Ciaran Laval

July 24, 2015

Microsoft Tech Evangelist Deploys OpenSim To Microsoft Azure But Pricing Is Confusing

Over on Gamasutra there’s a sponsored blog post from Microsoft, the post is from Amanda Lange, Technical Evangelist, Microsoft : Sponsored: How to simulate a tiny universe in Azure.

Microsoft Azure is open to all kinds of open source code projects, so I thought it might be neat to try running my own OpenSim on an Azure server.

OpenSim is a bit like Second Life, but open source. Anyone can create their own shard worlds to manipulate however they wish. It allows for a very private virtual world for use in role play gaming, education, or just to build out your own environment however you like and play with some 3D construction tools.

This sounds interesting and the blog post gives very detailed instructions on how to deploy OpenSim to Microsoft Azure. I’m not going to detail the instructions here, if you’re interested read the linked post near the start of this post, but it’s not a plug and play process, you will need to use the likes of Visual Studio. However these days Visual Studio comes in decent form for free in many cases.

Now if you’re wondering what Microsoft Azure is, here’s some of the blurb :

Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, a growing collection of integrated services – analytics, computing, database, mobile, networking, storage and web – for moving faster, achieving more and saving money.

Now if you’re still unsure, you can read more here : http://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/overview/what-is-azure/

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July 23, 2015

Project Sansar To Offer Instancing And Perhaps A Different Approach To Branding Experiences

Scientists have announced that they have found “The closest twin to earth outside the solar system“. The name of the planet is Kepler 452b and it’s considered Earth’s older and bigger cousin. However that’s not really what this blog post is about. No, this blog post is about me finding “The closest article to the article I found yesterday about Project Sansar, outside this blog“.

I have discovered the article at none other than Variety. The article in question is Second Life Maker Linden Lab Wants to Build the WordPress of Virtual Reality by Janko Roettgers, Senior Silicon Valley Correspondent for Variety.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, yesterday I blogged Ebbe Altberg And Peter Gray Talk To MMORPG About The Future Of Online Experiences, which was based on an article on MMORPG by Neilie Johnson entitled “Linden Lab Looks to the Future of Online Experiences“.

The article in Variety covers a lot of the same ground but it also has some additional and rather interesting information, for example, when it comes to how many people may be able to visit a build in Project Sansar, the Variety article states :

Why spend a lot of money to build a presence in Second Life if it could only be visited by only 70 people at a time? Project Sansar wants to solve this issue by allowing for unlimited copies of an experience. In other words, instead of just opening one restaurant, McDonalds could open hundreds or even thousands of eateries in the new virtual world, and open and close them based on customer demand.

This does indeed mean instancing! Now if you’re not familiar with instancing, imagine a Second Life region that is full. Instancing would address this by creating pretty much a copy of that region on demand, to allow more people to enter the experience. The obvious issue there is that you may not be in the same instance of the region as your friends, but we can worry about things like that later because instancing is a bloody brilliant concept.

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July 22, 2015July 22, 2015

Ebbe Altberg And Peter Gray Talk To MMORPG About The Future Of Online Experiences

First things first, some readers may find the website of MMORPG a little garish, it’s a bright site and very busy. I mention this because this post is about an article by Neilie Johnson on MMORPG; Linden Lab Looks to the Future of Online Experiences. The article is based on an interview with Linden Lab’s CEO Ebbe Altberg and Linden Lab’s Senior Director of Global Communications, Gray Of The Lab From San Francisco (AKA Peter Gray).

Whereas there are no ground breaking secrets revealed in the interview, it is worth looking at some things again. Firstly the proposed land model for Project Sansar, or what is known about it so far. The article reiterates that the plan for Project Sansar is to have much lower land costs than the USD$295.00 a month region cost in Second Life, with sales tax on the increase compared to the 5% Marketplace commission. There are no figures provided but I think it’s fair to say that this has been mentioned enough times now for it to be a reality.

The article also touches upon the fact that Linden Lab have learnt a lot from Second Life. Although the minimum age requirement will be 13, Linden Lab feel that they will be able to segregate content so that minors aren’t running into unsuitable content.

One of the things I’ve seen said about Project Sansar when comparing it to Second Life is that the Project Sansar development team will look at the way some things are done in Second Life and decide they would not want to start from there to achieve that in Project Sansar. Content and land restrictions are areas where Project Sansar can take a new approach and one that could very well deal with some of the problems we’ve seen in Second Life. The experience of the issues that have been raised in Second Life are an advantage here.

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July 21, 2015

ANSIBLE – An OpenSim Inspired Virtual World That NASA Might Take To Outer Space

PC Mag have an interesting article by Sophia Stuart : Inside NASA’s Version of the Holodeck. What makes this article interesting is that NASA’s version of the Holodeck looks like OpenSim and it seems like there may be a very good reason for that.

The crux of the article focuses around an interview with virtual world and virtual reality legend Dr Jacquelyn Ford Morie, founder and chief scientist of All These Worlds LLC. I’ll use just part of Dr Morie’s bio to exemplify her credentials :

Dr. Morie has 25 years experience in developing innovative techniques for rich, emotionally evocative virtual reality (VR) environments. As part of this pioneering work, she invented a scent collar to bring the emotional power of smell to immersive experiences, and developed new types of functions for VR, such as connections to multiple sensor and feedback systems to make VR more effective. Dr. Morie spent 13 years as a Sr. Research Scientist at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), which she helped found. While there, she created novel VR telehealth care activities using her deep understanding of art, computer animation and human behavior to enhance patient engagement with these programs.

Impressive stuff, and from the PC Mag article we learn about some things that are a little closer to home for this blog. Dr Morie is quoted as saying :

“In the early 90s, I was participating in networked VR like Dactyl Nightmare, BattleTech, and Virtuality, but they weren’t totally open worlds, they were applications. But I could see the potential, even then” Morie explained. “So, the first virtual world that I really took part in was Second Life.”

However Second Life is of course closed in many ways itself, so, yes I’m getting there, OpenSim comes into the equation. Dr Morie’s work had came to the attention of none other than NASA. They asked Dr Morie to write a technical document on how virtual worlds could be used in space. Two companies were asked to work on a prototype of this. One was Dr Morie’s All These Worlds LLC and the other was Smart Information Flow Technologies (SIFT). However they didn’t just build a protoype, they built the whole damn thing.

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July 20, 2015

Taking A Lick At The McFly Project

LICK in Second Life is interesting. This is the home of The McFly Project and connects differing worlds, from the creepy fairground landing point where you can test your feats of strength to a futuristic landscape that you can use vehicles to travel around.

I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for, although I did wonder if I had found the Droid I was looking for at one point.

The landscape and items are extremely engaging and so is the exploration, following the clues I found myself in an underwater cavern, with a hint that I needed to pull a lever.

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