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Monday, October 25, 2010

Blue World Notes: Heads-Up on Blue Mars' Customized Heads-Up Displays

I'm still early enough into my Blue Mars explorations that I'm impressed by small, subtle-but-powerful features about the world and its development platform -- in this case, customized heads-up displays that can come automatically loaded into your viewing software, when you enter a city. This is the HUD you see when you first enter OnLand, the immersive 3D space for enterprise use developed by DLAB:

Clicking the green HUD teleports you to an orientation for learning how to use Blue Mars. Just as clicking the other customized HUD, in the bottom right corner, brings up the OnLand map display:

... and clicking any of the purple icons on the map instantly teleports you to that location. Now if you're a Blue Mars regular, this all might seem obvious, but it's a distinctly different way of deploying HUDs, from Second Life. In that world, you can also have customized heads-up displays, but at the moment, you need to manually find and apply it to your avatar, before you can see it. But because Blue Mars is deployed in terms of different cities, all of which require a download before launching, any custom HUD the city developer makes comes pre-loaded and ready to go the moment you enter.

All that said, I do wish the OnLand map had a teleport to the lovely little park near the corporate area:

What should I look at next in Blue Mars? Email and let me know: hamlet at bluemarsonline dot com.

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