The idea is that this will allow mesh clothes to fit to your body in stead of having to fit your body to the clothes.
I am not that much into fashion and gladly wear the same virtual outfit every day for months.
But my avatar is based on me in RL and I am not a Barbie or catwalk model, so unfortunately every 1920s outfit I’ve bought would not fit me unless I was willing to change my body and as I spend all my time roleplaying, I don’t suddenly want to look completely different.
Also a much thinner avatar just wouldn’t be me.
So for the last couple of years I’ve been avoiding mesh clothes, but now it seems they may even fit me.
This viewer is experimental, so it could still be a little while before this goes grid wide, also it seems it will only work on clothes specially made to work with this system.
So don’t expect to suddenly be able to fit into all your mesh clothes.
Especially because as a result, a much used (and loved) free Textures website called CG Textures announced to its users that they were no longer allowed to upload any of their textures to Second Life.
This is rather bothersome to many SL creators.
So I found it interesting to discover that Linden Lab has chosen this very website to advertise Second Life!
Of course this is just a Google ad, so the ad is placed because of Google’s algorithms, cookies, etc.
One of the problems Linden Lab is probably working on as we speak, is making the User Interface (UI) work for people who are exploring their virtual world called Second Life with a Virtual reality system, such as the Oculus Rift.
After all, in Second Life we want to do more than just walking and looking around us.
The current viewer is based on a 2D system and it isn’t very practical.
To simply walk around, interact and communicate, you have to use all sorts of buttons, keep windows open, etc.
For this reason the mouse view option in Second Life is pretty useless, even when you’re using voice chat.
Changing this might be quite a challenge, because when you’re inside a game or virtual world with your VR setup, you can’t see your keyboard.
In my view the solution is to take everything ‘inworld’, put everything you need inside the game.
Need to type something in chat, make a hand gesture and a keyboard will appear in your view, on the screen and with your virtual hands you can type your message on that keyboard.
Need to select something from a menu?
Touch an object and right there, floating in mid air, a menu appears that you again can click with your hands.
Recently I found a video that uses that very idea, but it also shows a few other things that I am sure the people of Second Life will find very interesting.
Watch it with me and then I’ll continue my story;
The VR setup used here is far from perfect, they use the Sixense STEM System which is really cool, you add sensors to your body and they tell the computer where those parts of your body are and how they are moving.
But before we go into that, let’s look at the part I am interested most;
As you can see, the inworld floating menu idea is used here quite effectively.
Of course this is a simple menu and the hand isn’t very exact, but I bet that this could be improved and also work with more complicated menus, such as the SL pie menu that allows us to interact with things.
Many of us already use tiny keyboards that are projected onto our tablets or smartphone screens, I reckon we can get used to a floating one as well.
I don’t think we need a huge one that fills the entire screen (although that should be an option for people with bad eyesight for instance), it could be a smaller keyboard that perhaps even looks like a real keyboard, or perhaps just floating letters, etc.
There are many options, but we’ll no longer need the RL keyboard of our computer.
Anyway, let’s get back to the video because it shows a lot more exciting things.
First the bit I don’t like; they controllers.
What is it with controllers?!
We’ve been using those since the 1970s (yes I am that old) and just like the VR headset has just made a huge comeback, I think it is time that the virtual glove should make a comeback.
As you can see in this video, he use two of the five trackers to tell the computer where his hands are, this works very well but it also means the hands don’t come with many options.
For the feet, this is fine, it is very exciting to see him play around with them and even kick a football.
Will we finally be able to really dance in Second Life… and will that be a good thing? 😉
But with your hands, you want to do more than slap, push and make a fist.
Perhaps you want to play a virtual piano, poke someone in the eye, point in a direction, pick your nose or use all ten fingers to type on that virtual keyboard I just talked about.
The Stem system but also the Hydra, have lots of buttons on their controllers to give you more options but in the end that means that you’re still just walking around with some updated joysticks.
I don’t want to feel like I’m holding controllers, I want to feel like my hands are in the game, just like my feet and body.
So I hope that someone will start developing a new VR glove, perhaps with a few buttons on the top of the glove so you can still have a few action keys there, but one that will allow us to use all our fingers naturally inworld.
Besides, if you need action keys, something inworld could perhaps designed better.
After all, we don’t need action keys in RL do we?
Nevertheless, I think that this video again shows another huge step forward towards a whole new kind of experiencing Virtual Reality.
We’re still waiting for someone to combine the Oculus Rift, the Hydra Razor, the Sixense, the Omni AND THOSE VR GLOVES into one complete setup.
