Ciaran Laval

November 6, 2015

Daden Awarded Grant For Virtual Field Trips, Second Life Is Good For Your Health & Bigger Than You May Think

I’m having a busy week with birthdays and visitors from the emerald isle, so I’m a bit behind on virtual world news but I will highlight a few interesting looking stories that are doing the rounds.

Hypergrid Business report : Daden awarded £230,000 for virtual field trips. I might need to acknowledge some bias here. I come from the same city as Daden. However I won’t allow that to cloud my judgement. The Hypergrid Business report article informs us :

Daden Limited – a virtual reality specialist based at the Innovation Birmingham Campus – has been awarded nearly £230,000 by Innovate UK for its Virtual Field Trips as a Service initiative.

The funding has been awarded in phase two of Innovate UK’s Design for Impact Competition, which aims to identify and then support innovative technology that has been proven in pilot projects in education, but is yet to have a national impact. Daden, working with The Open University (OU), the Field Studies Council and Birmingham-based Design Thinkers UK, has been awarded the funding to develop its Virtual Field Trips as a Service concept as a national service for schools and universities.

The article further states :

From November 2014 to April 2015, Daden worked with teachers and students at Washwood Heath Academy in Birmingham, virtual world educators in Second Life, university lecturers at a Royal Geological Society workshop, and a range of other stakeholders to understand the potential, challenges and key features of any virtual field trip service.

David Burden added: “Virtual Field Trips as a Service is intended to support, not replace, physical field trips. It will help students and staff better prepare for a field trip, can provide additional context and gives a focus for post-field trip data analysis, revision, virtual visits to comparative sites, and provides a catch-up for those who may have missed the physical trip. Whilst this funded project is focused on UK education there are obvious opportunities overseas, particularly for virtual ‘exchange’ field trips.”

The issue of virtual field trips keeps coming up. Field trips are certainly seen as a good use case for virtual worlds and virtual reality so it’s encouraging to see a company who are embracing the concept.

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November 6, 2015

Can Virtual World Ventures Learn Anything From Blizzcon?

Blizzcon 2015 has started, a celebration of all things Blizzard related, including games and a movie. The opening ceremony was broadcast free to watch, although you wouldn’t have got caught up in the atmosphere like those in the Anaheim Convention Centre if you watched it via a stream. This means that many people who haven’t even got a virtual ticket have been able to view part of Blizzcon.

Blizzcon gives fans the chance to meet developers, artists, voice actors, view cinematics, engage in sports, cosplay and apparently there’s a tavern there too. Linkin Park will be making an appearance too, so it’s a costly affair to put together and I can’t think of a virtual world conference that would even scratch the costs of Blizzcon. However that doesn’t mean that virtual worlds can’t pick up some tips from Blizzcon.

The first point to note came to me whilst I was watching the opening ceremony via a Twitch stream. As noted earlier, the opening ceremony was a free to view affair, so it wasn’t a dodgy stream. As we all know, when it comes to Second Life, Twitch are the bad guys. However Twitch does have a rival in the shape and form of YouTube Gaming. Second Life has an auto generated channel there, but there’s also an official Linden Lab channel too, although I’m yet to see any live streaming from that quarter, but there is potential.

So why would you want to stream a virtual world conference via an external service? Well for a start, as much as we love being in the virtual world, watching a virtual world conference via a stream is likely to be more comfortable and less crashtastic than trying to cam in from a neighbouring region because the region where the conference is taking place is full. This should also leave room for me in said conference region to take photos as part of my role as the seeker of truth and justice!

Alternatively a live stream could be viewable on YouTube Gaming and also in other regions via media on a prim type solutions, so regions could share the load but have more people inworld watching the event.

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November 5, 2015November 5, 2015

Project Sansar Continues To Make The News

Linden Lab’s Project Sansar remains under a shield of secrecy, even on Linden Lab’s newly revamped website. We have picked up bits and pieces from interviews, such as when Tom’s Hardware spoke to Linden Lab’s Senior Director, Global Communications, Gray Of The Lab From San Francisco (AKA Peter Gray) :

Peter Gray likened Project Sansar for VR to what WordPress has done for the Web; the idea is to make it possible for anyone to create a virtual experience, without the need for a software engineering background. However the WordPress analogy may have fell just a bit short of exemplifying the message Linden Lab were trying to convey, so they’ve added a new analogy, YouTube.

John Gaudiosi of Fortune has been speaking to Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg and posted an article entitled; How ‘Second Life’ Developer Hopes To Deliver The ‘YouTube For VR’. The YouTube analogy is a good one because it encompasses more than just the creation aspect, as Ebbe Altberg explains in the article :

“Much like YouTube, Sansar will empower people to create, share, and profit from their own social virtual experiences,” Altberg says. “Doing that today requires an engineering team—it’s hard and expensive, and that limits the use-cases for VR. That’s similar to the old days of the web, so we sometimes also use WordPress as an apt analogy.”

Unless you work for Linden Lab or are in the top secret Alpha you won’t know which analogy works best, time will tell on that front. However YouTube is widely known as a platform where people create content and make money. Whereas that link between creation and income isn’t so clear when it comes to WordPress, although that route is available via use of WordPress too.

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November 3, 2015

Facebook Relaxing Their Real Name Policy? R.U. Sirius?

First of all I’ll cover some old ground and take us back just under four years to November 21st 2011. Author Salman Rushdie had been embroiled in a row with Facebook because they wouldn’t allow him to use the name “Salman Rushdie”. This was due to the fact that Salman Rushdie’s first name is actually Ahmed and initially Facebook changed his account to use that first name.

Eventually, Facebook saw sense and Salman Rushdie was allowed to use the name Salman Rushdie. A name he’s widely known as. Fast forward almost four years and numerous articles about the pro’s and cons of Facebook’s real name policy, Facebook are still at it when it comes to being stubborn over names, despite claims that they are relaxing their real name policy.

Alex Hern, in the linked Guardian article writes :

The new rules still officially require the use of “authentic names” on the site, something which has previously resulted in criticism from varied groups including the drag community, Native Americans, and trans people. While Facebook does not require the use of “legal names” on the site, it does demand that users identify with the name that other people know them by.

That doesn’t sound like much of a watering down of their policy to me. However further in the article Alex Hern writes :

Firstly, the site will now allow users to “provide more information about their circumstances” in order to “give additional details or context on their unique situation”.

According to the company’s VP of Growth, Alex Schultz, this should allow Facebook to accurately assess whether the name supplied fits with the rules. Additionally, he says: “It will help us better understand the reasons why people can’t currently confirm their name, informing potential changes we make in the future.”

Initially, that sounded a bit more positive, although it still requires users to jump through hoops and be authorised to use a name they are already widely known as. To highlight why this is still very much a problem we need to turn to Hamlet Au over at New World Notes who has been covering the Facebook problems faced by R.U. Sirius, AKA Ken Goffman.

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