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.

The 100 avatar prims limit

There is a 100 avatar prim counting limit in Second Life, that means that if more than 100 people rez something in a region, scripts go nuts.
Prim count scripts for instance stop working and just ignore the 101st person and everyone above that.
This issue is caused by the “llGetParcelPrimOwners” function, it doesn’t count beyond 100 even  though technically, a lot more than 100 people can rez a prim in a region.

I know, this is a luxury problem, but one that will become more and more common as more people are starting to build to scale and it becomes easier to decorate an apartment nicely with fewer prims thanks to mesh.

Also remember that many tenants share their house or apartment with their partner, friend or even a family.
If that is the case, you soon end up with the same problem if you have only 50 tenants or less.
Imagine if you want to build a nice neighbourhood where people are welcome to live together with their partner and their 2 children.
That is 4 people per house, unless you want to count all prims manually, you’re limited to 25 houses.

In 1920s Berlin we’ve been lucky enough to be a place where  a lot of people want to live and thanks to building to realistic scale (using the prim measurements) and having a big poor neighbourhood where people live in tiny apartments or even just a small room (with a shared toilet!), we soon reached this limit of SL.
Which was quite confusing because we had no idea and had to bother our rental system builder to ask him why the prims our tenants used weren’t counted properly.

But here we are, I’ve had to shut some of the apartments and even make some of them into apartments that you’re not allowed to share with friends, simply because we can’t allow more people to rez things in Berlin.

I am sure Linden Lab had a good reason for this limit, 100 people rezzing stuff in one single region is probably quite demanding for servers and not the best way to avoid lag…
Still, would it be such a huge deal to raise this limit to 120 or even 110?

I know that a small change like that would allow us to have more apartments, allow more people to enjoy living in our city.

I don’t know much about the technical side of SL and I’m sure that wishing something like that would be changed is a crazy thing to ask.
Few people experience this issue and who knows, it may blow up the LL servers.

I still wanted to mention it because if you one day find that your busy sim is having issues with prims being counted, you now know it might be that you’re pushing this limit.

Facebook names update

Tags

avatar, facebook, identity

Sister Roma who spoke today with representatives of Facebook about the real names issue has posted an update on her facebook page.

Since people have been speaking up this story has been mentioned on CNN, NBC and all over the net.
Although many SL avatars have moved to Google+, most of us still prefer to use Facebook because it is just so handy, especially for communities.
If we are forced to create a page, we lose the ability to be in a group, organise and invite to events, etc, etc.

Maybe one day Linden Lab will create a facebook clone just for avatars on the Second Life website.
Till then we are stuck with Google+ or pretend to be real people on Facebook.

Anyway, here is the update from Sister Roma her facebook page;

Facebook refuses to agree that the legal name policy is unfair and discriminatory.

They acknowledged that although Facebook has the legal name policy they do not enforce it.

They acknowledged that the current rash of suspended and deleted profiles have been under attack by users of the Facebook community who report the profiles for using “fake” names. Once a page is flagged it is reviewed by living human beings who police the site all over the world. If they determine that the person is not using their legal name on their page it is suspended for being in violation of the Facebook terms of use agreement.

While we could not get them to budge on the actual policy they did seem more open to considering that there are flaws in the complaint review process.

We met with Susan Gonzales, a public liason, and via skype with Monika, the person in charge of content policy. We also meet with members of the Facebook LGBT alliance. The purpose of this meeting was to establish an open dialogue and that’s what happened. I was very impressed by our team. Everyone spoke very eloquently and intelligently. Our broad community was well represented by David Campos, Steven Heklina Grygelko BeBe Sweetbriar, Tom Temprano, 3, Carmen, Nadia Kayyali, Dottielux Smith, Trisha Fogleman, Matt Cagle, Gabriel Haaland, Lil Miss Hot Mess, Alex U Alex U. Inn. Adam from Scott Wiener‘s office and Mark Snyder from the Transgender Law Center. Thank you all for your passion and dedication.

We left the meeting with an agreement that they would continue to meet with us to further hear our concerns and work together to find a compromise.

