Recently I spotted a lovely little animated picture on Loki Eliot‘s Twitter stream, one of those fun (and/or annoying) Gifs that you can find all over the internet.
He shared a link to the software he used to make them and now I’m making them myself all the time.
In a way they are moving screenshots, or short videos you can very easily shoot within Second Life.
We would of course love to make wonderful machinimas and show everyone with ultra graphics what our sims and our virtual world looks like, but alas, for this you need a pretty strong computer and it often involves setting up and running complicated and demanding software.
And right in the middle of a crowded events, our poor computers have to work hard enough already to simply make everything look half decent.
Anyway, this software is easy to figure out and works very well.
It is called Giphy and you can find it by clicking here.
Next time you’re in SL, activate Giphy, drag a window over your screen and click record.
Once done, edit it if need be, save it and upload it directly to the Giphy website.
Done!
I just love these little tiny films I can now make, but more importantly, they are such a great way to share your virtual adventures all over the internet.
I’ve been making a lot of them and people love seeing them, even friends and family who have never been in Second Life or don’t understand or even like it.
So I thought I’d go and share this nifty gadget and maybe you’ll like it as much as I do.
I look forward to seeing more and more animated Gifs from Second Life on Facebook, Twitter and even here on WordPress.
Donnie SC Lygonis, Swedish business coach, currently working in Silicon Valley, recently interviewed Ebbe Altberg (AKA Ebbe Linden, CEO of Linden Lab) for his podcast on spreaker.com.
Ebbe talks about his career, how he ended up with LL, he brags a little about how awesome Second Life is, talks about the new Project Sansar, how users can create experiences there and the future of VR (Virtual Reality), AR (Augmented Reality) and MR (Mixed reality).
Nothing really new or earth shattering is said, but Ebbe did mention that only a few months ago people who tested Sansar gave it a fairly high ‘discomfort rating’, probably based on how dizzy they felt using a headset in this Virtual World, but that today this rating is very low after fine-tuning the speed of walking, tweaking the teleporting, etc.
Ebbe repeated that this August, more users (by invitation only) will be invited to come test Sansar, it already is August, so lets hope those invitations are about to be send!
Close to 5000 people have signed up to be allowed to become part of the August test wave, I am one of them and my virtual suitcase is packed.
My plan for Sansar is to first build an embassy for Virtual Time Travellers, nothing fancy, nothing big, just a place where people interested in using VR for historical purposes (education, entertainment, etc) can hang out, chat, make plans and wonder how long it will take before I can build 1920s Berlin there.
Ebbe also mentions that Sansar will open “to the world” in January 2017.
We’ve been told that Sansar would go public in 2017, even early 2017, but as far as I know, this is the first time an actual month is mentioned and January is quite soon.
Most important of all though is the mentioning of The 1920s Berlin Project at 43:10 🙂
I love that Mr. Lygonis mentions how annoying it is that with all the experience we have in SL, it must be a bit annoying to have all these people re-inventing the wheel when they pitch something as original, unique and new… while we’ve been doing it in SL for over a decade.
Ebbe answers politely but I prefer to imagine him running around Silicon Valley screaming; “SL has been doing that for over a decade, and that, and that!”
After the interview Mr. Lygonis got to try Sansar and calls it “to date; the most interesting virtual reality environment”.
The stunning machinima made by Pepa Comata about The 1920s Berlin Project in Second Life has been watched over 10.000 times since it was uploaded two weeks ago!
It has been picked up by a few websites and shared on Facebook and twitter, reaching an audience beyond those who know and use Second Life already.
A nice article about the video was published on ‘The Creators Project’, you can read it by clicking here.
They have close to a million ‘likes’ on Facebook and amongst these readers quite a few were impressed even if some were surprised to learn Second Life was still even around.
One viewer commented;
I’ve been meaning to uninstall Second Life from my pc. Good thing I didn’t.
