Ciaran Laval

April 18, 2016April 18, 2016

The Day George R.R. Martin Brought Tyrion Lannister To Second Life

Inara Pey recently reported that participation applications for Second Life’s 13th birthday are now open. A thirteenth birthday for Second Life is an extremely impressive milestone, especially when you consider how many people are still surprised that Second Life is still around.

Meanwhile, Fantasy Faire 2016 in Second Life is on the horizon and they will once again be holding a literary festival (Litfest) which will include readings, poetry, discussions and on April 23rd, Shakespeare Day. More details will appear on that page soon.

I’m a fan of storytelling, as I’ve said many times, I’m also a massive fan of Fantasy Faire in Second Life and I always like to delve a little bit into Second Life’s history as Second Life’s birthday approaches. I’ll combine history, storytelling and fantasy to look at an event that took place in Second Life back in 2007, an event that I didn’t know anything about until I read an article by Michael Calia and Mike Ayers : How ‘Game of Thrones’ Became the Most Viral Show on Television. The link to Second Life comes at the start of the article :

In May 2007, a few months after HBO optioned the rights to a book series by George R.R. Martin, executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss joined the author for a surprise appearance in the virtual community Second Life.

“Game of Thrones” wouldn’t hit the screen until four years later, but Second Life was a vital hangout for gamers, fantasy role-players and fans of Mr. Martin’s novels. The two producers appeared on screen as digital avatars in a forum moderated by one Beelzebubba Rasmuson and reassured fans that they would remain respectful of the beloved books.

Second Life was of course a lot more popular in terms of media coverage back in 2007.

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April 13, 2016

Caitlyn Meeks Is Doing A Great Job Of Highlighting High Fidelity Content

Due to ongoing personal commitments I’m not finding as much time to explore virtual worlds as I would like. This is a great shame, but can’t be helped. This is particularly a shame when it comes to High Fidelity because they are making some great strides and they are being highlighted in an excellent fashion by Caitlyn Meeks, who made the move from the Unity Asset store to High Fidelity in February.

Caitlyn brought us the news that Content Team members Eric Levin & Jazmin Cano won best VR scene at the San Francisco VR Hackathon at Microsoft’s Reactor Space in March.

Caitlyn has also been talking us through the concepts of creating Mini-Golf in High Fidelity :

This is aimed more at content creators than consumers, but you can see Mini Golf in action here.

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April 13, 2016

Virtual Reality And Virtual Worlds Should Pay Attention To Older Participants

At the Game Developer’s Conference 2016 Professor Bob De Schutter of Applied Game Design at Miami University, gave an excellent presentation : Beyond Ageism: Designing Meaningful Games for an Older Audience.

Now you may be thinking that virtual worlds are not games, they aren’t, but they contain games and the mechanics of accessing virtual worlds are game like. The presentation Professor Bob De Schutter makes has themes that apply to virtual worlds too and platform providers as well as content creators would do well to pay heed to what he says.

That’s before we get to the sort of games older people play. Professor Bob De Schutter presented research from Quantic Foundry regarding the games people over 50 play. The top three, by gender :

Women over 50

FarmVille
Glitch
Second Life

Men over 50

Railroad Tycoon
Second Life
Microsoft Solitaire

This tells us that a certain virtual world that many of us are familiar with is popular amongst over 50’s. Many of us already knew that Second Life was popular amongst a more mature audience. Plenty of over 50’s also inhabit the likes of OpenSim, High Fidelity and more.

Now, as virtual worlds have an older crowd, the rest of the presentation makes for interesting viewing, it covers issues such as accessibility, ageism and the fact that older gamers want to be challenged, not patronised.

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April 6, 2016

SH//FT – A Non-Profit Organisation Aimed At Sponsoring Underrepresented Groups In VR And More

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes published an article regarding SH//FT : VR Industry Leaders Launch Pro-Diversity Non-Profit SHIIFT.

This prompted me to take a closer look at SH//FT, where I discovered that SH//FT is :

a non-profit organization that partners with industry leaders in emerging technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality to sponsor and create opportunities for underrepresented groups.

Helen Situ, who is behind this also has a Medium Post about this in which she explains more :

But I’ve noticed something unsettling. There are very few women in virtual reality.

To whoever is reading this, I’m sure that wherever you work, it’s true that the majority of your coworkers are male. In the tech industry, women only represent less than 20% of the workforce. We need to change this.

I’m really a fan of “Whomever” for some bizarre reason, but that’s not important right now! More women in tech and VR is important. I have taken a look at this subject before : Women Probably Don’t Want To Feel All Alone On A Crowded VR Island.

There is, without any shadow of a doubt, a shocking lack of women in tech and we really need to address the reasons why as we move boldly on to the brave new world of VR. I’ve worked in tech for many moons, I’ve worked in tech for many moons in an education environment too and there you see the shocking lack of women in the classroom too.

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April 6, 2016

Tyche Shepherd’s Awesome Private Estate Survey March 2016

Tyche “Statto” Shepherd has published her first private estate survey for over two years and it makes for very interesting reading. Tyche’s last private estate survey was published in November 2013. This survey covers Second Life only.

The methodology for these surveys is, to quote Tyche :

these results are based on a sample of 5000 randomly selected private estate regions designed to estimate full/ Homestead/ Openspace penetration.

So with that said let’s get straight to comparisons.

November 2013

Full Regions : 2,368
Homestead Regions : 2,005
Openspace : 29
Closed to Public : 598

March 2016

Full Regions : 2,266
Homestead Regions : 1,921
Openspace : 21
Closed to Public : 792

Now remember that this is a survey, not a comparison of the overall number of regions, the above comparisons designed to gauge an idea of how the land lies regarding the type of regions in terms of the percentage of the grid they occupy.

November 2013 Accessible Regions (4,402)

Full Regions : 53.8%
Homestead Regions : 45.5%
Openspace : 0.7%

March 2016 Accessible Regions (4,208)

Full Regions : 53.9%
Homestead Regions : 45.6%
Openspace : 0.5%

Tyche comments further on the methodology for this survey :

The Margins of Error are +/-1.30% , +/- 1.29% and +/-0.21% respectively for the three figures figure at the 95% confidence level.

Remember the above is part of a survey, not an overall comparison of the number of regions on the grid. Tyche does comment on the numbers overall in her commentary, but we’ll come to that later.

As we can see from the comparisons, the shape of the grid in terms of the percentage of Full, Homestead and Openspace regions has changed very little in the period between November 2013 and March 2016.

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