Virtual Worlds – Page 124

August 18, 2014

High Fidelity – We Want To Make A Supersonic World Out Of You

The High Fidelity team seem to be having such a good time, having a ball and whereas they may not be quite travelling at the speed of light, the team are working at reducing the curse of latency, as they explain in their blog post : Measuring The Speed Of Sound.

We are obsessed with reducing latency, because we have observed aspects of 1:1 interaction which are broken by too much latency.

The issue that seems to be causing most concern is that of audio, rather than video. I’d really like to know what the mobile phone has ever done to Philip Rosedale. Did he have a hot tip on the horses that he received too late to place a bet on because of latency? There’s more to this than meets the eye, or in this case, ear.

However back to the technology. The High Fidelity team conducted a test, as they explain in their blog post :

We connect two high quality microphones directly to the two input channels of a digital oscilloscope, and we then use either a metronome or simply snapping our fingers or clapping to create a sharp audio signal that can be detected by both microphones. By positioning one microphone at the input of an audio system and the other at the output, we can then easily and reliably use the scope to capture the delay over multiple samples down to millisecond resolution.

The results of the test were interesting, Skype winning the day over mobile phones. However with regards to mobile phones themselves, it seems Verizon are quite a bit more efficient than AT&T or T-Mobile if you’re making your call in the San Francisco area. Verizon’s measured 280msecs for 1-way latency, compared to 400-450msecs for AT&T and T-Mobile.

Skype blew them all away however, in terms of end to end latency, as the blog post explains :

Skype, by comparison, generally outperforms the cell phones in terms of end-to-end latency: we measured audio delays of from 100-200msecs for various combinations of audio and video calls, where the two endpoints were on the same WiFi network. So this means that with a packet delay of about 40 msecs (which is what we typically see when pinging Boston from San Francisco), a cross-country audio or even video call on Skype is going to come in with about 250msecs of delay and be a bit better than using a cell phone.

Pretty impressive results, but far from good enough for the ambitions of the High Fidelity team.

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August 17, 2014

Second Life Should Cut The Facebook Cord

Facebook has never been a good fit for Second Life users, whereas other social networks such as Twitter and now Google + have no objection to people having accounts with their Second Life names, Facebook has stuck rigidly to it’s real name policy. Obviously this policy is somewhat flawed in as much as there’s no real authentication of those real names, but it remains a poor fit.

Yes there are plenty of people who are happy to use their real name Facebook accounts and link them to their Second Life accounts, but it remains a Second Life unfriendly domain. Now comes news that Facebook have donated $10,000 to a politician who is fighting gay marriage.

Facebook made the donation in May to Utah attorney general Sean Reyes and have defended their decision, in a statement to the Huffington Post they said :

Facebook has a strong record on LGBT issues and that will not change, but we make decisions about which candidates to support based on the entire portfolio of issues important to our business, not just one. A contribution to a candidate does not mean that we agree with every policy or position that candidate takes. We made this donation for the same reason we’ve donated to Attorneys General on the opposite side of this issue — because they are committed to fostering innovation and an open Internet.

There is some merit in that statement, many of us will vote for political parties with whom we disagree with on certain issues. However gay marriage is quite a big ticket item to be overlooking in favour of a so called open internet. Facebook’s defence of their support is extremely mealy mouthed and does them very little credit.

However the wider point is that Linden Lab should be promoting Second Life on networks that are more Second Life friendly than Facebook. Indeed Linden Lab have their own outlets such as the blog and Second Life profiles in which they should be communicating with Second Life users.

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August 17, 2014

High Fidelity’s AKA Get Easy Like Sunday Morning

The High Fidelity team have ramped up their blog discussion during August and there’s a lot of interesting and fun stuff to look at. There’s a post about the importance of the speed of sound, there’s a post about Javascript from Paloma .. Paloma being a 17 year old intern and not a place and then there’s a post about frogs who aren’t frogs sitting on lilypads and singing.

Now as this is Sunday and I need to shave and hit the pub to watch a bit of footie, I’ll focus on the frogs who aren’t frogs sitting on lilypads and singing. We’re promised a follow up post from executive producer Ryan Karpf to explain the concepts behind this post at a later date. However for now we’re left to see some members of the High Fidelity team at play.

Ryan, Chris Collins, Emily Donald and Ozan Serim all feature in this video as well as a guy with very large shoulders whom looks uncannily like the avatar form of former Linden Lab employee Andrew Meadows (AKA Employee Number 2 when he worked at The Lab). However as this avatar isn’t introduced I’m not 100% sure who it is.

