Official Sansar publicity video released

Tags

PR, publicity, release, sansar, video

Today Linden Lab released a new Sansar video, an official sort of smooth trailer/teaser for the general public.

The narrator speaks English, proper British English, which is always a good idea.
And I’m not just saying that because I’m and anglophile.

She describes Sansar as revolutionary and unlike anything the world has ever seen before, I can almost hear my Second Life avatar slamming her fists on the inside of the computer screen shouting “Hey what about this place then?!”.

Check out the video yourself, I’ll share my thoughts below it.

 

The narrator tells us that Sansar will take VR to the next level and that its unprecedented technology will allow everyone to create their own social VR experience and that that is no longer limited to the professionals.
This is true and the best thing about Sansar and SL, it is very good that they put emphasis on this, it is what will lure VR enthousiasts to Sansar.
It is up to the Sansar team to make sure the new users then are not disappointed when they perhaps don’t have the freedom they expected or that they need to spend money first to buy stuff or go learn blender to make things.
I hope easy inworld building tools come to Sansar but will they be there when Sansar goes public?
Anyway, I’ve written about that before.
The narrator tells us there will be easy tools to help us make these experiences and share them with everybody.
And she tells us we can use Sansar to recreate history, well that is me sold!

She also talks about all the uses Sansar will have, live events, entertainment, education, etc.
But there is one thing I miss in her story; gaming.
At the moment this is one of the biggest uses for VR and you know many gamers will see this video and decide based on it if they want to try Sansar.
Some of these gamers may have youtube channels with millions of viewers but do you think they spotted something in the video that appeals to them?
Granted there may not be many gaming tools in Sansar yet, but I know that there is a cannon shooting thingy and of course you don’t need special tools for roleplaying.
I would have at least mentioned gaming in the list of possibilities and perhaps show a little bit of gaming madness.
So far the options offered seem perhaps a bit high-brow.

Anyway, the story is sound and appealing.

The visuals are pretty good too and as someone who has been waiting to get into Sansar for ages it is difficult to see if they are also interesting to outsiders because my absorb every bit of new Sansar footage as a sponge.
But I’ll try.

As someone who has been a hardcore gamer since Pong, I try and imagine what a regular VR gamer thinks of the footage and most of the visuals are quite impressive.
We get a good look at the avatars and they look pretty good although, it really depends on the angle they are being seen in.
In some of the shots they look better than in others and the girl with the black hair looks better made than the boy with the blue and white shirt.
But compared to SL, they are all perhaps still a bit dull.
I reckon some of us can’t wait to stick wings and tails on them.
The avatars we see are of course the basic starter ones but looking at the avatars in this video it seems not many users have done a lot of customizing yet, which makes me wonder if we’re going to get many avatar customization options when Sansar opens, I know we will get those eventually, of course!
But I think it is important to get them in place for the first day as they are so important.

The creation tools look good, we know them from SL, same sort of idea, the ring around your prim that you use to rotate, move, etc.
They do make it look easy to move stuff around and well, it will be.
Uploading assets looks easier than it is though, most 3d software will make your brain cry.

Adding lights, special sounds, scripting, it all sounds and looks pretty easy and if new users can indeed easily use these, we’re onto a winner.
It is when people want to actually build things that it becomes a lot more complicated.

We see a few people putting on their headsets but we don’t see anyone using Sansar on a regular screen, well besides people who are creating and building.
As corny as it might have looked, having people also explore an experience on a desktop and maybe even a tablet or something mobile, might have calmed the people down who somehow keep thinking you’ll need a headset for Sansar.

The locations all look rather good, Sansar creators have been real busy lately and it looks like there will already be plenty to explore.

The video ends with a nice close up of a lady wearing a Sansar T-shirt while talking in sync with the narrator.
This may not seem much but for us in SL it is something we can only dream of and in many other VR experiences this is still something quite impressive.
I wish she blinked though.

Conclusion; I think it is a pretty good public relations video, something to show off to outsiders and future users.
Of course there are also things I would do differently, but I’ve been to film school and have made films & TV so I say that about everything, it is one of the reasons nobody wants to watch movies with me.

And at the very end we get a Beta release date!
Spring 2017

Which technically means it could be released at any moment between now and June.
I hope I’ve got my new computer by then!

The most important question is; after seeing this, would you like to try Sansar?
Would you as someone who has been in SL for years, as a gamer, as a developer new to VR, as a random housewife, a school teacher, etc.?

Disclaimer; I am in the Sansar program but my computer is too old and I can’t try it, so my article is still written as that of someone who has not yet been in Sansar, because well, I haven’t.
/me cries.

 

Making animated Second Life Gifs

Tags

"second life", animated, animation, gif, media, publicity, social

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.

 

Second Life video about 1920s Berlin has 10.000 views within 2 weeks

Tags

machinima, media, pepa cometa, PR, publicity, The 1920s Berlin Project, video

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

— Vino (@vino3d) April 7, 2016

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.

