Ciaran Laval

April 2, 2014April 2, 2014

SL Share Extends To Flickr And Twitter But What Next For SL Profiles?

Linden Lab have blogged that the SL Share feature that was initially introduced to allow people to share photos, status and check ins on Facebook has now been extended to include functionality for Flickr and Twitter.

Personally I feel Flickr and Twitter are a much better fit for Second Life as both allow people to have their Second Life user name as their profile name, whereas Facebook is still in the bah humbug arena regarding pseudonyms.

In both cases they are taking advantage of features and requirements of the respective platforms, with Twitter the hashtag of #SecondLife is automatically added and with Flickr, they respect the fact that maturity ratings are sometimes required.

However there are also other funky features, such as post processing of pictures, as explained in the blog post :

This update will also introduce a set of post-processing filters that you can run your pictures through to create cool one-of-a-kind images! The new filters were inspired by the images posted to Flickr by Second Life Residents. With more than a million uploads, most of them enhanced by some post-processing, we thought it would be great to include this feature right in SLShare. These filters will work regardless of which social network you choose to share your Second Life pictures to.

However if you don’t like those filters, you can use the advanced features and create your own filters, the wiki has more details.

Now to take advantage of these features, you will need to download a special project viewer, which you can find here.

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April 2, 2014

The Drax Files: World Makers – Episode 18 Singing Like A Canary

Episode 18 of The Drax Files: World Makers is out and has thrown a bit of a curve ball by coming out on a Wednesday instead of Friday! Then another curve ball is tossed in by having two people whom live in London speaking with North American accents! I’ll post the video at the end, which is my traditional style with these videos.

This week’s episode features Canary Beck and Harvey Crabsticks who are engaging in immersive theatre within Second Life. The video follows Drax’s tried and tested formula of mixing inworld footage and real life footage, with a youthful looking Canary and Harvey walking the streets of London. Canary Beck is seen wearing a striped dress, which she manages to just about pull off …. wait wait wait, come back, I don’t mean she pulls her dress off! I mean stripes on film isn’t always a good mix.

The video features a behind the scenes look at their forthcoming inworld production of Paradise Lost, in which we do see Canary with her dress off, but tactfully done. The production features 43 roles, played by 8 avatar actors.

Harvey talks of how the actors in the production are real people, something sometimes missed when it comes to virtual world productions, he also mentions that the audience are real people too, again something oft forgotten.

However this episode also shows the advantages of virtual world productions, whereby they can quickly pull 12 sets together and also encourage the audience to view the show via certain camera settings, giving the production team more opportunity to have the show viewed in the settings they feel best befit the production.

However that isn’t to say an inworld production is easy, there are rehearsals and a few hundred hours worth of script development in their production of Paradise Lost. However one of the beauties of virtual world collaboration is again highlighted when it comes to working together, they don’t need to be in the same building to work together and although they are both in the same city, they find it easier at times to meet up inworld to avoid the trials and tribulations of travelling across London to meet.

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April 1, 2014April 1, 2014

High Fidelity And Identity In The Metaverse

I’ve had a lot of trouble and Strife (Onizuka) putting this post together. Haiku and LSL aren’t my thing and I need to have my wits about me today, so I’m staying on safer ground. So from a post from yesterday, Philip Rosedale has added an interesting blog post regarding how identity may work in High Fidelity : Identity in the Metaverse.

In the post Philip talks of how we don’t generally have name tags above our head or on our person when out and about. I mean some wear them at work, but it’s not a permanent identifier. We exchange names when we need to or are ready to. This is basic human instinct at play here, something social networks seem to be trying to consign to the dustbin of history, but instinct is on our side.

However at times we need to not only provide our name, we need to prove it too. I’ve had to take my Passport to the bank to open a new account, I also had to take my passport to work, even though I’d been working there for many moons. However I only provide the additional information when it’s absolutely required, we don’t carry our passports around with us and show them to strangers just to create trust. The exchange of trust comes in many forms, some more official than others.

Now you may be wondering what any of this has to do with High Fidelity. High Fidelity it seems is not going to be a walled garden, there will be other operators and when you visit their worlds, there will be different ID requirements. One of the concerns with OpneSim has always been about the operators. However this goes both ways and operators will therefore want to make their decisions about who they let in and what level of trust they require, Philip explains this with a brief overview in the blog post :

A ‘metaverse’ of connected internet servers run by different people and containing different parts of the virtual world poses an additional challenge: Not only do you need to have the choice when and to whom to disclose parts of your identity, you also cannot always trust the particular server you are ‘inside’ with different aspects of your identity. This is similar to visiting a new website and being unwilling to give credit card information, or unwilling to login using Twitter or Facebook, until you understand and trust the site.

Our design with High Fidelity is the one that seems like the best solution to meet these goals: Operators of different virtual world servers (we call these ‘domains’) can decide on the level of identity security with which they wish to challenge people arriving at their locations. This can range from nothing (meaning that disclosure of identity information is totally up to you), to a requirement akin to cookies on websites (I want a token that I can use to identify you the next time you login here, but I don’t need to know who you really are), or finally a request for unambiguous identity infomation (I want to know your real name to allow you to login here).

I’ve bolded those parts because Philip bolded them in his post! However obviously you need somebody to trust in the first place to run an identity system such as this and High Fidelity will be offering that service.

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March 31, 2014

European Online Services Suffer DDoS Attacks

Earlier this evening when I logged into World Of Warcraft, there was a warning that things may be a tad slow. They were not. When I logged in later this evening, I saw the following message :

A couple of my friends asked me if I was lagging, which is a question I sometimes get asked when I’m down the pub, but they were referring to lag and latency in the game. I was fine, they clearly were not as after not responding for a while both disconnected.

The issue it seems is due to a series of DDoS attacks on some European Online services, but certainly not all. The message from WoW indicated it’s not Blizzard under attack. Some Second Life users in Europe may have had a rough evening too.

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March 31, 2014

The Oculus Rift Widens Amidst Death Threats And Vitriol

Gamespot ran a story the other day regarding the negative reaction to Facebook’s purchase of Oculus VR. In that article they link to an article on Game Informer in which Oculus VR Vice President Nate Mitchell is quoted as saying :

We assumed that the reaction would be negative, especially from our core community, beyond our core community, we expected it would be positive. I don’t think we expected it to be so negative. As people begin to digest it a bit and think about it, you can see that Twitter and Reddit is swinging back the opposite direction. The onus is on us to educate people, and we want to share everything we’re doing.

However the original Gamespot article has been edited and had the headline changed to : Oculus VR employees got death threats after Facebook sale. In the updated article they quote Palmer Luckey :

We expected a negative reaction from people in the short term, we did not expect to be getting so many death threats and harassing phone calls that extended to our families.We know we will prove ourselves with actions and not words, but that kind of sh** is unwarranted, especially since it is impacting people who have nothing to do with Oculus.

I have absolutely no idea why anyone would find that sort of behaviour even remotely acceptable, this is not a life or death issue, it’s not that important in the grand scheme of things. I lean towards the unhappy camp over the purchase because I am not a fan of Facebook and I feel Oculus should have reached out to the Kickstarter backers but the deal is done and people will have to wait and see what happens next.

Nobody deserves to be on the receiving end of death threats over this issue and it is completely out of order to harass family members who have nothing whatsoever to do with this. I suspect some of that may be point scoring over the amount of data Facebook encourages people to share, but that is no excuse.

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