Drax Files radio show #122: sl13b

our last show before the summer break = we were LIVE celebrating 13 years of our wonderful, gigantic, mad, creative, frustrating, beautiful world… great guests, great exhibits, still up for y…

Source: show #122: sl13b

The Ebbe Altberg interview at SL13B (with video)

Tags

ebbe altberg, ebbe linden, interview, sl13b

Tuesday Zander Greene and I interviewed Ebbe Altberg as part of the ‘Meet the Lindens’ at Second Life’s 13th birthday celebrations.

It was an interesting chat, if I do say so myself, and many things were discussed.
Of course Sansar came up and one issue caused some confusion afterwards, especially by those who weren’t even there during the interview.

Some people were worried that they were going to have to use their RL identity to take part in Sansar and without checking if this was true, by for instance asking those who were present or who asked the questions, this story was spread.

Luckily, some people who were there and who paid attention wrote down in detail what was being said and there is now also a video.
So now you can make up your own mind.

I am far too lazy to write a transcript or detailed report of what was said so  we’re all very lucky that the brilliant Inara Pey did this for us.
Please check out her blog post on the interview by following this link;

https://modemworld.me/2016/06/23/sl13b-ebbe-on-the-lab-second-life-sansar-and-more/

And here you can see the entire video;

Thanks for the interview Ebbe and a happy 13th birthday to Second Life and all who sail in her.

The 1920s Berlin Project celebrates its 7th anniversary!

Our 1920s Berlin Project is about to celebrate its 7th anniversary!
Check out the 7 days of celebrations we’ve got planned;

The 1920s Berlin Project

In January 2007 I first joined Second Life, I looked around for a bit, didn’t see anything I liked, didn’t like what I saw and left after a few days.
In February 2009 I decided to run Second Life again, simply to test the ability of my then new computer.
And minutes before I decided that Second Life was not for me and would leave for ever (again) I found the ‘search’ option, tried a few search terms that appealed to me and found the first sim I actually liked; a surreal vintage bar called ‘Flashmans’.
There I suddenly realised that I everything I saw was made by users just like me and that maybe I could create something myself.
And I was doomed lost hooked.
The rest is, as they call it, history.

Within weeks I started working on The 1920s Berlin Project and on May the 30th 2009 I…

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show #116: hifi revisited

The latest Drax Files Radio Hour episode!

the drax files radio hour

show #116

fresh off of announcing public beta at svvr 2016 we discuss philip rosedale’s new world high fidelity vis-a-vis project sansar.

that and the usual banter and 1920’s berlin subliminal ads…

enjoy:

and find below additional audio/visual linkage for further reading/marveling at:

• svvr 2016 keynotes:

• drax fave at svvr = noitom’s project alice [which he experienced with malia probst]

malia probst and drax in project alice

• wargaming promotional video is actually pretty darn the best 360 video we have seen so far:

• and the making of is probably even more interesting!

a tank veteran on cardboard

• a vid from last year shows how vr could make us more caring for the planet?

• don’t forget to get building for sl13b ! ! !

sl13b

• music break: flicka da wrist = freddy krueger makes fun of a rap video makes fun of second life?

• vrchat – cooler than drax thought [interview…

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show #114: ebbe (svvr 2016 part1)

Drax & Ebbe at SVVR

the drax files radio hour

show #114

svvr 2016 – the third installment of this conference – is concluding as this show goes to air: three days of the newest vr gear in the expo hall plus panels and talks about immersive storytelling, 360 video best practices and a fireside chat with palmer luckey.

what more do you want?

well, if you are a drax files fan you want linden lab ceo ebbe altberg give you a bit more info on the just announced invite for creatots to project sansar. and that is what we have today – a brief chat in the hallway about what we can expect from this next generation virtual world.

all the other hours of interviews conducted with vr luminaries and product pitch-men/women = you have to wait another week.

here is ebbe:

and as indicated: all the other stuff – infinadeck, project alice, drax talking to timoni west from…

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New Project Sansar Screenshots

Tags

collision, ebbe altberg, ebbe linden, improvements

At the Collision conference Ebbe Altberg (CEO of Linden Lab) had a presentation which included some short images of Project Sansar.

The video is not yet online so if you’ve missed it, you’ll have to wait.
The Collision team will put the video online but it may take a few weeks.

Luckily for us all, Maddy Gynoid was on standby, watched the live stream and took a few screenshots.
With his permission I share them here, you can also visit his personal blog to read the actual article he wrote in German by clicking this link.

