Virtual Worlds – Page 31

December 23, 2016

First UCC SL All Set For Christmas Plus Plenty Of Other Festive Attractions Available

The virtual world offers an escape from the physical world this holiday and after spending time shopping this morning in a supermarket where it looked more like the Zombie Apocalypse was coming this weekend rather than the supermarket being closed for one day, I have to say that a virtual setting has distinct advantages.

I decided to pop along to the First United Church of Christ and Conference Center in Second Life to see how they were getting on with their Christmas preparations and a very festive sight it is.

This region changes with the season, so a change to a snow filled setting was not a surprise, but snow works well in Second Life, rather oddly I find it doesn’t work so well for snapshots from Second Life, you really need to visit the snowy settings to get the full and immersive beauty.

Continue reading “First UCC SL All Set For Christmas Plus Plenty Of Other Festive Attractions Available”

November 11, 2016

High Fidelity Now Available On Steam Early Access

An Image should be here

High Fidelity, the virtual world and virtual reality platform, arrived on Steam early access this week for Windows users. The welcome message states :

We’re incredibly excited to launch High Fidelity on Steam Early Access!

High Fidelity is an open-source virtual reality platform that gives everyone the power to create, explore, and share virtual spaces. It works with both Oculus Rift and Vive, and you can also run it on your PC in desktop mode if you don’t have a headset.

We’re looking forward to your feedback! We expect to learn important lessons about the needs of social VR from the active, engaged, and connected users here on Steam.

There’s a notice that you need a virtual reality headset to use the software, but as the above message informs us, you can run the software without a headset. However the minimum specs should be noted :

MINIMUM:

OS: Windows 7 SP1 64 bit
Processor: i7-4700 quad core equivalent or greater
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD R9 290
Storage: 2 GB available space

Now when you find the software on Steam there’s a good chance you will see this message : “Content in this product may not be appropriate for all ages, or may not be appropriate for viewing at work“.

This isn’t because High Fidelity is a den of iniquity, it’s because user generated content is involved, as the High Fidelity Twitter account explained to me : “The warning is a precautionary measure because it’s an environment with a lot of user generated content“.

Continue reading “High Fidelity Now Available On Steam Early Access”

October 26, 2016

360 Degree Snapshots Coming To Second Life

Whilst most of us are happy to take virtual world snapshots in traditional snapshot form, some people like to get a tad more artistic and some like to embrace new technology features, such as 360 degree photography.

Linden Lab are on the case as they blog about A New Perspective on Second Life :

If pictures are worth a thousand words, 360 degree images must be worth millions. That’s why we decided to develop a feature called 360 Snapshots that will make it easy to capture and share 360º images from Second Life. Check out some of these samples!

The link is most definitely worth following so you can see a sample of the feature via Callum Linden. The feature isn’t ready for prime time just yet, but you do have the opportunity to play around with it by the way of a project viewer. There are details and instructions about this on the wiki.

Continue reading “360 Degree Snapshots Coming To Second Life”

September 10, 2016

New Season Coming Soon

A new exciting season of blogging on this website is coming soon, if I can escape Azeroth.

In the meantime, here’s Drax

July 22, 2016

The Vordun Museum and Gallery In Second Life

This week’s Highlights from the Second Life Destination Guide has a host of attractive looking destinations, but I had to start somewhere, so I started at The Vordun Museum and Gallery. The blurb tells us :

The Vordun Museum and Gallery is a new art and history experience in Second Life. Featuring the use of experience keys, visitors can get a real life feeling of being at a museum. Three new exhibits will be featured at The Vordun, featuring various art by masters and Second Life residents, and a historic Titanic experience.

Inara Pey has already posted an excellent review : The Vordun: a new art experience in Second Life. I heartily recommend that you read it, but I will say that the experience does largely live up to the hype.

There are currently three exhibitions on offer; European Masters, 300 Years of Painting, Lip Service, which will run until September 19th and A Night To Remember, a Titanic experience and I mean that as in, it’s about the Titanic ship.

The three exhibitions provide different experiences. The first, European Masters, 300 Years of Painting provides the visitor with a HUD and also makes use of Second Life’s experience keys feature.

Continue reading “The Vordun Museum and Gallery In Second Life”