Conversations with LGBT employees of Facebook after the meeting left me feeling a little more hopeful. They hinted that this issue has been raised internally and there have been heated debates on both sides of the legal name policy. We definitely have allies working “on the inside.”

Shortly after the meeting Facebook announced that they would reinstate profiles of members of the LGBT community that had recently been targeted, suspended or removed. The statement further goes on to say that Facebook hopes that within 2 weeks time the users will either confirm their real identity, change to their legal names, or move to a fan page. While at first glance this seems like a grand show of support for our community it is actually a completely hollow gesture. Basically they offered to give us our profiles back so that two weeks later they could suspend them, demand we comply to their unfair and discriminatory policy, and if not, take them away again. This is completely unacceptable.

To Facebook this is an issue of broader consequence that could take years to review, rewrite or rescind. We do not have that kind of time. Our communities profiles and identities are disappearing daily. We could be wiped out entirely in a short period of time. If we do not get adequate action from Facebook in a few weeks time I would say that we’re ready to go back to our original idea and hold a protest at their campus. They might be able to wipe us off Facebook but they’ll know we’re still here!

We will not rest until not only drag queens, but everyone, has the right to CHOOSE how they wish to be identified on Facebook.

Stay tuned. This is not over! ‪#‎MyNameIsRoma

If only Facebook Pages came with more options, it would make everyone happy.

Facebook agrees to talks with Drag Queens regarding the use of real names

Tags

"second life", drag queens, facebook, identity, names, virtual reality

Just a few days ago I wrote about the problems Drag Queens, artists and many other people are having with Facebook because they are being forced to use their real name and can’t use their stage name, nickname or in our case, avatar name.

Of course this wasn’t news but I mentioned it because I felt that we now shared a goal with a group of people who’s voice might get more attention than that of us Second Life avatars.

And I was right.

Their uproar has exploded across social media, hashtags galore (#‎mynameis) and when a group of them started planning a demonstration outside the Facebook HQ (imagine how fabulous that would have looked) Facebook Supervisor David Campos got on the phone with them and promised to meet with Sister Roma (the lady behind most of the ruckus) in person.

So of course, cynical me has to say that this doesn’t mean anything.
But publicity means a lot in this game and getting them to talk about it and perhaps think a bit harder about a proper solution, is a step in the right direction.

Of course our virtual identity means a lot to us in Second Life but when you look at the long list of people to whom it is so much more important to be able to use Facebook under a different name, it becomes more and more wrong that they are not allowed to.
And even if I was not in Second Life, I’d still want to support this thing.
As Sister Roma said;

This issue affects a lot of marginalized, creative, and professional communities, including transgender people, bullied youth, activists, LGBTQ people who aren’t out everywhere, survivors of domestic violence and stalking, migrants, sex workers, artists who work under pseudonyms, and various professionals who work in sensitive professions (eg. mental health, criminal justice, etc.) who may want to interact with friends without being found by clients. Facebook claims that its “real name” policy helps protect people from bullying, but this is a form of targeting our communities that can actually make us much less safe. Facebook is today’s public forum and they can’t exclude us — who are they to say we or anyone else isn’t “real”?!

So bravo Sister Roma and lets hope that what all these people are trying to achieve eventually will benefit us avatars as well.

Thank you Herr von Rosenheim for the tipoff!

Will drag queens help our avatars stay on Facebook?

As it turns out, avatars are not the only ones who want to use Facebook under different name than the one they have in Real Life.

Drag queens and transgender performers have now started a petition to be allowed to use Facebook under their stage names.

I find it insane that we are not allowed to make up any name we want, I understand why Facebook wants it, but people with fake identities buy real stuff too and advertising works on us just as well.

Anyway, most important is that there are lots of people who want to be on Facebook under a different name than the one they were born with, artists, people who change their gender, people trying to escape stalkers or their family, etc, etc.

In some cases their reasons are of course much more important than the one we Second Life users have, but in the end we all want the same.

I don’t expect Facebook to change their rules and suddenly let everyone use a fake name.
But I do hope they are smart enough to either give Page accounts more options or create a new kind of account for those of us who want to remain anonymous.