This first picture shows us a science fiction type of post apocalyptic world.
It looks wonderful but perhaps most interesting about this screenshot are the buttons, or lack thereof!
We only see a few small buttons at the right of the screen, their function we can only guess, but let’s take a closer look;

Sound, controller, help and escape?

Chat, map, build and avatar?

This next picture got me very excited as it shows a theme I love; archeology.
I’d love to dig up some virtual ruins.
But it is also interesting to note that the shadows, clearly from some sort of grid or skylight above, doesn’t seem to work on part of the ruim that is sticking out.

Another wonderful picture, as a history addict, it makes me very happy to see subjects such as these, I can’t wait to go explore some ancient locations like these.
Interesting detail is the bit at the top of the passage there, looks like the 3D scanner didn’t quite get that corner scanned properly.

The last picture here shows someone building within Sansar with an Oculus and the Oculus controllers.
It looks interesting and I for one look forward to building within world while using a VR headset… as soon as I can afford one that is.
From the screenshot we can’t conclude that much, can we actually build inworld like this or is it just a matter of moving bits around that we’ve bought on marketplace or build in Blender or Maya?

As soon as the video is online I’ll probably share it here and let’s see what else we can learn from that.

 

Linden Lab opens applications for Project Sansar

Tags

project sansar

Today Linden Lab opened up the applications for their new virtual world; Project Sansar.

Besides the occasional image and a tiny video, still very little is known about PS but I think that many Second Life users are very keen to go and have a look.

I quote from the press release;

SAN FRANCISCO – April 26, 2016 – Linden Lab®, the creators of Second Life®, today announced that applications have opened for an upcoming “Creator Preview” for Project SansarTM, the new platform for user-created social VR experiences. Interested 3D content creators can now apply at ProjectSansar.com and accepted applicants will begin to receive invitations later this summer.

Slated for general availability at the end of 2016, Project Sansar will democratize virtual reality as a creative medium. It will empower people to easily create, share, and ultimately monetize their own interactive social experiences that can be enjoyed in VR with head-mounted displays like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, as well as via PCs and, later, mobile devices. The platform enables professional-level quality and performance with exceptional visual fidelity, 3D audio, and physics simulation, while also solving the complex engineering challenges that have previously limited creating and publishing social VR experiences to just sophisticated professionals.

“Creating social VR experiences is too hard and expensive today, and that limits the value and growth of this incredible new medium,” said Ebbe Altberg, Linden Lab CEO. “Creating your own VR experience shouldn’t require an engineering team, and Project Sansar will make that possible. Over the past few months, a small number of creators have already made an impressive variety of awesome social VR experiences with Project Sansar, from virtual versions of real-world locations to fantasy worlds and stylized game-like environments, and more. We’ll soon be ready for many more creators to join Project Sansar, and we can’t wait to see what people will create.”

I myself am cautiously excited about PS and really want to get inside and see what my options are, will I be able to recreate 1920s Berlin there or get started on 1940s London or will PS just not be suitable and will I have to stay behind in Second Life?

Only one way to find out!
So I signed up right away and hope to be let in when they open the backdoor.

The website where you sign up looks very smooth, that Project Sansar logo looks very professional.
The name has been trademarked, someone has spend time designing the logo, there is a website… almost as if they are sticking with that name…

Are you going to sign up and if so, what are you planning on trying in PS?

Pepa Cometa makes fantastic 1920s Berlin project video

The 1920s Berlin Project

After seeing the stunning Pfaffenthal video (see it here), I invited talented machinima maker Pepa Cometa to Berlin, hoping she would make a video about our sim as well.

Luckily she fell in love with our community and started work on filming it right away.
That is if she wasn’t too busy drinking schnaps, dancing with the charming men or The enjoying herself at the Cabaret.

The video was shot during the cold winter of 1929, of course we follow the seasons in Berlin.

The result is absolutely amazing, not only does it show our city in the best possible way, it also shows outsiders that Second Life CAN look stunning… if your computer is good enough…

It is especially impressive that Pepa managed to capture the vibrance of our city and the strength and spirit of our community.

Feel like (re)visiting our sim after seeing the video?
We’ve just moved, so…

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Ebbe speaks at VWBPE, mentions Sansar and banning controversy

Tags

banning, controversy, ebbe altberg, education, linden dollars, sansar

Ebbe Linden spoke at VWBPE (Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education) yesterday, sadly too late for me to be present myself.
I think the audience was a little smaller than last year so I guess it was too late for quite a few other people as well.

