Anyone who looks closely at the “big map” on SL while in USS in recent days will notice just a little south of the southern sims some new ones are popping up. One in particular is Artificial Island where I recently enjoyed an exciting tour by the fascinating ZATZAi Asturias. This is the conversation that followed.

Delinda Dyrssen: I understand your bringing some new additions to USS. Tell me how this came about?
ZATZAi Asturias: Well you can blame MarkTwain White actually, we’ve known each other casually for a good while and I was asking his advice on something (telling him my plans and so forth) when he suggested the connection. I’d always liked what Mark and the others had done with the USS and had always wanted sailing to be a part of my own efforts so I was of course fine with the idea. Over the course of several weeks we met and talked about what I could expect and what would be expected of me, as well as meeting with the current USS sim holders.

DD: Tell me a little about the sims you will be bringing in .. Especially the Artificial Island Sim and how it will integrate with the Sailing community
ZA: There will be five sims in all, mostly ocean sims, three of them will be open space class 5 sims, and two will be full class 5 sims. Artificial Isle is my main sim, it was designed to be an event host and we’ve played home to several events since its inception in early 2007. We’ve hosted the home grown Second Convention which shows twice yearly, as well as acted as the inworld hub for SLCC 2007 and a few small conferences and events for other groups as well. We also put on regular events of a smaller nature of course, such as live music, games, and sporting events. The plan is to begin having regular sailing events, as well as other sporting activities like submarine races, tugby and aero racing (Hoverboard racing). The Artificial Isle sim is a single island, with plenty of surrounding water to sail around, as well as a interior bay. The Passages sim to the southwest will be a beach property that is 2/3rds water. The other three Open Space sims will be predominantly or completely water. With one have a few residential spots (Two Actually), the other playing home to our sporting club, and the last being open water.

DD: Well as you probably already know, people involved in sailing are always very concerned about lag.. I understand you have done some things to combat this… care to elaborate?
ZA: For SLCC we had 2,499 people come through in three days, for SecCon (Second Convention) we regular maxed out the sim (65 people concurrent), so we have a lot of experience with sim lag and how to manage it. Having the sims be Class 5 helps a lot, but the way we combat it is is with careful design, there are actually very few textures in use on the surface, and the prim geometry is relatively simple as well. There are also several visual blocks so people’s occlusion culling can do it’s job (You don’t render what you don’t see), that and careful script management has done wonders. We’re a relatively full sim, but our performance stats tends to be much better than other sims, we also helped beta test Havok 4 so we could know what to expect as it was eventually deployed. I’m happy to say we’ve never crashed during a large event, and sim stats have almost always been stellar, any lag tends to be strictly on the client side, which is dependant on the speed of the users computer.

DD: Tell me more about the sort of event you do here on AI sim? What is SecCon all about?
ZA: We host several events, not just our own, but SecCon in particular is a convention of my own creations. It’s a virtual convention, for the virtual world of Second Life. Its traditionally been a three day event with several events a day. The events ranging from discussion panels about issues that affect Second Life and the Internet at large, as well as sporting events, a party or two, and even fashion shows. Perhaps the most fun event though is the “Slebrity Roast”, were we pick out one well known individual in Second Life and get their friends to come and poke fun at them, much like they do on Comedy Central. Our next convention is coming up this May, and will be announced shortly, we have discussion panels on Net Neutrality, the future of Second Life grids, a Slebrity Roast and fashion show of course, as well as sporting events like Tugby, and a sailing regatta just to name two. There will be around fifteen events this spring, and it’ll be hosted concurrently in other sims around Second Life for those who can’t attend in person (like if the sim fills up) but want to listen/watch the live stream.

