Games – Page 7 – Ciaran Laval

January 19, 2015

Oculus VR And Linden Lab Both Hiring As Development Of VR Gathers Pace

A sign of a healthy market can sometimes be found in the number of vacancies in that sector. Sometimes a number of vacancies can indicate that a company is not the best place to work because there’s a lot of churn. However, let’s be positive here.

Oculus VR and Linden Lab are both hirng and both list plenty of vacancies. Both companies also have plenty of perks. Reuters have reported : Facebook hiring spree hints at ambitions in virtual reality and beyond. Whereas this indicates Facebook hiring going beyond Oculus, there are an impressive number of job listings at Oculus :

Oculus Rift, the maker of virtual reality headsets that Facebook acquired in a $2 billion deal last year, is among the key areas slated for growth, with 54 jobs listed on its website, according to a review by Reuters of listings.

Oculus are advertising positions for Software Engineers, Hardware Engineers, Content, including a game designer, Resaearch, Recruiting, Operations, Sales, Marketing, Design & User Experience, Interns and Co-ops and University Grads, Masters & PHDS. Whereas this doesn’t give us a clear indication of where Oculus are going as a team, it is interesting that they are advertising for Unreal Engine and Unity engineers. Are Oculus planning on making games or are they planning on making sure games work well with Oculus?

Oculus offer some interesting perks :

Perks include flexible hours, free food, happy hours, team trips, free Oculus hardware, and much more. We offer competitive salaries and a full range of benefits including comprehensive health care and 401k.

Some of those perks I’ve seen cited as being a barrier to entry, but I’ll come on to that later. Oculus also state that they are an equal opportunity employer :

Oculus VR, LLC is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Employment with Oculus is governed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.

Very noble indeed. As for Linden Lab, their careers page lists around a quarter of the number Oculus do, but that’s still a very healthy 14 positions.

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January 8, 2015

The Virtual Reality Battle For Standards Is Coming

There’s a lot of excitement around about the future of Virtual Reality (VR from now on). There are a lot of gadgets, devices and potential. However there’s also going to be the inevitable battle to win the war on standards and protocols.

We’ve been here before in many ways, Blu-Ray v HD-DVD. Those of us who are a bit longer in the tooth can remember VHS v Betamax. There will be lots of other examples. Arguments will always rage about which format was the better one and why the better one doesn’t always win, but generally one format wins and the same surely has to be true for VR.

Initially we’ll probably find experiences optimised for the Oculus Rift, or optimised for a rival headset. Eventually, for the sake of consumers, that optimisation for a brand will need to be replaced by optimisation for a standard. For example consumers won’t want a headset for Second Life, a headset for Linden Lab’s next gen Virtual World, a headset for OpenSim, a headset for a game or MMO and so forth. Consumers will want a choice of headsets that work pretty much across the board. Obviously some headsets will be better than others but they should all work to a set of standards and protocols that mean software developers optimise their product for those standards and protocols.

At CES 2014 the BBC reported that Valve were making steps in this direction :

Valve designer Brian Coomer says the company is “days away” from releasing a VR software development kit that will give game makers a standard way to provide an interface for VR controllers.

I’m not quite sure what happened there because I haven’t heard much about this since. However at CES2015 noises are being made in this direction by Razer with their Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) Hacker Dev Kit.

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January 6, 2015

The Future’s So Bright You’ve Gotta Wear Goggles But Don’t Write Off Second Life Yet

As we enter 2015 an awful lot of people seem to be getting very excited about the forthcoming VR boom. I do anticipate a VR boom, I just don’t see it really happening this year. Virtual worlds such as Second Life, OpenSim, Kitely, Inworldz are more likely to keep hold of their communities in the short term because, that’s where the communities currently are and the brave new worlds aren’t ready yet.

However some people feel that 2015 will be the year where VR goes big, I’m more in the camp of 2015 being a year of tease and talk rather than mass adoption. However there are new and interesting things on the horizon that will get people interested in VR and they’re not just in games and virtual worlds. Storytelling is a big potential market here as is live music and theatre performances.

Peter Diamindis over at the singularity hub is, not surprisingly, excited about the future of VR : These 11 Technologies Will Go Big in 2015 :

Expect a lot more action on the virtual and augmented reality front. 2014 saw the $2B acquisition of Oculus Rift by Facebook. In 2015, we’ll see action from companies like Philip Rosedale’s High Fidelity (the successor to Second Life), immersive 3D 360-degree cameras from companies like Immersive Media (the company behind Google’s Streetview), Jaunt, and Giroptic. Then there are game changers like Magic Leap (in which Google just led a $542 million investment round) that are developing technology to “generate images indistinguishable from real objects and then being able to place those images seamlessly into the real world.” Oculus, the darling of CES for the past few years, will be showing its latest Crescent Bay prototype and hopefully providing a taste of how its headset will interact with Nimble VR’s hand- and finger-tracking inputs. Nine new VR experiences will be premiering at the Sundance Film Festival this year, spanning from artistic, powerful journalistic experiences like Project Syria to full “flying” simulations where you get to “feel” what it would be like for a human to fly.

