Multiverse MMO "Kit"

Boy -- people have been waiting for this one for a while now, but it looks like a company named Multiverse is going to soon offer an MMO development environment. I can see MMOs iterating the way "multi-media" titles did in the early 90s. Remember all those Director titles, and mTropolis? They eventually got killed by dedicated 3D platforms and game machines, but before they did, they were *everywhere* -- there was a Director title for *everything*. What if there was an MMO for every story franchise out there? What would the internet feel like? How would you build communities around a franchise? Could be way cool:

Massively multiplayer on-line games on the cheap

MULTIVERSE web site
Kothuria: The World's Edge

Ed Tech Life Has Moved

Mark Wagner moved his blog:

Educational Technology and Life

His blog connects in lots of ways: gaming, gadgets, education. A few good recent posts on "risk taking" as well as "fear" -- a couple of topics that certainly hit home for me:

Risk Taking and Educational Technology
What Teachers are Afraid Of

Top of mind since we recently had to block facebook and myspace URLs at my school. Some naughty naughty posts from some of our students. Very disappointing, but it's hard to argue with the other administrators when fac-brats, in particular, were trashed in the posts.

Anyway, Mark's blog is always a good read.

Also from the PSP rumor blogs, there are tons of reports (or maybe tons of links to a single report?) that Sony will release a PSP with 8GB of NAND flash memory, built-in:

Sony to adopt NAND flash in PSP

Also, Memory Stick Duo Pro prices are still falling (I got a 1GB stick for less than $70 a few weeks back; guess I coulda waited!):

2GB Memory Stick Pro Duo for $85 at Amazon

2GB sticks had been going for about $180. But this is coincident with reports that black-market Memory Sticks are also flooding the market:

$49.99 Memory Stick PRO Duo 1GB? Better Be Careful

Stuff is Going On!

First, a bunch of freshmen boys at the school are playing around with Unity and are having a total blast. Right now they have a game where you can drive a car of an island in the sky -- not great game-play, but they love doing it. It also involves an enemy car and a dragon and fireballs. All from the minds of freshmen boys, of course.

Next, the "top dog" at OTEE (who publishes Unity) has stepped up and said they would love to help seed a pilot project. So maybe we can buy (cheap?) a few copies of the software. It runs on Mac OS X -- so if you wanna try, drop me a note.

Last, I heard from Chris (Gail's husband) about maybe making some architectural models in SketchUp. It appears you can transfer them to Unity via a .3ds format. I think the thing will be to just take a simple model he already has and see if we can jam it into Unity and run around in it!

Chris may also have a lead on some beta testers. So stuff is happening!