Ciaran Laval

January 16, 2015

High Fidelity Talk About The Ease Of Setting Up High Fidelity Local Servers

Dan Hope of High Fidelity has blogged this week : Stack Manager Makes Local Servers Easy to Setup. The post is aimed in the main at those who have been in High Fidelity Alpha and have attempted to setup a local server before. However the post is also worth a glance from those who may want to know where High Fidelity is heading.

Stack Manager is the name of the application that allows people to setup a local server in High Fidelity, this amounts to running a server on a local machine. The application has been through a lot of changes, and in the past people found it a bit cumbersome. However the latest version makes setting up a local server a breeze, as High Fidelity engineer Stephen Birada explains in the blog post :

Basically, in less than two minutes — from download to installation to running the Stack Manager — you will have a local server, and you can start to build with it.

Basically that’s it, you download the application, run the setup and then start the server and you have a High Fidelity world running on your local machine. At the moment you need be an alpha tester to download and try Stack Manager I believe. However in the future anyone will be able to use Stack Manager, as the blog post explains :

After creating a new world, the next step is to invite people to visit, and Stack Manager is designed to streamline that process. Create a temporary place name — even without a High Fidelity account — and connect friends without making any firewall/NAT changes to your router or computer. If you like the domain, buy a place name in our directory to preserve it.

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January 15, 2015January 15, 2015

Virtual World Red Light Center To Support Oculus Rift

Dean Takahashi over at GamesBeat has an interesting article about the adult based virtual world of Red Light Center : Oculus Rift gets more virtual reality porn with Red Light Center. Now first things first, I stumbled across this article whilst trying to see if Linden Lab were in the news and, there is a reference to Linden Lab in this article, indeed it’s one that is surprising in many ways, although it’s not surprising to anyone who regularly uses Second Life :

Utherverse started development in 2003, and it opened its doors for the first time in 2005. Now the erotic community site consists of virtual nightclubs, hotels, bars, movie theaters, and stores. It also offers parties, classes, meeting rooms, live music with dancing, and art-gallery openings. It’s not unlike the virtual world Second Life, operated by Linden Lab, but this world is all about sex. The site has about a million monthly active users.

See! Dean Takahashi knows that Second Life is not all about sex, whereas I think it’s more difficult to argue that Red Light Center isn’t all about sex… actually that’s their selling point and they are not shy about it.

Now getting back to the article, it’s actually interesting even if you find Red Light Center a bit off, because it talks about virtual reality and Utherverse chief executive Brian Shuster make some bold claims about where Virtual Worlds are going in terms of Virtual Reality and graphics :

You’ll be hard-pressed to tell the difference between real people and the avatars. We use motion capture, and it looks realistic. The idea is that it makes you feel like you are actually there. You walk into a gentleman’s club and you feel like you are there. You can make it rain on the strippers on stage. And they are real people. That gets people worked up. Knowing there is a real person on the other end — that’s more stimulating than just watching porn.

I’m not convinced that this early in the VR cycle that this will be the case. However, although many people don’t like talking about it, adult entertainment will be a selling point in VR and there’s really no point in trying to deny this.

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January 14, 2015January 14, 2015

Whatever Happened To Second Life Demographic Metrics?

When I was a lad in Second Life Linden Lab used to publish statistics galore. They still make plenty of statistics available in terms of the economy, you can find those over at Tyche Shepherd’s Grid Survey site : http://gridsurvey.com/economy.php

However along with the economy stats Linden Lab used to publish statistics on age, gender, country of origin yadda yadda yadda. They stopped doing this some time ago. A report published in April 2008 by Janet Lo, Law student, University of Ottawa, commissioned by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada contains some statsics :

Age Of Users

13 – 17 (Teen Grid) – 0.96%
18-24 – 24.50%
25-34 – 35.43%
35-44 – 23.35%
45 or older – 15.25%
Unknown – 0.51%

That’s quite a vast age range of users. Gender was also quite interesting :

Gender Of Users

Male – 59.02%
Female – 40.98%

I seem to recall seeing a statistic where the gender balance was a tad closer, something like 57% – 43% but I can’t find a reference to this. I’m not sure why Linden Lab stopped publishing these statistics, they were good talking points and in today’s climate where diversity is a big thing, they may well be interesting. However as Linden Lab’s published statistics were, well, statistics, many people argued that we were in lies, damned lies and statistics territory. However that’s part of the fun of statistics!

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January 14, 2015

Linden Lab Announce Additional Payment Options For Second Life

Linden Lab have explained the mystery of the Skrill payment option news in a blog post : Additional Payment Options for Second Life. The post explains :

As you may have seen, a company called Skrill recently announced that we’re working together to provide additional payment options for Second Life users. Our relationship with Skrill allows Linden Lab to offer Second Life Residents many more options for their payment activity (like buying L$ or paying account fees), including additional local currency options for Residents outside the US.

The post goes on to explain that some Second Life residents are already using Skrill, as it was soft launched a few weeks ago. However now other Second Life residents can add a billing option of using Skrill for Second Life, instructions are in the LL blog post I linked to above.

However there is a discrepancy between the two announcements regarding processing credits and I think it’s safe to say that Linden Lab’s announcement carries all the weight.

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