Underwater Jules Verne world in Second Life

Wagner James Au sez, "In his spare time, a French journalist created an amazing underwater steampunk city in Second Life, a tribute to the works of Jules Verne, full of amazing visuals and great perfectionist details -- for example, all the gears in the beautifully rendered clocks actually work. Be sure to watch the video and catch the giant shrimp robot!"

Nemo Rises: Awe-Inspiring Underwater Steampunk City Inspired By Jules Verne Opens Today!

Previously:

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Summer Seale

I also create content in Second Life! While I don’t do steampunk, I do love the theme. It’s very popular there. I mostly do Faerie/Fantasy/Myst/Whimsical type of stuff though. =)
Rich Keller

Yes, content in SL is all user created. You import images for textures, animations for avatars and sounds from your own computer, but the primitive shapes for all objects are created and manipulated in world.

Sure, SL can be laggy, but it’s a real time 3D environment built by hand. The imagination that goes into a well made sim is staggering. It’s gone now, but going through the Starry Night sim was like a scene from What Dreams May Come.
Art

Absolutely incredible work! The design and details are the work of a genuine artist.
Anonymous

What’s the name of the sim?
Anonymous

I got gussied up in my Victorian finest, and went to go check it out. It is truly remarkable!
GrymRpr

@rikchik:
Troll Google for: Us and Them Symphonic Pink Floyd.
Should be by The London Philharmonic Orchestra ( Think Youtube has a few )
The Thompson Five

Thanks for all the replies. I’ll give Second Life a second chance.
johnlancia

Second Life?
Anonymous

You mean Second Life is still in business?

WTF?
The Thompson Five

I wish I could let my kids loose in Second Life to see and build stuff like that. I gave up on it about six months after it went public, when it seemed to have degenerated into nothing but a giant collection of genitalia shops and casinos. Has it changed since?
- Anonymous
  
  Well, the casinos are gone…and they’ve ghettoized the sex shops, so you don’t have to see them if you’re not looking for them.
- ian_b
  
  there is an entire teen grid separated from the main grid and tightly watched to prevent adult content. Linden Labs has also cleaned up the main grid, isolating the mature shops to adult sims.
- Zaren
  
  The casinos have been gone for a while now – the US government starting making noise about not collecting their share of taxes from gaming revenue, and Linden Labs put a stop to all of that. There’s a bit better segmenting of adult content now, but you can still find it floating about. If you want to get the kids back in to it, there’s always Teen Second Life – live monitors, no adult content, and nobody over the age of 17 allowed in.
kevinsky

That reminds me of the underwater Precursor city level in the original Jak & Daxter game on PS2. Think I’ll play that again tonight, even though Jak2 is far superior
farleymac

So, this is ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ week at boing-boing.
I’m going to have to look at the older posts to see what I’ve missed so far. Much better than the Nintendo version.
octopussoup

Fancy though I don’t remember mechanical shrimp and horseshoe crabs in any Verne novel. They should have added a Pleisosaur or Icthysaur from Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
ifthenwhy

I don’t get it.

This looks like a crappy video game from the 90′s?
rikchik

Is the music an orchestral version of Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them”? I want to hear more of it!
- Anonymous
  
  Yes.
  
  Us and Them, Symphonic Pink Floyd.
  The London Philharmonic Orchestra
  Point Music, 1995
foobar

Given that it’s Second Life, it took some mental effort to realize you didn’t say “all the gears in the beautifully rendered cocks actually work”.
Anonymous

I would check out Las Islas too if you’re looking for beauty.

There are lots of interesting sex free zones available in Second Life.
Mr Sorrowman

I wish my computer could make my Second Life look this nice.

For people looking for other steampunk sims in Second Life, I’d recommend New Babbage or Caledon, both large themed estates full of Victorian madness.

And definitely without genitalia shops or casinos.
Anonymous

Hello, my name is Rapture – I am an underwater city located within the video games Bioshock and Bioshock 2 and I am MUCH more interesting, detailed, and ORIGINAL than “Nemo”.

