Virtual Worlds – Page 112

November 11, 2014

Radegast Viewer Parked At End Of The Road

Inara Pey recently blogged some sad news regarding the Radegast viewer for Second Life and Opensim. Inara linked to a post from the main developer behind Radegast, Latif Khalifa, in which Latif typed :

It saddens me to have to inform you that I won’t be able to continue work on Radegast or my other opensource projects. My health has been deteriorating over the past few years to this point where my use of computers is down to just a few minutes daily. Not being able to work for several years bring its own set of problems.

Radegast is opensource so if there is interest people could continue improving it.

It’s been a great pleasure working with the Radegast and the wider Second Life communities.

The Radegast viewer won’t be as familiar to people as some of the more popular third party viewers for virtual worlds. That is largely because Radegast is a lightweight client that contains some enhanced accessibility features such as text to speech, which makes it a client that people with visual difficulties may embrace and therefore join virtual world communities.

There’s certainly room in virtual worlds for lightweight clients, even if they don’t come with accessibility features. People may just want to check in when they are on the go, so I don’t think this means the end of the road for lightweight clients and it certainly won’t be the end of the road for clients built with accessibility in mind.

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November 10, 2014November 10, 2014

Drax Files Radio Show Episode 44 Features Interview With Dwarfins Legend Jaimy Hancroft

Episode 44 of The Drax Files Radio Hour With Jo Yardley features an interview with a Belgian chef by the inworld name of Jaimy Hancroft. Jaimy is the owner of the Second Life brand Death Row Designs and also a creator for the fantastical Dwarfins team.

However what makes this interview interesting is just how much enthusiasm Jaimy has for Second Life. Jaimy talks about how she creates, how she enjoys Second Life herself and has great fun with games within Second Life such as The Cornfield and how she also finds the time to make appearances at events and help noobs out when they land in areas of Second Life that advertise themselves to noobs but probably aren’t noob friendly.

In short Jaimy is some sort of RPG wonder woman who seems to be able to bend time and space. However Jaimy also makes some extremely interesting observations, one of which is with regards to the inworld shopping experience and how it’s getting a lift from the number of events that are on the grid these days.

Jaimy points out that although she’s not a fan of the deadlines that events create, events themselves are a great way for creators to get exposure. This is interesting because the Second Life Marketplace has damaged the concept of inworld shopping but obviously not to such an extent as some of us may feel. Jaimy feels that over the last couple of years inworld shopping has improved for her store.

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November 7, 2014

Digital Cybercherries Use Oculus Rift And VR To Take Us Back To An 80’s Style Arcade

Over at New World Notes Hamlet Au recently posted : James Cameron: Virtual Reality a “Yawn” Until it Gets Mass Market Growth, Non-Gaming Experiences. The inspiration from the post comes from the following quote from movie director James Cameron regarding virtual reality :

The question that always occurred to me is, when is it going to be mature, when is it going to be accepted by the public at large, when are people going to start authoring in VR and what will that be?” Cameron said. “What will the level of interactivity with the user be other than just ‘I can stand and look around,'” he elaborated, adding: “If you want to move through a virtual reality it’s called a video game, it’s been around forever.

He has a point, but things are happening with devices such as Oculus Rift and whereas the example I’m going to highlight is game related, it’s game related in a different manner than you may expect. The example I’m highlighting has been talked about on The Road To VR and Gizmodo.

Digital Cybercherries are taking us back to our youth, well some of us, it may be going to a time before you were born for others. They have developed a retro arcade complete with playable arcade machines from the 80’s and early 90’s, playable gameboys, basketball nets, darts, a two lane bowling alley. In short you’re immersed in an 80’s style arcade which you walk through.

Then there’s the icing on the cake, that little bit of extra polish that makes this look so bloody awesome. The retro arcade has cassette tapes with 80’s music which you put into a cassette player and then listen away to those old favourites (or not so favourites). The wonder of this is exemplified in the Gizmodo blog post :

You can even find cassette tapes with ’80s music and stick them into a boombox, then carry it around the arcade with you. Because what’s cooler than playing Missile Command while jamming to The Final Countdown?

Come on, you’ve got to admit that sounds cool!

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November 7, 2014

CDN Teething Problems & Meauxle Bureaux Should Be In Destination Guide

I recently blogged about Meuxle Bureaux in Second Life, home of Michael Linden and The Moles of The Linden Department Of Public Works. I’m not alone in admiring the beauty of this sim, as can be seen from a quick glance on Flickr.

