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Jo Yardley's Second Life

Author Archives: Jo Yardley

Ebbe Altberg NEW CEO OF LINDEN LAB

05 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by Jo Yardley in News

≈ 6 Comments

Linden Lab JUST released this press release;

2014-02-05

SAN FRANCISCO — February 5, 2014 — Linden Lab®, the makers of Second Life®, BlocksworldTM, DesuraTM, and more, today announced that Ebbe Altberg will lead the company as its new Chief Executive Officer.

Most recently prior to joining Linden Lab, Altberg was COO of BranchOut. Prior to that, he was part of the executive team at Yahoo!, most recently as SVP of Media Products. His more than 25 years of experience managing teams that create world-class products and services also includes leadership roles at Ingenio (acquired by at&t Interactive) and Microsoft.

“We remain committed to world-changing innovation from Linden Lab,” said Jed Smith of the company’s Board of Directors. “We’re keenly focused on providing incredible experiences for all of our customers, and Ebbe is the perfect person to help lead our team as we continue to serve and grow our global audience of active users.”

“Linden Lab has long been at the forefront of building experiences that entertain people while empowering them to express themselves and profit from their creations,” said Altberg. “Our customers’ creativity is unparalleled, and I’m proud to join the talented team that serves them. Second Life is now in its eleventh year, and every day, users continue to create more and more amazing experiences to enjoy. Though much younger, Blocksworld has already seen hundreds of thousands of unique user-created worlds shared for everyone to play with. I’m absolutely committed to supporting our customers and helping them become even more successful. There are significant opportunities ahead, and I look forward to leading us into the next phase of growth.”

I can’t say I’ve heard of mr Altberg or the projects he’s worked on in his previous career.

I do of course know about Yahoo and am afraid that I can’t say many positive things about that company.

I will do some more research but so far I’ve not found much evidence that suggests Mr Altberg has any experience with Virtual Worlds, as a user or otherwise.

But I guess we’ll have to give him a chance and find out a bit more about him first.

I hope he will be willing to throw himself into this and actually create an avatar and become part of Second Life.

After all, you must understand the goods you’re selling.

And I hope he will improve the communication between LL and its users, talk to us!

He already made a first good step by being on Twitter and actually responding 🙂

A good first step would be an interview with Draxter at the Drax files

I am sure his last name is no reason to worry us… mr “Alt Mountain” 😉

Mr Altberg is descrbibed on LinkedIn as follows;

Over 20 years experience managing teams that define, produce and operate world class software, packaged or hosted, on multiple platforms and across numerous product categories and technologies.

Create fantastic and profitable experiences that positively impact millions of people.

Specialties:Team development, strategy, provide vision, software and business inventions, product design, engineering, product/program management, quality engineering, operations.

Manage teams that invent, create, define, spec, build, produce, test, ship, market and operate products.

Philippe CassereauVP of Technology at Disney describes him as;

Ebbe is a very strong business and product leader able to filter the noise and distill a crisp vision and direction for his team. He was instrumental in shifting the thinking in Yahoo Media from being vertically silo’ed to instead a strong platform SaaS horizontal approach at global scale. As a manager, Ebbe is able to inspire action and results without micro-managing his staff and trusting his teams to figure out the details, while setting a consistent direction and vision for his organization. He has great skills at filtering through the minutia and details of running a large organization and zeroing instead quickly of what is really important for the business.

Noelia Fernández ArroyoVP, Media Network, EMEA at Yahoo! describes him as follows;

Ebbe has been so critical in my career and the moment we live in Yahoo! He has a superb intuition and determination to build great teams and leaders, where people contribute to same goal and over perform. He also has a genuine and unique vision for Media on the Internet, how to create content in scale and leverage platforms and technology to create the best content experiences. He is also a true global thinker, as he sees beyond geographies and team sizes and allows and creates flexibility.

He is an architect, a creator of ideas as well as a builder. This is so key in the leadership we need to day on the Internet, to keep reinventing and innovating.

