SL machinima filmed in 1920s Berlin selected for prestigious film festival.

Tags

"second life", 1920s berlin, amelie marcoud, machinima, video

Recently well known Second Life machinima maker Amelie Marcoud made a wonderful almost 17 minutes long video completely filmed in 1920s Berlin in the style of a silent movie.

The end result is very impressive, you can see it here;

Today Amelie announced that the video has been selected for a film festival;

It brings me so much joy to know that The Fiancée has been selected by an international film festival called Lift-Off. The film will be shown on Vimeo-On-Demand next month, amongst other magnificent filmmakers; some of which worked with Disney’s Pixar. I never thought any of my work could make a SL/RL crossover, it feels surreal. Once again thank you to everyone involved in the film and cheers to our first film laurels!

It is very exciting that this wonderful video filmed in our 1920s Berlin Project is now getting the attention it deserves.
Congratulations to cast and crew!

New tools for region owners in Second Life

Tags

"second life", improvements, manager, region, tools

Many years ago, in 2012 to be exact, I wrote a blog about how it would be a good idea to give region owners some offline tools to help them manage their sims.

You can read it by clicking here, but in short;
I suggested some tools accessible on the SL official website that allowed region owners so do some things inworld without actually having to start up the viewer as that isn’t always an option.
One of the tools I suggested was to allow us to restart a region from the website.

Linden Lab has now given us this option!
This is very handy, not just because you can’t always go inworld because you’re too busy in RL, the computer you’re on doesn’t handle SL or maybe your sim is under attack by grievers and you can’t even get to it.
And of course, by being able to do this via the SL website means you can also do it on your mobile phone while in traffic and nowhere near a computer.
Click here to read the official announcement.

Region owners can now simply go to their land manager page and restart all their regions from there, you can also restart them in safe mode so with scripts, physics & collisions disabled.
Effectively making griefing impossible.

This is a very handy and some day it may save your bacon.

But I hope this is just the first of more tools to come!
Because I can think of a few more improvements that would be most welcome.
Here are a few ideas for SL website tools (not just for region managers) I wrote about in my blog back in 2012, if you can think of more, please share your ideas in the comments section.

• Be able to send an message to the region.
• Have access to your groups so you can send a group message, join group chat (for instance to explain what you’re doing about the griefer attack) but also give and take away permissions to make things harder for that troll who pretended to be a tenant or to give that new tenant rezing permissions without them having to wait till you get home.
• See who is currently visiting your region and eject someone if need be.
• Have access to detailed visitor logs.
• Change the windlight.
• Allow everyone, not just region managers, to chat, live, with anyone in SL from the SL website.
  Allowing you to talk to your friends but also fellow administrators in case of an emergency or just to check if everything is in order.

In short, all those little jobs that only take a few seconds to do but because you have to do them inworld, can take minutes, even hours if you have to wait to get home to take care of them.

UPDATE;

I’ve contacted Linden Lab and asked them if they are planning any improvements and additions to these tools.
I was told;

Yes, we do – we have a project viewer with an update to estate management tools coming very soon. The simulator changes have just rolled out to support those. We think these are going to be a very welcome addition.

Second Life’s new infographic & the old one

Tags

"second life", anniversary, birthday, infographic, linden lab

I love these, the media loves these, everybody loves these.
The infographic quickly gives you some interesting information packaged with pretty pictures.

Linden Lab just published this fresh new one as part of the 15th anniversary of the biggest user build virtual online world Second Life.

I’ve decided to dig up the infographic Linden Lab made for the 10th anniversary and compare the two.

Up to today 57 million accounts were created, that is impressive but doesn’t say very much about how well SL is doing or how many people actually use it because we all know that many of these people who sign up don’t use SL anymore ands some are alt accounts, I for instance have roughly 2 hundred thousand alts myself 😉
5 years ago there were 36 million accounts created, so that is another 21 million in 5 years!

Today the total time spend in SL is 482.000, now that is a lot.
It would be nice to know how many people actually are responsible for these hours though.
On the other hand, I really do not want to know how many hours I’ve spend in SL!
Five years ago this number was 217.000 years, so in the last 5 years we’ve spend more time in SL than people have in the first 10 years!
Now that is interesting.
SL may have stopped growing and is in slow decline but it is being used more intensely than ever before.

On average 350.000 people register for SL every month, even if many of these are alts and even if lots of new users only stay for a short time and don’t become “lifers”, it is still quite a high number of people who are still interested in checking out and trying a 15 year old product.
However, 5 years ago this number was 400.000, so this number has gone down.

$68 million has been paid to creators in 2017, I wish I was paid a million.
This number was not mentioned 5 years ago but in 2015 Ebbe said that users cashed out $60 million, so it looks like SL’s economy has gotten better the last 2 years.

