Second Life avatars get their biggest change in years

Tags

anouncement, avatars, improvements

Today Linden Lab announced ‘Project Bento’, the biggest change in Second Life avatars in years.

One of the things Second Life offers like almost nobody else is the freedom to change and personalise your avatar pretty much without limits, now they are making this easier and are going us even more options.

I quote from the Second Life website announcement;

We are introducing extensions to the standard Second Life Avatar Skeleton that give you dozens of new bones to support both rigging and animation, and accompanying new attachment points! This extended skeleton, which is fully backward compatible with existing avatars, rigging and animation, gives creators the power to build more sophisticated avatars than ever before. The skeleton extensions include:

• 11 extra limb bones for wings, additional arms, or extra legs.
• 6 tail bones
• 30 bones in the hands (all 10 fingers!)
• 30 bones for facial expressions
• 2 other new bones in the head for animating ears or antennae
• 13 new attachment points associated with the new bones

We’ve developed all this in collaboration with many expert Resident content creators and with the developers of the most popular tools for creating avatars and animations, so there will quickly be versions of those tools you can use to help take advantage of these changes. There is also some demo content already available.

I think this is interesting news, quite a few people seem to think Second Life will be neglected now Linden Lab is working on Project Sansar, but this clearly shows they are still putting a lot of work into improving their first-born.

Another thing I like is that they aren’t releasing this yet, but first want us to testrun these new features and let them know what we think.

I quote again;

The avatar skeleton changes introduced by Project Bento are not yet final because we want your feedback, either in the Creation Forum or in JIRA. To experience the changes, you’ll need to download the Project Viewer and upload any content using the new skeleton extensions to the Aditi Beta Test Grid (most regions on the Beta Test Grid will allow this; some may be in use for other testing and not yet have these updates). Once we have finalized the skeleton extensions, we will enable uploads using them to the main Second Life grid and the real fun can begin!

You can read the entire announcement by clicking here.

And check out this enticing video made by Gaia Clary;

show #98: qarl is back!

The latest Drax Files radio hour show;

the drax files radio hour

show #98

former linden lab star qarl [creator of sculpties among many other things] is back outside of vr and all that but nonetheless mind-boggling stuff = an ai paint engine.

enjoy the conversation and share your thoughts on the end of all human art:

• the origin of pikazo = neural networks! [and an interesting motherboard article on the matter]

qarl and partner noah rosenberg at nyc founder night

•  pikazo in the news & in the news again & in the app store

the source = hannah radcliff portrait source painted by martha iller

hannah radcliff in the style of a portrait made by another painter

• qarl’s book “musements” on amazon

drax avatar with “make sl great again” hat

• pikazo speaks for itself through the pictures of its users [mostly selfies for whatever reason…]:

helen peck in the style of a nice fabric

thomas pipia in the style…

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The Drax Files: World Makers. Episode 34: Cheeky Pea

Tags

cheeky pea, drax files

Draxtor Despres has released another wonderful short documentary about one of Second Life’s residents; Cheeky Pea.
You’ll find the video at the bottom of the page.

Draxtor writes;

The mainstream media likes to point out how “living online” destroys relationships in the “real” world but for one American-Scottish couple the virtual world of Second Life became a facilitator: a conduit to finding each other’s “soulmate”.

“You can absolutely tell who someone is by meeting their avatar in SL” says 3D designer Isla Gealach , who moved in with Ewan Mureaux two years ago after having met almost 8 years ago online.

Ewan, who makes a living doing land deals and writing scripts in Second Life, points out that by allowing to freely use an avatar identity as proxy for communicating, Second Life is unique in the category of social networks: “…it can cut through societal constraints and gets more to the heart of who you are!”

Completing the Edinburgh based family is Isla’s daughter who at 9-years of age has a solid grasp of the concept of virtual goods. No surprise there, since her mother makes her income by selling home and garden accessories via the Cheeky Pea brand.

The perceived esoteric nature of her work prompts Isla to use the term intangible rather than virtual when put on the spot about her profession: “I always respond to skeptics by saying that I make environmental spaces where the experience and the memories people have with my products are real!”

“As real as anything else!” says Ewan Mureaux.

And, suddenly, there is virtually nothing more to add…or is there?

For more information on Cheeky Pea check out http://cheekypeasl.com/

+++++++++

Special thanks to Moriko Inshan whose beautiful “Cherished” sim [http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife…] played backdrop to the ending of this episode.

Dark version of a dystopian VR future

Tags

3dar, Federico Heller, virtual reality, VR

The well known (and excellent) website ‘Road to VR’ has just published a story about a video made by Federico Heller of production team 3dar that is rather interesting.

It is about the future where VR junkies are addicted to VR and their dependence on it is abused by a third party.

Go ahead and watch it here, spoilers follow below the video.

 

Spoiler alert.

I rather enjoyed the video, as someone who spend 4 years in film school and a few years making film & TV, I was impressed with how well it was made.
I can enjoy a film simply based on technicalities.

At first I felt a bit defensive, because I consider myself to be  VR junkie already, or, like many people, at least a computer & TV addict.
How many people spend almost every available free moment behind a screen?
Yet my house looks pretty decent!
And I still have a social life.
So seeing people obsessed with VR being shown as social outcasts who live in squalor and filth, made me grumble.

But that is of course not quite the subject of the film.

This story is about the state (I assume) abusing those who spend lots of time in VR as entertainment to fight their (very) dirty war.
Connecting their avatar to an actual robot warrior somewhere across the world.

I find this a very realistic scenario and would not be surprised if in the future this is something that actually will happen.
After all nobody wants to risk the lives of their own soldiers and what we do with drones today will one day be possible with robots.
Putting metal boots on the ground.

However, I fear that the state will not have to fool VR junkies into doing this.
Maybe I am too cynical and have too little faith in mankind, but I reckon that they can just recruit gamers.
If a country would offer its civilians the ultimate VR experience, a very exciting combat game that also could be considered as patriotism, doing your bit for freedom and democracy and that could involve a salary or possibly prizes and awards… people would come running.
No need to fool them, no need to mask the reality.
Countless people would enjoy playing this ‘game’ of war even if they knew the people they were shooting were real, as long as they don’t get hurt themselves.
And perhaps most shocking of all, would be that most of these soldiers would be kids.
A battle half way across the world could end abruptly as half the soldiers of one side have to go to bed as it is a ‘school night’.

Anyway, enough dark thoughts.

An interesting video.

And what do you think about the VR device?
A little nose ring…

Make sure you check out more information about it here on the ‘Road to VR’ website.

 

show #97: lab chat response

The latest Drax Files Radio hour is here;

the drax files radio hour

show #97

a brief show in response to the emotionally charged comment threads which started after the first lab chat broadcast…who would have expected that a few were of the nasty kind?

enjoy out post mortem analysis:

and just handful of links this week as we are out the door already:

• ciaran laval is writing on the issue

lab chat crowd – darn big

• and a few other blog posts [from canary and one from loki eliot] on lab chat
• the official videos of lab chat on the sl yt channel

• luca grabacr made another great video

the drax files radio hour [with jo yardley] is a weekly production of basicdrax entertainment.

the show is supported by maven homes, gizza creations, botanical, strawberry singh, abranimations, aeros avatars, kahruvel design, giant snail races every saturday, avacon, the cube republic, fatewear by damien fate, the avazines publication family, {what next}, bright…

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