I look forward the day I can work with him again!

Nitin AhujaVP Engineering at SmartShoot.com says;

Ebbe has the unique ability to focus on a problem and always find an elegant solution. He is a natural leader and is able to rally everyone around him in working towards making the customer happy.

Ebbe can absorb large amounts of technical information and use it build innovative and useful features and products. Having worked with him for over eight years I have come to respect his judgment and his flair for product design.

It is of course to be expected that praise on LinkedIn is always positive but it seems Mr Altberg is mostly someone who can run a company well.

I fear that we at Second Life need a bit more than just a good manager though.

Photo copyright Linkedin

Photo copyright Linkedin

Screenshot_2erf

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Suggestion for solving the large texture problems in SL

03 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by Jo Yardley in Improving Second Life

≈ 6 Comments

Large textures are a huge problem in Second Life, I know, I’m guilty of causing that problem myself.

If you want to make something look really nice from far but also up close, you are easily tempted to use the biggest texture allowed in SL, 1024 pixels by 1024 pixels.

In most cases this is absurd.

if you want to build a big building with a one texture façade that has lots of little details and that has to look good up close, then it makes sense.

If you prefer using 1 large texture that consists of several smaller ones so you can wrap it around a mesh object without having to use many different textures, it makes sense.

However people don’t always seem to care about the size of textures or they don’t even know they are using large images in stead of regular or small ones.

This becomes a problem when you live in a full sim with up to 100 other people who all enjoy rezzing stuff.
Yes, that is where I live.

A 1024×1024 texture takes for ever to rez, that is all the grey stuff you see in SL.
And when there are lots, it slows things down.

A 1024×1024 pixel texture uses 16 times as much memory as a 256×256 texture!
And when texture demands get too high, frame rate suffers.

As I said, it makes sense to use them in some cases but in many other cases you can use smaller ones without any noticeable loss of quality.

Linden Lab can’t solve the problem of people who use large textures on purpose, because they need big textures or just because they are lazy or don’t care.

For instance, some designers make little shoes, handbags, jewelry and sunglasses with lots of huge textures.
This makes the objects look great and who cares that they cause sims trouble somewhere outside the shop?
But really, nobody would actually notice if you use a 512/512 or 256/256 texture for the sole of that shoe, the backside of that earring or for those 80 individual pieces of diamond on your necklace…

I am trying to cut down on large textures, I promise.
But when someone in SL sends me a texture they want me to use as wallpaper in the house they rent or for whatever other reason, it is often a very large texture.
That means I will first have to download it (and usually remind the sender to give me a full perm version), then I have to open photoshop and make the texture smaller, then upload it again and pay 10 Linden for the pleasure of all that hassle.

But Linden Lab could do something about people who accidently upload large textures, who are perhaps not so good with image editing software or who just don’t know about the whole large textures issues.

Here is what I think Linden Lab could/should do, consider it as a free gift to the next CEO 😉

Add this to the texture upload window;

CHANGE SIZE2

First of all, a nice big red warning that lets the user know he or she is uploading a large texture, the red question mark button below that warning will give them some information on why large textures are not always a good idea and rarely needed.

But when the user then clicks the change size the SL viewer rezzes several different sized versions of that picture, for instance 512×512, 256×256, 64×64, depending on the size of the original texture of course.

The user can then decide to easily, without any image software hassle, decide to upload a smaller texture.
You wanted to upload that 1024×512 pixel image, the uploader warned you, you saw that the quality really wasn’t that bad at a 512×256 resolution and uploaded that version in stead, easy, quick and we’re fighting lag.
Everybody happy.

You may think that it will be a hell of a lot of work for LL to add this to our viewers, yes it probably is although the viewers can already rescale images, try uploading a picture that is 2000×2000 pixels big, it will automatically be converted to 1024×1024.

But even if it is a lot of work for LL, it will be worth it.