 

5 million virtual goods created for the marketplace, back in 2013 this was 2.1 million, so this too seems to have grown rather a lot.
In the last 5 years we’ve been creating and/or selling more items on marketplace than in the 10 years before!
Mind you, with this number you have to ask yourself if everything that is being sold is actually created by users for sale or sold one, the cacha market is huge and consists of people selling stuff they did not create.

The top 3 categories most popular in the destination guide are games, editors picks and photogenic spots.
I had not spotted the photogenic spots category yet, all my sims should be in there of course!
It is interesting to see that 5 years ago the most popular categories were games, events and adventure & fantasy.

50 million chat messages sent daily, that doesn’t surprise me, I reckon I get at least half of all those messages!
Or at least it feels like it sometimes.
Unfortunately this number was not shared 5 years ago, but I think it has gone up because those who chat the most are the people who spend a lot of time in SL and it looks like we’ve been spending more and more time in this virtual world of ours.
I wonder if the real world becoming less and less pleasant might have had something to do with that…

Most popular shopping categories; avatar apparel, avatar accessories, home & garden.
In 2013 this was not shared but we did learn that women’s hairstyles were the most purchased items.

I’d like to have seen how many users visit monthly these days and how large SL’s landmass is.

I wonder if my analysis of these two infographics makes sense.
The most important things I notices are that although SL is in decline, those of us who do make it our home spend more time and money.
Which I reckon is pretty good news.
Of course we have to keep fighting to make sure more people join and stay once they’ve joined, but the locals, the regulars, the oldtimers, are doing a great job of keeping the world alive, active, fresh and interesting.
I reckon we deserve some nice gifts during the anniversary… subtle hint….

New SL feature; Place Pages

Tags

"second life", improvements, places pages

Linden Lab just announced that they are rolling out yet another feature for Second Life, one I’m very excited about and have been, in parts, suggesting for a while; Place Pages.

They basically give every region and parcel in Second Life a page on the Second Life website where you can find out more information about them.

It is a bit like the information page you see when you use search inworld before you teleport to that sim, but bigger & better.
And all you have to do to visit these pages is click ‘visit this location’ and the teleport window in SL opens.
No more visiting the, if I may say so, confusing map first.

To make such a page your parcel and/or region needs to have “Show in search” activated in the land setting.
Go to https://places.secondlife.com/places to see a list of all these pages and click “my places” to see a list of your sims that you can make a page for.
The rest is self-explanatory.

And rather exciting; you can use 360 degrees photos and even stream LIVE via youtube from inworld!

But it gets better.
Place pages right now is still in the Beta testing phase, so it will get better and how we are going to use these could influence what will happen next with them.
Linden Lab promises future improvements and features, such as an event calendar!

I’ve written before (click here to read) about making more use of ‘my-sl’ profiles and perhaps creating pages for groups in SL.
Finding a way to allow us to stop using Social Media for all these things and start using the official SL website more for this.
Giving us online events calendars for our sims is a huge step towards this.

I hope that in the future the Place Pages for communities will include perhaps also a forum or place where people can chat with each other, an online photo album (or widget that allows us to show our Flickr pictures there),  contact options that allow you to chat directly with admins and managers or at least send them a message, etc.

But above all; an events calendar.
Right now we have to send reminders, have a Facebook calendar, google calendar, etc.
I’d love to have a calendar for a sim that shows you right away ALL the events in that sim, region, all parcels in that region or just selected parcels in that region but that also gives you the option to subscribe to this calendar so you get IM’s when these events are about to begin.
And please, also the option for us to create recurring events so we don’t have to create a new calendar event for those daily or weekly events.

Can you think of more improvements and additions?
Let Linden Lab know, you can follow their forum post by clicking here and file a Jira about bugs or for your ideas and suggestions.

Either way, I’m getting busy making pages for all my parcels and sims!
Starting with this one for 1920s Berlin.

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 releases new Fantasy themed starter avatars

Tags

"second life", avatars, newbies, noobs, starter

Linden Lab just announced (click) a new set of starter avatars with themes such as “steampunk, vampires, sci-fi, post-apocalyptic… and beyond!”
Not a theme I have much affinity with, perhaps next time we can have Time Travellers as a theme for starter avatars?
Victorian, Medieval, Roman… and oh I don’t know… 1920s! 😉

They have the normal good old fashioned system bodies, which is a good decision as mesh avatars are something for more experienced users.

If only we could now also find an easier way to deal with alpha layers, can’t we connect them to the clothes so you wear them automatically?

Anyway, more choice of new avatars is a good thing although I still think it would be even better to have some sort of avatar creation tool on the SL website as part of the signup process.
Let new users play with how they want their avatar to look before they even start Second Life.