On twitter the video was also shared and received a few wonderful compliments;
@RoblemVR@1920sberlin Beautiful piece of art to be experienced. infact this kinda aesthetics are essential & also the missing piece in vr
This shows the power of well made, good looking machinima but of course also of networking and social media.
People are impressed and intrigued, not just with our 1920s Berlin sim but also with Second Life still being around and looking this good.
It also shows why it is so important to try and offer as many users as possible a visually pleasing experience when visiting Second Life.
Right now a minority get to experience our virtual world the way it looks in this video.
Having graphics set to ultra and shadows on is something many computers can’t handle.
That is why I hope Sansar will be able to do that for more users or that LL will at least offer a streaming service.
About a year ago, I wrote an article called ‘Music videos shot in Second Life and why we need more of them.’ and in it I mentioned a video by Pepa Cometa as a good example of what is possible.
I’m so glad she choose to accept my invitation to come to Berlin and make this wonderful video.
Let’s hope many more videos like this one are made, they allow us to show the world that SL CAN look good and is about more than just shopping and hanky panky.
The Guardian newspaper published a podcast about the 2015 Web Summit under the title; ‘Is Virtual empathy the ghost in the machine for AI?’.
The subject is quite interesting, presenter Nathalie Nahai and her guests Oren Frank from Talkspace; Rana el Kaliouby from Affectiva and Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab, talk about;
Could machines ever understand us emotionally? How much is technology already affecting our cognitive abilities, mental wellbeing and emotional lives? And as our personal and emotional experiences migrate to alternate platforms, VR, mobile, and others, will empathy be lost in an AI world?
Today a nice article about Sansar, the next virtual world Linden Lab is building revealed a few new details.
The article was published on WDSU, a NBC-affiliated television station located in New Orleans and CNN Money.
A few interesting things were mentioned so I thought I’d share them here.
Think of it as the YouTube of the virtual world — an entry point for anyone who wants to build a VR experience without investing a ton of time and money.
I think this is a rather brilliant way of describing Sansar, or any kind of user created virtual world.
I prefer it to the WordPress comparison made before.
I also think this is the way to sell Sansar to the world; this is the entry point for anyone interested in creating their own VR experience, just like Youtube has brought millions to the world of making this new kind of Television.
“We know more than anybody else what it takes to do something like this,” said Linden Labs CEO Ebbe Altberg.
Well done Ebbe on sharing that very important bit of information, no matter what you think of Second Life, it has given Linden Lab more of something pretty much nobody has; lots and lots of experience with a virtual online world.
Creating worlds will be more difficult in Project Sansar than Second Life, but Altberg said they’ve made a tool non-engineers can use.
This is both worrying and intriguing.
It is scary to hear that creating is going to be more difficult, but what does Ebbe mean?
Does it mean more difficult than the very basic building with prims or more difficult than making mesh, something many of us already need outside tools for.
I think it is essential for Sansar to succeed to have inworld building tools that make it easy for us to create but also allows us to create things together with others.
So this mysterious tool sounds good but I guess we won’t know how much more complicated it is till we get to try it ourselves or till one of the testers leaks information.
If you’re reading this testers… give me a call 😉
Internally, Linden Labs employees are working on polishing the product, building their own test worlds along the way. They’ve made a desert scene with crazy big machinery, weird futuristic lounges and a famous landmark. They’ve even created an exact replica of a conference room in Linden Labs’ San Francisco office, down to the objects on the desk.
This are some of the first descriptions of what is already being created in Sansar that I’ve found and it sounds good.
It makes the imagination run wild.
If only I could go and have a look myself!
Someone send me an invite already!
Finally, what is it with people adding an S to Linden Lab?
There is no Linden Labs, technically, I don’t even think Linden Lab is one lab, they don’t wear white coats, there are no flasks, no bunsen burners, no brains in jars and they don’t even blow up stuff now and then.
Anyway, make sure to check the complete article out by clickinghere.
You may remember a website called “moviepilot” (what a name!) when one of their articles caused quite a kerfuffle a while back.