Not only will a better use of textures make SL look better, it will also make it run a lot smoother.
Lag is and will be the biggest complain users have and getting rid of a lot of the big textures will make a difference.

 

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Drax Files radio show episode 4

31 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by Jo Yardley in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Episode 4 of the Drax Files Radio Show with Jo Yardley is online.

We’re talking about Rod Humble leaving and talking to lots of people about their opinion on the current situation.

But of course we talk about other news stories;

You can listen to this episode by clicking here.

Enjoy and let us know what you think.

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Another Oculus Rift user visits 1920s Berlin

30 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by Jo Yardley in Oculus Rift, Virtual reality

≈ 3 Comments

Emily Kenney visited 1920s Berlin with her Oculus Rift and was kind enough to write me a report about her experiences.

If you have visited 1920s Berlin or the Oculus Rift Test area and want to write about it for my blog, let me know.

It would be much appreciated.

My name is Emily Kennedy. I started in second life in Feb. 2005, but I’ve taken frequent breaks from SL in that time. I had been away from SL for about a year and a half when I found out that the Ctrl Alt Studio Viewer had experimental Oculus Rift support.  This made me incredibly excited to go back to Second Life to try it.
 
For people who aren’t familiar with the oculus rift, it’s a virtual reality headset that’s still in development. The company has sold development kits to the public so developers can create games and applications for it.  It’s not a finished product, but it’s more than enough to show how much of a breakthrough this technology is in creating a virtual reality experience affordable to the general public.  The development kit has lower resolution than a computer monitor, and doesn’t have positional tracking, only rotational tracking, but these are issues that should be fixed when the consumer versional is eventually released.  
 
When I first heard about the Oculus Rift, I wanted to understand what it was like to actually use one. I went online, and tried to learn everything there was about it.  I watched as many youtube videos as I could, but sadly, most of the people who had one said “You have to try it to understand it.”  After I got my own rift, I found that all those hours of watching videos and reading articles really didn’t convey what it was like.  I tried to come up with a way to give a sense of what was different. If you imagine a pc monitor is a window, and you were able to reach into the monitor and pull out a game character, they might be about the size of a Barbie Doll. And the buildings and structures are the size of doll houses that would fit on your kitchen table.  They have to be smaller than real life, so you can see as much as possible on the limited screen area.  With the rift, everything is suddenly life sized.  If you’re next to a 30 foot tall building, you have to look up to see the top, just as you would in real life, and it towers over you. That sense of scale is something I never experienced with a monitor.
 
Another difference is the head tracking.  Imagine that you’re inside a small 4 walled building with just one window the size of a computer monitor, and you’re seated about 2 feet from it.  That window is all you know of world around you.  That’s what regular gaming is like.  Now imagine that all 4 walls and roof suddently vanish, and now you can see everything all around you, even what’s behind you by turning your head. That’s what it’s like to use the oculus rift.  You’re no longer trying to make sense of the world thorough a tiny window, but now you’re actually in the world.   When you get close as you can to a virtual wall using a monitor, your character might be right in front of it, but your real life body is still as far away from it as the monitor is. When wearing the rift, I got as close as I could to a wall, and it really felt like it was 5 inches away from my face, and covered my entire view. 
 
One of the most striking differences is the 3D effect.  The oculus rift gives each eye a slightly different view, and the brain uses those differences to calculate differences in 3D space. I’ve gone to 3D movies, and back in the 90’s I bought shutter glasses that connected to the PC that gave you a sense of 3D, but both of these methods made the screen dimmer.  The rift has the best 3D effect I’ve seen, without a loss of brightness.
 
All of these work together to give an incredible sense of immersion. 
 