Luckily I found an excellent video by the splendid Mal Burns here on youtube;

 

 

Here are some of the things that stood out to me;

• Linden Lab has been playing with a lot of the new VR hardware and trying to integrate it with Project Sansar.
• SL performance has improved this year and more improvements are in the pipeline.
• Registration and setting up will become easier.
• Lots of work done on compliance, redeeming Linden Dollars, fraud control, etc.
• Today you need Maya to work in Sansar, this will change in June, when they open up Beta access to a broader set of creators.
  They are very focused on creators for the rest of the year, people with lots of experiences in building experiences.
  Somewhere in May or June they will start accepting applications from people who want to get involved in beta testing Sansar via an online signup page.
  Depending on your skills and project you have in mind, they’ll let you in.
  People who just  want to snoop around is not what they are looking for.
  They want creators who are willing to give feedback and help test Sansar.
  FIY Linden Lab, building 1920s Berlin is a pretty advanced demonstration of experience building tools… subtle hint…
• Sansar will be opened to the public at the end of the year.
• Sansar will be no where near as feature rich as SL is now, many of the things you depend on in SL, will not be available at the beginning.
  You can create prettier and faster things in Sansar that work better with VR tech, there will be features that you do not have in SL, like lightning, physics, avatar movements etc.
  But creating a highly functional educational scenario might not work yet.
  It will take time before you can do in Sansar what you can now do in SL.
• There is no plan to migrate everyone to Sansar and for years and years to come Sansar and SL will remain different products.
• The Community Gateway program is progressing well, there is no final ‘Ship date’ for it and they are signing people up for it.
• Ebbe explains that if LL knows your RL identity and have the relevant documentation, your credit processing is more likely to go faster.
  The announced changes are planned for early April.
• LL is now working on integrating te HTV Vive VR headset with Sansar,  the headset also used for Steam VR and Ebbe expects it to work next week.
  Ebbe does not know how and if this will work with Steam VR.
• No skill based gaming in Sansar at first and it has not been determined yet if LL even wants to allo this at all because it is very costly and requires a lot of oversight because of the many laws.
  For now LL will concentrate on making Skill Based Gaming work better in SL before they decide if they want to bring it into Sansar.
• Sansar is aiming for an age range of 13+ but there will be content ratings.
• LL may create some SL community gateways themselves, for instance one for Educational sims.
• Ebbe thinks that when Sansar goes public many people will leave Second Life but only to have a look around and when they realise they can not (yet) do the things they do in SL in Sansar, that they’ll return to SL.
  I personally can see that happen as well, for instance what are many of SL’s communities to do without something as basic as a rental system?
  I can perhaps build 1920s Berlin in Sansar, but what if we can’t have shops yet, something as basic as doors that open or… schnaps?!
  Berlin probably won’t move permanently till we can do in Sansar what we do in SL today, or at least most of it.
  Nevertheless, as soon as I can build in Sansar, there will be a 1920s Berlin outpost or embassy say there.
• Right now Sansar is being build for PC, Windows specifically, Oculus and Vive HMD.
  They are preparing for Android and IOS.
  One employee is working fulltime on getting Sansar to work on mobile devices.
• There is a streaming solution for Sansar like we’ve seen in the past being offered by third parties.
  Using Cloud GPU’s we can stream all of Sansar to an iPhone, Ebbe sees that demonstrated every day.
  This is very exciting.
  When SL Go came to an end I felt and wrote that LL should take its place and offer high quality streaming of SL to its users.
  This did not happen but I’m happy to see that they are now doing this for Sansar.
  This could mean that everyone will be able to experience Sansar at the highest graphics settings, although of course this will come at a price.
  Personally I hope that they will have premium accounts in Sansar that will offer you, amongst other things, this streaming service.
• A Mac viewer is described as going to be looked at somewhere further along the line.
  Which is bad news.
  I’m not sure how many SL users are on a Mac, but I am one of them, even though I do plan to get a new gaming PC later this year.
• Contrary to earlier information, Ebbe announces that the Linden Dollar will probably NOT be used in Sansar.
  So there will be an exchange system that allows you to transfer Linden Dollars to whatever the Sansar currency will be.
  This is because of the hugely different business model Sansar has.
• There will be lots of different building tools in Sansar but LL will strongly support 3rd party tools and thus a common file format.
  So you’ll be able to build in all kinds of programs like Blender, Maya, etc and import it.
  But there will also be tools inside Sansar such as terrain and layout tools, but also basic object manipulation tools so you can take assets and arrange a scene.
  Over time they will work on creation tools that will allow you to build within Sansar.
  This is good news, I personally think that many people do not want to use that 3rd party software as they can be rather complicated or intimidating.
  Easy inworld tools are one of the things that made SL great and leaving those out would damage Sansar I feel.
  I hope they won’t wait too long with this.
• Ebbe experienced 360° video in Sansar.
• Ebbe used handcontrollers to rearrange objects in Sansar.
• Sansar uses a sort of ‘baking’ progress, so in stead of building something ‘live’ and seeing it work right away, like we do in SL, you have to ‘publish’ what you’ve build.
  This allows the system to optimise the scene for lighting, spacial audio, performance, etc.
  This is needed to make the world work at the high specs it promises.
  It may be the end of watching someone build, which is a shame.
• Ebbe talks about the recent banning of several creators in SL.
  He says that it is something that happened because Lindens now and then just ‘dip in’ and see what people are doing and then notice something that calls for a warning or a ban.
  But sometimes they make mistakes.
  He also explains that outsiders who sometimes support those being banned often don’t know what it exactly is what rule was being broken and what it exactly was these banned people did.
  He suggests that when some people say they were not given a reason for being banned, they may not strictly be telling the truth but Linden Lab can’t speak publicly about what it exactly was that got them banned in the first place.
  He asks people to trust him, they do not take banning people lightly and have good reasons to do so.
  There is no sudden ‘crusade’, just following the ToS they’ve always had but sometimes a certain kind of rule breaking flies under their radar long enough and when they act on it, people think something unusual is happening.
  To see his answer, go to 47:50 in the video.
• Ebbe is too busy to make his own avatar or bears.
  Which I can appreciate but I still think that making your own avatar is such an essential part of being in SL and understanding its users, that I feel he has to spend some time to do that anyway.
  Without any help!
• Ebbe ends his talk with reminding us that Second Life is the best virtual world on the planet and it will take a long time for anything to surpass that, including Sansar.

