Second Life Oculus DK2 viewer coming next week

Tags

"second life", dk2, ebbe altberg, ebbe linden, oculus rift, The 1920s Berlin Project

Ebbe Linden, CEO of Linden Lab, has been testing out the Oculus DK2 compatible Second Life viewer and hopes to have it available to us all early next week!

He was seen last night running around 1920s Berlin testing this DK2 viewer there, because we build that sim to RL scale and have been trying really hard to make a visit there an immersive experience, it has become place where Oculus wearers go to test out the VR experience in SL.

Ebbe spend about a hour in our city, walking around, chatting to people and doing a lot of looking in different directions.

Ebbe Linden talking to a few locals at Der Keller in 1920s Berlin. Pictyre by Eloise Schiltzen

We really should help him find a nice mesh 1920s outfit!

Ebbe also wrote about the DK2 viewer on twitter;

This is quite interesting news for everyone with a DK2 Oculus Rift.
Sadly I am not one of them, I even had to give my DK1 back and I can’t afford to buy the DK2.
Yes, this is a subtle hint; “SOMEONE GIVE ME A DK2!”.

Designing Worlds talks to Ebbe Altberg

Tags

"second life", designing worlds, ebbe altberg, ebbe linden, future, interview, progress, SL2

The excellent Second Life show ‘Designing Worlds‘ celebrated its 250th (!) episode with an exclusive interview with Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab.

It is a very interesting and exciting talk, I won’t write too much about it because others have already done so and you should of course just watch it.

You can see it here on the ‘Designing Worlds’ page on Treet.tv, or here on the Excellent ‘Living  in the Modem World’ blog where you can also read along with a transcript.

I could not resist picking the currants out of the porridge (yes, that is a Dutch saying), and sharing some of the extra interesting bits;

In short; mesh avatars will be improved, starter experience will be changed, 1920s Berlin is amazing, Ebbe’s son Aleks helps Linden Lab with inworld research, Second Life isn’t coming to an end, groups and group chat are being worked on, bringing back last names is high on the list, SL2 Alpha release planned for middle of next year and it already looks better than SL1.

Ebbe;

The team is working on making improvements to the avatars, from little things that we might see as bugs, and also trying to solve the “dead face” , get some eyes and mouths  start moving.

For the future, we’re thinking really hard about how the on-boarding to the next generation platform will not necessarily be to have you go through this one place because we want to make it easy for the creators of experiences to bring-in an audience directly into their experience.

It’s one of those things that’s near the top of priorities for Second Life to bring back the idea of the community portals or something like that, where it’s easy for experience creators to attract users directly into their experience from the outside world.

(1920s) Berlin is amazing to me. It’s funny. My son actually did a little bit of contracting here, helping the product team with some in-world research. He spent some time in Berlin and interviewed Jo Yardley, and just listening to him talk to me when we were driving down to LA together the other day just you know, how it’s grown over the years and the incredible community engagement around that experience and how they’re sticking to a very specific design and community philosophy, and it’s working and the residents in that community love being there.

Second Life will be around for a long, long, long time for people to continue to enjoy what it is.
We don’t have any plans right now to do anything that would be destructive to what you can do in Second Life today. So it’s mostly just improvements we’re talking about, not extreme changes to anything that would jeopardise the content or the creations or people’s livelihood.

On group chat ; We spoke to Jo (me! 😉 ) and many others, once you get into many groups and you’re trying to manage communities, there’s plenty of functionality we could add to make that easier.
But the performance issues of the lag in chat is something that a group of people here worked on for quite a while. It’s only of those Second Life old technology things where you just start pulling at a bit of string and it keeps going and going. So I don’t know when we can say definitively that we’ve solved it and you’re no longer going to see chat lag, but I already know we’re better today than we were a few months ago, but I’m not sure how close we are to being able to say, it’s solved now, there are no more problems.

(Bringing back last names) is on the list of Second Life things that I know both Oz and Danger would like to tackle.
I don’t know what exactly or when exactly. I just know it’s high up on the list… …But it’s clearly something that the team would like to solve. I just don’t have any more information than that right now, because everything that is below the thing that we’re actively working on right now, gets a little fuzzy until it actually becomes an active project where people are actually working on the designs and the specifications and the code.
So it’s sort-of in that next set of things that we would like to tackle, I just don’t know how many other things could get in the way.

On SL2;
We are also looking out to what will the first, at least a little bit public, release, an alpha release which might be invite-only for certain use cases, when can that take place. And we’re trying to aim for somewhere middle of next year.
…I’ve already seen this little test world that we have, and I look at that little test world, and I go you know what? I haven’t seen something in Second Life that looks that nice. So even though it’s this early, you can already start to see that we have some advantages already this early on.