Because the Ctrl Alt Studio Viewer can’t show all of the User Interface in oculus rift mode, I had to make sure my avatar was all set before I put on the Rift.  Like most SL avatars, I was much taller than the average real life person.  I was probably close to 7 feet tall.  One of the features of the 1920’s Berlin sim created by Jo Yardley is that everything sized to a real life scale.  I’m sure it took a lot of effort to do this, but it’s is one of the things that helps to create a great virtual reality experience. Before going to the 1920’s Berlin Sim test area, I adjusted my height and became 5’7″ plus a few inches from my heels. Now I was ready for the Rift!  I teleported to the sim, and found myself in another era. I saw a sign saying “Freebies” and some freebie boxes for period appropriate clothes and a few miscellaneous items. I was wearing a bright red modern dress that felt out of place, so I put on one of the free 1920’s dresses, and felt ready to explore.  I turned on the rift mode in the viewer, and then put on my rift.  Now I was looking at the world through my avatar’s eyes.  When I turned my head, my avatar turned her head in the exact same way. When I looked up at the ceiling in my apartment, I didn’t see my ceiling, but instead I saw the starry night sky above my avatar’s head.  When I looked down, I saw my avatar’s body wearing the 1920’s dress. From this point on, I’ll stop refering to my avatar, because the feeling of immersion was so great, it really felt like I was IN the virtual world, and not watching a picture of it on my monitor.
 
As I was walking along, I noticed a poster on the wall, but it wasn’t just a texture of a poster flat on the wall, but instead it was a poster that had thickness, and even more, the upper left corner looked like it had come loose, and had folded over part of the rest of the poster, causing some wrinkles. I had to move back and forth, looking closely. The thickness and attention to detail was something I probably would have missed normally, but now I was able to appricate it in a new way.   As I walked on, I saw an area that had snow. I had to stop, and felt my mouth open. It looked amazing, because the snow was falling in 3D.  Some looked like they were right in front of my face, others looked like they were further away, but they all felt like they were really there.  I then walked into a bar, and had the feeling of the doorway being a few inches above my head. I walked around trying to take in all the detail.  I saw a house of cards on one of the tables, and sat at the chair in front of it. I had a closer view of the cards, and it was marvelous seeing them in 3D right in front of me. Maybe in a few years, people might be able to put on haptic gloves, and be able to not only build virtual houses of cards by moving their real life hands, but maybe build anything they wanted to in second life.  I left the bar and hopped on the train that would take me from the berlin test area into the full 1920s Berlin Sim.
 
After I arrived in Berlin, I left the train station. I glanced up, and saw a large zepplin high in the sky. It was hard to tell how big it might be.  I then wandered into a blue telephone booth.  I really felt like I was in the enclosed space, but I didn’t feel uncomfortable, because I was able to see through all the glass panels.  I then wandered along the street and passed a few avatars that were roleplaying as inhabitants of the city, performing their job. I won’t say who I saw, so as to not spoil anything. If you come across any of them, be sure to read their profile, to read about their character. 
 
As I strolled along, I saw not too far in the distance, a huge zepplin hovering maybe 30 feet above a landing field.  I was in awe. The sense of scale was very strong at this distance. As I got closer, I could tell that the dirgible was perhaps the length of a football field. I had to turn my head from side to side to see it from end to end.  As I walked underneath it, it seemed as though each of the propellers was longer than my body was tall.  I was able to take a seat in the passenger compartment, and hoped that I would be able to take a ride around the city, but it didn’t appear to be the case.  I left the zepplin, and walked near a gyrocopter, with one of the vertical blades passing just a few inches above my head. I almost felt like ducking in real life to avoid it. That’s how real it seemed.  I went inside a clothing shop and ended up on the roof, where a hedge perhaps 3 feet tall ringed most of the rooftop.  The texture showed the leaves of a hedge, but the edges of the edge were flat, so unfortunately it had the appearance of a painting on a flat surface. This is another thing I would not have noticed without the Rift.   I stood at an area that didn’t have a hedge, and looked down.  It really felt as though I was standing on a ledge, with the street far below me. I  decided to jump, and felt a few butterflies in my stomach as I fell.  my dress flapped around me as I fell, and it added to the immersion.  Luckily, like Neo in the Matrix, I survided my fall off the building, and continued my stroll.  I saw some snowmen outside a theater and studied them for quite a while, trying to see how close I could get, marveling at how realistic the carrots for their noses looked. They really felt like if I got too close, they might poke me in the face.  
 
