What is Drax making?

Tags

draxter, ipad, SLGo

Draxtor send me this mysterious screenshot… what is he making?

It has something to do with SLGo… ipads… and a little bit with Berlin!

We’ll know in November…

SL GO now available for Ipad

Tags

"second life", ipad, mobile, onlive, SLGo

Great news coming from OnLive.

SL GO is now available on the Ipad!

Now you can enjoy Second Life on your Ipad everywhere you go with ultra high settings.

Yay shadows!

Drax got to try it out and is rather excited about the experience;

From the press release;

SL Go empowers Second Life residents to experience Second Life in full 3D and in real time on any iPad running iOS 7 or greater, without the need for an expensive desktop computer. New and existing users can simply sign in over Wi-Fi or 4G LTE to enjoy a high-fidelity Second Life experience with amazing graphics quality, full shaders, shadows and full motion capability. Streamed from OnLive’s powerful cloud-based servers, which have been clocked at speeds as high as 200 FPS set to Ultra with Maximum Render Distance, each secure Second Life session enables users to rez quickly into their favorite sims to connect with in-world friends, participate in events, engage in combat games, and enjoy immersion in Second Life at a level never before possible on iPad tablets.

SL Go offers access to the full Second Life Viewer interface, including edit menus, inventory, preference settings and chat management, adding intuitive touch controls. All user customizations are saved from session to session, even if played on a completely different device or platform. Design a beautiful scene using SL Go on your Mac or PC, and then show it off to friends on iPad. Your world transfers seamlessly, making it mind-blowingly easy to stay connected with in-world events.

“Ever since we launched SL Go for Android™, the Second Life community has been clamoring for iOS compatibility,” said Rick Sanchez, VP of Product and Marketing at OnLive. “Now, residents can keep Second Life at their fingertips whether they’re at work, home, out with friends or traveling for the holidays. And with the iPad’s stunning Retina display, the Second Life world is beautifully rendered with breathtaking 3D graphics.”

Since its launch in 2010, OnLive has enabled premium-quality gaming via the cloud on nearly any Mac or PC computer and a wide range of thin client devices, including lightweight laptops, tablets, phones and TVs—platforms that would normally lack the processing power and memory to run graphics intensive games.

To get started with SL Go for iOS, users can sign up for an OnLive account here, and choose from one of two payment plans: $9.95 (£6.95) per month for unlimited access, or pay as you go for $1.00 (£0.70) per hour. A free 7-day trial is available for monthly subscribers. iPad users in the United States can then download the free OnLive SL Go app from the iTunes Store here, or in the UK here, for instant access to their virtual world. Alternately, users can open iTunes and search for “SL Go”.

More information on Second Life can be found at www.secondlife.com. More information on the OnLive Game Service and SL Go can be found at games.onlive.com/landing/slgo.

So, if you’ve got an Ipad, go ahead, give it a go and share your experiences in the comments!

Oculus DK2 viewer for SL now available

Tags

oculus rift, viewer

Linden Lab has announced that the Second Life Oculus DK2 viewer is now available.

I quote from their announcement;

A few months ago, we released a Project Viewer that made it possible to use the first generation Oculus Rift development kit (DK1) anywhere in Second Life.

Since then, Oculus Rift has released a second generation development kit, DK2. The new hardware offers an even more immersive experience when used with Second Life – there’s less likelihood of feeling motion sick thanks to the motion-tracking features, and less of the “screen-door effect” on the visuals, thanks to higher resolution and brighter display.

We’ve integrated the DK2 with Second Life, and today are releasing a new Project Viewer so that virtual reality enthusiasts with the DK2 can use it anywhere in Second Life, just as DK1 users can.

Unfortunately, though, there are still some bugs impacting the experience, which we won’t be able to fix until we receive the next SDK from Oculus Rift. Because Second Life uses OpenGL in its browser, we cannot support direct mode in the Rift until Oculus releases a version of the SDK that supports that.

In addition, juddering is an issue (as it is with most DK2 demos).This can be significantly improved on Windows by turning off Aero, which allows the Rift to use its full refresh rate rather than being limited to the refresh rate of the primary monitor. This refresh rate is a major factor in the judder and turning off Aero can significantly improve your experience.

