Ciaran Laval

April 14, 2015

Man From Pennsylvania Reportedly Arrested Over 50k Virtual Land Scam Allegation

Recently I’ve been blogging about how Second Life has been generating some good news articles. In this post however, I’m sadly reporting on something that isn’t positive. Sometimes stories appear in the news feed that aren’t current or aren’t what they seem, but I’ve now seen this story in two places.

The Reporter Times inform us : Investigation uncovers alleged land scheme in Morgan County.

Indiana Public News reports : Virtual Land Scam Of Morgan County Resident Leads To Arrest.

The case surrounds a supposed loan of over $50,000 to a man whom promised to invest that money in virtual land in Second Life. The idea was that after two years the loan would be paid back with another $10,000 on top.

Ok I would imagine plenty of us are scratching our heads now, not just about the idea that virtual land in Second Life is a good investment these days but also regarding such huge sums of money being involved here. I say this as someone who is familiar with virtual worlds and how expensive they can be as well as the rewards they can reap.

Secretary of State Connie Lawson is quoted as saying :

We’ve seen a lot of real estate scams, but we’ve not seen a virtual scam like this before, It’s amazing that people want to invest in something like this, but obviously it’s out there, it’s on the web, and people need to be aware.

I’m still scratching my head on this one. However there is gold in them there virtual world hills, it’s just hard to find.

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April 13, 2015

Bright Canopy Beta Testing Frame For Second Life Streaming In A Web Browser

SL Go from OnLive is of course going, but the ideas behind it and the fact that there are Second Life and OpenSim users who would like to see a similar service developed has been discussed. In my previous post I looked at the work Nebandon Izumi had compteted with regards to getting the OnLook Viewer working with Amazon AppStream for OSGrid.

However there are other people looking at options regarding this too and one of them is Bright Canopy who state :

We render SL on powerful machines and stream it straight to your device

Android, iOS, Chromebook, Mac, Linux, anywhere

Say hello to freedom

Bill Glover of Bright Canopy, has been commenting on Inara Pey’s recent blog post. Bill has also setup a blog : Bright Canopy Blog. The blog so far has a total of two posts, but both of them are absolutely fascinating when it comes to streaming Second Life.

His first blog post was : Notes on Streaming SL With Amazon AppStream, which contained a report of trying to get Second Life working with Amazon AppStream. Although it did work, Bill summarised the experience as :

I’m in a hotel room in Reno for a conference, but I’m grabbing what time I can to do some quick proof of concept stuff.

I setup a stream with the Firestorm and was able to use it from both a Chromebook and an Android phone. It was really very responsive over a hotel wifi network, but there are many caveats.

tl;dr: It works, but it’s expensive and nowhere near being useful for just casually streaming SL without some custom client development and viewer integration.

The link to the blog post has a lot more information and is definitely worth a read. However Bill didn’t hang up his pen there, he’s actually moved on to a second experiment : And Then There Was Frame.

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April 11, 2015

Amazon App Stream And OnLook Viewer Used To Stream OSGrid

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes recently pondered Could Linden Lab Replace SL Go With Another Service – Say LiquidSky, Leap Computing, or Amazon App Stream? The answer it seems, is possibly, because in the comments Diva Canto says :

Today, Nebadon and I have set up OnLook (a derivative of Singularity) on the Amazon AppStream. It was surprisingly easy to set up and it works amazingly well. I’m still in shock.

This changes everything.

To demonstrate this, Diva shared a video that Nebandon Izumi had created :

The video shows a stable looking experience running really smoothly. However for more details on this, it’s time to turn to our favourite Delicia Whipsnaps lookalike, Inara Pey, whose original post of Could the Lab use Amazon AppStream to “replace” SL Go? provided the basis for Hamlet’s question.

Inara has followed this up with another post, Using Amazon AppStream to stream a viewer. In that post Inara talks to Nebadon Izumi about the process of using Amazon AppStream. The process is not straight forward, it’s not like using SL Go where you just login and, well, go. However it is feasible.

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April 10, 2015

Dennis Harper Of Onlive Talks To Draxtor Despres Regarding SL Go

The latest edition of The Drax Files Radio hour (without Jo Yardley this week) features an interview with Dennis Harper of OnLive. Dennis’ role at OnLive was as Product Manager for SL Go, so he knows his stuff.