I spent more time exploring, but I think what I’ve written so far really gives a sense of what it’s like to explore an area with the rift.  I’m very glad that Berlin was made to a consistent real life scale, to really give the sense of immersion in a realistic space. I’m very excited about the future of virtual reality, and really excited about the future of Second Life, which I haven’t been for a while.  I hope that Linden Lab decides to embrace virtual reality, and makes adjustments in SL to make it the best possible experience. 
After her experience Emily wrote a handy blog guide with tips and advice for those who want to try the Oculus Rift in Second Life;
http://virtualemily.wordpress.com/2014/01/28/using-the-oculus-rift-in-second-life/
9121911862_8ed7462747_c

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Rod has left the building

29 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by Jo Yardley in News

≈ 8 Comments

The leaving of Rod Humble as CEO of Linden Lab and commander in chief of our Second Life world, has caused quite a bit of surprise and excitement.

When Rod announced it to me a few days ago in a facebook message I was rather shocked and surprised, I didn’t see that coming.

Let me just make it clear that Rod and I are not close friends and that I am not really  a special privileged position.
We are Facebook friends but that is about it, we did not chat regularly and only met inworld once when he visited 1920s Berlin for the Drax files episode.
I was just bold and brazen enough to now and then bother him, asking him for a scoop for my blog, and to my surprise he didn’t mind and didn’t immediately mute me.
I guess I was just lucky asking him if he had any news for my blog just when he was about to tell everyone he was quitting LL.

Anyway, after I heard the news I wrote my blog post and soon It spread across the (virtual) world.

We don’t know why he left, I just asked him a few moments ago and he isn’t ready to talk about the subject in detail yet, so it will be probably another few weeks before we know more.

Snapshot_002

But now we are without CEO and where do we go next?

Lots of people are talking about what Rod managed to do during his time as CEO, where he succeeded or failed.
Opinions can be found on both extreme sides of the spectrum.
Some think Rod was the best thing since sliced bread, others feel he didn’t do a thing.

In the end it of course depends on your personal perspective, on the things that you find important.
For instance as a builder I’ve experienced huge improvements in the last 3 years, bigger prims, mesh, texture layers, speeding up rezzing of avatars, etc, etc.
To me personally, those things meant a lot and I felt that during Rod’s time more changed in SL than in the years before.
I am not in the position to be able to say if Rod was personally responsible for some of these improvements, but he was in charge and thus responsible.

Of course other things got worse or were not fixed at all.
The ToS debacle is still fresh in our minds and it took way too long for us to get fitted mesh clothes.

Anyway, now Rod is gone we have to start thinking about his replacement, even though we will have nothing to say about who our new “virtual king” will become.
Which is a bit of a shame, after all, we are a world of people and the next CEO will be in charge of our world.
We need elections!

One thing the farewell of Rod has shown is that Linden Lab still has a big problem communicating with its population.
Although I am of course happy that I got a ‘scoop’, this really should have been something we should have found out via a proper LL press announcement.
So that is one the next CEO really should sort out.
We know that it is not a good idea to try and communicate with all SL users at once, that a CEO that everyone can tweet or send a message is just asking for trouble.
But like many I feel that LL just isn’t very chatty.
Changes happen, like Rod stepping down, without us hearing about it.
If Rod had not told me and if his Facebook account had been set to private and if he had not also befriended a couple of other SL users, this news may still have been unknown!

Linden Lab needs someone who talks to us all, a lot.
A direct representative to the CEO or the CEO him/herself.
We want to know what is going on at LL, what are you working on, how far is the Oculus Rift project coming along, what happened when marketplace crashed, tell us about some sim the CEO visited and really liked, show us a new SL video we can share with our RL friends and, oh I don’t know, perhaps let us know WHEN THE CEO RESIGNS!?!

