Ollie Tristram

After being fed up with the amount of slow loading and uncustomisability that SecondLife and There.com in particular offer, I noticed that some other students had been using vSide - a music orientated 3D chat program. With music as an interest of mine I decided to check it out.

To begin with, the avatar creation is much more varied as a non-paying user compared to There.com. You can chose from around 10 different hair styles, tops and bottoms and a few different shoes. It was no coincidence that I saw someone wearing exactly the same as me except with a different skin tone within 15 minutes, but still, its better than having everyone look like you. So compare what I like here, compared to There, much more lifelike I think you'll agree.

What makes vSide unique is that when your in the main areas music is streamed to your computer, as if it is being played aloud in the virtual world you're in (as seen in the

screenshot in the bottom left). What I thought was cool is that there are certain clubs around the different areas of vSide, which like in real life, play different genres of music. The music got louder the closer you got to the club and had a realistic club environment once inside, with flashing lights people dancing and even a DJ in a booth.

There are many different actions which can be performed for other avatars to see. Gestures are one type such as smiling, laughing, sitting, waving etc. Another type which is good are Dances. There are at least 50 different types of dance which can be performed which is good because they can represent your personality or you can choose to dance to a particular music style. My favourite was the 'Two-step' which is perfect for dancing to Hip-Hop! It's CRUNK!

General usage of vSide was easy and quicker to. I found with There that some environments took minutes to load, whereas here they loaded instantly.

As for people, everyone seems pretty similar in terms of friendliness and helpfulness as they have done in all the 3D chat programs I have tried. This is good because to say I have never met these people its quite good to have faith restored in humanity, however its quite sad to know that humanity spends its money on virtual items like clothes.

Which brings me to the shopping side of vSide. Again, you can spend real pound sterling to customise your character and from looking in the shops available there is a wide choice of things to purchase. There was also some free items on offer, but you needed a certain amount of 'Respekt' to acquire them.

Respekt could be gained by adding new friends or by finding secrets such as hidden pathways and jumping to new areas. I had earned 220 points but it still wasn't enough to get any of the free stuff in the shops, and there was no indication of how much I would need.

I still wouldn't use these programs for any personal benefit, but so far vSide seems to be the best in my opinion. Check out all the screenshots to see what I got up to.