I hope you all go and watch it and share it with everyone you know, people who are not into VR or Second Life but also those who are, especially if they are Linden Lab employees, or if they work for Oculus Rift, Leap Motion, Virtuix Omni or any other kind of company involved in this type of business.
Many of these people need a little reminder regarding the full potential of Second Life, yes that includes some Linden Lab employees.
But the video will also remind them of how far we’ve come.
We have an amazing virtual world here and although many think we’re part of the past, I reckon we’ve only just begun.
This excellent video was made by Loki Eliot who is a well known creator in Second Life.
It shows us the past, present and future of Virtual Reality.
A lovely walk down memory lane that will make you get all excited (again) about what VR is all about and where it is going at the moment.
But as I said, it is also just an excellent documentary about VR in general.
Draxtor presents Loki Eliot’s “The LOST Virtual World”
A collection of videos telling the story of a virtual world, how a community embraced it and the media forgot about it.
Behold: a mash-up of interviews and documentary clips from the last 20 years about the phenomenon of virtual reality, its trials, tribulations and media mis-interpretations, all feeding social and political agendas of various stripes, juxtaposed with excerpts of a popular fictional TV show about passengers stranded on a mysterious island [no NOT Giligan’s!] – 30+ minutes, edited by 3D artist Loki Eliot.
A wonderful look at all sides of the debate about reality, the future of the human race and how to proceed, sandwiched between wide-eyed cyber utopianism and dire warnings of the end of reality as we know it.
With its inclusion of recent interviews with Oculus Rift inventor Palmer Luckey and early idealistic statements by Second Life founder Philip Rosedale this clip-show gives a great overview of the current debate and may even enthuse some of VR’s disillusioned early adopters…
Clips used include statements by
Robin Harper
David Fleck
Rick Kim
Philip Rosedale
Palmer Luckey
Steve Ballmer
Andrew Keen
Louis CK
Rod Humble
Fran Seranade
and
various elected US congress persons
Clips from ABC’s “LOST” copyright ABC Television, used under fair use guidelines.
In this little corner of Second Life you can explore a street, a bar and a house that have all been build to a real world scale. A lot of places in Second Life have been build to different ideas of scale, often just guesses or estimations based on how large some of the avatars are. By using a realistic scale, things feel more natural. We use the scale of the “prim”, the building blocks of Second Life, translating real world scale straight into Second Life Centimeters.
When using the Oculus Rift, realism and realistic scale becomes very important. You will be seeing Second Life trough the eyes of your avatar, while normally you would see the virtual world trough a camera view high above the head of your avatar. This makes visiting a lot of places in SL a strange experience as doors and ceilings appear to be made for giants.
This Test area allows you to see what the use of realistic scale looks and feels like without having to change your avatar or your avatar’s clothes so you can visit the actual 1920s Berlin sim. If you would like to visit an entire city build to this scale and with immersion as one of its main goals, please change into some of the (free) 1920s clothes and get on the train behind the little station.
Here you can also get Loki’s mesh Oculus Rift headset for your avatar and the complete building kit for realistic proportional avatars for free.
I’d appreciate it if you wrote down your experiences and shared them with me, perhaps for my blog.
And if you’re interested in discussing the potential of using the Oculus Rift in Second Life, join us on facebook; https://www.facebook.com/oculuslife
Although most people by now seem to realise the huge potential the new VR technology (in the shape of the Oculus Rift) could have for virtual worlds like Second Life, some still think that it will be a niche thing.
That only a few people will actually end up owning this gadget and that eventually it will end up in the cupboard, dusty and forgotten or only used by a few nerds.
I think that the Oculus Rift (or any other kind of virtual headset) will actually end up in almost every household.
People don’t always see that virtual reality can and will be used for much more than just playing games and having fun in virtual worlds.
I think that this technology will be used to watch movies/tv, to go shopping, for education, as social media, for exercise, to work, etc, etc.
I will try and explain why I think this.
Virtual reality & film/tv;
This video shows people enjoying short clips shot with a 360 degree camera, the camera is stationary, it does not move, the person watching moves his head to look around “inside” the film.