We’ll continue to fix bugs and improve the experience as quickly as we can once we get the next SDK, but in the meantime, we wanted to get this Project Viewer out into testers’ hands. If you have an Oculus Rift development kit, you can download the new Project Viewer here.

Second Life Oculus DK2 viewer coming next week

Tags

"second life", dk2, ebbe altberg, ebbe linden, oculus rift, The 1920s Berlin Project

Ebbe Linden, CEO of Linden Lab, has been testing out the Oculus DK2 compatible Second Life viewer and hopes to have it available to us all early next week!

He was seen last night running around 1920s Berlin testing this DK2 viewer there, because we build that sim to RL scale and have been trying really hard to make a visit there an immersive experience, it has become place where Oculus wearers go to test out the VR experience in SL.

Ebbe spend about a hour in our city, walking around, chatting to people and doing a lot of looking in different directions.

Ebbe Linden talking to a few locals at Der Keller in 1920s Berlin. Pictyre by Eloise Schiltzen

We really should help him find a nice mesh 1920s outfit!

Ebbe also wrote about the DK2 viewer on twitter;

This is quite interesting news for everyone with a DK2 Oculus Rift.
Sadly I am not one of them, I even had to give my DK1 back and I can’t afford to buy the DK2.
Yes, this is a subtle hint; “SOMEONE GIVE ME A DK2!”.

Linden Lab ceases development for Patterns

Tags

linden lab, patterns

Linden Lab just made the following announcement on their Press release page;

The Conclusion of Patterns

2014-10-09

Recently, Linden Lab announced that we are working on an ambitious project to create the next-generation virtual world, while we continue to improve Second Life and grow Blocksworld. As we focus on these priorities, we have ceased development for Patterns, and we will be no longer offering the game for sale.

We at Linden Lab are extremely grateful for the adventurous early players who explored the Patterns genesis release. Those who purchased the Patterns genesis release will still be able to play their copies of the game, but features relying on server connections, such as world-sharing, will not be functional.

Patterns had early promise, and while Linden Lab focuses our efforts on our other offerings, we are still evaluating the future of the Patterns technology. Interested parties are welcome to contact us with proposals.

Linden Lab moved quickly, the Patterns website www.buildpatterns.com now links to the Linden Lab website and it has already been removed from their Products page.
The twitter account https://twitter.com/BuildPatterns has also been deleted.

Linden Lab announced Patterns in September 2012.

I tried it myself and felt it had potential but it failed to keep me entertained for more than a few hours.

It was described by many as ‘MineCraft’ with triangles in stead of cubes.

Although sad to see something that still gives a lot of people pleasure go, I personally like that Linden Lab concentrates on fewer products.

Poor little triangle guy.

Designing Worlds talks to Ebbe Altberg

Tags

"second life", designing worlds, ebbe altberg, ebbe linden, future, interview, progress, SL2

The excellent Second Life show ‘Designing Worlds‘ celebrated its 250th (!) episode with an exclusive interview with Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab.

It is a very interesting and exciting talk, I won’t write too much about it because others have already done so and you should of course just watch it.

You can see it here on the ‘Designing Worlds’ page on Treet.tv, or here on the Excellent ‘Living  in the Modem World’ blog where you can also read along with a transcript.

I could not resist picking the currants out of the porridge (yes, that is a Dutch saying), and sharing some of the extra interesting bits;

In short; mesh avatars will be improved, starter experience will be changed, 1920s Berlin is amazing, Ebbe’s son Aleks helps Linden Lab with inworld research, Second Life isn’t coming to an end, groups and group chat are being worked on, bringing back last names is high on the list, SL2 Alpha release planned for middle of next year and it already looks better than SL1.

Ebbe;

The team is working on making improvements to the avatars, from little things that we might see as bugs, and also trying to solve the “dead face” , get some eyes and mouths  start moving.

For the future, we’re thinking really hard about how the on-boarding to the next generation platform will not necessarily be to have you go through this one place because we want to make it easy for the creators of experiences to bring-in an audience directly into their experience.

It’s one of those things that’s near the top of priorities for Second Life to bring back the idea of the community portals or something like that, where it’s easy for experience creators to attract users directly into their experience from the outside world.

