Virtual Worlds – Page 151

March 27, 2014

Minecraft’s Markus Persson On Why He Turned His Back On Oculus Rift

Markus “Notch” Persson is the owner of Mojang, the company behind Minecraft and he has also announced he has decided to part ways with Oculus after they were purchased by Facebook. Notch explains his reasons in a blog post entitled : Virtual Reality is going to change the world.

A few things are clear from the blog post, Notch is very excited about virtual reality and he was very excited about Oculus Rift too. How excited you may ask, well on the Kickstarter page for Oculus Rift, those who pledged over $5,000 got all the goodies backers at other levels got plus:

VISIT OCULUS FOR THE DAY : We’ll fly you out to the Oculus lab where you’ll spend a day hanging out with the team and checking out all of our latest work (and maybe playing a few games too). You’ll also receive a developer kit, a copy of Doom 3 BFG, Developer Center access, the t-shirt, and the poster, all signed by the entire Oculus team, in person.

Notch qualified for that offer, although he’s not a US resident as far as I know, so I’m not sure how he sneaked in, but hey, he pledged funds for this kickstarter, but, as he explains in his blog post, the Facebook purchase changed the game :

Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers. People have made games for Facebook platforms before, and while it worked great for a while, they were stuck in a very unfortunate position when Facebook eventually changed the platform to better fit the social experience they were trying to build.

Don’t get me wrong, VR is not bad for social. In fact, I think social could become one of the biggest applications of VR. Being able to sit in a virtual living room and see your friend’s avatar? Business meetings? Virtual cinemas where you feel like you’re actually watching the movie with your friend who is seven time zones away?

But I don’t want to work with social, I want to work with games.

In some ways it may have been better had Notch waited to see what transpired, but as someone who put his money where his mouth is on this product, I certainly respect his view and as I’ve said on these pages before, I’m not Facebook’s greatest fan.

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March 26, 2014

Facebook Buys Oculus Rift, Kickstarter Gets Kicked In The Teeth

At times it is best to take a deep breath and not blog, which is what I did last night when I read the news that Oculus Joins Facebook. The news that Facebook, the company who kick the virtual out of reality when it comes to their main platform were buying a piece of hardware based on putting the virtual into reality was beyond irksome for me. Judging by the comments around I’m not alone in that view, although I’ve calmed down somewhat now.

Over on Reddit Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey has been trying to reassure people, and hasn’t been succeeding that well, although this isn’t helped by Palmer himself seeming to be very naive about Facebook :

Q. What does this mean in terms of data collection on FB’s end? Will us early Oculus users have to mitigate the NSA everytime we decide to jack in?

A. Nothing changes. Keep in mind that Mark Zuckerberg has publicly spoken against NSA surveillance.

I’m not a big fan of Facebook, I don’t like a lot of their policies, I don’t like the way they treat people’s privacy and I don’t like their attitude to pseudonyms. However a lot of people do get pleasure out of Facebook, it’s a product with plenty of reach and plenty of users, even if it is apparently on the wane. They are at their heart a data mining company, it’s a trade off between users creating free content and being rewarded for that free content by being able to stay in touch with family and friends, it’s a model that works but it most definitely has a dark side. The comments on the Oculus blog should also firmly put to bed claims that Facebook comments mean people behave better, some of those comments are horrendous.

There’s a lot of anger, there’s a lot of disappointment and there’s a lot of debate. Some of the anger is misplaced, some of the disappointment is misplaced too. However the people with whom I have the most sympathy are the Kickstarter backers, some of whom are also expressing unhappiness over this move. Now if there’s one group of people whom Facebook and Oculus should be scrambling to appease it’s the Kickstarter backers because without them, this whole debate wouldn’t be raging as there would be no Oculus Rift for Facebook to buy.

The other issue is that this is a major kick in the teeth for crowd funding and Kickstarter itself.

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March 25, 2014

The Slow Down In Region Losses … With Charts!

To fully appreciate the full extent of the slow down in region losses it’s best to turn to an expert. Unfortunately Tyche Shepherd doesn’t blog here, so you’ll have to read me instead. However the good news, I’m basing this post on the expert work of Tyche Shepherd and Tyche has kindly agreed to let me use her charts. Now please remember, these charts are Tyche’s work and copyrighted by Tyche, in other words, they shouldn’t be used without permission.

Ok on with the show.

Private Region Changes 2012 – 2014 (2 years)

Chart Of Private Region Changes 2012 - 2014 — Private Region Changes 2012 – 2014

Unfortunately this chart doesn’t display well on a blog this small, you can get a much better view of it on SLUniverse because there when you click the link, it enlarges. This chart shows the change in private regions between 1st Jan 2012 and 29th December 2013, so that’s around 2 years, give or take a few days. Private regions shrunk from 23,857 down to 19,273. A loss of 4,584 regions or 19.2%. That’s an alarming figure but hopefully you can see the slow down. The second half of the chart shows very few weeks where the third line down was reached.