And of course we’re still waiting for Linden Lab to finish their Oculus Rift friendly viewer that was supposed to come at the end of the summer…
But try and imagine the amazing potential all this have.
In less then a year SL could have changed beyond all recognition and our VR experience more real than we can even imagine at this very moment.
If you are a builder in Second Life you depend on finding nice textures on the internet.
We search for hours to get that right shade of plaster, the perfect bit of fabric or the brick wall that is not too dirty but also not too clean.
Especially if you want to build something unique and detailed, this costs a lot of time and involves much work.
Of course, many images on the internet can not be used because of copyrights or other user restrictions.
But luckily there are also websites where you can find tons of nice textures you can use in SL.
This is now about to become even harder.
On the 15th of last month, Linden Lab changed their Terms of Use in a way that will worry
many creators and those who previously gladly allowed anyone to use their textures in SL.
By uploading anything to SL, it becomes LL’s property.
It is of course unlikely that they will start to sell it or make money from our little houses
and crazy wallpaper designs, but it is scary that they own everything we make.
I quote;
2.3 You grant Linden Lab certain licenses to your User Content.
[..]you agree to grant to Linden Lab, the non-exclusive, unrestricted, unconditional, unlimited, worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, and cost-free right and license to use, copy, record, distribute, reproduce, disclose, sell, re-sell, sublicense (through multiple levels), modify, display, publicly perform, transmit, publish, broadcast, translate, make derivative works of, and otherwise exploit in any manner whatsoever, all or any portion of your User Content (and derivative works thereof), for any purpose whatsoever in all formats, on or through any media, software, formula, or medium now known or hereafter developed, and with any technology or devices now known or hereafter developed, and to advertise, market, and promote the same. You agree that the license includes the right to copy, analyze and use any of your Content as Linden Lab may deem necessary or desirable for purposes of debugging, testing, or providing support or development services in connection with the Service and future improvements to the Service.[..]
In short; whatever you upload, they can do with whatever they want.
Previously Linden Lab only had permission to use our stuff in Second Life, which is reasonable.
We know it is unlikely and won’t happen, but in theory we now give them permission to sell our textures and creations.
Most SL creators will not feel comfortable with the new TOS, but well, so be it.
It isn’t big enough a problem to stop our Second Lives.
But you may see that for websites and companies who make a living selling or offering textures on the internet, are very worried about this.
Some of the bigger sites are already changing their licenses, telling us that it is no longer allowed to use any of their textures in Second Life, even the ones that you heavily edit.
The site I use for almost all my textures has also done this.
Because Linden Lab now claims unlimited redistribution rights for any uploaded content, these websites now put these new restrictions into place.
Some sites have contacted Linden Lab about the problem, trying to find a solution, but didn’t get anywhere.
I hope that Linden Lab realises that this is a big problem that damages one of the most important parts of Second Life; creativity.
Of course some people will continue to use textures they shouldn’t and it is unlikely that someone will actually come and check in your sim and then take legal action, but for those of us who take this stuff serious, it is rather annoying and scary.
I am sure that Linden Lab does not want to sell our stuff or other people’s textures, so I hope that they can get their legal team to take a new look at the Tos, talk to the owners of these texture websites and together find a solution.
When Mesh first came to Second Life, I was worried.
Somehow I am wired in such a way that whenever I try Mesh software such as blender, my brain implodes and escapes my head via my ears.
So I was very excited to hear about ‘Mesh Studio’, this tool allows you to turn something build with regular prims into mesh with just a few clicks.
You build your object, stick the mesh script in it, tweak it a bit, experiment a little and then you click a few times and you have your building turned to mesh.
Of course it takes some getting used to and you’ll need to learn a few tricks, but it is still a zillion times easier than any software I know.
I’ve been turning my entire Berlin sim to mesh with it ever since and only get into trouble when I want to create something that is fluid, like a blanket.
Everything that is hard to make with prims, is hard to turn into mesh with Mesh Studio.,
Anyway, this got me thinking.
Linden Lab could/should pay these creators and add this mesh creation option to the build window.
Mesh is good for everyone, it brings down the amount of textures used, gets rid of laggy sculpts and generally makes SL look better and more detailed.
But Mesh is not easy to make if you don’t have Mesh studio or spend some very long nights trying to figure out how Blender works.
This creates a rift between those who can make mesh and those who can’t.
Shopkeepers without this ability are being left behind and new people may decide to never even try and make stuff because they know they’ll have to put in such a huge effort.
I think it would be a swell idea to add a big red mesh button to the viewer’s build window, especially now other 3rd party viewers are also offering this option.
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.
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.
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 😉
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.
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.”
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.