The interview is a fascinating and emotional one. There are some cold hard truths about what happened with SL Go, why OnLive’s patents were sold, the power of virtual world communities and why a virtual solution for Second Life would still be welcomed by many

We learn early on how the way companies envisage something working, aren’t always the way they turn out. For example Dennis explains that OnLive thought that the people who may want SL Go would be power users, landlords, content creators, people who are in Second Life a lot and may see SL Go as being a good addition. However they soon realised, landlords and content creators often already spend a lot of time working on their home computer, which in many cases is quite a decent spec. The people who ended up embracing SL Go? People on older hardware.

This sort of thing always interests me, it happens a lot, a company think they have a target audience and find out they do have a target audience, but it wasn’t the one they originally envisaged.

However as much as I love (it hasn’t gone yet) SL Go, it’s not perfect and Dennis points out some of the flaws. The number one complaint was regarding voice chat, or more to the point, the lack of voice chat. However Dennis did let us into a little secret. Voice chat via OnLive servers was possible, but only to other OnLive users. Therefore if two people were using SL Go, it would have been feasible to voice chat, but not inside Second Life, the chat would be via their OnLive accounts.

Another issue people complained about was the fuzzy looking world SL Go could produce. The reason for this was that OnLive is 720p, not 1080p, therefore on smaller screens it looks fine but on large monitors, it could get a bit fuzzy.

Dennis also talked with glowing praise about the Second Life community. When SL Go opened their island people would come and visit, they’d join in the chat, some people wouldn’t quite understand what cloud computing was, they wouldn’t understand what SL Go could do, but they would give it a go and then, in many cases, they’d be extremely excited about the results, seeing Second Life in a new light. This was the power of SL Go, but having the inworld island helped people to learn more about SL Go before giving it a try. The richness of the conversations people could have within a virtual world aided their experience.

The other side of the community issue was that Dennis himself was a noob. He had no idea how to use Second Life initially and his comments here are comments that Linden Lab should take note of. The way Dennis learned about Second Life was by someone else showing him how to use Second Life. Someone showed him how to dance, how to groom his avatar, where to go shopping, where to hang out and how to overcome some inworld quirks. Dennis suggests that without that sort of support from other users, he imagines many users may turn away from Second Life before they’ve really got started.

However how about OnLive and SL Go? What really happened, this is interesting indeed.

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April 9, 2015

Looking For Horse’s Heads In People’s Beds At Gravesend Bay In Second Life

Risking life and limb I decided it was time to follow Sir Trevor McDonald and dip my toes into the murky underworld of crime. However unlike Sir Trevor, my visit was to a virtual crime location, namely Gravesend Bay in Second Life.

This is underworld roleplay Second Life style and as in many roleplaying sims in Second Life, a lot of work has gone into the storyline. In this case it revolves around two main families, The Gianni’s and The Morella’s.

An image should be here — Gravesend Bay Map

The Gianni’s have been involved in an internal power struggle which tore the family apart and allowed their enemies to take advantage. The current storyline leaves The Gianni’s in this situation :

Left with a dilapidated neighborhood, the Gianni Family feels the pressure for the Morella’s to the south and is at the point where they’re willing to do whatever it takes to not only keep what they have but to reclaim what the considered theirs.

However when it comes to The Morella’s, there’s a slightly different story.

The Morella’s watched The Gianni’s tear themselves apart and took their chances. Now the head of The Morella family finds himself in this situation :

The Morella’s gain power, prestige and wealth quickly and continue to use their political connections to push the Gianni’s further north. If they prevail, they plan on finally gaining control of the region and wiping the Gianni’s off the map.

Beyond that there are factions. The Drifters and Ava’s Angels.

The Drifters are described as :

The Drifters are the group of misfits, meaning doesn’t fit in to a family. This group is mostly composed of bikers, drug dealers, addicts, and homeless people. The drifter are lead by nether family, they answer to a faceless figure. He’s known to most simply as the Kingpin.

Ava’s Angels on the other hand are ladies of the night who are still controlled by The Gianni family. This is an adult region, so adult activities can be expected but it’s not a region that encourages adult activities in plain sight.

Continue reading “Looking For Horse’s Heads In People’s Beds At Gravesend Bay In Second Life”