Virtual Reality Is Within Reality

So I was staring at my bookshelf and wanted to pick up something to read, House Of Cards by Michael Dobbs stared back at me and having just watched the series again on Virgin Media on Demand I reached for it but got sideswiped by Philip K Dick’s “Do Avatars Dream Of Electric Sheep?” … ahhh yes why not, I thought. This also ties in with a blog post from Hamlet Au over at New World Notes and listening to people on the radio pondering whether any of the real world is real or are we in a simulation, sort of like Second Life but with much better graphics and technology would be the answer if that were true, of course it’s an argument you can’t win and probably best saved for a night down the pub because that’s a debate with no end.

Philip K Dick came from an era where Mars and Alpha Centauri were the Kings of Sci Fi. Mars is no longer fashionable, to such a degree that I’m told that the remake of We Can Remember It For you Wholesale Total Recall doesn’t even include the Mars component. Alpha Centauri might be back in fashion in the Sci Fi world though now that they’ve found a planet the size of earth orbiting it. However, a theme in Sci Fi has been inhabiting worlds elsewhere, another one has been replacing human to human emotions with virtual ones or machinery. Even Woody Allen’s Sleeper and the movie Barbarella touch upon this.

Continue reading “Virtual Reality Is Within Reality”

Bring Your Own World

The in thing in the workplace these days, the big headache generator for IT Support departments is bring your own device, or BYOD as it is affectionately known, or pain in the arse bloody devices (PITABD) as it is unofficially known. I was in a meeting this week discussing how wonderful it is that people want to link their own devices to our work network, how cost savings can be made on our own hardware purchases and how we need to have a list of policies as long as both arms to deal with issues such as data leakages, insecure devices, unprotected devices, authenticators to login, acceptable use policies yadda yadda yadda .. several cups of coffee later I came away with a headache and a feeling that the more control we seem to pass to the user, the more control we need to get back by investing in even more security and polcy documents

Which brings us to Second Life and what some see as it’s insular approach to the wider metaverse. Hypergrid Business is a great site to get the lowdown on other virtual worlds, collaborative projects between owners of different grids, sims. There are examples of great business and education projects using worlds other than Second Life. However I can appreciate why Linden Lab have been reluctant to join the party. The wider metaverse has been discussed at Linden Lab, Robin Linden discussed others joining the Second Life grid back in the day when she was here and running office hours. However controlling access is a problem and the bottom line really is, Second Life is not the right project to join other grids. However that doesn’t mean Linden Lab could never engage.

Continue reading “Bring Your Own World”

Take A Snack On Large Group Fixes

Yesterday’s rollback on the Magnum RC channel meant that some potentially decent fixes to large groups were not unveiled. These fixes are designed to deal with issues such as large groups not loading, so you can’t change your preferences etc.

However, Linden Lab seem determined to get these fixes out into the wild one way or another, so they’ve designed a workaround. The workaround includes the sometimes used Snack release channel. This code has been unleashed on some sandboxes, to test the large group fixes you will need to use a development viewer, be a member of the Second Life beta group and visit one of the listed sandboxes. Which listed sandboxes you may be asking, well the full details (including how to join the Second Life beta group and how to get a development viewer) can be found in the forum thread started by Oskar (where you can leave constructive feedback), the thread is here.

However be warned, the reason Magnum was rolled back yesterday was largely due to a bug with llSensor() in the code, that bug exists on these regions.

Continue reading “Take A Snack On Large Group Fixes”

Second Life Is Brought To You By …

In the help and about section of the Second Life viewer you will find the credits, lots of names:

An Image Should Be Here
Second Life Credits

Now how you get on this list I have no idea, I once read it was from logging into the beta grid. The Lindens, well that’s obvious and the translators, who do brilliant work, that’s obvious too. However the middle section, the Opensource contributions, I don’t know how you get in there. So, for a bit of fun and frolics, I’ve sorted these lists alphabetically.

There are names of long left, but not forgotten Lindens, well except for the ones we’ve never heard of, which will be a few I’d imagine, but they all made contributions. Then there are amongst the opensource list, long left avatars too, although some super awesome avatars are in there, I’m still confused as to how they get there.

Let’s also not forget that Second Life is brought to us by basically everyone who enters the world and that many people make valuable contributions whom aren’t listed in the credits, I’m just doing this for a bit of fun. I compiled the list using copy and paste and then transposing the results, so apologies if my mousework missed some in the cut.

The lists are under the cut…. of course if you’ve came straight here from a link, there is no cut!

Continue reading “Second Life Is Brought To You By …”

Magnum Gets Rolled Back

The usefulness of Linden Lab running release channels has been exemplified well this week The Magnum channel being rolled back due to problems with llSensor(), this seemed to impact breedables. Now as only magnum sims were impacted, plenty of people have been happily going around with llSensor() working perfectly fine, whereas if this code were all over the grid, we’d be seeing far bigger problems.

The issue was first highlighted by Lucia Nightfire in the technology forum thread on this week’s server deploys, Oskar and the team investigated and decided the issues were serious enough to warrant rolling back the new code and aligning magnum with the current Blue Steel code.

The release channel system is of course not everyone’s cup of tea and it does lead to issues, for example the current release channel of LeTigre has a newer version of the Havok physics engine, this has caused an issue whereby mesh objects, such as vehicles, get stuck when trying to move from a LeTigre sim to a sim on a different channel that is running an earlier version of the Havok physics engine. The mesh objects won’t cross over.

Continue reading “Magnum Gets Rolled Back”

Follow

Get the latest posts delivered to your mailbox: