Virtual Worlds – Page 149

April 5, 2014April 5, 2014

LSL Portal Poetry Project: Improving LSL documentation readability

When someone makes a post on April 1st, you get suspicious. When someone makes a post on April 1st that talks of haiku, poetry and the Linden Scripting Language, you get even more suspicious, even if the person is Strife Onizuka, long time resident, one time moderator, long time scripting person. However it seems it’s actually a real project! Here are Strife’s words:

Hello. I’m Strife Onizuka, LSL Portal editor and scriptor. This being the start of the second quarter I come to you today to announce a new project I am spearheading, it’s goal is to make the documentation more accessible to a larger portion of the SL community.

Long have we struggled with how to make the documentation more accessible. One of the most common complaints is that is simply too technical and we are hearing this more often than you would believe from one of SL’s more traditional content creators: descriptive writers. So I am proud to announce that after many sleepless nights we have come up with a way to address this. As the core problem is that the documentation relies upon very specific, technical language we have come up with a way to bring more mundane verbiage into the documentation.

To achieve this end we are announcing the LSL Portal Poetry Project! The goal of the the LPPP (or LP³ as I like to think of it), is to provide poetry for every LSL Event, Function and Constant. More specifically, the form of poetry we have chosen is Haiku. Screen realistate being at a premium haiku requires the minimum amount of space while packing the greatest metaphorical punch.

To illustrate, here is the haiku for llParticleSystem:

Cherry blossom sprites
alight upon fickle breezes
to fall through the ground.

For myself I had to had to have this haiku explained to me. It’s writer explained that the literary expert will be able to extract with great ease the following incites:

Particles in SecondLife are traditional 2D sprites often seen in may games.

That SecondLife not only has wind, which is a bit capricious, it has a full blown weather simulator.

That the particle system has no notion of clipping; particles will go through solid objects, including the ground.

The writer has a tabby that likes to sleep on the keyboard.

As always the LSL Portal needs volunteers. To give you an idea of what we need, some articles already have poems. You can find a list of them here: Articles with haiku

If you would like to help with this project, here are a list of LSL articles in need of haiku: Articles in need of haiku

If writing haiku isn’t where your strength lies (it sure isn’t mine) maybe consider writing examples or just generally expanding on what has already been written: LSL articles in need of an example

For those interested, the runner up to Haiku was Limerick but we had trouble rhyming anything with llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast.

As I said earlier, I thought this was an April fool, but it’s not.

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April 4, 2014

Do Chief Scientists Dream Of Electric Sheep?

Oculus VR like Valve employees so much that they are getting into the habit of making them ex Valve employees. They’ve recently added Aaron Nicholls to the team, who will apparently be working out of Bellevue R&D with Atman Binstock, who used to work for Valve and became Oculus VR chief architecht in March. A year earlier and Tom Forsyth had started the trend of being ex Valve, now Oculus.

Then of course there is Michael Abrash, who is the new Oculus VR chief scientist and used to work for Valve. In the blog post welcoming Michael Abrash to Oculus VR Michael gets more than a little excited about the possibilities of the future of virtual reality. A little too excited to be honest, but you’ve got to have a dream, if you don’t have a dream, how you going to have a dream come true. The problem of course about dreams about virtual reality is that in traditional fiction and film, they are more like nightmares than dreams.

In the blog post Michael says :

Sometime in 1993 or 1994, I read Snow Crash, and for the first time thought something like the Metaverse might be possible in my lifetime.

The good thing about the blog post is that it attempts to move the discussion away from the murky acquisition and back to the concept of virtual reality. This is a noble and important move because the technology trumps the controversy. Michael says:

You get the idea. We’re on the cusp of what I think is not The Next Big Platform, but rather simply The Final Platform – the platform to end all platforms – and the path here has been so improbable that I can only shake my head.

I have to say he sounds a little too excited there, the platform will evolve and so will the technology, the holodeck is not just around the corner and there are going to be many swings and roundabouts before people are able to truly immerse themselves in virtual worlds. However, the excitement in Michael’s post is most definitely to be welcomed, this is after all a technology people have been hoping and waiting for.

There are problems ahead, Hamlet Au over at New World Notes recently highlighted a potential problem : Does Virtual Reality Literally Make Most Women Sick? That post links to a post from Danah Boyd : Is the Oculus Rift sexist? The issue is nausea and this isn’t an off the cuff post from Danah Boyd, there’s real research there. Danah concludes that more research is needed, which is hopefully where funds for VR projects will come into play.