Private Region Changes 1st January 2012 – 23rd December 2012

Chart Of Grid Size Image — Private region changes during 2012

This chart shows the private region changes during most of 2012, 51 weeks of it. Two things to note, the losses during 2012 came in at 2,863, this means the majority of the two year losses came during 2012, it works out at around 62.46% of the two year losses coming during 2012, which of course means, the slow down in private region losses did not get well under way until we hit 2013.

Private Region Changes 30th December 2012 – 29th December 2013

Private Region Changes 2013 Chart — Private Region Changes 2013

Above is the chart for those losses in 2013 and what we can see is that there was a total net loss of 1,719 regions or 8.2% for the year. As I said, this is considerably lower than during 2012 but still probably a little high. The losses are heavily loaded towards the first half of the year, the slow down really starts to become apparent around July and August but as we head into the Autumn we do some weeks where the losses picked up again. None of this really indicated what was to come during the first few weeks of 2014, but the slow down is most definitely apparent.

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March 23, 2014

Second Life Grid Size – Steady As She Goes

Tyche “Statto” Shepherd’s weekly grid report breaks the news this week that the Second Life grid size has remained static for a second week in a row, although the net number of private regions grew by one sim, this was cancelled out by one Linden owned region disappearing.

The current scores on the doors are a total number of 26,178 regions on the Second Life grid, with 19,195 being private estates and 6,983 being Linden owned.

Now to get this shift in fortunes into some sort of perspective, let’s compare the scores on the doors during the first few months of 2012, 2013 and 2014.

2012

Type	01/01/2012	25/03/2012	Change	Percentage
Estate	23,857	23,046	-811	-3.4%
Linden Owned	7,221	7,105	-116	-1.60%
Overall	31,078	30,151	-927	-2.98%

In the above table we can see that overall losses were over 900 regions in the first few months of 2012, coming in at just under 3%. This table is a little bit odd because there were a higher number of Linden owned regions disappearing than we’ll see for 2013 and 2014, but this table is also the one with the largest losses for private regions too, both in numbers and percentage wise.

2013

Type	30/12/2012	24/03/2013	Change	Percentage
Estate	20,992	20,469	-523	-2.49%
Linden Owned	7,102	7,088	-14	-0.2%
Overall	28,094	27,557	-537	-1.91%

Here we can see that losses were still rather high with a net loss of over 500 private regions, but that in itself was an improvement on the early part of 2012, although the figures look disappointing there is indication of a slow down with a net loss that is almost 300 less than a similar period in 2013.

2014

Type	30/12/2013	23/03/2014	Change	Percentage
Estate	19,273	19,195	-78	-0.40%
Linden Owned	6,986	6,983	-3	-0.04%
Overall	26,259	26,178	-81	-0.31%

Here we can see that the slowdown in net region losses is getting quite significant. A net loss of just 78 private regions as opposed to the 523 in 2013 and the 811 in 2012 is extremely impressive. That’s just 9.61% of the net losses we saw during a similar period in 2012 and just 14.91% of the net losses we saw during a similar period in 2013.

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March 22, 2014

The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 11 – Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Gray

Episode 11 of The Drax Files Radio hour opens with Bill May introducing the show and visiting Drax in real life. The show as usual covers a variety of topics, with the main attraction of this week’s show being an interview about virtual reality with Ben Lang of the road to VR Blog.

Ben talks about virtual reality hardware and its uses, where the technology is heading and why it isn’t as difficult to use some of this hardware as some may feel. This is a subject that Mona Eberhardt has been covering and Mona recently blogged : VR headset designs: Maybe we’re missing something? The interview with Ben makes for very interesting listening, this is something that Drax pulls off so very well.

They were due to interview Emily Short of Versu fame, but Emily has politely declined. Has Emily been knobbled? Has someone made her an offer she can’t refuse? Is this a case of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Gray wherein Emily is put in an impossible position by unknown forces? Well no, the reality is likely that Emily has said her piece on the subject and now wants to move on. I remain deeply disappointed by Linden Lab’s decision to turn their back on Versu, but the decision has been made and although it’s a massive loss, it remains Linden Lab’s right to make that call.

Then there’s the issue that has been irritating many people, especially Drax’s co-host Jo Yardley who recently blogged : Second Life advertising hits new low. The issue :

Second Life advert example — Second Life Advert

Bikini Babes without machine guns. Yes this is a tacky advert in many ways and yet it will appeal to some and that’s the aim of any advertising campaign. Are there better ways of advertising Second Life? Absolutely and Botgirl Questi touches this subject matter in a post entitled : Second Life Advertising: Beyond Bikinis and Vampires

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