December 2015 – Ciaran Laval

December 18, 2015

Snow Wars Episode I’ve Lost Count – The Snowball Awakens

A long time ago in a virtual world far, far away ……

Linden Lab have announced the date and the time of the annual Linden & Resident Snowball Fight. The date and time for those who may not be paying as close attention as they should is Monday December 21st at 10am SLT.

The blog post bills this as :

Come one – come all to the Snowball Arena for a friendly ice battle of epic proportions! We’re bringing back the Official Snowball Showdown – where you’re free to pelt your fellow Second Life Residents and Lindens with a bevy of sparkling snowballs!

These battles can indeed be epic.

Do not fear if you think you will be walking into a trap, there’s no need to be unarmed and not very dangerous because there is free weaponry available from the vendors in Winter Wonderland.

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December 18, 2015

Project Bento Greeted Enthusiastically

On Wednesday December 16th Linden Lab announced; Introducing Project Bento – New Bones Added to Second Life Avatar Skeleton. The project is designed to add extensions to the Second Life skeleton in terms of bones, these bones :

11 extra limb bones for wings, additional arms, or extra legs.
6 tail bones.
30 bones in the hands (all 10 fingers!).
30 bones for facial expressions.
2 other new bones in the head for animating ears or antennae.
13 new attachment points associated with the new bones.

The blog post describes this as :

While we want to make improvements, we also want to maximize backward compatibility. Get ready for the biggest thing that’s happened to avatars in years …

Ever wish you could incorporate a tail, wings, or second set of arms into your avatar? How about having animations for facial expressions and finger movements? Yes, we know that there are some incredibly creative workarounds that give you some of these, but they can’t leverage skeletal animation, so they have been very complex, often fragile, and very expensive in performance and resources both in your Viewer and the Simulator.

The biggest thing that has happened to Second Life avatars in years is a bold claim but looking at the reaction from Second Life content creators, it seems that this bold claim has some merit.

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December 16, 2015

Tribeca Film Festival To Feature Virtual Reality & Philip Rosedale

The Tribeca Film Festival® is set to run April 13th April 24th 2016 and news about the festival is starting to appear. The first round of speakers have been announced. Tina Fey and Tom Hanks are grabbing the headlines for their part in; Tribeca Talks: Storytellers platform, and I do love storytelling but this year’s festival is also taking a look at technology and innovation :

On April 19, it’ll be home to Imagination Day, powered by the Hatchery. The industry’s top minds will convene for an all-day summit focused on, “What happens when our wildest dreams become reality, and what will that reality be in our not-so-distant future?” The first round of confirmed speakers is no joke: entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, founder and chairman of the Virgin Group, and business leader and product innovator Regina Dugan, of Google ATAP. The Hub will also host the following esteemed VR creatives and tech entrepreneurs: Second Life and High Fidelity founder Philip Rosedale, VR directors Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël of Felix & Paul Studios, and STRIVR founder and CEO Derek Belch.

Imagination day sounds like quite an interesting day, although there aren’t many firm details just yet.

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December 11, 2015

The Drax Files: World Makers Episode 34 – Cheeky Pea And A Virtual World Love Story

Episode 34 of the Linden Lab sponsored Drax Files: World Makers, features the Cheeky Pea brand and the people behind it, Isla Gealach and Ewan Mureaux. This is the age old tale of virtual world scripter meets virtual world home and garden decor creator, they fall in love and live happily ever after. This of course isn’t the story the media often highlight regarding virtual world romance turned real, but it’s a story beautifully told in this edition of The Drax Files : World Makers.

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Don’t panic, it’s not a mushy love story, it’s a tale of the benefits of virtual world collaboration and physical world realism making up the whole. The episode opens with Isla talking about the beauty of immersion in a virtual world, how the space can be manipulated to create something you can feel.

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Where this episode really hits the button is in terms of the footage outside the virtual world. Isla using Maya to create items, her daughter taking an interest and even wanting to create her own items firmly makes the point that behind the 3D avatars are real people, doing real things.

There’s also an excellent section where we see how the physical world that we all live in, is an inspiration for the items created for a virtual world.

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December 8, 2015December 8, 2015

Second Life Special Offer Of Marvelous Designer Training Is On The Right Track

Back in June 2012 I blogged about Blender version 2.64 having Second Life related options. I also mentioned that there were opportunities for the Second Life and 3D creation communities to cross promote their wares :

I’ve often wondered why Adobe aren’t advertising on the Second Life forums, after all Photoshop is a popular tool for Second Life creators. Then there’s Autodesk Maya which can be used to make Mesh.

Blender and Gimp are open source tools that can be used for Second Life content creation, how about some adverts for them in the forum in exchange for links to Second Life from their sites, or Linden Lab talk to the guys at Blender Cookie about linking to some of their training materials, some of their content is free to use and some require a subscription fee. Linden Lab could even enquire if they could sell training subscriptions on behalf of Blender Cookie and bundle it with a new premium plus membership package for Second Life, which would be aimed at content creators.

I returned to this area in March 2014 when I blogged about missed opportunities for cross promotion between Second Life and Adobe :

However with Adobe charging a monthly fee, and with Linden Lab charging a monthly fee and taking into account that Adobe have products that are very suitable for Second Life content creation, I feel there’s a massive cross promotion opportunity here. A new premium membership plan could be introduced that includes a subscription to Adobe Photoshop CC and Lightroom 5, obviously this would be more expensive than the current Second Life Premium plan but with sensible negotiation between Linden Lab and Adobe, it would work out roughly the same or cheaper, than subscribing to both, on the Second Life end you’d lose some of the current premium perks to compensate for this.

Whereas this still hasn’t happened, we are seeing a step in the right direction with Linden Lab’s blog informing us of an offer; 50% Off Marvelous Designer Online Training from CG Elves – Limited Time!

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