First Oculus Rift user visits Berlin

Tags

"second life", oculus rift

Re-blogged from The 1920s Berlin Project blog.

Björn-Christian Bönkost decided to try his Oculus Rift virtual reality headset in our 1920s Berlin Project sim!

I am of course very jealous because I can’t wait to try this myself, but I’ve decided to wait till the commercial version is ready to go public.

Björn-Christian was able to visit Second Life with the Oculus Rift thanks to the latest upgrade of the CtrlAltStudio Viewer which recently had this option added.

You can read more about this in this blog;
An Initial Foray into Second Life with the Oculus Rift

I asked Björn-Christian to write about his experiences as an Oculus Rift visitor in 1920s Berlin;

I visited Berlin in 1920 today in second life, with my Rift Dev Kit.
The new prototype viewer from ctrlaltdel made this possible.
I was impressed, amazed and stunned.
The city is bigger than anything you can find as a demo for the rift.

The client is still in it´s infancy so after some trials, I decided to go to places in the standard mode and only take a look around in the rift once I got there.The presence and immersion in the environment is one of the strengths.

You sit on the bench in the Biergarten,you feel the narrow walls in the back alley.
The height of the ceiling in the asta cinema.
I was surprised by the size of the cars. I am not exactly small and my feeling was, I could not drive some of these because I instinctively know, I would not fit behind the steering wheel.
I visited a library, a gallery and the Volksbad bath house, admiring the design.
This is another plus point for this virtual world, Berlin has a constant scale, houses are big and the newspapers and glasses, tables and chair all have the right size.
And this is present in every corner I saw, nothing stands out or  breaks the suspension of disbelief.
I made a video of a rat, I saw on my way, movement certainly adds another layer of realism.

I also saw another person on my travel through the city, she walked just behind me and I was a little surprised, when I first saw her eye to eye, so to speak. But it reveals one of the main missing pieces, you have no interface in the client in Oculus mode.
So you can not see her chat message and cannot really answer, I switched back and answered her question: “taking a look around ?” with “Just a little” 😉

Another thing is a certain lag in motions, only after setting pre-rendered frames to 1 in the Nvidia control panel it was bearable.
I had to leave after I got really sick after 15-20 minutes in the rift.
I am very new to second life, I started in 2004, to try this new thing but I logged out right after I saw the first graphics, tried to move and got the feeling this wasn’t for me.
I tried again in 2008, just looking around, for maybe an hour to forget about it again.
I just started this with the oculus and had for the first time the feeling this will be interesting and was realy excited.

About myself:
I am Björn-Christian Bönkost, I live in Koblenz Germany.
I bought the rift for a simulation project I am working on in unity.
I got hooked by the dream of virtual reality and read “Ready Player One” and “Snowcrash” in a hurry.
In my free time I go rambling with my fiancee and am into photography.

Björn-Christian made a few videos of his visit, it is very exciting to see SL trough Oculus Rift eyes.

If you own a Rift, you can use it to view these videos and experience a visit to 1920s Berlin yourself.

To see more of the Oculus Rift videos in Berlin, visit this link;

http://www.youtube.com/user/yassokhuul/videos

50% discount for Educational and Nonprofit Institutions IS BACK

Linden Lab has made a very important step today, they undid one of their biggest mistakes of the last years.

Educational and Nonprofit Institutions used to get private regions with a 50% discount but this was cancelled in 2010, a very bad decision.
It caused many of SL’s educational sims to pack up their bags and leave.
Making an educational sim profitable is very difficult, I should know as I run The 1920s Berlin Project.
And of course it is important that these institutions get some help.
Cutting their discount did a lot of damage to the relationship between SL and many educational institutions and I fear that many won’t return, even now the discount is back.

Regardless of its steep learning curve and all its issues, SL remains the best tool for virtual online education and it is good that LL now wants these people to come back.

LL is showing that they ARE willing to lose some revenue, give discounts, lower tier, lets hope that they will now start thinking about doing the same to regions in general.
Not give everyone a discount, but create different kinds of tier, as I wrote about here in this blog.

Educational sims are important to SL, they show the outside world that this virtual world is not just about shopping and hanky panky.

When the Oculus Rift comes to SL, using it for educational will become even more interesting.
Imagine a history class in school where all the students put on their Rift and explore a Roman city… or 1920s Berlin!

I am not sure if the educational sims will come back, they may have found other places they can use for their projects or have just given up on virtual education for now.
But SL is (still) one of a kind and the alternatives that are out there just don’t cut it.
So who knows.

Either way, it is a step in the right direction even though it undoes a step that never should have made in the first place.

You can find the official announcement here;
Updated Pricing for Educational and Nonprofit Institutions

Rod Humble talks to Gamasutra about Desura

Tags

"rod humble", interview

One of the big games websites Gamasutra interviewed Rod Humble about Linden Lab buying Desura, some sort of digital distribution website.

And this time the website used a SL picture that is only 3 years old… I think that especially when Rod Humble does an interview, LL should flood those people with some up to date screenshots they could use.
“Hey, you want to interview me, sure, but please use up to date pictures when talking about SL, like these….”

I’ll admit that I am not that interested in this story (yet) but I do know that this is very big news and probably a good move.
Well done Linden Lab.
But, more interesting to me, Rod also mentioned Second Life.

Linden’s flagship Second Life, which despite years of getting slagged off in the press is still chugging along with 400,000 new registrations a month and a 20 percent retention rate. Not bad at all for a free title.

Now, this of course is old news, but it is nice that this website feels that perhaps the media treatment of SL the last couple of years has been a bit unfair.

The reason we don’t retain [more] people is, very simply, if they don’t find something that fits with their vision, they’re gone,” says Humble. “[For years] there was a belief that it would be big companies coming in and setting up shops, and in fact what happened was this user-generated economy of millions of people coming in and making small things. That’s a pattern that you’ve seen throughout many industries, the games business being one of them.

Rod Humble shows that he has pinpointed the reason why new people don’t stay in SL; they don’t find what they are looking for.
I also think this is one of the major problems SL has, new users need to be at least helped finding a sim they will enjoy and like, a theme they find interesting.
Once that happens, the rest will follow and they will want to figure out how it all works and accept the steep learning curve.

In facilitating that, Linden has rolled out (and continues to roll out) some pretty significant overhauls to Second Life, including to the servers. “As I’m sure you’ve heard from a lot of MMO developers, the one thing you never want to do is go in and try to refactor the server code. It’s just a nightmare. Well, we did that,” Humble chuckles anxiously. “We thought it was going to take us a year and it took us 18 months… [But] I think a lot of people will be seeing performance improvements now.”

I find this interesting as well, they planned such a massive overhaul that they assumed it would take them 1.5 years, that is impressive.
And yes, I’ve experienced some improvements already but am still waiting for the server side texture thingy to come to 1920s Berlin.
Either way, in my experience SL has changed a lot for the better in the last year.

The journalist writes;

Propping up the company’s mainstay is of chief import, obviously, and certainly a developer couldn’t be blamed for sticking to just that. The fact that Linden is instead capitalizing on Second Life‘s cashflow to expand into what could turn it into a solid rival for Valve’s Steam service is unique, risky, and potentially something to watch out for.

That is a good way of putting it, personally though I am not very interested in the LL cashflow but I guess that eventually, what is good for LL is good for SL.
I just hope that if it all goes wrong, SL does not suffer.

“We’re always on the look-out for key partners to further our strategy,” Humble says candidly. “We’re a very profitable company, we’re cash-rich, and if we can find potential partners, we will. That said, the strategy going forward is quite clear: to take all of our creative platforms, make them more and more open, and hopefully allow people to share and, if they want, sell their creations.”

Good, keep reminding the press how well LL is doing, that should keep them interested or make them interested again, after all, 10 years of pretty much running just one game and still making enough money to put bread on the table is a good story.

Rod Humble playing with the Oculus Rift

A few minutes ago Rod Humble (CEO of Linden Lab) posted this picture of himself trying the Oculus Rift in Second Life.

Notice the message on the board behind Rod… ‘Supa Sekret Acquisition here’… with an arrow and aw, what a coincidence, Rod is blocking the details!

Evil! 🙂

It is great to see Linden Lab taking the Rift so serious and work on it seems to be coming along!

Such exciting times, I can’t wait to try the Rift myself in 1920s Berlin!

Oculus Rift in Second Life goes public late summer!

Tags

"rod humble", "second life", oculus rift

In a very interesting interview with www.allthingsd.com Rod Humble talks about the Oculus Rift.

He says amongst other things;

I’m traditionally very skeptical of peripherals or hardware, but we’re integrating Oculus Rift support, which turned out to be really cool. Surprisingly cool.

It is great to hear that Rod is very excited about the Oculus, because I am too and I truly believe that it will not only change gaming and interaction with computers for ever and for more people then just gamers, I also think it can be a ‘game changer’ for Second Life.

We already know Linden Lab has the Oculus Rift up and running and is working on its usability, thanks to the interview with Draxtor Despres a few weeks ago.

