Virtual Worlds – Page 34

June 17, 2016

All The Old Paintings On The Tombs They Do The Sand Dance

Whilst reading last week’s Highlights from The Second Life Destination Guide I noticed a place called Plagues of Egypt. The blurb informs us :

Explore this Egyptian-themed build representing the Egyptian plagues circa Moses and the 10 Commandments.

So I decided to go and take a look.

The location is a parcel named Xiao Tiangang on a region called Devils Mind. This is certainly an atmospheric parcel and I found myself sliding my feet on the street, bending my back, shifting my arm and then pulling it back.

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June 15, 2016June 15, 2016

LaTurbo Avedon Talks To ArtSlant About Art And Digital Existence

Christian Petersen over at ArtSlant has published a great interview : The Wednesday Web Artist of the Week: LaTurbo Avedon. This is an interview with digital/virtual artist, LaTurbo Avedon but what makes the interview great for me is that it goes beyond artwork and delves into areas of avatar identity, creative spaces and much more.

I speak a lot about how good Draxtor Despres Drax Files : World Makers series is, because it gets to the real physical person behind the avatar, but Christian highlights another way of how avatars can evolve and how lines between the physical and virtual world can blur :

The artist LaTurbo Avedon may be a computer-created avatar but she is very much alive. Her identity has been created through very real experiences and interactions over numerous websites, social platforms, and gaming consoles. The notion that there is a “real” person behind the avatar becomes increasingly meaningless as the division between all of our online and IRL identities blur and dissipate.

That’s a fascinating way of looking at how avatars can evolve. LaTurbo Avedon has evolved via many platforms but she has deep roots in Second Life which go all the way back to 2006 and in her time in Second Life LaTurbo built and ran a club, which exemplifies a strong engagement with the environment because running clubs, even in the virtual world, is not as easy as some may think.

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June 13, 2016June 13, 2016

Second Life Resident Casper Warden Is Collecting Donations For Victims Of Orlando Shooting

Linden Lab have blogged; Casper Warden of CasperVend Collecting Donations to Support Victims of Orlando Shooting :

In light of the tradegy that struck Orlando nighclub, Pulse this past weekend, Casper Warden of CasperVend has set up a kiosk in his mainstore to collect donations for the GoFundMe set up by Equality Florida to benefit and support the victims of this horrific event.

When I visited, Casper was actually there, but I didn’t want to bother him, he was doing something with the sign in the picture, which also acts as a collection kiosk.

Casper plans to donate the funds raised to the Equality Florida GoFundMe page. which has been created by Ida Vishkaee Eskamani, a Development Officer with Equality Florida, she resides in Orlando, Florida. People can of course donate directly on that page if they prefer, rather than inworld but you want be able to donate Linden Dollars on the GoFundMe page of course.

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June 11, 2016

Live Music In High Fidelity

Last night I visited High Fidelity to watch Kevin M Thomas perform live. Kevin is not new to performing live music in virtual worlds, he has been performing in Second Life since 2007, see my previous blog post for more details.

Arriving at the location I was informed by way of a pop up that my LOD settings had been reduced due to the complexity of the scene, which is a nice touch. LOD means Level Of Detail, which will dictate what I can see and from how far away I can see objects.

I had not had to mess with my LOD settings for a while in High Fidelity so it took me a while to find them and this is exemplified in the image above, Kevin’s Guitar does not appear in this shot. I would advise people to stick with the reduced LOD settings in general in a situation like this, but I wanted to take some snapshots so I wanted to tweak those settings.

What we can see in the above picture is Kevin’s avatar and on the screen, the actual band, who were all in a room together to perform. This provided an excellent perspective to what exactly was going on here and highlighted the fact that real people were very much involved in the performance.

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June 10, 2016

Kevin M Thomas Talks To High Fidelity About Live Music In Virtual Reality

Kevin M Thomas is a name that should be familiar to fans of live music in Second Life. Kevin has been performing in Second Life since 2007 and has an inworld group with over 7,000 fans.

Being a musician of course is a portable skill and Kevin is taking advantage of that portable skill by taking his performances to other platforms. Today Kevin will be performing at a music jam event at 15:30 PDT in High Fidelity at hifi://open. That’s 23:30 British Summer Time … I think!

Kevin recently spoke to Caitlyn Meeks, Director of Content for High Fidelity and Caitlyn has posted some of that conversation in a blog post : Live Performance in High Fidelity.

There are some great points in this blog post and one of them is an issue I’ve raised before, the potential for Worldwide reach in virtual worlds, Kevin says :

Performing in VR requires incredible energy as a performer as you do not normally get the fan feedback as you would in real life, however the payoff is greater as you can build a much larger fan base in VR as no one is limited by where they live to attend a show.

Worldwide reach doesn’t just cover musicians, back in March I blogged : Comedian Sami Shah Exemplifies The Advantages Of Virtual World Reach. Storytellers, artists and film makers can all build reach via Virtual Worlds and as we move forward, more immersive Virtual Reality environments.

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