Go on, have another look;

 

 

Moviepilot website changes its tune with positive article about SL.

Tags

"second life", article, media, moviepilot, publicity, reputation, sex

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!

Yet another positive story about Second Life in the media

Tags

"second life", ebbe altberg, ebbe linden, media, PR, publicity

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.

In short, an article worth reading (and you can read it by clicking here), but also positive about our virtual world.

Let’s hope more journalists start to realise that Second Life is actually a very interesting topic, again.

Music videos shot in Second Life and why we need more of them.

Tags

"second life", art, music video, PR, publicity, reputation

Even though the fact that many people don’t even know Second Life (still) exists is a big problem for Linden Lab and us who are enthusiastic about this online world, I still think that the bad reputation our virtual place has is also something that needs to be fixed.

And although that may not be possible, or at least not something we can completely get rid of till SL 2.0 comes around, I can’t help thinking about new ideas and schemes that might make it easier for people like me, who are out of the virtual closet, to share the brilliance of that place where I spend so much time with people who don’t know much or anything about Second Life.

That is why I get excited every time I find something that makes Second Life look good, that shows that there really is more to our virtual world than shopping, playing Barbie and Ken or hanky panky

It can be wonderful screenshots, a great documentary series or a stunning music video.

Recently Drax and I chatted about how much good things like these can do, they can completely change how people think about Second Life, if they ever had any thoughts about it to begin with!

So anyway, one of the things that I think can be wonderful advertising for Second Life is a well made music video.
You know, sometimes these go ‘viral’, as you kids call it these days, as disgusting as that may sound, that is a good thing.

That is why I am asking you, folks in SL who are artistic, who can make good super high quality videos, who can sing, make music, build amazing places, etc, etc, to get together and make stunning music videos.

If your video turns out amazing, everybody wins.
The performer gets publicity, the machinima maker gets publicity and SL gets publicity!
You may all even get  little famous.

The internet is full of Second Life videos but most of these are about grieving, drama, getting married, having babies or other sorts of things that either make SL look bad or are just very difficult to understand for outsiders.
I’ve also seen a few music videos but they only show avatars dancing, often half naked, to awful music, there is nothing that appeals to me, that is visually stunning or original.
Or they are interesting but whoever made it used an old computer with bad graphics, visited sims that haven’t been updated since 2007 or weren’t very good at editing, etc.

So go on, artists, performers, machinima makers, get together.
Feel free to use the comments section here to find others to work with and start making music videos.
These are generally not too long, don’t need long complicated stories, can use stunning visuals without having to justify just throwing in a pretty picture and if the video is good it helps the music and if the music is good it helps the video.
Of course you can also use an already well know song as basis for your video, as long as you have permission to use the recording.

In my view a music video is a rather good way to reach a wider audience.

A great example of what I think is absolutely wonderful is this old video I’ve only just discovered.
It was uploaded months ago by Pepa Cometa but only the other day did she also upload a bit of it to Flickr where I stumbled upon it.
So you may have already seen it a million times, it may have been blogged about before, I don’t care, it is new to me.

It was filmed at “H220”, a moody location created by Squonk Levenque and Miuccia Klaar, unfortunately the sim no longer exists.
The song is unfortunately not by an SL artist but by the wonderful Mumford & sons.

I think it is stunning, something I’ll be glad to share with people who’ve never heard of Second Life or have a negative view of it.

I hope to be able to share more amazing Second Life music videos soon, got any, share them in the comments!

Enjoy this wonderful video and start making your own!;

And, thank you Pepa Cometa for the tip, here is another rather wonderful SL music video, this one made by Erythro Asimov, with Cica Ghost;

Another tip, by owldragonash, intoduced me to the wonderful videos by Nina Caplin (Fuchsia nightfire), like this one with music from an actual SL artist BlindBoy Gumbo!

Bad journalism strikes again

Tags

cliches, journalism, media, press, publicity, reputation

Those of us who art part of the Second Life community are used to negative publicity.
For years the media has been filled to the rim with scare and shock stories about lots of dirty, kinky, disgusting and generally weird stories.
And lets be fair, there is a lot in Second Life that most people will find disturbing or at least odd.

But so is reality, and internet, and tv, and books… have you ever heard of ‘Lady chatterley’s lover’?
Disgusting!
And don’t get me started on that pervert Shakespeare….

But somehow when it comes to Second Life, we just don’t seem to be able to shake that bad reputation, so many “journalists” keep writing about that side of our virtual world, as if that is all there is and has been for over a decade.

Still, it can be annoying, even infuriating when yet another bit of lazy journalism rears its ugly head and this article on a website I’d never heard of called “moviepilot“, takes the biscuit.

I guess the writer Marlon McDonald was told to quickly write some ‘click bait’ and to finish it in 20 minutes.
Or at least I hope so, it doesn’t seem like a lot of effort was put into his article.