Writer (and I use that term very loosely in this case) Marlon McDonald made a real mess of things when he wrote an article about Second Life back in 2014 that was one of the worst I’d ever seen.
All the negative cliches were brought up, SL was “unmasked” as a place full of perversion and hanky panky.
On top of that, the article was illustrated with pictures from the SL prehistory and some even from completely different games!
It was horrendous and there was a lot of backlash.
You can read my blog on that story by clicking here and Inara Pey’s blog by clicking here, she even got them to publish her rebuttal which you can read by clicking here.
When they published another article on Second Life I wasn’t quite sure what to expect but it seems they have changed their tune and published something about our virtual world that actually makes sense, sort of, and even involved doing some research.
The newest article, called ‘Second Life: How to navigate an Online Virtual World (and Maybe Even Make Some Money), written by Jack Carr, is a lot more positive and honest.
It also uses a few decent and up to date illustrations.
Sex gets quite some attention but this is balanced by also talking about some of the other things possible in SL.
It is also nice to see our 1920s Berlin Project get some attention although we really don’t have a cabaret club on every corner!
So although there isn’t a lot of depth or detail in the story, it is balanced, factual and about a zillion times better than the hysterically bad piece written by Mr McDonald.
I know my dear fellow cynics, I know, Moviepilot doesn’t really care about SL or about what their writers write some of the time, but they have 5 million likes on Facebook (yes really! That is even more than I have), 40 thousand twitter followers and they’ve finally written something positive about our virtual world, so that is a good thing!
Ok, I know, I’m shallow, I care about the visual aspect of interviews, not just what is being said.
So when I saw this interview, I immediately liked it.
The interview was made for a website called Upload VR and takes place in front of a lovely old fashioned fireplace, both gentlemen are having an alcoholic (?) drink, there are books on shelves and dogs walking around.
Wonderful!
Before you get too excited, no this is not Ebbe’s home or a corner at Linden Lab.
Image copyright; Upload VR and youtube
Of course it could be better.
Both gentlemen should be wearing 3 piece suits, smoking a pipe and of course refrain from wearing a hat indoors!
Anyway, so far the super-visual part of this blog.
What is being said?
Not much exciting news that we didn’t know yet, but interesting nevertheless;
Sansar is still a few weeks away from letting testers in.
First half of next year more people will be allowed in and maybe by the end of 2016 a public version may be released.
Ebbe mentions something very important; that if you want to create an interactive VR experience today you have to be an engineer, it is very complicated to do but not so in SL.
We all know that of course, but I think you can’t repeat this enough.
The alpha testers for Maya will download Sansar and it will have an add-on for Maya, the software SL is using to build it.
This explains why LL is looking for Maya users to start testing Sansar, you may not even be able to get into Sansar without it, for now.
However, once you “publish” your Sansar VR experience, you can share a link to it with your friends and everyone can come and explore it.
The idea being, I think, that Sansar will be extremely easy to use and share.
I hope to one day be able to share a link to 1920s Berlin with RL friends and have them explore the sim in minutes with no or almost no installing of viewers and no or almost no instructions.
I think Ebbe is right in promoting SL/Sansar as a place where we can all experience and create VR without the skills needed to do this in any other way.
Ebbe says that SL has experienced a slow and steady decline, from just above 1 million monthly users at its peak, it is now just below.
But SL is still very strong and people cashed out 60 million dollars last year alone.
Ebbe describes Sansar as a “parallel universe” to Second Life.
I wonder if perhaps there is a good name for this world in there somewhere.
It is going to be less world focused, it will be more like several platforms.
This has been touched upon before and I think people will be sad to see the idea of living in a virtual world together change so drastically.
Some of us enjoy just exploring, running around, flying from one sim to another not knowing what they’ll bump into.
With Sansar, it seems, you’ll have to actively choose your destination before you can go there.
That is why LL prefers to compare Sansar to a virtual version of WordPress, and not a world.