I’m certainly a big fan of the direction High Fidelity are heading in and with the platform being so open, there’s a lot of potential for people to grasp hold of it, but I think High Fidelity is also a good example of how much ground work has to be done before people adopt. I’m excited about the future of High Fidelity and I certainly expect to see a lot more people experiencing and talking about High Fidelity in 2015 but I don’t see many thousands of people leaving Second Life for High Fidelity just yet.

Over at AD Week Christopher Heing is talking about marketing creativity with VR : How Oculus Rift Is About to Reshape Marketing Creativity Brands are enamored with the potential of 360-degree storytelling. The storytelling angle sold this to me, but the article also talks about Second Life :

Nancy Bennett is a virtual-reality marketing veteran. (Yes, such people actually exist and are about to become hot commodities among talent recruiters.) In the mid-2000s, Bennett had her avatar boots on the Internet-code-built ground of Second Life, constructing cyber experiences for her employer at the time, MTV Networks.

Of course, Second Life never really took off. So with her been there, done that perspective several years later as chief content officer at Two Bit Circus, she does not deal in hyperbole when it comes to the impact the much-hyped virtual reality headset Oculus Rift will have on marketing. Rather, Bennett leans on data. One-third of her agency’s new business in 2014 was powered by the Oculus Rift developer’s kit, helping grow her 2-year-old Los Angeles digital shop from 15 to 35 employees.

When people talk about Second Life never really taking off they’re really talking in terms of mass adoption by the mainstream and that’s something that can’t really be argued with. However the point people miss so often when they talk about brave new worlds is that they recognise that there’s something in virtual communities and communications but they can’t quite figure out what that is. The Oculus Rift may well answer some of the questions, or it may be that the answer is that virtual worlds are simply a niche product. Time will tell.

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December 31, 2014

2014 Reviewed All In One Post

If you’re read my other two posts reviewing then there’s nothing new here in this one, it’s just a merging of the two posts to make it easier for future reference. This means it will be a long post, with pictures, videos and probably some errors.

January

January started with a look back to 2013 and the number of private region losses. The scores on the door from Tyche Shepherd displayed a slow down on the number of regions leaving the Second Life grid, something that would continue during 2014.

2012 Net Private Region Losess – 2865 (12.0%)
2013 Net Private Region Losses – 1719 (8.2%)

The virtual world of Kitely moved to a different pricing model which largely did away with the pay by the minute options as these had not been popular.

Blackened Mirror poster should be here — The Blackened Mirror Poster

Season 2 of The Blackened Mirror was taking a mid-season break but would return by the end of January. The show was recorded in Second Life.

Linden Lab were Raising The Roof : The HTTP Project. This project, which had started in 2012 was aimed at improving HTTP communications to improve the end user experience. Linden Lab would continue working on improvements during the year.

Second Life users were getting frustrated by tax and account information requests from Linden Lab. They would continue to be frustrated by these requests throughout the year despite Linden Lab improving their communications and information on these issues.

Second Life got a mention in the comedy show, 2 Broke Girls.

Then came the storm to warm up many a chilly January evening, Cloud Party announced that they would be closing their virtual doors on February 21st.

This was quickly followed by even more news to warm up January, Aston Villa fan and Linden Lab CEO, Rod Humble, was leaving Linden Lab. This created a Twitter storm.

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December 31, 2014

2014 Reviewed Part 2 : July To December

In this post I will review 2014 from a largely virtual world perspective for the months July to December. This is part 2 , part 1 is the post before this one. I’ll combine both posts into another post for easier future reference once they are both completed. These posts will miss lots of big and interesting stories because the nature of the beast demands some brevity. These post may well look longer than they actually are at first glance because of images and pictures. The aim of posts such as these are to give a brief overview of the year, rather than an in depth review. An in depth review is too long for a blog post, it may make for an interesting book.

July

New changes to Skill Gaming policies in Second Life were coming to the fore in July, the result would be a learning curve for Linden Lab, creators and region owners. This was not a smooth process. KR Engineering, creator of the very popular Greedy Greedy announced they would be releasing a free to play only version of the game to ensure they did not have to deal with the Skill Gaming Policy.

Experience keys were the flavour of the month as Linden Lab invited us to the Cornfield to experience the new experiences!

Linden Lab updated section 2.3 of their terms of service. The update wasn’t really convincing and remains problematic. CG Textures, who now forbid use of their textures in Linden Lab products remained unconvinced that any of their concerns had been addressed at all and told Jo Yardley :

I’m afraid this does not change the situation for us.

I’m not sure why it’s so difficult for Linden Lab to address this issue.

Linden Lab announced upcoming improvements to Second Life, including experience keys beta, improving group chat, implementing the chrome embedded framework and more improvements for Mesh and texture loading.

I covered the University Of The West Of England teaching an MA in Virtual Worlds within Second Life. This course was aimed at those who want to teach in virtual worlds but some of those taking the course were actually just interested in the subject matter.

Despite the slow down in the loss of private regions in Second Life, the overall amount was still dropping. Tyche Shepherd informed us that the number of private regions had slipped below 19,000 for the first time since 15th June 2008.

The new Skill Gaming policy in Second Life, which had initially been pencilled in to be enforced from August 1st had its deadline pushed back to September 1st.

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