We should not be hearing something that important via someone who just happened to get a message on Facebook.

Snapshot_015

There are lots of things I could say about who should be the next CEO but I feel that the most important thing is that the new CEO understands Second Life.

I feel that a lot of previous CEO’s but also staff members at Linden Lab and even many of its users still don’t quite get Second Life or don’t see its full potential.
At the moment Second Life feels like a black and white TV with only one channel, the broadcasts are great and there is plenty to see… but nobody seems to realise yet that there are more channels… and that if you push the right button… we can even have broadcasts in colour!

The new CEO should spend a LOT of time in Second Life, travel all over the place, meet lots of people and see where things go wrong and where they go right.

Don’t just try it on your nice fast Linden Lab computer either, use a slightly older model as well and perhaps a slower connection.
Feel our frustrations!

But above all, understand what SL is and why it is surviving.
Because really, it shouldn’t have.
It is 10 years old, the graphics are behind on what we’re used to in regular games, there still is lots of lag, it has a terrible reputation and it hasn’t gotten any real publicity since the anniversary.
Its users find it too expensive, too laggy and pretty much every user can see 987231 things that need improving.
Yet most of us stay and love our Second Life’s.
Why is that?
The CEO NEEDS to figure that out.

Besides becoming a regular SL user who doesn’t just explore a bit but who rents a home, decorates it, goes to clubs, etc, the CEO should also get in touch with some of SL’s hardcore users.
Those people who own successful stores, own lots of land, manage role playing sims, are landlords, create amazing machinima, are brilliant builders, etc, etc.

But also add a noob, someone who joined just a week ago and who somehow has not ran away screaming yet.

Use them as consultants, let them tell and show you what needs to improve, what is important and what is so great about Second Life.
Let them make you fall in love with it, let them make you realise it is not just another game, let them make you enthusiastic so you can truly defend and promote it during your interviews.

I don’t care what you personally want to change in SL, or where your priorities are, I just want you to get it, to understand SL and us, its users.

We are not just people who play a game you’ll be in charge of, we are people who live in a world you are in charge of.
Treat us as citizens, not gamers.

Snapshot_037

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Sponsoring a monument to victims of Nazism

27 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by Jo Yardley in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

In RL history plays an important part of my life, it is my job and I am very close to several people who lived trough the Second World War.

I am very happy that history and especially the war is also very important to many of the people involved in the 1920s Berlin Project, the sim I started almost 5 years ago.

It isn’t much of a surprise though as of course we are reminded of the dark years that followed the Weimar republic on almost a daily basis here in Second Life’s 1920s Berlin.

There is no escaping the political tension and the dark clouds on the horizon, even in this virtual world.

I am very proud that thanks to the people of this project and the many random visitors of 1920s Berlin, we collected enough money to sponsor a ‘Stolperstein’ monument, these are little monuments, the size of a cobblestone, to individual victims of Nazism.

You can find these stones in the pavements all over Europe.

We have put another donation meter at the entrance of our sim (click for slurl) and hope to collect enough money this year to sponsor 2 of these stones.

More about this on the 1920s Berlin blog here; http://1920sberlinproject.wordpress.com/2014/01/27/supporting-a-monument-to-victims-of-nazism/

This is the stone we supported last year, you can see it on the Rykestrasse 54 in RL Berlin.

Image

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Rod Humble leaves Linden Lab

24 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by Jo Yardley in SL in the media, Virtual reality

≈ 62 Comments

In a personal message to me via facebook send a few minutes ago, Rod Humble told me that he has left Linden Lab as CEO last week.

Screen Shot 2014-01-25 at 03.55.50

The IM I received

He then announced it to friends, family and coworkers on his personal facebook page.

