By: The value of virtual world market data | Innovation Factory

The value of virtual world market data | Innovation Factory — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:59:23 +0000

[...] this problem an initiative is being launched called Metaverse Market Index (MMI). According to Techcrunch, “MMI is founded by Nick Wilson of Metaversed.com and Robert Bloomfield of Cornell [...]

By: Jared Freedman

Jared Freedman — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 19:05:49 +0000

As someone involved in V-metrics for almost two years, and as the creator of the first commercial V-metrics tracking package, V-Tracker, I’ve given some thought to the topic of what defines a Virtual World Metric. There is so much activity that goes on inside a virtual world to consider, and then there are the after-effects of virtual worlds that end up as You Tube videos, media write-ups, or blog posts. In the end, I decided to go to the root and here’s what I’ve come up with:
Visitor Tracking – Determining who is where, over what period of time.
Visitor tracking is the heart of a 3D based virtual world metrics, as it will tell you where people go. There are many ways to get this information, and a wide spread of options as to the actual time scales used. Personally, I find that one minute intervals are most appropriate for tracking visit activity, as it takes that long for most environments to ‘rez-up’ and be recognizable. Also, there is the issue of granularity, or how much level of detail you need to know about specific short scale movements. Is it important to know that the avatar ’shifted his feet’ and moved a single meter to the left? Or is it more important to know if the avatar stood by a kiosk that played videos for the length of time it takes the video to play? Scale and granularity are important factors and as there are no standards yet, I’m thinking each V-metrics provider will come up with their own solutions, and each installation will have its own requirements. Something important to consider is how much bandwidth will be consumed and how much data will be generated by a V-metrics installation. Let’s consider a single island, and let’s make it popular, with 50 concurrent avatars visiting on average over 12 hours of every day. If we use a ‘Visit Minute’ as the root of our tracking scale, we’ll come up with the following:
1 Visit Minute x 50 avatars x 60 minutes per hour x 12 hours per day = 36,000 visit minutes/day
Run for one month = 1,080,000 visit minutes/month
To recap, one popular sim, full half the time, creates one million visit minute records in a database, using one minute intervals. Some people may read this and their eyes will gloss over, however anyone who has ever worked closely with database technology will immediately see what an issue this is. It can quickly become a staggering amount of difficult to manage data when you start to track even dozens of sims simultaneously. For this reason, trade-offs in scale, scan distances and granularity, and processing performed during each scan need to me made. Good architecture and data warehousing technology is absolutely necessary.
There are a few other areas of V-metrics that I feel deserve discussion, but the concept of a visit tracking metric root, or the visit minute, should give a nice point to start the discussion.
To Be Continued . . .

By: Lowell Cremorne

Lowell Cremorne — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 03:54:28 +0000

A promising development – if true independence can be established this will be a success…

By: Steve Ballmer

Steve Ballmer — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 23:58:28 +0000

What are they talkin’ bout?

By: phenom

phenom — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 16:40:48 +0000

the platform developers have done it again…..very impressive
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com

By: leah

leah — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 15:24:59 +0000