But that Rod himself is also keeping an eye on it and doing some of the ‘testing’, is fun to read, he says;

I’ve ridden on a train within Second Life with the Oculus Rift on, and it’s very cool.

But most interesting is what he says on how far Linden Lab is with working on it;

We have it up and running, and right now we’re working on usability. You need to integrate it with the Rift so you can look around and touch things. I think it’s late summer when it’ll be public.

The official commercial Oculus Rift model is not out yet of course, so only people with a developer’s kit will be able to use it but nevertheless it is very exciting that, if all goes well, people will probably be able to start using their Rifts in Second Life within a few months!

There are a few more interesting things Rod says in this interview;

It’s coming in and out. When I arrived (in 2010, coming from EA), I thought it would be a core group. But well over half of our user base has been here 18 months or less, with about 400,000 new registrations a month. With the world I’m used to, video and computer games, usually you get a core and it’s the new users who stop coming. And we’ve maintained this incredibly healthy user acquisition. It may be that we don’t have a large competitor that’s well funded. If you want a user-made virtual world, we’re kind of it.

He also mentions one of SL’s biggest problems, the fact that so few people stick around, this is something I will write about (again) in my next blog.

It’s usually about 20 percent are going to be around a month afterward. That’s a massive drop-off, but it’s still not too bad compared to other services.

You can read the full interview by clicking here.

Only negative thing I can say about this interview is that once more… they used a picture from 2007!
I wrote about that typical problem we have with the media in a blog you can read about by clicking here.
That is sloppy journalism (let’s use google images to find a copyright free picture of Second Life and use the first one we find) and I think Linden Lab should make sure that every time they get a request for an interview or some background info, that the journalists use the pictures Linden Lab provides.
One of the things people complain about is the level of graphics in Second Life, by showing them six year old screenshots, it will be hard to convince people things look a lot better these days…

Oh, one final thing, Rod needs a haircut.
But I say that about all men 😉

Update that viewer!

Linden Lab just announced that it really is time to update those viewers.

Early next week they are rolling out ‘Project Shining‘ (All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy…).

I quote

“the single largest capital investment in new server hardware upgrades in the history of the company. This new hardware will give residents better performance and more reliability.”

Sounds good ey?

Project Sunshine stands up a Texture Compositing server that is separate from the Sims servers. When a Viewer needs to render an Avatar, it sends a message to the Sim, which in turn sends a message to the Texture Compositing Server. The Texture Server then performs the texture compositing and sends the results back to the Viewer.

In short; Second Life will become better.

Unless… you keep using that old viewer!

Then SL will become a LOT worse.

So time to get with the times daddy-o!

Kickstarter cancelled for Surreal Project

You may have heard of Surre.al, it’s kickstarter got a bit of attention lately but it seems to have died before it even got started.

I quote from the kickstarter page;

Guys — an important update:

Given that we didn’t get the early traction so critical to Kickstarter projects, we are canceling the project and retooling it and perhaps coming back to Kickstarter at a later point.

As we’ve said in the project description, Surre.al is a dream job for us, so we are fully committed to it, and do expect to launch by the end of 2013 — please keep an eye on us in the news.  

As you know, this will automatically make sure that your pledges are not charged — thank you SO MUCH for all of your support.

Most interesting to me was that in many ways this virtual ‘world’ would become very similar to Second Life but somehow nobody seemed to notice that.

Lets get back to the beginning.

The idea was to build this massive virtual world all around this huge cruise ship.

People would create avatars, rent a cabin at the ship and the ship would sail the virtual seas, giving people the chance  to travel to strange and unusual islands.

To anyone who knows ‘Second Life’ and who realises this huge virtual world is still around and pretty active, this sounds like a bad idea.
It is just like Second Life…. except with less options, less freedom and as it seems, no way for its users to be truly creative.
In a way it was just a 3d world where you could chat, do the virtual hanky panky (yes they mentioned that in the kickstarter and no it didn’t give it the bad PR it gave SL), and now and then play a game.

Surre.al did offer some very interesting bits that Second Life could/should also employ, it offered its users full Oculus Rift support (something SL is working on) and it would be useable on lots of portable devices.
Personally I don’t care for portable technology, I don’t even have a mobile phone, but I know that most people today do.
At this moment in time, to me being mobile, seems to suggest that the graphics will not be of an extremely high level.
That is the reason why most computer games are not (yet) available on your Ipad.
Either way, this is what Surre.al was promising, not something they already had ready.

From their Kickstarter page I quote;

“I am excited about Surreal. This is exactly how I envision virtual reality.”

