties, how .bvh will translate to internal .anim files, and whatever else unique quirk Second Life and OpenSim have.
There’s also the fact Blue Mars “cities”, the equivalent to Second Life regions, are capable of landmasses up 16km x 16km in size vs. the 256m x 256m of Second Life. Maybe this won’t matter to most of us because we’re used to building things in miniature museum fashion and driving cars in straight lines for a few seconds max before hitting a sim border, but being able to visualize and simulate to scale is definitely a plus for Blue Mars as well.
There’s a lot failings Blue Mars had, but everything it got right I think makes it a great fit for what BSU has been doing with it. Its a shame Blue Mars was steered in all the wrong directions because it would’ve made a great competitor to Linden Lab and necessitated improving the platform in more ways and reevaluating tier prices.
Well, the big thing, I think, was that it never got all that close to its launch list of features. Wasn’t feature-complete, and all sorts of things seemed to be distracting from working towards that goal.
I’m surprised how little information’s been shared so far about the future of Blue Mars outside of this deal. They have a couple newish products (iOS and Blue Mars Light versions), as well as the legacy virtual world. The release I saw was from Ball State. Nothing so far from Blue Mars itself, either on its main website or their blog.
@Ezra: Thanks for the fill-in on Blue Mars. : )
When I said SL and OpenSim are “much more powerful”… I of course meant operationally. Blue Mars may have had a stronger “engine”… but an engine doesn’t do much good unless it’s hooked up to the transmission, drive shaft and wheels. None of that is any good if the steering and fuel isn’t kicked it. From your description of Blue Mars it sounds like a lot of good foresight and intention… with very little end-user follow-through. Thus, SL and OpenSim were more powerful– as far as users were concerned. As far as the tech end of it, to be honest most users couldn’t care less, so long as it works. As other users stated, there wasn’t much of Blue Mars that was actually developed and to end-user stage. My guess: releasing a pre-beta product to market might not have been the best idea for that platform.
LsL vs Lua… .bvh vs .dae, CryEngine vs Havok… the vast majority of users wouldn’t even know the difference. You pointed out sim size… and that we can all appreciate and understand. Beyond that I’m reminded of the old axiom of the boss: “I don’t care how you do it, so long as it gets done right.”
Ezra, I’ve maybe not been in SL that long, but some of those differences, based on what I was picking on CGI before I ever heard of SL, sound like SL chose from what was available when they started, and so did Blue Mars. And some of the other differences are, from my PoV, a case of SL choosing an option any duffer can use.
I’ve sometimes wondered if SL could roll out a better AV Mesh, some of the details are annoying, but they’d have to keep the UV mapping the same. It is possible. They could fix some of the oddities which Qarl has reported. But does the Lab have the skills to do that work? And I sure they will ask, is it worth the cost?
I don’t know. Maybe Blue Mars knew enough to avoid some of the mistakes that the Lab is locked into. If you can only design the Avatar once, get it right.
But the good answers have changed.
@Wayfinder
“Vast majority of users” doesn’t matter anymore though. I was just answering why Ball would choose Blue Mars over something like OpenSim. It’d be a different discussion if we were speaking about why your community would choose one over the other or some other community that has different needs.
@Wolf
Some of the more backward features we’re stuck with in Second Life are a direct result of actions taken in the last few years alone.
LSL for example survives only because Babbage and other critical Lindens got canned before C# could be implemented. And so we have Mono but no C#, the language Mono is built for.
Mesh and support of .DAE imports made it only because Charlar and others that worked on it had to fight for it judging by his Metareality podcast appearance.
Linden Lab has the manpower to make Second Life more and more a platform the skillsets of millions of people increasingly apply to, and it does seem like they’re heading in that direction now on a few fronts, but its all catch-up to where Blue Mars was from a content creator standpoint if we’re comparing the two.
Ezra: ““Vast majority of users” doesn’t matter anymore though. I was just answering why Ball would choose Blue Mars over something like OpenSim”
Ahhh… point taken. : )
Ball State has long been an innovator in classroom technology. I was stunned a few years ago, at a conference they held, by how well the faculty integrate technology into humanities classes. And they don’t let teaching go by the wayside: pedagogy drives the technology.
Now, perhaps, we’ll get a Blue Mars that this Mac user can visit. But even if that does not happen, I’ll be up in our lab with the fastest Windows 7 box I can find to have a look-see.
@Wayfinder I would suggest that the uniqueness of the platform was a major factor. It’s a platform that nobody else has – plus, they’re already the platform’s biggest customer. Why not go the extra mile?