When I first read it I thought it was a story from 2007, with matching images.
But no, it was written yesterday.
The screenshots though…. the first one isn’t even from SL but from IMVU!
Which is telling…

It is quite obvious that the writer just wanted to write a little dirty story about the adult sort of pervy side of Second Life.
Which, let me say it again, is absolutely not my cup of tea but I also don’t care about what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own sim.
But it does annoy me when people make it seem like that is all there is to Second Life.
Because it is not part of my Second Life and even those only involved with the adult entertainment part of SL know very well that there is so much more to our virtual world.

In his conquest for a little story Mr. McDonald did manage to find the Second Life destination guide, because that is where the first (non IMVU) picture comes from.
That sort of gives the game away.
He saw the list of all the types of sims we have in SL yet he only seems to have found the kinky sims.
If… he bothered to actually try SL at all and just randomly snatched a few pictures of the internet.

The most recent picture used in that article is from 2010, 4 years ago.
Try using a 4 year old screenshot when writing about any other game…
And clearly it wasn’t even made with a half decent computer.
The oldest picture is from 2007.
Yes even the ‘flying penises’ story was mentioned, something that happened 7 years ago!

Now, if this was an article about the ‘darker’ side of Second Life as it used to be and how it looked several years ago, it might have made a little sense.
Especially if the writer had bothered to write about how things have changed since then.
Because these days even the sexy side of Second Life has decent graphics!

This is a story about what Second Life was like several years ago, but nowhere in the article this is mentioned.
By “forgetting” to share that information, uninformed readers may think that Second Life still looks that way, but even worse, that adult entertainment is all there is.

A good journalist who wants to write about this side of SL would at least mention that there is more to SL and that the images are a bit outdated.

This article is everything journalism shouldn’t be; unfair and unbalanced.
Sadly, this is what journalism often is, not just when it comes to SL.

My story here is not one about yet another negative cliche ridden article about our SL, it is about one that is the mother of them all.
And I feel that it is up to all of us to make sure that people who write this nonsense are confronted.
Not just because bad journalists need to be called to order but also because people who read this drivel will perhaps also read our comments and thus get confronted with the other side of the story.

So go on, do your bit, leave a comment, tell people what SL is really like.
Defend your world.

Linden Lab updates PR screenshots

Tags

"second life", illustrations, linden lab, pictures, PR, publicity, screenshot, snapshot, virtual reality

Linden Lab has uploaded about 30 new Second Life screenshots into their Flickr account that will, I assume, be used for PR purposes.

I’ve written before about how important I think it is for outsiders to actually see how good Second Life can look if your computer is up to scratch.

And it frustrates me that so many journalists use screenshots from 2007 to illustrate their article about our virtual world, regardless if the article is positive or negative.

But journalists today sometimes need a little help, they don’t always have the time to go inworld, figure out ultra graphics settings and look for nice locations or scour the internet for pictures, contact the makers for permission to use them, etc.
Of course in some cases its not the journalist but the editor who decides on which images to use.

So it is Linden Lab’s and our job to make sure our virtual world is represented properly.

When Paste Magazine recently published an article on the 10 Best MMO’s written by Janine Hawkins, with a less than flattering illustration, people on twitter spoke up.
The writer was contacted and the picture replaced.

I’ve started the ‘Second Life is looking good’ flickr group to show outsiders whats possible in SL these days, but these pictures in many cases come with copyright restrictions.
Still, journalists could at least contact thebut I’ve also added a few screenshots to Wikipedia Commons without any use restrictions.

Journalists have already found and used these, with added bonus for me that my 1920s Berlin sim gets some free publicity at the same time.

Linden Lab does send some information and pictures if they are aware an article is being written or when a journalist contacts them, but I don’t know if they always speak up and protest when a journalist uses very old bad screenshots.

They do have a Press section on the Linden Lab website, but for some reason there are reporters out there who overlook the pictures they can find there or don’t even bother checking if the subject of their article has a press page.

To be honest though, there are only 12 not that impressive pictures to be found in Linden Lab’s Flickr album that the press page links to.

But now it seems that Linden Lab has decided to update the images they offer by adding about 30 new pretty good pictures.
Not only are they of good quality, they are diverse and not too tacky.

They haven’t been added to the press folder yet and unfortunately they have not added a small description of the location or slurls so people can check them out inworld.

And to my shock and horror they’ve forgotten to include pictures of 1920s Berlin!
However, they do offer journalists much better illustrations than before.

Because they are not yet moved to the right folder, you’ll have to go to the main page of the Linden Lab flickr account to see them.

It remains our job to be vigilant and keep an eye out for articles that misrepresent Second Life, it is also in our best interest to let everyone know our world is not ugly, well not everywhere anyway.
If you see a bad SL image being used, leave a comment, tweet the author, let Linden Lab know.