We’ve said that mesh is something that is very likely to be importable (in SL2), we’re working on that already. so people working in mesh should be able to leverage their assets to a large degree in the future.
This place (SL) is great, stay here for a long, long time. We don’t even think about how to transition people in some specific time frame. If three years from now, this is still a better place for people than the new place (SL2), then so be it.

We’re trying to make it clear to people that the content is yours, and we just need to have sufficient protections to protect ourselves. But again, it’s obviously not in our interest to make a mess for content creators by ourselves stepping in and starting to be part of the problem, rather than the solution with regards to IP protection.

On ending, congratulations to Saffia Widdershins and Elrik Merlin on reaching this very impressive milestone.
Thank you very much Inara Pey on providing the excellent transcript and writing about it on your blog.
And well done Herr Altberg on another excellent interview.

The future looks interesting!

Screenshot from Designing Worlds

Improving the Second Life social media experience

Tags

"second life", communication, facebook, google+, groups, social media, website

The whole debacle with Facebook being nasty to people who don’t use their real name has made me think about the use of social media in Second Life and the communication tools Linden Lab has given us.
I think these can be improved and it may also remove the need for us to use Facebook at all.

At the moment most of us use Facebook or other social media to stay in touch with our Second Life contacts and communities because it is just too cumbersome to do this inworld, because it is impossible at that moment to start up the SL viewer or because the Second Life communication tools just aren’t good enough.
I use Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Hippogroups, email, Google+, Plurk, etc, etc.

Sometimes we have to talk to people in SL quickly, just a short message, we just want to look at something, read something, quickly in and out.
That is not how I would describe my SL experience.
Starting up Second Life for me means having to get my SL laptop, turn it on and start up a viewer, SL doesn’t really run on my 5 year old macbook I use for everything else and SLGo takes time and makes me use the official viewer I don’t like.
And of course once your SL viewer starts you have to wait for the world to rez, you may be bombarded by IMs from other people, get reminded of other jobs that need doing, etc.

Imagine the situation; there is a big event in 1920s Berlin and I want to make sure everyone knows about it.
I set an event on the facebook group’s calendar, I set it on the google calendar, I send a note to the group inworld, I send a message to my hippo mailing list, I stick posters all over Berlin, I send a message to group chat and finally I send a message to the region…
Phew!

And all the time we’re hoping Facebook doesn’t delete our accounts.
Because replacing a Facebook account with a Facebook Page account means you lose a lot of options, including the ones we use most.

Good or bad, Facebook is the easiest and most versatile tool for us and the one we use the most, for serious important stuff but also for quick little chats, for sharing a funny 1920s themed story, event pictures, etc.
We don’t have to tell Linden Lab that, they know, they use Facebook and they have a Second Life page with more than 360.000 ‘likes’.

It would be fantastic if there would be just one place on the internet where we can do all this.
Some people think that Facebook is enough because we already use it, but because most of us use it with a different name than the one we use for our real life, we already have to log in and out when we have to switch accounts.

A while ago Linden Lab gave us mysecondlife, a good idea but not quite enough to replace all the tools I mentioned above.
For starters, I keep getting logged out by the Second Life website, which is a good security measure but not very handy if you want to use a website for social media, it is not uncommon for people to have their Facebook page online permanently.
And as the name suggests, its a very personal page, a place where you share your stories and your pictures.
But we use Social Media much more for community things, for groups activities.

There used to be something called ‘Avatars United‘, it had many of the options we need but was bought by Linden Lab, eventually shut down and incooperated into the Second Life website, but without many of the options the original version had.

What I would love to see is for Linden Lab to improve and expand the mysecondlife experience, give it more options like Facebook offers.

Make it the one stop website for all our Second Life related out-world activity.
Not just have our own page but also a page for every group we have in world, or maybe even let us build pages for groups we create outworld.
A place where we can upload all the events pictures (into separate folders), have a calendar we can use to set up events, invite all the other members of the group, share links, etc.
And who knows, maybe even have it connected to inworld groups.
Let us send messages, notecards and event announcements to groups in-and outworld via the website or the other way around.

This will allow Second Life users to stay more connected with their virtual lives even if they are not able to actually log in or if one day they lose interest in Second Life, they might still keep using the website to stay in touch with friends and who knows, this may one day make them decide to return.

It would be swell if we could abandon Facebook and Google+ and be happy using ‘Second Life Book+’ for that.
Go to the Second Life website that won’t log you off, where you can check each group to see what is going on, set events on the calendar, share pictures, see who else is online and chat with them, regardless if they are in Second Life or just online on the Second Life website, regardless if you are behind your power computer at home or on a bus using your tablet o mobile phone.
Improve the connectability and interaction between virtual reality and reality, make the barrier between Second Life and Real Life smaller.