However with Oculus VR, there’s the Facebook angle. In most VR type stories and films, Facebook would be “The Corporation”. They wouldn’t be the good guys, they’d be the guys with power, the ones who know everyone’s secrets and use them for power and influence, so when Michael Abrash says :

That’s why I’ve written before that VR wouldn’t become truly great until some company stepped up and invested the considerable capital to build the right hardware – and that it wouldn’t be clear that it made sense to spend that capital until VR was truly great. I was afraid that that Catch-22 would cause VR to fail to achieve liftoff.

That worry is now gone. Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus means that VR is going to happen in all its glory. The resources and long-term commitment that Facebook brings gives Oculus the runway it needs to solve the hard problems of VR – and some of them are hard indeed. I now fully expect to spend the rest of my career pushing VR as far ahead as I can.

This is where the alarm bells start ringing.

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April 3, 2014April 3, 2014

SL Go Updated Pricing Now Includes Unlimited Monthly Subscription

Linden Lab have blogged news of what may well be a very interesting move by Onlive in terms of their SL Go product aimed at mobile devices. The pricing changes include a reduced per hour pricing but more importantly, there’s a monthly subscription plan.

The update prices are :

Monthly unlimited usage subscription plan for $9.95US/£6.95UK. No commitment – cancel anytime
Reduced hourly rates – only $1US/£0.70UK per hour (the free 20-minute trial remains in effect)

However there’s more, when SL Go was initially launched it was only available to people living in Canada, United Kingdom or United States but now the product is available in 36 countries, including The Vatican City, I wonder if his holiness is popping in now and then. The full list of 36 countries :

Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lichtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, San Marino, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, Vatican City.

These are really positive and brave moves from OnLive, when the product was first launched there was a lot of debate about hourly fees and what many perceived as a 1990’s pricing model. However Dennis Harper of Onlive did say to Draxtor Despres : “We need to study usage pattern and we may be able to in short order offer a subscription package! “

Well it seems they have indeed studied those usage patterns and decided that a subscription package can be offered.

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April 2, 2014April 2, 2014

SL Share Extends To Flickr And Twitter But What Next For SL Profiles?

Linden Lab have blogged that the SL Share feature that was initially introduced to allow people to share photos, status and check ins on Facebook has now been extended to include functionality for Flickr and Twitter.

Personally I feel Flickr and Twitter are a much better fit for Second Life as both allow people to have their Second Life user name as their profile name, whereas Facebook is still in the bah humbug arena regarding pseudonyms.

In both cases they are taking advantage of features and requirements of the respective platforms, with Twitter the hashtag of #SecondLife is automatically added and with Flickr, they respect the fact that maturity ratings are sometimes required.

However there are also other funky features, such as post processing of pictures, as explained in the blog post :

This update will also introduce a set of post-processing filters that you can run your pictures through to create cool one-of-a-kind images! The new filters were inspired by the images posted to Flickr by Second Life Residents. With more than a million uploads, most of them enhanced by some post-processing, we thought it would be great to include this feature right in SLShare. These filters will work regardless of which social network you choose to share your Second Life pictures to.

However if you don’t like those filters, you can use the advanced features and create your own filters, the wiki has more details.

Now to take advantage of these features, you will need to download a special project viewer, which you can find here.

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April 2, 2014

The Drax Files: World Makers – Episode 18 Singing Like A Canary

Episode 18 of The Drax Files: World Makers is out and has thrown a bit of a curve ball by coming out on a Wednesday instead of Friday! Then another curve ball is tossed in by having two people whom live in London speaking with North American accents! I’ll post the video at the end, which is my traditional style with these videos.

This week’s episode features Canary Beck and Harvey Crabsticks who are engaging in immersive theatre within Second Life. The video follows Drax’s tried and tested formula of mixing inworld footage and real life footage, with a youthful looking Canary and Harvey walking the streets of London. Canary Beck is seen wearing a striped dress, which she manages to just about pull off …. wait wait wait, come back, I don’t mean she pulls her dress off! I mean stripes on film isn’t always a good mix.

The video features a behind the scenes look at their forthcoming inworld production of Paradise Lost, in which we do see Canary with her dress off, but tactfully done. The production features 43 roles, played by 8 avatar actors.

Harvey talks of how the actors in the production are real people, something sometimes missed when it comes to virtual world productions, he also mentions that the audience are real people too, again something oft forgotten.

However this episode also shows the advantages of virtual world productions, whereby they can quickly pull 12 sets together and also encourage the audience to view the show via certain camera settings, giving the production team more opportunity to have the show viewed in the settings they feel best befit the production.

However that isn’t to say an inworld production is easy, there are rehearsals and a few hundred hours worth of script development in their production of Paradise Lost. However one of the beauties of virtual world collaboration is again highlighted when it comes to working together, they don’t need to be in the same building to work together and although they are both in the same city, they find it easier at times to meet up inworld to avoid the trials and tribulations of travelling across London to meet.

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