Blue Mars celebrates the one year anniversary of its open beta release on September 2
The Blue Mars official You Tube channel -- which has over 30 videos and is a great place to find general information and tutorials about this new virtual world- released this video last month showing initial fashion releases as avatar customization takes off.
Blue Mars went open beta one year ago on September 2. To celebrate it's birthday, I am showing some interesting effects that can be applied to the beautiful Arcadia region, home of an emerging game called the boneyards.
Flauntr, a free online photo editing and effects site corrects, frames, and does other things to enhance your digital photography.
Flauntr's PicasR is a great free online tool for toning down what can be the harsh effects of digital online photography. Picasr has uploaded the color effects from over 50 famous art works. All you need to do is upload and image and see how it looks with different tonal conversions applied. Some of the paintings that were analyzed and uploaded by Flauntr are below:
Here are photographs from the recently - opened Arcadia area of Blue Mars -- all in the same harsh blueish light - that have been converted to calmer tonal effects with PicasR. The best thing to do is experiment to get the tonal effects you like. The treated photographs are below the original image.
Blue Mars celebrates it's first birthday tomorrow.
One of the best things about Blue Mars is it's incredibly realistic underwater rendering and sound. The realism of the underwater waves, current, and light is amazing, as is the marine life. I love the way this manta ray glides and moves in the water.
Check out Blue Mars official You Tube channel for more videos like this.
On August 27, Blue Mars rolled out a new client that offers considerable improvements in a number of areas including avatar interface and graphics capabilities. The one I like is the new "very high" rendering quality option. Visualization on my HP Pavilion 7 laptop improved dramatically even though it is not a high end device (it has an ATI 4630 512k card-- really upper mid range and not truly high end).
I had just downloaded the new client and took a fast trip to New Venice. Here are some quick images that have not been processed to show the new look of Blue Mars at a higher and cleaner resolution. It makes me want to go out right now and buy a new high end gaming computer to really see how Blue Mars can look, something which my recession budget will not allow.
Blue Mars will celebrate the first birthday of its Beta release on September 2 and I will have additional coverage then.
Shade City in Blue Mars has these very realistic looking cars and motorcycles. You canot ride them (yet at least) like you can in Second Life, or purchase them. but they look amazingly realistic. Note that I have run the last photograph - of the scooters- here once before.
Irish Philip James Bryan, known as Dude Starship on Blue Mars, is one of the biggest believers and proponents of this new virtual world, which will celebrate the first birthday of its beta release on September 2.
Arcadia is a region on Blue Mars which Philip has told me is it's future. Besides having a gorgeous central research center which is the most stunning single building on Blue Mars, and an equally impressive landscape, is the home of a very cool "game" - that pits teams of researchers who I think try to determine Martian life evolution based on archeological finds. I am not a gamer, but I just might be, since Philip raves about it.
I have not been able to figure out how to get out of the central boneyard- but Philip has in this brand new video. Philip does not overly edit his machinima (gaming videos), and shows the Blue Mars interface- something I edit out.
Here is what Philip has to say about the video:
"Exciting stuff. The video is self-explanatory. What happened was that I found a hyole and told others. Sister JamT followed and found the old Arcadia. Then they installed a teleporter and we can get in. Sister and Dafney and King went in overland. I haven’t managed that yet. But I will, I will . Heres the vid."
I am an avatar in the virtual worlds of Second Life and Blue Mars. The real life me lives in the State of Florida.
I am a well known photographer. I maintain several blogs, but my main blog is at http://eddihaskell.blogspot.com
I am a freelance wedding minister and officiate, it is one of my favorite things to do.
My Second Life partner is Jago Constantine.