Have you got any suggestions or ideas?
Please share them in the comments section below.
I know that a few Lindens follow my blog and are interested in hearing your opinions.

Facebook agrees to talks with Drag Queens regarding the use of real names

Tags

"second life", drag queens, facebook, identity, names, virtual reality

Just a few days ago I wrote about the problems Drag Queens, artists and many other people are having with Facebook because they are being forced to use their real name and can’t use their stage name, nickname or in our case, avatar name.

Of course this wasn’t news but I mentioned it because I felt that we now shared a goal with a group of people who’s voice might get more attention than that of us Second Life avatars.

And I was right.

Their uproar has exploded across social media, hashtags galore (#‎mynameis) and when a group of them started planning a demonstration outside the Facebook HQ (imagine how fabulous that would have looked) Facebook Supervisor David Campos got on the phone with them and promised to meet with Sister Roma (the lady behind most of the ruckus) in person.

So of course, cynical me has to say that this doesn’t mean anything.
But publicity means a lot in this game and getting them to talk about it and perhaps think a bit harder about a proper solution, is a step in the right direction.

Of course our virtual identity means a lot to us in Second Life but when you look at the long list of people to whom it is so much more important to be able to use Facebook under a different name, it becomes more and more wrong that they are not allowed to.
And even if I was not in Second Life, I’d still want to support this thing.
As Sister Roma said;

This issue affects a lot of marginalized, creative, and professional communities, including transgender people, bullied youth, activists, LGBTQ people who aren’t out everywhere, survivors of domestic violence and stalking, migrants, sex workers, artists who work under pseudonyms, and various professionals who work in sensitive professions (eg. mental health, criminal justice, etc.) who may want to interact with friends without being found by clients. Facebook claims that its “real name” policy helps protect people from bullying, but this is a form of targeting our communities that can actually make us much less safe. Facebook is today’s public forum and they can’t exclude us — who are they to say we or anyone else isn’t “real”?!

So bravo Sister Roma and lets hope that what all these people are trying to achieve eventually will benefit us avatars as well.

Thank you Herr von Rosenheim for the tipoff!

The ongoing trouble with the new mesh avatars

Tags

"second life", avatar, mesh, problem, virtual reality

I must admit that I was impressed when Linden Lab released the new mesh avatars, they looked better than the very old ones we used to have and looked pretty decent.

However we soon realised that there are a few big problems with them.

One problem was that the faces were stuck like a Beverly Hills ex starlet who’s had too much botox, they couldn’t speak, smile, nothing.

But a bigger problem was and unfortunately still is, that new users find it very hard to figure out how to change these avatars.

Because there really isn’t that much you can change about them and changing your avatar, customizing it to look just the way you want it to look is one of the best features of Second Life.

It is the first thing most new users want and try to do and as I’ve written before, I think that letting new users do this easily helps them bond with their avatar and understand the appeal of Second Life sooner.

I was reminded of this problem today when I spotted one of those brand new avatars in 1920s Berlin today.
Poor chap, turned out he was a 3D creator with years of experience, but Second Life offered quite a challenge when he was asked to change into 1920s clothes for his visit to my sim.

He didn’t quite manage it, ended up wearing part of the free 1920s outfit we offer combined with the modern mesh outfit he got when he joined SL.

Eventually he had to go into his library folder and replace his complete avatar with one of the old ones, it was the only way he could change his outfit.

I fear that this is making things even harder and unwelcoming for the new visitors to Second Life, add this to the horrendous welcoming island experience and its a wonder people still join Second Life.

Luckily the chap in question was so excited by 1920s Berlin that he didn’t think of leaving.

Nevertheless this is turning out to be a serious problem that is damaging SL every day a little bit.
I would consider taking the mesh avatars offline all together and bring back the old ones, although better looking perhaps.
At least till mesh avatars can be improved and made easier to adjust.

I feel that getting new users an avatar they like, they’ve customized and have a bond with is an important part of making them stay in SL a little longer.

Ebbe confirms; SL will get Oculus Rift DK2 support

Tags

"second life", dk2, ocolus rift, viewer, virtual reality

Some time ago Oculus Rift released the Developers Kit v2 of their VR headset, better than their DK1 but still not the commercial version.

David Rowe’s CtrlAltStudio released a Preliminary Rift DK2 Support viewer on the 19th but it remained unclear if Linden Lab was going to upgrade their viewer to work with DK2.

The work that had to be done was not trivial and they only got their DK2 headsets roughly two weeks ago and who knows, the public Oculus Viewer release could be around the corner, although insiders seem to think it won’t be till 2015.

But even though we don’t know when the Second Life official DK2 viewer arrives, we do have some confirmation from mr Ebbe Altberg himself via Twitter;

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.

