Ask The CEO, featuring Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg is still in play on the official Second Life forum. However we’ve learnt a few things from the eleven pages of the thread that currently exist.
The first thing to do is to read the opening post, because that already includes a lot of answers that Ebbe gave at the SL12B meeting. That’s where you’ll find out that Linden Lab are planning to improve media on a prim in Second Life :
We are working on a significant upgrade to the media capabilities of the Viewer (watch for a Project Viewer release). The new support will be focused on supporting modern formats and HTML 5. Content creators should be preparing to convert any older proprietary media such as Flash or Quicktime to the newer formats soon. Longer sound files has not been on the list, but perhaps it should be?
With the recent problems Flash has been facing, many would say that this can’t come quickly enough! That’s also the place where you will learn a little bit about differences in the approach Linden Lab are taking with Virtual Reality Head Mounted Displays, in Second Life and Project Sansar. When it comes to Second Life :
We don’t have any specific plans at this time, but with our open source Viewer, third parties could certainly integrate new hardware and we’ll continue to experiment from time to time.
Whereas when it comes to Project Sansar :
Right now, we’re focused on making Project Sansar an ideal experience with the Rift. In the future, we’ll probably support other hardware as well, but some of the challenges we’re solving for with the Rift – latency, frame rate goals, etc. – are things we’d need to get right for any HMD, and we don’t want to diffuse our focus by integrating lots of peripherals right now, when there aren’t any consumers who even have the hardware.
This is understandable because Second Life is already here and would need a lot more work to optimise for use with VR HMD than Project Sansar, which is a work in progress at a time when these devices are coming to the market.
Moving on past the opening post, Ebbe, Pete and Danger have all provided more answers to additional questions. I’ll highlight some of the answers but not all of them. The thread is worth a read and if you read the thread, you may even have questions of your own
A very interesting question came up wondering whether Project Sansar you have instancing for terrain and inworld mesh objects, Ebbe replied :
Yes, we’re planning to support instancing of entire experiences.
That sounds interesting, very interesting. I hope it means what I think it means!
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