The post introduces a name for the High Fidelity band, they are known as AKA, they are also known as AKA too.

The video in the post exemplifies High Fidelity in action as well as Chris Collins reminding me of a character from Monkey Island for some reason. However what we see here is facial expressions and once again the mouth movements are pretty damn impressive.

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August 16, 2014

SL Go Viewer Improvements And Offer Of Paid Work For Viewer Developers

Inara Pey brings news of some improvements to the SL Go Viewer from OnLive. The improvements include SL share for Flickr and Twitter now working as well as a fix that means fitted mesh now works properly via the SL Go viewer. SL Share for Facebook should also work but Inara doesn’t have a Facebook account to test that with.

SL Go offers the potential for people using mobile devices to use Second Life as well as offering the opportunity for people running older hardware to get a better experience. This is because you run the Second Life viewer via Onlive’s hardware and therefore you can have higher graphics settings without bringing your machine or mobile device to its knees and feel like you’re walking through treacle. This of course comes at a cost, which is currently comes with the following options :

$9.95 (£6.95) per month for unlimited access. Starts with a 7 Day Free Trial.
Pay as you go for only $1.00 (£0.70) per hour.

I’m not associated with SL Go in any shape or form, nor am I on their list of bloggers, but I will say that this is not a bad deal at all for those who want to explore Second Life. The system does have some drawbacks, one of which Inara explains in her post :

There is still no capability to save snapshots locally. This isn’t surprising, given SL Go is a streamed service, rather than something running locally with access to the local hard / flash drive, and so is likely going to take a lot more banging on things before it works – if it can be made to work.

As I said earlier, you use SL Go via their hardware and therefore the local disk drive is going to be their hardware. This should not be insurmountable. There are security issues with allowing people access to the SL Go local hard drives, but with some care this could be worked around. Another option would be for a SL Go viewer only email texture option, although this would be rather clunky for end users, it would work.

Inara also posted an very interesting blog about the fitted mesh improvements as well as information regarding paid contract work for viewer developers : SL Go: viewer update fixes fitted mesh issue.

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August 14, 2014

Virtual Worlds Should Pay Heed To The Rise Of The Orcs

Earlier this year Mitch Wagner had an article published in Information Week about High Fidelity : Second Life Founder Pursues Second Chance. The article talked of how Second Life had not reached mainstream appeal and pondered whether High Fidelity can. Mitch wasn’t convinced because of the time investment, but he did acknowledge that Second Life got a lot right. However for the real reason Second Life hasn’t reached mass appeal we need to go to the comments on the article and consider the issue of Orcs :

Second Life would have fared better if it had appealed to MMORPG fans, the primary proven market for such activities. Philip Rosedale, you need orcs.

This comment misses the point of Second Life somewhat and yet in doing so, highlights one of the issues for Second Life and any other virtual world. People see Second Life as a singular place, it’s not, but the architecture of the platform can make it appear so, which brings us to another comment on Orcs :

I think the Orcs comment is spot on. It’s one thing to fix the technological elements, but Second Life never appealed to me because it was so open and amorphous. Part of the fun of an immersive experience is having an objective and a set of limitations to work within (or against). An open world where you can do anything sounds great, but then you run up against the limits of your own imagination.

This comment hits the nail firmly on the head. Second Life needs to deliver experiences as well as offering open creativity, people want something to do. This also goes back to the points Mitch made about time investment, people want to pop into a virtual world, experience something and logout. They don’t want to build, they want to be guided. The problem here isn’t Second Life itself, it’s the way people view Second Life as .. well, Second Life. I’ve said something along these lines before, but for Second Life to reach mainstream appeal it requires people to stop talking about Second Life. This may sound somewhat odd but my point is that Second Life should be viewed as the technology. The experiences the places people visit, the places people learn at, the places people role-play, they should be at the forefront of the major discussion, Second Life should be consigned to the geeky conversation about technology.

Now of course virtual worlds offer a sandbox experience and the concept is absolutely brilliant. Virtual worlds such as Second Life, Kitely, Inworldz, OpenSim etc. offer authors, creators, designers the opportunity to build their very own stage and bring their own visions to life. This really is a fantastic opportunity for people who want to get creative, to do so. However there are many many people who want to be guided through an experience, they want to teleport right in to the end product. Virtual worlds do indeed offer great potential but to some, a blank canvas is very difficult to grapple with.

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