This is what the 10 new avatars look like;

Linden Lab made an internal video to introduce these new avatars, you can see it here;

Ebbe Altberg interview about SL & Sansar which is going public next January.

Tags

"second life", ebbe altberg, ebbe linden, media, podcast, project sansar, sansar

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”.

You can listen to the complete podcast by clicking here;
https://www.spreaker.com/user/constantinnovation/episode-7-ebbe-altberg-virtual-reality-s_1

First 360 degrees video recorded within Second Life

Tags

"second life", 360, 360 degree camera, 360 degrees, Arduenn Schwartzman, draxtor despres, Electric Shepherd, The 1920s Berlin Project, vimagine, virtual reality

Imagine being able to bring your 360 degrees camera into Virtual Reality, just set it up in the club, house, park or city that you’ve build yourself in Second Life, record it and then share it online with people from all over the world.

Let them get a taste of where you live in VR, let them look around and even give them the feeling they’re actually there by looking at it with their VR headset.

This is now possible!
Yesterday Electric Shepherd from Vimagine (who also worked on the ‘Virtualize it’ documentary for ‘Der Spiegel’) and Draxtor Despres came to 1920s Berlin to test out an amazing 360 degrees camera to film the, as far as I know, first 360 degrees video shot Live in Second Life in real time.

The camera rig was made by Arduenn Schwartzman (of Warbug fame), it has audio and video syncing capabilities and all recorded tracks are then aligned in post production.Even though this is still just an early test, it is already very impressive.

I can imagine short clips like these made in sims all over Second Life being used to show outsiders what life in our virtual world is like and the things that they can experience there.
Because these can also record busy events with lots of people and with many things happening at the same time!

Not only are these just fun videos on youtube, but they are very impressive when viewed through the Gear VR, the Cardboard VR or other headsets.
And not just that, it will also allow me to show off my sim in a whole new way to people who may not have tried Second Life, don’t know how SL works or who don’t have a computer that can handle SL.

And imagine making a full length machinima with this technology!
We could be making 360 films while people in RL have only just experimenting with it.
Once more the people in SL are groundbreaking.

You can see this pioneering footage here;
(not all browsers support 360 degrees video)

Some technical details send in by Draxtor;

• We are simulating a goPro Rig of 6 cameras, filming each with 1080 by 1080 (which is already too low = SL can handle more but we need the screens for FRAPS to capture it that high, working on it!!)
• I filmed this test myself so there is no syncing which means the Zeppelin dissapears into the cloud at one point: to do live action in SL we need to film at same time.
• Syncing is no prob: we have an automated system made by Arduenn Schwartzmann which syncs the six cameras with sound and a visual cue. But again = we need to figure out higher resolution = who has the computers to make it happen, are the colors in sync as well, is the SL lag an issue when aligning the cameras later on (f.e. a dance or fast car race or airship battle etc).
•  I am working with spatial audio on a RL project so next step will also involve inserting some sounds and dialogue which is spatialized.
• All in all the workflow we have is SUPER FAST = plop down the virtual camera rig in SL and shoot, export, stitch, correct = DONE = faster than RL 360 !!!!!!
• Big benefits of SL for this = inserting virtual sequences into a RL 360 video = much faster and easier than constructing it via other CGI options because you can film it in REAL TIME and the assets are all there. Yes maybe render engine less able than Unity or Unreal but a LOT easier and ultimately not worse than RL 360 at this point in the game!

And this article wouldn’t be complete without this earlier 360 degrees video in VR experiment by Zuza Ritt;

A new project; Time Portal, a community for Time Travellers in Second Life.

Tags

"second life", cinema, club, commerce, historical, history, mall, movies, retro, shopping, shops, theatre, Time Portal, time travel, vintage, virtual reality

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You may have noticed that I love history.
And that is quite an understatement, I’m obsessed with it, I’m addicted to it, I live it, I breath it, I need it.
And to be fair, it is the only reason I am in Second Life, this virtual world allows me to travel back in time and spend my evenings drinking schnapps in 1920s Berlin.

There have been shops and malls in Second Life that had historical themes, where you could buy vintage, retro and antique stuff but as far as I can tell they catered to a rather specific era or sold things that weren’t quite authentic and historically accurate.

Not that long ago my 1920s Berlin Project was neighboured with such a mall and it was nice for visitors to Berlin to have a place to go shopping nearby.
But Berlin moved and that shopping sim has since vanished.

As my friend Sonatta Morales her shop and my own shop Weimar! now suddenly found themselves without a place to sell their wares, we started thinking about setting up something new.

