Home certainly monopolized the mind share from the Sony Keynote at GDC. With everyone pondering what Home meant to the Second Life crowd, mostly coming to the conclusion that user created content trumped everything they were doing with super slick graphics, they somehow over looked the super cute style of LittleBigPlanet. LittleBigPlanet from Media Molecule, the company behind Rag Doll Kung Fu, is proof that Sony understands the power of user created content but just isn't ready to jump on the band wagon just yet.
LittleBigPlanet looks very fun, and it has controls that make me think about the Second Life Dynamic Puppeteering Linden Labs announced at SIGGRAPH last year. It also has some very simple looking tools for creating your own content. To me this is just a test of what can be in Home. While it does not appear that user created content is going to be part of the initial release of Home, it is only one downloadable update away.
1. The setup reminds me of The Incredible Machine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_Machine), a classic physics / Rube Goldberg game from Sierra or, specifically with the stamps, Brøderbund's KidPix, both from the early to mid-nineties. The key similarities (with TIM) are (a) the use of realistic physics and (b) the ability to construct complex systems from a kit of parts.
The main differences are, of course, the introduction of the puppet avatar and three-dimensional space. An interesting similarity, though, is that, while LittleBigPlanet is indeed based in three-dimensional space, all of the objects displayed basically faced the camera, as if the entire setup were on a theatrical stage, and the camera seemed only to pan and zoom, rather than change in angle.
Also, while the depth of the stage seemed to be a lot shorter than its width, the camera, in the course of its panning and zooming, would use focus to indicate depth of field (around 5:05 in the video). The abilities (a) to set focal length and (b) to set depth of field I would really welcome as part of the Second Life rendering engine. Focal length does exist in SL (as evidenced by the occasional, rather odd telephoto angle), but field-of-view controls are rather crudely connected to zoom, such that it is often unclear whether one is moving the camera or zooming in. (see http://www.lslwiki.net/lslwiki/wakka.php?wakka=FOV)
Posted at 2:12AM on Mar 21st 2007 by Pablo Andalso