Maddy Gynoid has been there too and blogged about it : Meauxle Bureaux: Neue Heimat für das LDPW. There are some impressive pictures in that post as well as a shout out to someone in a language I’m not familiar with, but I don’t think it’s rude :

Gestern hatte ich im Blog von Ciaran Laval gelesen, dass Linden Lab in den vergangenen Tagen eine Reihe neuer Regionen im Second Life Grid gestartet hat. Eine davon heißt “Meauxle Bureaux” und dient nun allem Anschein nach dem Linden Department Of Public Works (LDPW), sowie den dort arbeitenden Moles und ihrem Chef Michael Linden, als neue Heimat.

I saw Marianne McCann flying off in a helicopter and I also saw Uccello Poultry there. Uccie has also blogged about Meauxle Bureaux. However this brings me to a matter of a technical difficulty I experienced there. I planned to take my snapshots of Meauxle Bureaux last Sunday. Alas the sim would not fully load and what did load, was taking a very long time to do so.

I did the teleport in, teleport out, in, out, in, out, shake it all about trick, but the sim still wouldn’t load. Textures were grey, signs and objects were missing. The problems I was experiencing were not localised to Meuxle Bureaux either. I’m a lot more patient in my old age, I put it down to one of those things and returned on Monday, performance was fine then and has been for me all week. I don’t know if my issues were related to Linden Lab’s new Content Delivery Network but Linden Lab have blogged an update on CDN where they state :

For most users most of the time there has been a big performance improvement in texture and mesh data loading, resulting in faster rez times in new areas. The improvement has been realized both on the official viewer and on third party viewers.

However, we have also seen that some users have had the opposite experience, and have worked with a number of those users to collect detailed data on the nature of the problems and shared it with our CDN provider. We believe that the problems are the result of a combination of the considerable additional load we added to the CDN, and a coincidental additional large load on the CDN from another source. Exacerbating matters, flaws in both our viewer code and the CDN caused recovery from these load spikes to be much slower than it should have been. We are working with our CDN provider to increase capacity and to configure the CDN so that Second Life data availability will not be as affected by outside load. We are also making changes to our code and in the CDN to make recovery quicker and more robust.

Some residents have been feeding back the problems they’ve been experiencing on the official Second Life forums. Some of those problems sound very much like the problems I experienced but I really don’t know if my problems were due to the CDN wobbles.

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November 6, 2014November 7, 2014

The Verge Asks : Can we build a virtual world?

An interesting post on The Verge : The Big Future: Can we build a virtual world? The question may initially seem odd to those who have experienced virtual worlds such as Second Life, Kitely, OpenSim and are keeping their eyes on future virtual worlds such as High Fidelity and Linden Lab’s next generation platform. However the question is one that goes beyond the current generation of virtual worlds :

The web is fine, but how do we get the internet we always wanted — a “real” space you can walk around in, like the Metaverse from Snow Crash? It’s not a new question, but it’s one that’s being taken a little more seriously now that a huge company like Facebook is putting its weight (and its money) behind virtual reality. In this week’s Big Future, we look at what it takes to build a convincing virtual world, why we’re not there yet, and what we might do if we got one.

The Metaverse that exists in Snow Crash has long been the inspiration and dream of many a virtual world enthusiast, but will we ever get there? Indeed do we really want to get there? That level of immersion may well read well in a novel but can it ever really be a place that will happily co-exist with the physical world?

There will be no real answers to this until we have an answer to the question “Are we there yet?” As The Verge article states, it’s easy to trick the eyes, it’s a lot more difficult to trick our other senses and natural motion. For example The Verge talks about walking in a virtual world and how that’s far more of a challenge than tricking our eyes. I remain sceptical because of the sheer number of peripherals required at the moment to achieve greater immersion. However over time those peripherals will become less intrusive and more intuitive.

Obviously the full on immersion that some crave may not be the route to go. Whereas I fully expect greater immersion to open many a great door, I do feel that some doors may be better if they remain locked. The Verge article does mention the current virtual world scene :

We already have examples of “virtual worlds” like Second Life, and they’ll only get cooler with immersion. But some of the most exciting possibilities involve blending the physical world with VR. Sharing experiences will become more intense, and online research takes on a whole new meaning.

However one area that The Verge article doesn’t touch upon is who will be running the bold new worlds.

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