The Metaverse Blogger

One of the biggest gripes coming from the Metaversians who use Macs is that a fair portion of our environments aren’t compatible with the Mac OS. On September 22, 2009, a bit of that changed as another “larger” player in the 3D virtual environment universe stepped up and released a Mac compatible version of their software. While it’s still in beta testing phases, and is only a “Lite” version, Vivaty has given the  Mac world something to be pleased about.

Indeed, the Vivaty experience offered in the Mac compatible version is fairly limited for the moment, but the technical achievement behind the move in itself is something to take notice of. Vivaty managed to make the environment work purely in Flash, which means that web users no longer need to download or install custom plugins in order for the environment to work (other than Flash, of course). Vivaty staff admits the the customization on this release of the Flash based environment is minimal, but that much of this initial push was to simply get a working version of the environment out the door. And so they have.

You can give the Flash version of Vivaty a try here.

Make no mistake: The test verion of Flash Vivaty is by no means the full enchilada. Lots of development is to come, and some of the functionality of the full version is not present in the Lite deal.

All of this brings up some interesting points about Mac compatibility with virtual environments. While “most” of the internet is dominated by Windows based operating systems like Windows XP, Vista, etc., there has been a sharp increase in Mac OSX usage over the past year. Some figures have been released that suggest almost 20% of internet browsers (that’s to say, the people doing the browsing) today are Mac users. And while that number isn’t exactly staggering, it does show that there’s been an increase in Mac usage, suggesting that perhaps it’s time for Metaverse creators to step it up on Mac development. Indeed, it’s well known that many “artists”, be it musicians, graphic artists, etc, prefer and use the Mac OSX environment over Windows.

Currently, the only large-scale 3D virtual environments to cater to the Mac population that we know of, are 3D Xplorer, Just Leap In, Habbot Hotel, and Second Life. Activeworlds, Blue Mars, ExitReality, IMVU, There.com, and Twinity, currently do not have Mac versions (that we know of here).

Way to go, Vivaty. Time to step it up, guys. The bar has been set just a little higher.