Ciaran Laval

January 10, 2015

A Visit To Paris In Second Life

Paris in Second Life is quite an impressive location, spanning four sims and two centuries it portrays the French capital in a very good light. There are a number of visitor attractions and they include : Theatre Sarah Bernhardt, Moulin Rouge, Eiffel Tower, Maison Victor Hugo, Carousel 1900, Grand Roue Ferris Wheel, Moulin de la Galette windmill, Notre Dame Cathedral, The Champs Elysees, Arc De Triomphe, The Louvre and The Gallery Of Machines.

Most of the sims have an early 1900’s feel to them with vintage cars and people wearing Edwardian era style clothing, the people in this case being models rather than bots but they do help to add to the ambience.

There’s quite a lot to see and do. Shopping, Art galleries, theatres and tourist attractions being some of the main activities. Part of the income to pay for these sims comes from renting out shop and room spaces.

Four sims means there’s a lot of legwork to do to see it all, however there are options on your mode of transport. Taxis, which are populated at various points being one means of transport that can take the weight off your virtual feet.

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January 9, 2015

Allons Enfants de la Patrie – Paris In Second Life Is Worth Visiting

I’ll be doing a more in depth post on Paris in Second Life in the near future, at the moment, not at all surprisingly, it has a theme related to real life events about it and even in virtual worlds there’s a sense of mood. However it is a rather stunning build and contains a historical 1900’s theme in parts.

Obviously The Eiffel Tower is a central focus point and here you’ll find people gathering around, some with placards, some with Mesh avatars I can’t see due to the AMD drivers not playing nicely with Second Life. However there’s much more to this location than the Eiffel Tower.

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January 8, 2015

The Virtual Reality Battle For Standards Is Coming

There’s a lot of excitement around about the future of Virtual Reality (VR from now on). There are a lot of gadgets, devices and potential. However there’s also going to be the inevitable battle to win the war on standards and protocols.

We’ve been here before in many ways, Blu-Ray v HD-DVD. Those of us who are a bit longer in the tooth can remember VHS v Betamax. There will be lots of other examples. Arguments will always rage about which format was the better one and why the better one doesn’t always win, but generally one format wins and the same surely has to be true for VR.

Initially we’ll probably find experiences optimised for the Oculus Rift, or optimised for a rival headset. Eventually, for the sake of consumers, that optimisation for a brand will need to be replaced by optimisation for a standard. For example consumers won’t want a headset for Second Life, a headset for Linden Lab’s next gen Virtual World, a headset for OpenSim, a headset for a game or MMO and so forth. Consumers will want a choice of headsets that work pretty much across the board. Obviously some headsets will be better than others but they should all work to a set of standards and protocols that mean software developers optimise their product for those standards and protocols.

At CES 2014 the BBC reported that Valve were making steps in this direction :

Valve designer Brian Coomer says the company is “days away” from releasing a VR software development kit that will give game makers a standard way to provide an interface for VR controllers.

I’m not quite sure what happened there because I haven’t heard much about this since. However at CES2015 noises are being made in this direction by Razer with their Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) Hacker Dev Kit.

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January 7, 2015

Enjoy Weird Science At The Exploratorium’s Second Life Auditorium

I’ve mentioned before that there’s a lack of Science Fiction in Second Life. There’s also a lack of Science Fact. However both genres do exist in Second Life, just not to the degree I’d have expected.

When it comes to real science, as I’ve mentioned before, The Exploratorium is a good place to go. The Exploratorium is also the home of the podcast Virtually Speaking Science. The latest edition is going to be all about humour : Science + Humor = A Winning Formula for Laughing and Thinking. The show will be hosted by Alan Boyle of NBC News and will feature Marc Abrahams of Improbable Research reviewing some of weirdest tales of Science from 2014 and furthermore, you can watch the show live in Second Life :

Marc Abrahams will review the past year’s weirdest scientific tales with NBC News’ Alan Boyle during Wednesday’s installment of “Virtually Speaking Science,” an hourlong talk show airing at 8 p.m. ET via BlogTalkRadio. You can also watch the show as part of a live virtual audience in the Exploratorium’s Second Life auditorium.

