Virtual Worlds – Page 122

August 29, 2014

High Fidelity Take Us Behind The Easy Scene

Back on August 14th High Fidelity’s band, AKA, that’s their name, published a video of the band performing a cover of the Commodores song “Easy”. The original video was accompanied by a promise that executive producer Ryan Karpf would provide a behind the scenes follow up post.

That behind the scenes post appeared this week : “Easy” Behind the Scenes. Inara Pey has eloquently covered this and Ryan’s hypnotic eyebrows already. However I’m going to cover it too, although I may pass on mentioning Ryan’s hypnotic eyebrows. That doesn’t count as mentioning them!

First of all, the production of this video involves a lot of peripherals. The actors used PrimeSense or Asus 3D cameras. PrimeSense were acquired by Apple just over twelve months ago. Faceshift software was used for the expression tracking.

Emily (0n vocals) and Ozan (on guitar) used PrioVR upper body suits.

Camera man Grayson was using, to quote Ryan, something like the Elgato capture unit. Audio editing was done in Logic and video editing done in Premiere. I’m assuming these are products from Apple and Adobe as those are the companies I know produce products with those names.

Ok so first of all, the average user is not going to have access to all of those peripherals and pieces of software. However we should bear in mind that this video and the follow up one are aimed at demonstrating the capabilities of High Fidelity. At this point you may be thinking that the future’s so bright I’ve gotta wear shades.

However that’s not all that was involved, far from it. Next came a Javascript script to utilise nine different camera positions. The beauty of the script was that it mapped to different keys on the keyboard, therefore camera 1 may well have been mapped to key 1, camera 2 to key 2 etc.

However they were far from good to go, whilst building the set they ran into a bug that High Fidelity’s Alpha users had reported. Basically having too many models in close proximity caused the server to crash. A technical explanation of the issue is provided by rad Hefta-Gaub. At this point I should warn you to beware of geeks bearing gifs. This is all in the video, well not the part about geeks bearing gifs.

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August 27, 2014

LL Issue Reminder And Warning On Skill Gaming Policy

Linden Lab have issued a reminder : New Skill Gaming Policy in Effect September 1, 2014. The blog post also contains a warning that the new policy will be enforced. Skill Gaming in Second Life is basically defined as :

A game where the outcome is determined by skill, rather than by chance.
Has the option for payment to participate in Linden Dollars.
Pays out in Linden Dollars.
Is legal according to United States and international law.

That’s pretty much the gist of it, so if the game allows you to pay in with the option of paying out if your skill allows you to win, then it’s a skill game. Now if those criteria aren’t met, say for example you can pay in but there’s a random chance of the game paying out, such as a traditional fruit machine style game, then that’s gambling and is strictly forbidden.

Now if you haven’t been paying attention then you may be wondering how on earth Linden Lab know if the game you play or create meets this criteria. Well that’s what the Skill Gaming Policy is for. Games of skill will only be allowed to be played on approved sims. Only approved games, created by approved creators are permitted and they can only be operated by approved operators. This means that if your game meets the skill gaming definition, you will still be breaching the rules of the new policy if the game, the land or the person operating the game have not been approved.

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August 26, 2014

Virtual Reality Potentially Taking Killer Apps Too Far

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes has posted a link to an excellent article in The Verge : The Rise And Fall And Rise Of Virtual Reality. The tag line for The Verge’s article is : In the wake of Facebook’s purchase of Oculus VR, can this revolutionary technology triumph anew?

The premise of the article, as the headline suggests is that Virtual Reality has never really got going yet. They see the internet as an alternative, not a version of virtual reality. This is not a short article, but it does make for fascinating reading. However the more relevant part of the article for people who read blogs such as this and Hamlet’s blog comes with the Facebook QA, which is an interview with Second Life co-founder and now Vp of Engineering at Facebook Cory Ondrejka.

In the interview Cory talks of the advantages of using a headset such as the Oculus Rift and how immersive it can be. People may be wondering how people are going to use these devices and Cory touches upon an area that links in with the Facebook theme but also offers an interesting use case :

So let’s say you have a friend getting married and you can’t be there. Today you’re going to get texts and videos. But what if you could put a 360 video camera in the audience? Then, what you have is an ability to really feel like you’re there, and look around and see what’s going on in a way that’s making an incredible connection. Moviemakers will take advantage of this. You think about what you could do with director’s commentary or additional scenes. What if you could turn around and have these 360-degree views of the set while they’re shooting? Wouldn’t that be the coolest thing ever?

I’ve seen people touch upon similar areas before in terms of a rock concert. Hey you can’t get a ticket to the live event, but how about a ticket for the virtual reality event? There’s potential there. I’m not going to reveal too much of Cory’s interview, it’s well worth reading if you have an interest in virtual reality, as is the whole article but let’s get to the killer app issue because the lack of a killer app has been cited as one of the failures of virtual worlds as we know them :

What’s going to be the killer app? While we don’t know exactly what it’s gonna be, we’re confident there will be a bunch of them. And that killer app is gonna be so much better than anything you can experience on a screen or phone.

However some people have a different view and we may have to rejig how we describe killer apps. In an article in Gamesindusty.biz, unrelated to the excellent Verge article,Cloudhead Games’ Denny Unger warns :We’re very close to having the first death in VR.

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August 25, 2014

High Fidelity’s Worklist For Developers

High Fidelity seem to be ramping up their communications this month and they have posted a video on YouTube to inform people of their Worklist. I’ll embed the video at the end of the post, it’s not a long video.

High Fidelity is currently in the Alpha stage and is an open platform covered by an Apache 2.0 licence. This means the code can be downloaded from GitHub, forked etc. Now you could just look at the code and play around with it or you can go via the Worklist route and look at which issues have been posted. Now if you’re a developer and fancy doing some of this work, you can bid on the work and get paid when it’s complete.

Now you may be wondering what they mean by getting paid, are they talking about virtual money? Well from a cursory glance at the jobs done page it looks as if they’re paying people in US dollars, not virtual money.

The High Fidelity team will work with people who bid on work, so you’re not going to be left out on a limb.

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