Thank you,

Charles Atlas
Anonymous

Second Life is awesome! 3d virtual world where the USERS create the content, not some gaming company. clothes, houses, vehicles, gadgets, jewelery, skins, hair and tons more. Basic account is free, with no time limit. I’ve been there for over a year now. I have a nightclub, live on a starship, engae in combat and more.
Rich Keller

I’m going to have to check this out.

There are various levels of content in Second Life, PG, mature, (maybe nudity and some violence, think R rated movie type content), and adult, (NC-17 for violence or other, ahem, content). You can set your search terms for any of these levels and “Adult Content” can only be accessed if you have age verified your account. You could also preview a sim on your own to see if it’s anything that you would or wouldn’t want your kids to see.

I’ve seen some really beautiful sims in SL. Most, if not all of them, are off the main land on their own islands. It just takes some patience and time to find them.

Oh, and check out the awesome sculpted prim banana in your inventory while you’re at it.
AirPillo

Unfortunately, the actual exhibit is long gone and the parcel it inhabited is empty and for sale now.

I tried to visit several times and the simulator hosting it was so burdened down it was barely online at all and even moving around was impossible.

Finally, I try again one day, and things are running smoothly… sans exhibit. I was very disappointed.
space380

I was introduced to SL about 8 months ago. It is truly an amazing community of artists. My band, The Follow, has been welcomed with open arms and we are thrilled to have found this great avenue to share our music across the globe. Here is a sample video from a concert where we broadcasted live video into SL and also had an SL camera view projected in the room for the live audience: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOFd1mAs7ZU
AirPillo

Oh hey, scratch that. It seems to have returned! I guess its’ disappearance was just a mixup.

*runs off and explores gleefully*

Thanks for the reminder to check again!
Keystone

Wow, nice work! omw…
FreakCitySF

I want a nautilus. I always thought a few rich people in the world could combine funds to make a real nautilus and have it tour the world and promote peace or Disney product/services.

SL always ran glitchy and felt like a late 90s game.
Anonymous

You know, Second Life is what you make it, both figuratively and literally. Creators who create stuff like this make my SL awesome. The fact that it’s made by some creative person, not someone who’s being paid to make something that’s peripheral to a stupid game, is what brings me back to SL every day. I go there for the art, not because I need someone else to write a storyline to go with my virtual playtime. It’s a social world. And just like everywhere, there’s a portion of adults who want to make that about sex. Avoiding that if you want to is easy as pie, just like it is on the internet at large. The people who only see sex wherever they go have their own issues (*look at that! oh my god! don’t look!*). Know what I like to do best? Give out lindens to artists who deserve it. What do you do? Follow a programmed storyline in an online game, grinding for points, the same exact way every other schmo has in that same game? Boring.
JoshP

staggeringly beautiful, and I as a rule I don’t like steampunk. But it does beg the question… what would the French do without the apostrophe?
@ITW pretty sure secondlifers do all their stuff by hand, one person conceptualized and designed that… get a copy of google sketch and see how easy something like that is. :)
MadRat

It looks like Bioshock only steampunk instead of decopunk.
- Rich Keller
  
  I was there early this morning and there was an avatar in a Big Daddy outfit.
Anonymous

This paints an overly beautiful view of Second Life. Most of it is completely ugly and haphazard. Parcels don’t segue between one another, so you can be in a street with “heritage”-like buildings, then suddenly into a commercial bazaar of spinning gifs. Even well-designed areas are packed with advertising, to allow its creator to recoup the price of land. It’s just not a good experience for someone who wants to explore beautiful worlds.

Yes, there is OSGrid, where you can connect your own server to the grid, but even then SL lacks support for meshes, so everything is built out of basic primitives and “sculpted prims”. (A sphere that can have its vertices moved, but none can be added)

These combined factors make it difficult to produce worlds that are actually immersive. Overall, I’ve seen modding communities for First Person Shooters that would produce better worlds.
Itsumishi

For the first time I’m actually tempted to get into Second Life. So long after it started.

Also… FIRST? Since when did Boingers start with that nonsense?
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  It’s so unusual, I assumed that it was meta-commentary so meta that even I didn’t get it.
Anonymous

FIRST