VEEMEE’s 3D Printer
by SealWyf, HSM editor
It looks like Lockwood is about to get some competition.
For a long time, they have stood alone in Home as the only developer to offer a fully-featured Gift Machine. Although other developers have allowed you to present gifts to your friends in specific private spaces, the Lockwood Gift Machine operated across spaces, and outside of them altogether. You could use the Gift Machine built into many of their public or private spaces, or place a portable one in any space you chose. And you could sent gifts from the machine to anyone on your Friend List. It was a powerful concept, and it was extremely successful. Lockwood Gift Machine token bundles have been on the Top Ten Sales list for many of the months it was made public.
It’s always been somewhat of a mystery why other developers didn’t hitch a ride on what looked like an extremely profitable bandwagon. The token economy necessary for a gift machine has been introduced in specific games and spaces by many developers besides Lockwood. Token economies have been used by Digital Leisure, Hellfire Games, Juggernaut, nDreams, Mass Media, and (in the new Acorn Meadows Park public space) VEEMEE itself. Digital Leisure even allowed people to send tokens (in the form of casino chips) as gifts. But the next step — using tokens to purchase gifts for others — has not been taken.
Until now.
Lockwood’s Gift Machine
If VEEMEE’s gift items are even reasonably interesting, I’m sure their new venture will be a howling success. In a social MMO (which Home most definitely is), social interactions are key. And what could be more social than sending your friends presents? It helps if the items available to be gifted are unique and desirable. Lockwood has gotten a lot better at that game recently. From trinkets and clothing color-variants, they have graduated to some truly stunning gift-able items, including their Unicorn mount and three highly desirable apartments. VEEMEE has a lot of catch-up to do, if they want to compete with that.
On the other hand, VEEMEE is starting out ahead of the game, because they have included a feature we have long wished to see in the Lockwood Gift Machine — the ability to send gifts to yourself. This may seem to run counter to the spirit of the social MMO. Solitary purchases are less emotionally satisfying than gift exchanges. But, let’s face it — sometimes you just don’t have a friend who will send you the item you want. This is especially true if it’s something expensive — the equivalent of several dollars worth of tokens. At that point, your only recourse is to create an alternate account, and use it to send yourself presents. That can be a bit of a nuisance, and being able to gift yourself is a reasonable alternative. I suspect that including this ability will get VEEMEE a lot of business.
3D printing can be surprisingly complex
I’m also giving VEEMEE props for presenting their new gift machine as a 3D printer. In case you have been sleeping under a rock for the past few years, three-dimensional printers are a very hot technology. The possible range of applications seems unlimited. They have been used to produce everything from pottery to jewelry to handguns to flyable aircraft to habitable buildings. Printing organ replacements with biological materials is on the horizon. And the technology is becoming more affordable all the time. Basic 3D printers can now be purchased for a few hundred dollars. All the cool kids are using them.
So what better symbolic representation for a gift machine (itself a metaphor for an intangible property-transfer service provided by Sony and a third-party developer) than a 3D printer? You send it a pattern, and it creates an item as you watch. From what we have seen in the promotional trailer, it’s an entertaining process.
We’ll all get a chance to try it out, starting tomorrow. For at least the next week or so, anyone visiting the Hub will receive a VEEMEE 3D Printer for free, along with 50 gift tokens. How far those tokens will take you remains to be seen. But they should purchase enough content to give us a feel for the technology, and help us decide if we want to buy more.
I predict we will. This is an idea whose time has come. Prepare to give (and receive) lots of presents.
May 8th, 2013 by SealWyf_ | 4 comments
SealWyf is a museum database programmer, who has been active in online communities since before the Internet, and in console gaming since the PS1. In games, she prefers the beautiful and quirky, and anything with a strong storyline. She is obsessed with creating new aesthetic experiences in PlayStation Home.
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this sounds interesting. it’d be nice to ‘gift’ ourselves -- it is just as enjoyable. i remember seeing a 3D printer back in like 2003; was in an engineering dept. used for robotics at a college i visited.
I just hope they give out enough coins/tokens where we won’t be short 1 or 2 o_o i like “50”, nice and even. every item ending with 9 just irks me.. i dont want the penny, just take it!!! >__> lol (i know that’s just about everything… though i could buy a hat or something to use up the accumulated 12 cents..) cant wait to see this thing though. lots of cool items in the trailer alone!
This is a good article Seal.
I saw the printer on a tech show and it created an ear from living cells. I was floored, that is so fantastic!
I can’t wait to try it out here, no ears of course but still exciting. I went to the hub this morning though and didn’t get anything.
That’s frustrating. Perhaps leaving and re-entering Home will help. Unfortunately, one comes to expect this kind of bug on Content Release Day.
So they are already printing biological things? I had assumed that was still just a dream. The whole 3D printing field is exploding. There are web sites out there where you can design a sake set using a simple CAD program, and they will print it and ship it to you. It’s not cheap, but what a concept!
I wonder if we will ever reach the point where we can design virtual objects in Home (or its successor virtual communities) and have them created for us? Sort of like a Blueprint:Home for objects. Wouldn’t that be something?
This is a great stroke of genius. I hope that this pushes the other gift machine into tuning their ways by way of competition. I would (and always have)loved the thought of gifting yourself, now VeeMee gave it to us. I too hate ending up with 13 coins…ugh, so annoying, but a new gift machine, this has such promise and hope. Now I don’t have to put out a wish list, I’m not that kind of person. I feel like I’m nudging people to what I want. Here I get to gift what I want to me. Win. Great article Seal.