Walking around in something that was filmed in this way is at this moment not yet possible but I don’t doubt that this will be possible soon.
And yes, many of us would probably prefer to enjoy our movies in the old fashioned way but imagine watching the last episode of ‘Breaking Bad’ while actually being inside it, watching an exciting scene… and then suddenly realising someone is standing behind you…
It may not be your cup of tea, you may prefer to watch a movie the traditional way, but it is obvious that many people will enjoy this new possibility as well.
That makes this video so interesting, it is a big step in that direction.
Another option is to watch a movie together with friends in a virtual cinema;
I think that this is another interesting and fun way to watch a movie, it brings the magic of the cinema to your home without the noisy people, mobile phones or sticky floors.
And you can perhaps also pick a certain type of cinema, such as a lovely 1930s art deco one for that vintage movie, complete with an audience of 1930s people, smoking all trough the movie.
And of course you will be able to share the cinema with friends and family even if they live on the other side of the world.
Virtual Reality & Shopping;
I personally hate shopping and would love to avoid it completely but other people love it.
Either way, many of us already use the internet to shop and VR will make this experience more fun or less of a hassle.
For instance, imagine you need a new tv, you visit a few websites but the most they can offer you is a picture that perhaps, if you’re lucky, you can turn around a bit.
Whoohoo, I can see the backside of a tv.
In a virtual shop you can see 3d models of each television set but you will eventually also be able to get a free virtual copy that you can ‘rez’ in a virtual facsimile of your living room, make sure it fits in that corner, if you need a new table to go with it, etc, etc.
The tv will of course work!
And as always, this can be a shared experience.
You can invite your mother to come see you fit a wedding dress even though she lives far away.
It will probably never replace normal shopping, but I bet it will be the end of the regular online shopping experience.
Because those online shops are dull as dishwater.
Virtual Reality & education;
Now here is a big one, especially for me personally.
I am not a teacher but I work a lot with schools, museums and educational tv shows and as someone with a huge passion for history, sharing that interest and making people understand how amazing and interesting history is, education is hugely important to me.
But in the world of Virtual Reality this is also a big one to use as a way to promote this technology and it is quite simple to convince people about how well this technique could be used for this purpose.
For instance, sorry about using history again and blatantly promoting my own sim in the following bit, imagine a class room discussing 1920s Berlin as part of their curriculum.
Learning about the chaos of post WW1 Germany, the rise of Nazism, etc.
As the class begins, everyone puts on their VR set and soon find themselves wandering the streets of 1920s Berlin.
Perhaps they will use something like my crude creation in Second Life or a much smoother and more realistic version made especially for schools.
Teacher shows them some of the spots, their avatars in 1920s clothing makes them realise what they might have looked like had they actually lived back then, the place is filled with NPCs (non–playable characters) and feels alive, real. But after after the lesson, after school, children will go home and do their homework also by using the VR set to go back to 1920s Berlin, take their time to visit more places, to investigate or perhaps just to have some fun as well.
One day perhaps the whole school will take place in a virtual reality, a scary idea perhaps but a huge solution to those children living far away from school.
Anyway, I think it is quite obvious that Virtual Reality can be an amazing tool for education, both in school and at home.
I couldn’t find a nice video about the future of virtual education, so I’ll share this old one of me giving a tour in 1920s Berlin;
Virtual reality & Social Media;
Many of us spend a lot of time on facebook, keeping in touch with friends, family and work colleagues.
How this will develop in the near virtual future is very hard to predict.
Will it become a quick sort of virtual world where everyone has their own “page” that they can design?
Will checking how someone is doing be like visiting their tropical island, villa or castle in the sky?
Will it be something like Second Life… will it be Second Life?
Or will it be a bunch of pictures and notifications that just float in the air while you’re busy working or playing in your virtual office?
In the novel “Ready Player One” our hero has a virtual basement where he hangs out with his friends, will social media evolve into something like that?
Will facebook of the future look and feel like a virtual neighbourhood where all your friends have a home they designed themselves, with sign floating above it when something important has happened, where their latest snapshot is projected onto the lawn and where above the roof their current status is shown?