By Wednesday they mean today, unless you live in a timezone whereby 8pm ET is tomorrow of course, which would be the very early hours of the morning in Europe alas. I also think Alan Boyle needs to embrace SLT as a timezone to assist us all!

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January 6, 2015

The Future’s So Bright You’ve Gotta Wear Goggles But Don’t Write Off Second Life Yet

As we enter 2015 an awful lot of people seem to be getting very excited about the forthcoming VR boom. I do anticipate a VR boom, I just don’t see it really happening this year. Virtual worlds such as Second Life, OpenSim, Kitely, Inworldz are more likely to keep hold of their communities in the short term because, that’s where the communities currently are and the brave new worlds aren’t ready yet.

However some people feel that 2015 will be the year where VR goes big, I’m more in the camp of 2015 being a year of tease and talk rather than mass adoption. However there are new and interesting things on the horizon that will get people interested in VR and they’re not just in games and virtual worlds. Storytelling is a big potential market here as is live music and theatre performances.

Peter Diamindis over at the singularity hub is, not surprisingly, excited about the future of VR : These 11 Technologies Will Go Big in 2015 :

Expect a lot more action on the virtual and augmented reality front. 2014 saw the $2B acquisition of Oculus Rift by Facebook. In 2015, we’ll see action from companies like Philip Rosedale’s High Fidelity (the successor to Second Life), immersive 3D 360-degree cameras from companies like Immersive Media (the company behind Google’s Streetview), Jaunt, and Giroptic. Then there are game changers like Magic Leap (in which Google just led a $542 million investment round) that are developing technology to “generate images indistinguishable from real objects and then being able to place those images seamlessly into the real world.” Oculus, the darling of CES for the past few years, will be showing its latest Crescent Bay prototype and hopefully providing a taste of how its headset will interact with Nimble VR’s hand- and finger-tracking inputs. Nine new VR experiences will be premiering at the Sundance Film Festival this year, spanning from artistic, powerful journalistic experiences like Project Syria to full “flying” simulations where you get to “feel” what it would be like for a human to fly.

I’m certainly a big fan of the direction High Fidelity are heading in and with the platform being so open, there’s a lot of potential for people to grasp hold of it, but I think High Fidelity is also a good example of how much ground work has to be done before people adopt. I’m excited about the future of High Fidelity and I certainly expect to see a lot more people experiencing and talking about High Fidelity in 2015 but I don’t see many thousands of people leaving Second Life for High Fidelity just yet.

Over at AD Week Christopher Heing is talking about marketing creativity with VR : How Oculus Rift Is About to Reshape Marketing Creativity Brands are enamored with the potential of 360-degree storytelling. The storytelling angle sold this to me, but the article also talks about Second Life :

Nancy Bennett is a virtual-reality marketing veteran. (Yes, such people actually exist and are about to become hot commodities among talent recruiters.) In the mid-2000s, Bennett had her avatar boots on the Internet-code-built ground of Second Life, constructing cyber experiences for her employer at the time, MTV Networks.

Of course, Second Life never really took off. So with her been there, done that perspective several years later as chief content officer at Two Bit Circus, she does not deal in hyperbole when it comes to the impact the much-hyped virtual reality headset Oculus Rift will have on marketing. Rather, Bennett leans on data. One-third of her agency’s new business in 2014 was powered by the Oculus Rift developer’s kit, helping grow her 2-year-old Los Angeles digital shop from 15 to 35 employees.

When people talk about Second Life never really taking off they’re really talking in terms of mass adoption by the mainstream and that’s something that can’t really be argued with. However the point people miss so often when they talk about brave new worlds is that they recognise that there’s something in virtual communities and communications but they can’t quite figure out what that is. The Oculus Rift may well answer some of the questions, or it may be that the answer is that virtual worlds are simply a niche product. Time will tell.

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