Every week it seems a new virtual world is being released. Often they are really virtual rooms, connected through portals. Just Leap In is of this approach, letting you embed your world/room into your webpage

So I have opened the HatHead Dojo in this world. Just Leap In is super easy to install and use. Although it is first-person shooter perspective, you can still see other avatars. Performance off the top is excellent and my Dojo world is pretty large in comparison to other room-based virtual spaces.

Some snaps:

A confluence of both creative philosophy and emerging technologies have really inspired me over the past few months, marking a real shift in how I design and produce. Enough of a shift that stopping for a moment to frame this approach will help me to hopefully crystallize the new HatHead version 3.0 (version 1.0 being the first music web presence; v2.0 being the founding of HatHead Incubators).

In essence, the philosophy is that the experience of your audience - whether film, virtual worlds, music, web - has the most primacy. As an example, in Second Life there is something known as “lag“: essentially the bandwidth, graphics and CPU resources decrease the frame rate of display (FPS) of the virtual world, sometimes lower than 1 FPS. In contrast, video is around 30 FPS. While the digital pioneers in Second Life suffer through it, this quality of experience is very low, making it difficult to often perform even basic user operations.

While issues such as performance can always be improved, HatHead 3.0 is not about craftsmanship for any skilled craftsman best understands the strengths and limits of their craft, hopefully with some style. Rather, more and more I see that many of the projects I have wanted to do but did not because the were too expensive or impractical are now possible. This includes virtual installations, machinima and multimedia performances. While there will be more on individual projects in later posts, the underlying theme is the primacy of the user experience.

To leave you with a sense of scale of this shift, the content on both the 2 HatHead Second Life islands will totally change on Sept. 1/08.

Also, a HUGE shout-out to John Martin and Jason Lin at Reallusion for their mind-blowing release of iClone 3.0. I have been kicking the tires of the early release for a week or so and this product deserves its own post so stay tuned!