 

Finally faster credit processing but…

Tags

credit, dollars, linden, money, processing

Today Linden Lab announced that it is going to speed up credit processing.
This is great news, something I’ve been asking for and bothering Lindens with a while.
In these days having to wait up to 5 working days for your money seems a bit much and slow, especially if those days include a weekend.
I understand that it is not easy and the government has put lots of pesky rules and laws in the way, but still, we can get cash from eBay trough paypal within minutes.

So it is great news that now they have improved this;

We’re happy to announce that we will significantly improve how quickly we’re able to process a majority of credit requests.

Based on current data, we estimate that the upgrades we’ve made will allow approximately 75% of process credit requests to be completed within 2 business days.

Still not a couple of hours, but an improvement nevertheless.
But this may not always work;

For a minority of requests, the process may still take 5 business days. Because we’re dealing with sending real money to users around the world, we may require additional information and perform other processes that could impact the time needed.
A good rule of thumb is that the better we know you as a customer, the more likely it is we’ll be able to quickly process your credit requests.

So I guess the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
I’m hoping to cash in a few Linden Dollars in a few days, so I’ll be counting the seconds to see how long it will take now.
Let me know how long it takes for you.

But there is a sting in the tail…
Only the sun rises for nothing (a Dutch saying).
Better faster credit processing comes at a price.

In addition to taking time, processing credit and paying real money to users’ PayPal and Skrill accounts incurs costs to Linden Lab. Each transaction actually costs us more than the $1 (USD) fee we have been charging. To address that and in light of the significant investments we’ve made to improve the related systems and processes, we will be making some adjustments to the fee structure, beginning next month.

As of April 5, 2016, instead of charging a flat fee of $1 (USD) per transaction, we will charge a fee of 1.5% of the transaction value, with a minimum fee of $3 (USD) and a maximum of $15 (USD). Additionally, the fee for purchasing L$ on the LindeX will increase 10¢, from $0.30 (USD) to $0.40 (USD) per transaction.

Which of course is not good news.
Most people in SL don’t make any money at all and amongst those who do only a minority actually make big bucks.
For the average ‘credit processor’, a few dollars is quite a lot, it adds up.

Either way, here you have it.
Both good and bad news I guess.
I can’t help asking myself if LL is going to make a profit on the cashing out now, if so it would create another source of revenue and might give them another reason to lower our tier… subtle hint…

I wonder if perhaps they could have given us the choice between fast or regular credit processing.
If you’re not in a hurry, you choose regular and safe yourself up to $14 a month, if you are in a hurry, you get it faster but you pay extra.

You can read the full announcement by clicking here.