Jan Goetgeluk, CEO Virtuix, maker of Omni

Has mr Goetgeluk not tried Second Life?
Or can he imagine nothing more then people stuck on a ship as virtual reality?

Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of sticking people on a virtual cruise ship, might be fun for a few days, maybe even weeks.
And it is a nice idea to let people then get off at islands that they like.
Maybe a good idea to start Second Life that way, let new avatars experience Virtual Reality from the safety of a ship before getting off and trying some actual sims.

I like normal boring avatars that look like people do in RL, but as far as I can see, the cruise ship experience does not offer that much freedom when it comes to changing your avatar.
I didn’t see any old people or children, no furries, animals, dragons, etc.
So again, an experience with less freedom then Second Life.

Most importantly, there was no building.
I love building, it is perhaps the biggest reason I am using Second Life.
I would have gotten bored of Surre.al within days, if not hours and would probably not be interested in 90% of all the worlds they would create for us users to explore for a bit before coming back to the ship.

As I said, I like cruise ships, I want to build one in Second Life one day, but not a boring modern one where people run about in their bathing suits by day and dance in the disco by night.
No, I’d build The S.S. Normandie, a proper Ocean Liner!
I can’t imagine myself on a modern cruise ship in RL, let alone a virtual world.

But it is interesting that this project has failed to gather enough funding and enthusiasm.

The kickstarter started on June 25th and was cancelled half an hour ago.
They were looking for $100,000 in funding and managed to get only $6,802.

Why is this even interesting?
Because it got any funding at all and generally some positive feedback and interest from the tech community.
And it shows that now the Oculus Rift is about to start the Virtual Reality Rennaisance, new  ideas for virtual worlds are popping up.
People are getting excited and motivated about its possibilities… but may have forgotten some of it could already be achieved trough Second Life, even though SL will of course need an update and keep up with the technology.

Let me for instance also mention this doomed indiegogo;
‘World of diving‘.

Yes, learn to dive with the Oculus Rift… great idea, but that too is already possible in Second Life and once SL gets the Rift to work properly, many of these ideas for games will simply be bypassed.

And looking at the funding this game is getting, either people are realising this or it is just too early to invest in such projects.

Personally I think it is a combination of both.

I do believe the Virtual Reality renaissance is coming but with only devkits available at the moment, it has not started yet.
When the first commercial VR headsets come out, things will start to go faster and faster.
Everyone who has tried the Rift (myself included) knows how big it can become.

If Second Life plays its cards right, it will be right there, ready and waiting, offering that cruise ship experience, that virtual diving and so, so much more.

My avatar has Oculus Rift before I do!

The brilliant Loki Eliot has made a superb mesh version of the Oculus Rift headset for your avatar to wear!

I am not sure if my avatar actually sees a 3D world herself as she won’t stop wearing it and I’m not allowed to play with it.

I’ve send a copy to everyone in the SL Oculus Rift group.

IM me inworld if you want a copy!

The problem with the media

Tags

bbc, media, press

To me the biggest problem SL has is PR related; it has a bad reputation.

Some of this is not SL’s or LL’s fault but something to do with lazy ‘journalists’.

And I am speaking with some experience as I get to deal with journalists in RL all the time.

Let’s look at a few examples.

Because SL has just turned 10 years old, it has received some extra media attention, I think that LL planned this very well and did a good job.

Any good reporter working on any kind of article would or should first visit a website related to the subject of the article.

In this case a good reporter would visit the Second Life website but also the Linden Lab website.

The SL website sadly has no Press section, this is maybe something LL should add there because they too know that journalists are sometimes too lazy or dim to visit the LL website as well.

With the media you should never assume that the person who picks you as their subject is one who is dedicated to their job and doesn’t mind doing a little extra work.

But once a good journalist does visit the LL website, they can easily find the press section and find the recent press releases.

And it was a very good idea to make that so called infographic and publish it there together with some snappy PR.

Journalists love this kind of stuff, it works.

And if they look a little further they can find a link to the LL flickr set with SL pictures they can use for their article.

These promotional images are not bad and also pretty recent, uploaded just a month ago.

Of course we can debate and disagree on the kind of images they have chosen and maybe we should because I can think of more interesting pictures, but at least the material is available!

This update on the Press section of LL (I don’t know if they offered images to be used by the press before last month) does seem to work.

Have a look at this article for instance; San Francisco interview with Rod Humble.
It uses one of the press package images and the journalists clearly read the press release and based his questions on it.

Some important websites also found (or were send) the press release and made good use of it.

Have a look at the Gamespot article for instance and this one on Massively.