Hate or love facebook, it is a very powerful social tool that is a very handy way to stay in touch with your SL friends or community when you’re not inworld.
And with a facebook page, it just doesn’t work that well because you don’t have access to groups, group events, photo albums, etc, etc.
So if they let us use those, most of us will be happy enough.

Anyway, please click below to read the article on the BBC news page, it has a link to a petition, might not help us that much, but hey, can’t hurt to sign it either.
Any publicity against the Facebook identity rule is good, right?

Drag queens in Facebook name row

Ebbe confirms; SL will get Oculus Rift DK2 support

Tags

"second life", dk2, ocolus rift, viewer, virtual reality

Some time ago Oculus Rift released the Developers Kit v2 of their VR headset, better than their DK1 but still not the commercial version.

David Rowe’s CtrlAltStudio released a Preliminary Rift DK2 Support viewer on the 19th but it remained unclear if Linden Lab was going to upgrade their viewer to work with DK2.

The work that had to be done was not trivial and they only got their DK2 headsets roughly two weeks ago and who knows, the public Oculus Viewer release could be around the corner, although insiders seem to think it won’t be till 2015.

But even though we don’t know when the Second Life official DK2 viewer arrives, we do have some confirmation from mr Ebbe Altberg himself via Twitter;

High Fidelity sings Queen

The High Fidelity team just uploaded this interesting video showing an avatar singing along to Queen.

Just in case the video is blocked in your country or doesn’t work on my blog, try this direct link;
High Fidelity sings Queen
A VPN service may also help you bypass the block.

It is a huge step forward from the previous avatars we’ve seen so far and the technology is really impressive.

This is something that will appeal to a lot of people, not just performers and artists who sing live in virtual worlds, but of course it is also hugely important to translate your RL expression into VR.

When looking at HiFy, we have to remember that it is still in very early Alpha stages but it appears to be moving along pretty well and if this footage is a good indication of what will be possible in Philip Rosedale’s new virtual world, we’re in for a treat.

Let’s hope that Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab can borrow some of this cool stuff for the next Second Life as well, because personally, I can’t wait to use something like this in my virtual time travel adventures.

This screenshot, uploaded to Twitter a few hours ago is also a huge step forward from what has been shown to the public before.

painted ladies in sand dunes… having fun building @highfidelityinc pic.twitter.com/tD1aHvb4pG

— Philip Rosedale (@philiprosedale) August 1, 2014

Seraph City is no more

Seraph city was a lovely sim, one of the few I visited regularly outside of 1920s Berlin.

The theme was Dieselpunk, a 1930s-1940s interpretation of the future.

The sim looked fantastic and was a lot of fun to explore.

I first learned the sim was in trouble last February, when it was announced that the sim would close.

However the passionate people involved with this sim didn’t want to give up and several times they tried to restart the city, turn it around, keep it going.

It is sad that these plans now officially seem to have failed, the land has been sold, all prims returned and a new owner appears to have completely different plans.

It is a shame to see such an original sim go but I am sure that all the talented and nice people who made it what it was will find other projects to work on and will find new ways to share their creativity with the rest of us.
Good luck chaps.

Goodbye Seraph City, visiting yesterday’s future was fun.

SLGo’s SL birthday promotion

The folks at SLGo are offering the people of SL a special promotion as part of Second Life’s 11th birthday celebrations!

This special promotional code will give you 75% off the first month of your SL Go subscription.
Combine that with the 7-Day free trial and they will get 5 weeks of SL Go for only $2.50!

This is of course extra interesting for those of us with old computers who would love to go explore SL11B without the lag such massive events are notorious for.
And not just without lag but also with ultra graphics!

Click the picture below or go to this page.

To claim the discount use the promotion code when signing up.
For US residents the code is SL11US and for UK residents the code is SL11UK.
This discount is also valid for people living outside the UK and US, jus pay with dollars or pounds.

The codes are only valid between June 22 and 29, 2014.

Oh and they’re actively fixing the ‘fitted mesh’ issue now!
Hopefully we should see a fix very soon.

Click to sign up for the promotion