Tier is also brought up, land is very expensive in Second Life but this will change in Sansar.
Land in Sansar will be much bigger, much cheaper and, Ebbe said with a smile, much more beautiful.
To be able to afford this there will be a sales tax on the Gross Domestic Product.
In short, property taxes go down, sales taxes go up.
Right now in world transactions are tax free (which I sure hope they will stay!) and marketplace taxes are 5% which is very low, 30% is the norm.
By doing this LL hopes that Sansar becomes appealing to many more users to start creating content, to build things and experiences.
Ebbe also shares a few examples of how SL is used, the musician who can afford to have his RL record published because of SL concerts, the fashion designer who made over a million bucks selling SL clothes, the man who make an income selling jeans, etc.
These kinds of stories appeal to people, it may be a bit daft, but fact is that when people hear that you make virtual goods for some virtual world they may think it is a bit silly but when they hear you can make a living out of it they are often suddenly very interested.
But also the many other wonderful things people do in SL get mentioned, lots of different ‘use cases’ that I think will give outsiders a real good idea of what SL is all about.
And even that crazy woman from Holland who build 1929s Berlin gets mentioned again.
I stumbled upon this nice article on a website called mmorpg.com, an online community all about massively multiplayer online role-playing games.
I first thought it was just another story, but it turned out to be an interview by Neilie Johnson with Ebbe and Pete Linden and although nothing really shocking or new was revealed it is still a rather interesting read.
But although it just looks like a post on a small online forum, it is quite a bit more than that.
Mmorpg.com is extra interesting because it is read by a very important target audience for Second Life, it is not a tv show watched by millions of whom most have little or no interest in actually joining us in our virtual world, but it is read by people much more likely to actually be interested and willing to come try it out.
The website has over 46.000 followers on twitter and more than 76.000 ‘likes’ on Facebook.
Not to mention that the website itself has over 3 million members!
And all of these people are members of online communities and play online games.
This is why it makes this interview so interesting.
After all, when you’re trying to sell food it is better to target hungry people than people who are on a diet.
This interview is like talking to an army of Mr. Creosote’s who are very, very hungry.
Don’t look up Mr. Creosote.
I warned you.
The article is pretty good and doesn’t mention the bad reputation Second Life has/had, but it does come up in the comments section, once more showing that the shadow of the past hasn’t quite cleared up yet.
But other readers are rather positive and are quick to explain that SL is more than just that.
The story is also accompanied by some rather decent pictures.
Recently a journalist who wanted to write about Second Life did the right thing, he asked for help.
As soon as reporter Eric Grundhauser realised how massive our virtual world was and how impossible it would be to write a proper article about it without exploring it for many days, he reached out to Linden Lab and asked for a guide.
Linden Lab pointed him in the direction of one of the best guides imaginable, Ziki Questi.
She showed him some of SL’s most impressive sims (but forgetting the best one, mine ;)) and the result is a rather nice, positive article about Second Life.
One to counter all those negative stories with.
But he didn’t forget to mention the more adult side, luckily, unlike with most media, it was not the main focus of his story.
The story was published on a website called ‘Atlas Obscura‘, “the definitive guide to the world’s wondrous and curious places.”, as they describe themselves.
So not a tech website, not a blog about games or virtual reality, but more like a travel guide for those interested in the unusual.
It is very interesting that they choose to publish a story about a virtual destination, I like that a lot.
Make sure you read it, you can find it by clicking here.
But a few days later Wagner James Au on his website ‘New World Notes’, wrote an article about the Atlas Obscura article that was rather surprising to many.
He felt that the adult side of Second Life, ugly outdated sims and things such as lag, old graphics, etc. did not get enough attention and that the article thus “presents a distorted picture of Second Life that ultimately does a disservice to SL and its best creators, while doing nothing to help grow its userbase.”
You can read his entire article by clicking here, make sure you also read the comments below it.