They both pretty much copy the LL press release and use the infographic or other up to date decent screenshots.

In contrast, here is an article that came out just before LL uploaded some free to use screenshots.
It was written for PCgamesN, not a very big website, but in the world of PR, every bit of publicity counts.

You can visit the article here and you will see this horrendous illustration being used;

I’ve managed to track this picture down to 2007, but it could be even older.
Even though this article was made just a few days before LL put free to use pictures on the internet, it still shows some lazy ‘journalism’.
It may come as a shock but many reporters can’t be bothered to spend much more then a few seconds on google to do their ‘research’.

Anyway, regardless of your opinions about Second Life and Linden Lab, there is no excuse for sloppy work, so I felt I had to at least complain to that website via twitter about them using such an old screenshot.

Showing that with an article about Second Life in 2013 is unfair, wrong and it just not cricket.

But alas, it is not just a problem you can have with sloppy journalists from small websites.

The once holy BBC, broadcaster of all broadcasters, recently made this little video that does pretty much everything wrong it could do wrong and as such a big tv station, it causes lots of damage.

The title ‘Whatever happened to Second Life’, is already negative, it almost suggests that we should expect that it died years ago.

In the video we first see a backroom band that has a monthly gig in Second Life, not a bad start, but what does it have to do with the story and why does the footage of the band inworld seem to be rather old and simplistic?

40 seconds out of 2 minutes of precious airtime, we’re being told about this band, why they enjoy using it followed by more ancient footage.
Nice but what does that say about 10 years of SL?
One would almost think that the reporter used the 10th anniversary as an excuse to tell something about the band.

Then a bit of negative history about how SL had a hype that it didn’t live up to, true but not that important really because most big companies just didn’t get Second Life.

Yes this is an article in the business section so it is understandable that they look at the big companies that came and left.
But that is old news, they should have looked at LL as a company, had they bothered to visit the LL press section and found the press release they would have realised that that would be rather interesting a subject as well.
Even for people just interested in business, it is rather remarkable that LL has managed to keep SL going for over a decade, how much money it still makes, how it survived the leaving of all those big companies, how huge its virtual economy is, etc, etc.

So sometimes, it does not matter what you do as a company, there will always be reporters and journalists who are too inexperienced, lazy or dim to find their way to your press package.

They will use old screenshots and ignore your view of things.

There is very little you can do about it.

Luckily in todays world, we as users can step in now and then.

If you see a website that is writing about Second Life and being overly negative, unfair, unbalanced or even tells lies, share it with your friends and tell them to share their thoughts.

Go on, find the BBC on twitter or facebook, check out pcgamesn, trace down other websites, and tell them what they are doing wrong.

The media doesn’t have to love Second Life, they don’t have to blindly copy the story Linden Lab gives them, they can be critical or even hate it.
But they least they should do is pick up some up to date information and screenshots!

 

Another Rod Humble interview

The San Francisco Chronicle posted a rather interesting interview with Rod Humble on its site today.

You can read all of it by following this link, but I’m sharing a few extra interesting bits here;

We are continuing to invest in Second Life and also other future virtual worlds, which will be next generation. I do think virtual worlds are going to enjoy significant growth again in the future. You don’t have that level of consistent response over time unless there’s something there.

I don’t think, in principle, there’s any barrier to it becoming very, very large. Whether it will ever be as large as a social-networking site like Facebook, I don’t know, but I certainly think there’s a lot of room for growth.

 

With “The Sims,” we definitely discovered that people love watching people. When we were working on it, we used to call “The Sims” hamsters with jobs because they didn’t speak English. It’s very much a similar vibe. The No. 1 best-seller within Second Life is hair. The number one best-seller always in “The Sims” was hair.

 

The past couple of years, we’ve made it a lot easier to use. We’ve just released a significant improvement in performance. It used to be pretty laggy, and that’s gotten dramatically better, and there’s more improvements coming this year. It doesn’t sound sexy, but it’s really important.

 

Q:Is there going to be a Second Life 2?

A: It’s not going to be for a few years, but it’ll be something next gen. What we’ll call it, I don’t know. The fundamental aim is to make sure that everybody who wanted to love Second Life will love our future products.

There’s an awful lot of people who tried Second Life and for whatever reason, it didn’t resonate for them. That number is 36 million. That’s a lot of people who tried it and said “eh,” for whatever reason. My aim is to get those people (back).

 

Every indication is that Second Life will continue to thrive. I do think that virtual worlds and this ability for everybody to make their own place is going to grow significantly.

 

Please make sure you read the full article as well.

Original article by Benny Evangelista.