Oculus talks about Billion people MMO they want to build with Facebook

Tags

"second life", oculus rift, virtual reality

Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe was a guest at TechCrunch Disrupt yesterday and spoke about an idea they have been thinking about; creating an Massively Multiplayer Online Experience (MMO) for a billion users.

“This is going to be an MMO where we want to put a billion people in VR”

He also said that this is going to take a bigger network than exists in the world today,” but getting together with Facebook is a first step in the right direction as Facebook has about 1.3 billion users today.

Important is also that he mentioned that this idea was one of the reason they decided to sell Oculus to Facebook.
They want to reach as many people as possible, especially those who aren’t really gamers.

“We know with Oculus, with a virtual world, if you’re putting on this pair of glasses and you’re gonna be face-to-face communicating with people, you’re gonna be jumping in and out of this new set of virtual worlds, this is gonna be the largest MMO ever made,”

“This is gonna be an MMO where we want to put a billion people in VR. And a billion person virtual world MMO is gonna require a bigger network than exists today. Why not start with Facebook and their infrastructure, and their team and their talent that they’ve built up?”

A lot of people, myself included, have been talking about the possibility of Facebook and Oculus were planning to build a virtual online world, it now seems this indeed is the case.

In the chat he even calls it the ‘Metaverse‘.

As we speak they are visiting universities and recruiting the best of the best, getting students involved, asking them to help them create the new virtual reality world.

It is difficult to predict where this is going and how fast, but if they succeeded in creating an online Virtual World where the users can actually build and do what they want, they will turn out to be a huge competition for Second Life and High Fidelity.

It is still early days and we don’t have to get worried yet.
But this is big.
And I can’t help wondering if the Oculus-Facebook team are now looking at both Second Life and High Fidelity.
Regardless of the current state of both, there is plenty of interesting stuff there to buy, borrow or steal if you want to start your own Virtual world.

In the chat Mr. Iribe also said that Facebook promised them that although bought by their company, Oculus would be able to remain independent (like Instragram) and could decide to use or not use any part of Facebook.

You can watch the full interviews here at the Techcrunch website, a few interesting things about the general future of VR are being talked about as well.
As I wrote before, more and more people are now thinking that VR is going to become part of our lives, even if you’re not a gamer.

Celebrity regrets turning Second Life offer down

Tags

"second life", bit coin, Lily Allen

This is a funny way for Second Life to reach the world news again, although the story makes little sense.

Lily Allen, who apparently is a world famous star, posted this on twitter two days ago;

It is of course very funny to hear that someone regrets not performing in Second Life, even though the main motive here is just financial reward.

This starlet has over 4 million followers on Twitter and 3 million on Facebook, so it is a big name who is now making some free advertising for our virtual world.

I wonder who made her the offer!

But if this really happened 5 years ago, she is mistaken.

Bitcoin has just celebrated its 5th anniversary so if this indeed happened 5 years ago, there would not have been “hundreds of thousands” of bitcoins in existence.

She probably means Linden Dollars, a lot less valuable but generally more stable and more easy to convert to real money.

Still, in the end Second Life got some free publicity!

 

Second Life is Oculus ready! Viewer to be released soon.

Tags

"second life", oculus rift

Nalates Urriah just announced on her blog (click to read the article!) that Linden Lab has finished making a viewer that works with the Oculus Rift!

This is very big and exciting news.

We knew LL was working on this but all we knew was that it would be finished before the commercial version of the Rift became available to the public next year.

Nalates says that VoidPointer Linden said that things looked really cool and that he was actually using it during the meeting.

Apparently it had very little effect on his FPS.

VoidPointer Linden responded to this blog with the following comment;

“Feature Complete” is not “ready”, actually. It means that the planned features are done. There is more to a release than just features, however, as there is still testing and bug-fixing, which is in progress. It’s the equivalent of a first-draft of a book”

So we’re not there yet, but I’m still very excited.
Things are working and LL is making progress!

It has not yet been officially announced when the Oculus Rift compatible viewer becomes available to the public but now it is ready, it seems we won’t have to wait very long.

The more time we in SL have to prepare for an Second Life full of Oculus users, the better.

Because I think, being very optimistic, that when the Oculus becomes public, lots of people will buy one and after trying a few demos that come with the Oculus, they might want to give Second Life another go.

After all, trying a demo is fun, but being able to explore something in VR that you’ve build yourself is even more fun.

Of course this all depends on how Linden Lab is going to play this, they have to make sure they are ready to start a whole new PR campaign the second the Oculus goes commercial, making sure everyone who buys one, knows they could (and should) try it in Second Life!

Inara Pey was also at the meeting, you can read her report on her blog here.

Want to stay up to date with all Oculus Rift in Second Life news?
Join us here on the unofficial but approved Facebook page ‘Oculus Rift and Second Life’.

CEO of Linden Lab, Rod Humble, trying out the Oculus Rift.