Unsurprisingly many Second Life users were confused, annoyed and angry about his story.
Finally the media writes something positive about our virtual world and now this.
Honour McMillan wrote an interesting reply to Wagner’s story here on her blog and of course there was lots of talking about the subject on Twitter and plurk.
So Drax and I decided to invite Hamlet to our little attic studio in Berlin (AKA Skype) and interviewed him.
I think the result is rather interesting, an edited (for time) version will be part of the Drax Files Radio Hour to go online this Friday and we will also put the complete unedited interview online.
I personally think that just because sims are catagorised as adult, they don’t necessarily are ‘rated Adult for extreme sexual and violent content’.
Interestingly enough yesterday Linden Lab organised a ‘Inworld Linden meet up’ in the adult themed (stunningly wonderful) sim Basilique Town… where public nudity or even (wearing or walking around in?) underwear is not allowed!
And although the place has a few corners here and there where the rules are more relaxed and hanky panky probably goes on somewhere, these areas are for members only.
So their rating as adult may be legitimate, I definitely wouldn’t call it a sex sim, if it was, I wouldn’t even dare visit it, Lindens or no Lindens.
Then again, my rating system would be even worse, I’m such an old fashioned prude, I’d probably rate 99% of SL as perverted.
I mean some women walk around with skirts that don’t cover their knees!
I also think that a lot has to do with the words you use.
For instance Hamlet says Second Life is dying, I’d prefer to say it is declining or even better; evolving into the Next Generation virtual world that Linden Lab is working on now.
Anyway, I’ll leave the rest of my opinions to the interview we did with Wagner, a link to our podcast will be shared here on this blog, and on of course on the Draxfiles website as soon as the show is online.
Is the media falling in love with Second Life again?
After years of terrible, silly, shallow, badly researched or simply made up articles with screenshots from 1979, recently there have been a few rather positive and well written stories in the media about Second Life.
It seems that the virtual reality renaissance, set in motion by Oculus Rift, is bringing Second Life back into the spotlight and quite rightly so.
Because no matter what you think about our 13 year old online world, it is still there, it is still doing well and unlike any other VR related thing out there, it has a huge amount of experience, an amazing track record and its own economy.
It was a matter of time before (good) journalists would realise the importance of Second Life, or at least how interesting its story is today.
A few days an online magazine called ‘Good’ had a pretty decent article about us and today ‘Business Insider Australia’ published a wonderful story with the rather good and eye catching title;
‘This company was 13 years early to virtual reality — and it’s getting ready to try again’
Love that title, because SL was early, perhaps even ahead of its time.
The story has an ok screenshot, that at least is up to day (although not very exciting).
Because the audience is people who want to read about business, they get straight to the point and in my experience, that is very good when the story is about Second Life.
Throw some facts and figures at the reader and they will be impressed and perhaps stop thinking about all the pervy stuff they read about in the other articles.
Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab is quoted in the article and as I mentioned before, Ebbe knows what to say and how to sell our virtual world to outsiders and once more he does a wonderful job of it.
The story goes into the past and future of Second Life and well, it just sounds good.
Which is why the next version of Second Life has a few clear priorities, Altberg says:
Make it easier for people to find cool, relevant stuff.
Make it possible for more people to attend and experience that cool stuff (Duran Duran did a free concert in Second Life once, but only 50 people could fit in the room for technical reasons).
Make it possible for people to make money in new ways from their stuff (like letting people who run virtual classrooms rent out the technology to other universities).
If the company can do that with this next version, Altberg says, then Second Life’s prosperity will continue well into the new reign of virtual reality.
And what can I say, I am easily pleased, so I was quite excited when my 1920s Berlin Project was mentioned.
My already massive ego likes being stroked but to be blunt, I do think that at least the theme of my sim is a good one to show outsiders with that Second Life is about more than shopping, chatting and hanky panky.
Although of course all those things also happen in our sim… ssshhhh don’t tell anyone.
Jo Yardley's Second Life 