Unfortunately I did not get to see Oz Linden live at VWBPE 2015 this evening, which was disappointing because I wanted to see this discussion, alas I had to go shopping and then got into family matters, which changed all my plans.
However over at the VWBPE website there is a small part of Oz’s appearance where he answers questions. This video is not the full appearance of Oz the Great and Powerful, you’ll have to keep your eyes peeled for that. However it contains enough information for us to take a look at the sort of challenges educators using Second Life face compared to individuals. However don’t think that the information does not apply to people who aren’t educators, there’s interesting news of developments for all here.
One of the questions Oz got asked was whether or not screen sharing would ever be available in the Second Life viewer. Oz’s answer was a very sensible one. Oz pointed out that screen sharing is an area whereby other people have already developed solutions, and those solutions work well. Oz said that he himself will use applications such as Skype to share his screen with other people to look at bugs, new features etc.
That’s a very fair point and sometimes we overlook the fact that there are other applications dealing with matters very well that will work with Second Life.
However as an example of the fact that not all apps that do something well work with the Second Life viewer, a rather fascinating issue was raised. Someone pointed out that the Second Life viewer accepts typed Chinese characters, there’s a Google App (which wasn’t named) that allows people to speak Chinese and then that spoken word is entered into a document or a browser, so we’re probably talking about a speech to text app. However that app does not work with the Second Life viewer, if it did students would be able to interact with NPC’s in Chinese.
Oz was totally honest and admitted that he wasn’t familiar with the app, so therefore he didn’t know how it injected characters. However he says that he could not think of an architectural reason as to why it doesn’t work, but there is one extremely big problem in terms of Oz looking at this, he can’t speak Chinese.
However we then saw an example of how Linden Lab’s community can assist, Oz suggested that this may be something he could put on a list for Open Source developers to take a look at because there’s more likely to be an Open Source dev who can speak Chinese than there is a person at Linden Lab who can speak Chinese and work on the problem.
The question of education pricing was raised and Oz, honest again, replied that this really wasn’t an area he could discuss as it wasn’t within his remit. However he did point out that Ebbe Altberg had touched upon pricing in his keynote speech.
Continue reading “Oz Linden Meets The Educators At VWBPE 2015”