Where you can enter their home, look at their stuff and hear their music?
Exercise is big business but generally it is a rather boring activity, unless you’re able to spend a fortune to buy cool toys or travel to exciting places.
But virtual reality will make exercise a lot more fun for many people, regardless of budget.
Thanks to omnidirectional treadmills you will be able to walk and run in a virtual reality, you can choose to get your exercise just walking around some virtual world, running for your life in a computer game but you can also burn calories in surroundings specially created for this purpose.
After all, where would you rather do your morning jogging?
In the street outside your home that you see every single day already or some exotic beach, stunning dessert, the rainforest, across the moon or perhaps in a world you created yourself?
Virtual reality will make this possible and this will be interesting for people who might usually not be interested in gaming, virtual reality or even computers.
For instance, I can see my mum use VR for this purpose.
This is a big market.
The Wii Fit for instance, a computer “game” that allows people to do real exercise, has sold nearly 23 million copies.
This video shows some of the options, but here of course all they do is watch a screen.
Imagine doing these sports in a virtual reality.
Virtual Reality & work;
It is obvious that working from home (AKA teleworking) is going to be big in the future.
Renting expensive offices, travel costs (both in money, time and pollution), etc.
Virtual reality will make this a lot easier, you will actually be able to feel part of a team, be present at a meeting, do a presentation and even feel like you’re chatting at the watercooler, while never leaving your chair at home, or perhaps even without getting dressed…
Either way, I reckon it will beat this alternative…
Conclusion;
I am trying to explain that Virtual Reality will not just be a niche gadget for extreme gamers with more money than wisdom.
I hope to have shown that in the very recent future Virtual Reality will be something you’ll find in almost every home, the VR set will be as common as tv sets are today.
And when everyone has access to Virtual Reality and when Linden Lab manages to keep up and make it work very very well in Second Life… our virtual world may become bigger than it has ever been.
The minute people get their hands on a VR set for the first time they will want more than the demos and games.
And then they may remember Second Life, see that advertisement, hear that story, see that youtube video and realise that it still is the biggest online virtual world there is.
And that it can be more fun to explore something you have build yourself than some place build by some game designer, some place everyone has seen a million times before.
And maybe you will realise that some of the VR experiences you’re about to pay for… can already be found in SL, for free.
In short, we’re at the dawn of a Virtual Reality renaissance and I think that this could also be Second Life’s renaissance.
There WILL be a Second Life for Second Life… as long as Linden Lab plays its cards right… and fixes its Terms Of Service!
It looks like Linden Labs latest PR video is causing a little bit of a buzz.
And most of that seems to be because at the very end they mention the Oculus Rift.
A lot of people appear to be interested in the Rift and the combination with Second Life is interesting to many of them, even the skeptical ones and those who don’t seem to like SL much.
It is (becoming) a hot topic of discussion, sadly this also reminds us of the bad reputation SL has.
Everywhere you hear the old comments of “Does that still exist?!” to “Oh where the pervy furries do the naughty things” and “Oh where they have graphics from 2007?”.
However, I think the video LL just made gets is a step in the right direction to change peoples opinions of SL and I hope that their next PR step will be showing how pretty SL can be.
I am a gamer and have played some very recent games and although of course, SL’s graphics can’t quite reach the level of many of those games, I’ve also been in some sims where at least visually things get pretty close.
I think that it would be a great idea if LL started some sort of photo contest, picked the most stunning pictures made in SL and shared those with the world.
Or perhaps invite some of the best Machinima makers and ask them to shoot some stunning footage for a PR video purely made to let people know SL moved on.
I can see it now… Second Life… has such bad graphics… and then a amazing montage of some of SL’s most amazing places with superb windlight settings, shadows, the works…
Fade to black; This is how Second Life can look, we moved on, come along with us.
Come to think of it, one video per cliche might be fun.
One video about how Second Life is all virtual hanky panky (by showing all the other things also happening in SL), one about that it is only for people who like to dress up and pretend to be barbie (by showing the enormous diversity in avatars), one about that it is only for losers (by showing smart, educated, funny SL users as they are in RL), that it is laggy (by showing what SL looks like on a up to date computer), one about that it is only a virtual chatroom (by showing roleplaying, education, art), etc.