(1920s) Berlin is amazing to me. It’s funny. My son actually did a little bit of contracting here, helping the product team with some in-world research. He spent some time in Berlin and interviewed Jo Yardley, and just listening to him talk to me when we were driving down to LA together the other day just you know, how it’s grown over the years and the incredible community engagement around that experience and how they’re sticking to a very specific design and community philosophy, and it’s working and the residents in that community love being there.

Second Life will be around for a long, long, long time for people to continue to enjoy what it is.
We don’t have any plans right now to do anything that would be destructive to what you can do in Second Life today. So it’s mostly just improvements we’re talking about, not extreme changes to anything that would jeopardise the content or the creations or people’s livelihood.

On group chat ; We spoke to Jo (me! 😉 ) and many others, once you get into many groups and you’re trying to manage communities, there’s plenty of functionality we could add to make that easier.
But the performance issues of the lag in chat is something that a group of people here worked on for quite a while. It’s only of those Second Life old technology things where you just start pulling at a bit of string and it keeps going and going. So I don’t know when we can say definitively that we’ve solved it and you’re no longer going to see chat lag, but I already know we’re better today than we were a few months ago, but I’m not sure how close we are to being able to say, it’s solved now, there are no more problems.

(Bringing back last names) is on the list of Second Life things that I know both Oz and Danger would like to tackle.
I don’t know what exactly or when exactly. I just know it’s high up on the list… …But it’s clearly something that the team would like to solve. I just don’t have any more information than that right now, because everything that is below the thing that we’re actively working on right now, gets a little fuzzy until it actually becomes an active project where people are actually working on the designs and the specifications and the code.
So it’s sort-of in that next set of things that we would like to tackle, I just don’t know how many other things could get in the way.

On SL2;
We are also looking out to what will the first, at least a little bit public, release, an alpha release which might be invite-only for certain use cases, when can that take place. And we’re trying to aim for somewhere middle of next year.
…I’ve already seen this little test world that we have, and I look at that little test world, and I go you know what? I haven’t seen something in Second Life that looks that nice. So even though it’s this early, you can already start to see that we have some advantages already this early on.

We’ve said that mesh is something that is very likely to be importable (in SL2), we’re working on that already. so people working in mesh should be able to leverage their assets to a large degree in the future.
This place (SL) is great, stay here for a long, long time. We don’t even think about how to transition people in some specific time frame. If three years from now, this is still a better place for people than the new place (SL2), then so be it.

We’re trying to make it clear to people that the content is yours, and we just need to have sufficient protections to protect ourselves. But again, it’s obviously not in our interest to make a mess for content creators by ourselves stepping in and starting to be part of the problem, rather than the solution with regards to IP protection.

On ending, congratulations to Saffia Widdershins and Elrik Merlin on reaching this very impressive milestone.
Thank you very much Inara Pey on providing the excellent transcript and writing about it on your blog.
And well done Herr Altberg on another excellent interview.

The future looks interesting!

Screenshot from Designing Worlds

Can we have graphics like these in SL please?

Tags

cgi, graphics

Ebbe, can you somehow magically give us graphics like these in Second Life please?

I know, I know, it is not (yet) possible, but I am sure that in the not to distant future all our games and virtual experiences will look this stunning.

And stunning is an understatement.

Amazing CGI rendering of an animated head made by the very talented Chris Jones.

This is beyond the uncanny valley, this is real, but it isn’t.

Picture from mr Jones his website.

Breaking news; Facebook is changing its real name policy

Tags

facebook, identity

After another meeting with representatives of the LGBT community, Facebook has agreed that their ‘Real name policy’ was flawed, apologised for offending people and may “revert” to a “preferred name” policy instead.

The company also said that it will outline to activists how it plans to fix its policies.

Following a meeting today, Supervisor David Campos’s office send out this press release;

On Wednesday morning Supervisor David Campos, the lead negotiator for a broad coalition of activists including drag queens, transgender people, performers, survivors of abuse and stalking, political dissidents and privacy activists announced a successful outcome to conversations with Facebook regarding their real name policy.

