Blue Mars Gets Small
January 16, 2011Avatar Reality, the company behind the Blue Mars virtual world which up til recently was considered a competitor to Linden Labs’ Second Life, announced they will cease further development of the PC client for Blue Mars in favor of focusing on Apple’s iOS platform. This is not to say the client will not be available for users, only that they will provide needed bug-fixes, no new features. Apparently, there was a lack of balance between development of the client and marketing the Blue Mars product, so the hoped-for user base and resulting cash flow never quite materialised for the company.
It doesn’t help that their client is only available to Windows users. This clearly shows a lack of unified vision for the company. Attending a session in SL back in November featuring Blue Mars developer Richard Childers, there was a very real sense of dedication, intelligence and frustration.
Since the mobile app market bandwagon trundled into town, everyone and their uncle has been jumping on, hoping to make a fast buck and a big splash. There are some SL applications available for mobile devices, SLEEK is one example of a text-based version. Developing a graphical client to run on such devices, however, is a seriously dubious idea, given the enormous graphic demands of a visual, 3D virtual world. The cloud concept sounded promising last spring, but rumbles against cloud technology have been felt since then. And well, how is a user expected to feel immersed when squinting at a barely-four-inch-diagonal screen and attempting to work the controls on the mobile device to manipulate the avatar and other objects? Content creation is another question mark (and it appears to us, still available only to Windows based 3D modelers) – it is implied that content creation must continue by means of the PC client at present, although that could change. The novelty of doing this could quickly wear off as the reality of a small screen’s visibility sets in, unless something truly innovative appears on the scene, something as seemingly far-fetched as shrinking the hardware and interface, then integrating into neural networks. Or, Blue Mars could just become another game…
Last year, Blue Mars announced its four-phase plan to develop for the iOS platform, but what about the Android users? The cloud server is claimed to deliver Blue Mars to any device that can run a web browser.
So, looking again at Blue Mars and the apparently much leaner Avatar Reality, is there really a market in the mobile space for virtual world development?
Share your thoughts here.