“Its been a great 3 years! All my thanks to my colleagues at Linden Lab and our wonderful customers I wish you the very best for the future and continued success! I am starting-up a company to make Art, Entertainment and unusual things! More on that in a few weeks!”

After 3 years of running Linden Lab and bringing a lot of improvements to Second Life he resigned and is going to start up his own company that will make art, entertainment and all sorts of wonderful stuff.

It is not yet clear who will replace him but I wish him lots of success with his new project.

This news comes as a bit of a surprise and shock and there is no official announcement yet.

Although Rod’s name has now officially been removed from the Linden Lab leadership page;

http://lindenlab.com/about

Screen Shot 2014-01-25 at 01.15.52

Linden Lab management and board, now without Rod’s name.

Rod and me chatting

Rod and me chatting

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Amazing video about past, present and future of Virtual Reality

24 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by Jo Yardley in Drax files radio hour, Virtual reality

≈ 4 Comments

It has been announced and discussed in the Drax Files Radio Hour with Jo Yardley and I am happy to say that this video is now online.

I hope you all go and watch it and share it with everyone you know, people who are not into VR or Second Life but also those who are, especially if they are Linden Lab employees, or if they work for Oculus Rift, Leap Motion, Virtuix Omni or any other kind of company involved in this type of business.
Many of these people need a little reminder regarding the full potential of Second Life, yes that includes some Linden Lab employees.
But the video will also remind them of how far we’ve come.

We have an amazing virtual world here and although many think we’re part of the past, I reckon we’ve only just begun.

This excellent video was made by Loki Eliot who is a well known creator in Second Life.

It shows us the past, present and future of Virtual Reality.

A lovely walk down memory lane that will make you get all excited (again) about what VR is all about and where it is going at the moment.

But as I said, it is also just an excellent documentary about VR in general.

More about the creator and his video here on Loki Eliot’s blog.

Draxtor presents Loki Eliot’s “The LOST Virtual World”
A collection of videos telling the story of a virtual world, how a community embraced it and the media forgot about it.
Behold: a mash-up of interviews and documentary clips from the last 20 years about the phenomenon of virtual reality, its trials, tribulations and media mis-interpretations, all feeding social and political agendas of various stripes, juxtaposed with excerpts of a popular fictional TV show about passengers stranded on a mysterious island [no NOT Giligan’s!] – 30+ minutes, edited by 3D artist Loki Eliot.
A wonderful look at all sides of the debate about reality, the future of the human race and how to proceed, sandwiched between wide-eyed cyber utopianism and dire warnings of the end of reality as we know it.
With its inclusion of recent interviews with Oculus Rift inventor Palmer Luckey and early idealistic statements by Second Life founder Philip Rosedale this clip-show gives a great overview of the current debate and may even enthuse some of VR’s disillusioned early adopters…
Clips used include statements by
Robin Harper
David Fleck
Rick Kim
Philip Rosedale
Palmer Luckey
Steve Ballmer
Andrew Keen
Louis CK
Rod Humble
Fran Seranade
and
various elected US congress persons
Clips from ABC’s “LOST” copyright ABC Television, used under fair use guidelines.

12117974696_d0205f0393_b

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Drax Files Radio Show with Jo Yardley, episode 3: Esteban Winsmore invades!

24 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by Jo Yardley in Drax files radio hour

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The third episode of our podcast ‘The Drax Files Radio Show with Jo Yardley’ is NOW online!

It has lots of interesting subjects and also an interview with infamous griever Esteban Winsmore!

You can enjoy the show here;

http://draxfiles.com/2014/01/24/show3_esteban/

We also show a really great documentary made by Loki Eliot, more about that in my other blogpost that you can read by clicking here.

tdf-rh-show-3

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Drax files Radio show with Jo Yardley episode 2

17 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by Jo Yardley in Uncategorized

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Second episode of the VR and SL podcast ‘Drax files Radio show with Jo Yardley’ now online;
http://draxfiles.com/2014/01/17/show-2-the-legacy-of-osprey-therian/

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