“The drag queens spoke and Facebook listened! Facebook agreed that the real names policy is flawed and has unintentionally hurt members of our community. We have their commitment that they will be making substantive changes soon and we have every reason to believe them,” Campos said. “Facebook apologized to the community and has committed to removing any language requiring that you use your legal name. They’re working on technical solutions to make sure that nobody has their name changed unless they want it to be changed and to help better differentiate between fake profiles and authentic ones.”

Facebook’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox (sure that isn’t a Drag Queen name?) made this public post on the matter;

I want to apologize to the affected community of drag queens, drag kings, transgender, and extensive community of our friends, neighbors, and members of the LGBT community for the hardship that we’ve put you through in dealing with your Facebook accounts over the past few weeks.

In the two weeks since the real-name policy issues surfaced, we’ve had the chance to hear from many of you in these communities and understand the policy more clearly as you experience it. We’ve also come to understand how painful this has been. We owe you a better service and a better experience using Facebook, and we’re going to fix the way this policy gets handled so everyone affected here can go back to using Facebook as you were.

The way this happened took us off guard. An individual on Facebook decided to report several hundred of these accounts as fake. These reports were among the several hundred thousand fake name reports we process every single week, 99 percent of which are bad actors doing bad things: impersonation, bullying, trolling, domestic violence, scams, hate speech, and more — so we didn’t notice the pattern. The process we follow has been to ask the flagged accounts to verify they are using real names by submitting some form of ID — gym membership, library card, or piece of mail. We’ve had this policy for over 10 years, and until recently it’s done a good job of creating a safe community without inadvertently harming groups like what happened here.

Our policy has never been to require everyone on Facebook to use their legal name. The spirit of our policy is that everyone on Facebook uses the authentic name they use in real life. For Sister Roma, that’s Sister Roma. For Lil Miss Hot Mess, that’s Lil Miss Hot Mess. Part of what’s been so difficult about this conversation is that we support both of these individuals, and so many others affected by this, completely and utterly in how they use Facebook.

We believe this is the right policy for Facebook for two reasons. First, it’s part of what made Facebook special in the first place, by differentiating the service from the rest of the internet where pseudonymity, anonymity, or often random names were the social norm. Second, it’s the primary mechanism we have to protect millions of people every day, all around the world, from real harm. The stories of mass impersonation, trolling, domestic abuse, and higher rates of bullying and intolerance are oftentimes the result of people hiding behind fake names, and it’s both terrifying and sad. Our ability to successfully protect against them with this policy has borne out the reality that this policy, on balance, and when applied carefully, is a very powerful force for good.

All that said, we see through this event that there’s lots of room for improvement in the reporting and enforcement mechanisms, tools for understanding who’s real and who’s not, and the customer service for anyone who’s affected. These have not worked flawlessly and we need to fix that. With this input, we’re already underway building better tools for authenticating the Sister Romas of the world while not opening up Facebook to bad actors. And we’re taking measures to provide much more deliberate customer service to those accounts that get flagged so that we can manage these in a less abrupt and more thoughtful way. To everyone affected by this, thank you for working through this with us and helping us to improve the safety and authenticity of the Facebook experience for everyone.

It seems that things will get a little easier for people who don’t want to use their RL name on FB.
Let’s hope this will also work for us avatars, if not, we can always explain to them that we are Virtual Drag Queens, after all, many people in SL swap gender now and then 😉

On the other hand we have to remain sceptical, this could all just be coorperate PR talk, damage control.
And it may not be motivated by the actual believe they need to improve things but by fear of the competition.
Facebook alternative Ello has been getting a lot of attention lately, 31.000 people an hour are joining it.
Not something Facebook could/should/would ignore.

Why is it still so important for us to be allowed to use Facebook?
Well, love it or hate it, it is just very handy for SL communities and individuals to stay in contact with each other.
And until mysecondlife offers more options or Ello evolves, there aren’t that many other options.
Google+ sort of works, but isn’t to everyone’s liking.
Some people say that you should create a page for your avatar, but these have almost none of the functions that make Facebook interesting in the first place.

Either way, nothing is sure yet, but I was right when I said that I thought that we would have some good allies when the Drag Queens started getting upset and that people would now start paying attention.