Just another unauthorised virtual world fansite
It’s that time of year when I had off to sunnier climes and embrace sun, sea and sand. I shall be AFK for a couple of weeks topping up my tan and hopefully enjoying myself.
The Virtual World of course continues to orbit too of course and you can read about wonderful places such as Airship Pirate Port Town, which is a wonderfully picturesque location.
I’ll be back soon!
Over at Road To VR there’s a post up by Kent Bye : Open vs Closed Metaverse: Project Sansar & The New Experiential Age. This is a dual media post as it contains text and an accompanying Podcast where Kent speaks to Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg. The interview took place at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality (SVVR) Conference in April this year.
The text isn’t a rehash of the interview with Ebbe Altberg, it explores many deep issues and concerns regarding Virtual Reality, information and whether walled gardens or open systems are the best approach. There’s some fascinating discussion material here. For example when it comes to the trade in the Information Age between users and providers, Kent writes :
One of the primary business models of The Information Age has been that information is freely available, and that it’s supported by ads. There’s an explicit agreement that authenticated users are volunteering to be tracked and surveilled by companies in exchange for all of this free content and social connections that they are enabling.
There’s a lot of discussion here, I am not a fan of the way data is shared and collected by many platforms, but I accept that in exchange for access, I need to give up some information about myself. This is an exchange, it’s not a free lunch.
Kent goes further and talks about how with VR we can embrace the Experiential Age, which has a different trade :
While there’s a level of consent for data that we are explicitly sharing on websites within the context of the Information Age, the Experiential Age is going to be tracking behavioral and biometric data that is a lot more unconscious but yet still revealing. Virtual Reality has the capability to gather an enormous amount of biometric data ranging from our heart rate data, our emotional states, identifiable body language cues extrapolated from head and hand tracking, and eventually our eye-tracked “attention” for what we’re looking at and getting impressed by.
While we have had no real pause with sharing abstracted information with companies, then perhaps we will be more cautious about what type of unconscious medical data from our bodies that we’re willing to share with companies. That means that Facebook, Google, or Linden Lab could start to save vast repositories of personal biometric data that could become a target for governments or hackers.
This is meaty stuff and deserves to be read in full at Kent’s article.
Continue reading “Road To VR On Open Versus Closed Metaverse And An Interview With Ebbe Altberg”
Inara Pey has posted the transcript and audio from the most recent edition of Lab Chat, held live in Second Life on Friday May 6th. I’m not going to go into all the details, there’s plenty of information in Inara’s post.
Inara’s post is split neatly into sections so that you can listen and read the parts you find most relevant and for a lot of Second Life users, that’s going to mean the parts about Second Life. There’s plenty there and no signs of Linden Lab stopping work on Second Life.
For example they talk about continuing to work on improving inventory robustness. There’s also talk of fixing existing issues and sometimes that means updating technical aspects of Second Life, as Oz Linden explains :
We’re continuing to dig very hard to try to fix existing problems; one of the things that’s going to be coming out over the next few weeks is some changes to the protocols between the viewer and the back-end inventory system. We’ll be removing support, over the next couple of months, for some of the older, more fragile mechanisms, and making sure that everything is beginning to transition to using the newer and more robust methods, so that we can continue to make the whole system more reliable.
These are the sort of non headline grabbing improvements that help everyone to enjoy a better Second Life experience, so on a personal level, I like reading about things like this.
There is also talk of making improvements on the animation and sound file front. In answer to a question about the length of sound files in Second Life, Oz said :
Actually, this is something we’ve recently been talking about. We’re going to have to make some changes to how sound files are delivered to the viewer, which incidentally will make the download faster and more predictably [via the Lab’s CDN services], and once we’ve done that, then we can make them without and adverse impact.
So, yes, we’re definitely looking at this. I can’t pin it down to exactly how big a difference we’ll make, but we’re going to do something.
We’re also going to allow larger animation files to accommodate Bento. We’ve got more bones to animate, so we want to give people a little more room to do that with. But again, that’s part of the same change to how things are delivered to the viewer before we make them any bigger, otherwise we’ll just be adding lag.
So there are two examples of Linden Lab continuing to develop and improve Second Life. There’s a lot more in Inara’s post including discussion of the new Grandfathered tier offer, having more estate managers (generally for large events), group reports of abuse and a hell of a lot more, really, read or listen to this.
Lab Chat took place today at the LEA Theatre in Second Life. I’m not going to delve into the details of what was said in this post, I need to listen to the recording again when it’s available, but I do want to talk about how Lab Chat draws crowds and the format works well.
Saffia Widdershins and Jo Yardley ask the panel questions that have been submitted via the Second Life forum. This format means that there is not a lot of shouting at the panelists and gives them time to answer the questions.
The panel today included Oz Linden, Ebbe Linden and Troy Linden and they all sit in comfortable looking armchairs. One complaint may be that the seats spectators sit in don’t look quite so comfortable!
Continue reading “Lab Chat Draws The Crowds And The Format Works”
On April 4th Linden Lab made an offer many estate owners couldn’t refuse : Want Lower Tier? Now You Can Get Grandfathered Land Rates! The offer, which remains on the table until at least October gave estate owners to permanently lower their tier rates for an upfront fee :
Full Island:
Homestead:
So how is this going? Well Tyche “Statto” Shepherd has been on the ball and reveals some of the progress in an awesome Private Estate Survey April 2016. The survey revealed that since the March 2016 survey there had been a net loss of 35 regions (down 0.2%). However when it comes to the new buy down rate, Tyche reveals :
20.8% of Full Regions of all types are now at Buy Down tier rates while 3.8% of Homesteads are now Buy Down, homestead uptake of this offer has been low because most homesteads are already grandfathered (85% of them) .
Overall to date I estimate there are 1960 buy down full regions taken up since announcement and another 302 Homesteads , the margin of error on these estimates is +/- 145 and 117 regions respectively.
As Tyche points out, there were already a high number of Homestead regions with a grandfathered rate, to be honest I’m surprised that 302 have been converted to the new rate. When it comes to full regions, 1960 is quite an impressive figure.
Continue reading “Linden Lab’s Grandfathered Tier Offer Shows Early Signs Of Promise”