DD: It sounds like you will be exposing many people to Sailing in SL simply by the events being held in USS. I know you originally designed your sims with sailing in mind… tell me more about your experience with sailing in SL.. or in RL if you want.
ZA: I actually don’t sail in real life, I kayak. As far as Second Life is concerned, I was introduced to sailing way back in fall 2005 when Pixeleen Mistral was just getting things going in Sanchon. I would sail around the Korea mainland from my property in Seonhan to her sim and back, back then you could circumnavigate the continent, but there’s far too much litter now. I had a great deal of fun with her and the pirates but I never got into competitive sailing, because it was just too competitive! But I also took a lot of inspiration from the young Hollywood sim, and I really liked how you could sail all the way around it back then, and I followed a similar design with my own sim, but also adding a bay you could sail in and out of easily.

DD: Well it looks like it will be a major attraction to sailors everywhere in SL. I can see from the amount of effort you put into SL that you believe there is a bright future in Virtual Worlds. Can you tell me more about where you have been and where you see it going?
ZA: I remember reading “Snowcrash” years ago and thinking what a great idea Stephenson had, the Metaverse. I’ve seen a couple places try to pull it off without large success. I even remember seeing Second Life on display at E3 (Electronic & Entertainment Expo) several years ago, I thought it had potential but wasn’t terribly impressed. Second Life hasn’t changed too much since then, though it’s nice to finally be getting Havok 4, Windlight etc, but it’s fundamentally the same. Second Life is a platform, and it succeeds or fails based on what its user-base does with it. We’ve certainly seen individuals and organizations alike succeed and fail in this realm. I think the largest mistake some outfits make, is treating Second Life like a billboard, they treat it like a website. A place where you say who you are, and what you do, and that’s it. And that’s fine if you just want people to know you exist, but if you want to build word of mouth, get people involved, you have to be interactive. You have to take the approach you would in real life, if a company was to build an embassy of some sort to explain who they are and what they do, or like when any organization gets involved in a local community. It’s not an easy thing to do, but if you can pull it off, it can be very rewarding. I think there is still much potential to Second Life and other virtual worlds, each world having its own advantages and disadvantages. But Second Life is certainly poised with its recent technological advancements, the pressure Linden Lab is exerting on their Congressional contacts to become the ICANN of the Metaverse, and the coming of Open Source options from within and without Linden Lab.

DD: I understand you have been working on some things that can improve sailing?
ZA: Mostly pet peeves really, and things to help out friends or situations. A number of people are familiar with the composite calendar I created thats available open source on the SLSF forums. It basically makes it easy to combine and display google calendars from multiple sources on a single page in a browser or in Second Life on a prim. I’ve helped some with terraforming the new Balboa sims with Mark and Transparent, as well as the Newport Bay sim’s new look, so you can blame me for the idea of those giant rocks if you hate them. :-p Beyond that I’m working on some pet peeves, a way to ease communication during a regatta, perhaps a new start line of my own creation (If people prefer it), and I’m sure a few people were witness to our testing of a radio commentary of a sailing regatta the other week. There will be more work along these and other lines as time allows.

DD: Here is a question the boat builders out there will want to hear your answer to. Which is you favorite sailboat on SL?
ZA: For a long time it was the Trudeau Sea Sharp, and that still holds a special place in my heart (I have one permanently moored in my sim). But currently I enjoy sailing about in my Tetra 1.2, and I can’t wait for Verkin to release the 1.3 model he teased us with on the forums.

DD: The name ZATZAi… not common at all.. there must be a story behind that?
ZA: Not a terribly interesting one really. Years ago I was tired of having a different sign on every place I went, so I sat down and decided to come up with a unique word. It had to not exist in any language, be pronounceable with standard english grammar, be exactly six characters long and easily shortened to three letters. I came up with ZATZAi, it’s pronounced ZAT like CAT and ZAi like Hi, just two syllables. There is actually a zatzau root in Germany I later found out, and Ai means love in Japanese, but I was shooting more for Artificial Intelligence with the Ai reference (This was LONG before the movie btw). Why is it capitalized the way it is? Because it looks good that way.

To learn more about ZatZAI, AI sim and Second Convention, you can follow this link http://www.zatzai.com.