Sure, SL can be bad, but do you think that Rockstar games shows the lowest quality GTA 5 footage in its advertisements?
We need to let people know that Second Life is still here, is not what many people seem to think it is, that it has improved and that it will improve even more.
So more videos, more up to date pictures (contact those journalists that keep using 2007 screenshots!!) and keep the buzz going.
Anyway, I am getting distracted, back to the subject.
If you search the internet for Second Life and Oculus Rift, you’re getting quite a few hits, many of them quite recent.
And no, I promise, I’m not responsible for all of them… although you probably will bump into me at some of those sites 😉
Anyway, all of this makes it clear that no matter how it ends up, a lot of people are now watching this and are keeping an eye on how Second Life and the Oculus Rift will work together… or not.
Just as I predicted and expected.
So I am glad that LL seems to take this very serious as well.
I may be a bit too optimistic, but I still think that the Virtual reality renaissance that is about to happen could also mean a renaissance for Second Life.
Today I send an email to Linden Lab asking them how things were going on the Oculus Rift front as I wanted to know if some of the rumours flying around were true.
Especially a comment on my blog by Inara Pey recently made me want to find out a few things for sure.
I mostly wanted to know about the User Interface (UI), as that is where most of the problems are expected and it will be interesting to see how Linden Lab (LL) is going to solve these.
I mentioned that I heard that LL was working on floating menus, so they would be where you would normally not look but by simply looking up these menus could appear.
LL:You’ve heard correctly. In our current design, the menus float just outside the user’s field of view, and it works quite well. The UI also provides an anchor / point of reference that helps to mitigate some of the nausea that people sometimes experience when using the Oculus Rift.
I had something like this in mind, I think I mentioned it in my blog before.
By having the menus inworld as 3d floating objects, you could access them quite easily.
I also thought further into the future and mentioned that you could then perhaps operate the menus with your virtual hand, bypassing the keyboard completely.
I am not sure how it works now but I assume that you simply look up, the menu appears and you then choose with your mouse.
Either way it is good to hear that it works quite well although it is still a bit difficult to imagine.
When I am looking up at the 1:1 scale Zeppelin in 1920s Berlin, will menus pop down all the time?
I also asked about how they will implement chatting, this is of course extremely important for us and hard to imagine how it will work.
LL:As for chatting, text chat still works as well as voice. We suspect that voice will become the preferred method for Rift users to communicate in SL, due to the fact that they won’t be able to see their keyboards (for obvious reasons).
Unfortunately that doesn’t really tell us how it will work, but as expected they think voice will become used by more people.
I hope they improve it a bit first, because every time I use it (almost never) I hear people with cheap headsets, a tv and barking dogs in the background.
Of course that is mostly a problem users are causing themselves, but it isn’t always very realistic to hear that coming from a person who is not that near.
But it could be that I just need to adjust my settings a bit better, as I said, I never use voice.
I don’t mind using it but I know many do.
And some of us can’t type blind (although you should learn!), so it remains an issue to allow SL users to type on their keyboard while wearing the Oculus Rift.
I wonder if my idea of a floating inworld virtual keyboard could work, I think it could.
LL:So far, the results are incredibly encouraging. Even the most mundane content inworld springs to life through the Rift.
That sounds very exciting and this makes it even harder for us to wait even longer.
And of course, that brings us to Rod Humble’s comment recently that the Oculus Rift enabled viewer would come at the end of the summer.
LL:We can’t share a target release date just yet, but the project is coming along nicely, and we’ll certainly keep you posted.
I don’t think anyone is surprised that the ‘end of summer’ date was a bit optimistic, but to be honest, Rod never mentioned which summer…
Either way, it is moving along and all seems to be going well.
So, although I promised not to harass LL too often, it might be a good idea to start gathering some questions on the Oculus Rift subject that I can perhaps ask them next time.
If you have a question about the Oculus Rift in Second Life, the progress, the viewer, the UI, or anything related, post it in the comment section!
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.