So, coming to Second Life (right next to 1920s Berlin);

Time Portal; Time Travel Gateway

A sim that will not only offer you the chance to shop with some of the best vintage, retro and historical creators in Second Life but where you can also rent an apartment, visit a club, see a show at the theatre, watch a movie at the cinema or learn something new at constantly changing exhibits in the museum

A place where shops will sell the best in historic clothing and items from any era up to the 1960s, where you can live in historical buildings, where we have a club and theatre where you can enjoy historically themed shows and even a museum with historical exhibits.
And of course, everything you see, from goods, buildings to entertainment, will be historically themed.
It will truly become a community for Time Travellers and history lovers.
You may be a Victorian Urchin living in a dirty old attic, your neighbour could be a 14th century princess living in a tower, while the guy living across the street enjoys walking around in his Roman armour.

Time Portal will not be a role-play sim (although it will of course be allowed), there won’t be a dress code, anyone will be welcome.
You can listen to someone playing Live 17th century music at the theatre,rock ‘n roll by the jukebox at the 1950s diner, enjoy yourself at a 1940s dance in the dance hall, learn something about Medieval architecture at the Bauhaus style museum or just hang out with a bunch of Victorian pickpockets.
Try and imagine a city where Time Travellers live, shop and entertain themselves in-between time travelling and you’ll get an idea of what Time Portal will be like.

Time Portal will be build and managed by me, Jo Yardley, builder and manager of the 1920s Berlin project, a sim that has been successful for over 7 years and won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.
And I won’t do it alone, my team of admins, advisors, event organisers, entertainers and performers from 1920 Berlin will also help out, all experienced people who know what they are doing and will make sure Time Portal will be a safe, fun place with plenty of customer service for visitors and tenants.

We are preparing Time Portal now, funds are gathered to buy the region and if everything goes well we’ll be able to start building next month.
We’re accepting applications for shopkeepers now.
If you sell good, authentic items or clothes from the stone age up to the 1960s, let me know!
And if you build and sell authentic and historically accurate buildings, also get in touch.
We’ll be filling the sim up with buildings from different eras.

To simply stay updated like and follow the page;
https://www.facebook.com/timeportalsl/
I look forward to seeing you in Time Portal!

Linden Lab removes Oculus Rift Project Viewer and may not release another one

Tags

"second life", HMD's, oculus rift, virtual reality

When Linden Lab released a new Oculus ready viewer, one that worked with DK2 and CV1, the reactions were, to put it mildly, not enthusiastic.
I wrote about it in my previous blog post that you can read by clicking here.

Today Linden Lab announced they have removed the Oculus Rift viewer from its alternate viewers page.

The Oculus headset picture and link to more information  about using it in SL seems to have also been removed from the main page on the official SL website, at least I no longer see it.

In this discussion on one of the official blogs the following comment was posted by Linden Lab;

Thank you for experimenting with our Oculus Rift Project Viewer and offering your feedback. Unfortunately, the Project Viewer that we recently made available didn’t meet our standards for quality, and so we’ve now removed it from the Alternate Viewers page.

By definition, Project Viewers aren’t ready for primetime. The purpose of these experimental Viewers is to share with you the earliest possible version of what we’re working on, so that you can see what we’re up to, help discover problems, and provide feedback. In this case, though, we’re not ready for that, as those of you who tried it have seen.

We can’t say at this point when or even if we may release another Project Viewer for experimenting with the Oculus Rift in SL.

We want to prioritize our development efforts around initiatives that we know will improve the virtual world and bring more value to SL Residents, and due to some inherent limitations with SL, it may well not be possible to achieve the performance needed for a good VR experience. (In fact, this is one reason why we’re creating Project Sansar a new, separate platform optimized for VR).

We greatly appreciate the interest in trying SL with the Oculus Rift and are grateful that several of you took the time to try the Project Viewer. We regret that the quality was not up to our standards, and we will of course keep the community posted if we release a new Project Viewer for VR in the future.

Of course people were very unhappy with the new viewer and yes, it was not good enough for people to actually enjoy Second Life with.
But hearing that they may not release another one is very disappointing.

As imperfect as Second Life is for Head Mounted devices at the moment, I still was extremely impressed with my visit to 1920s Berlin wearing the DK1.
Regardless of lag and if the frame-rate was fast enough or not, I was exploring MY world, the place I build and loved.
I didn’t care about the imperfections, I was inside my Second Life.
Of course, if you can’t make it work, releasing (another) viewer is probably a good idea.
But it is going to be months, perhaps even years before most of us can start enjoying Sansar as a virtual world that is as interesting and has as much to offer as Second Life and it really would be nice if we could at least have some fun with the HMD’s in Second Life.
Even with the old Oculus Viewer and head set, I loved every minute I spend in SL with it.

So I hope that that we will see another HMD viewer for SL, regardless.