Virtual Worlds – Page 56

August 18, 2015

Linden Lab Announce They Are Inviting Selected People To Test Project Sansar

Linden Lab have published a press release regarding Project Sansar; Linden Lab Invites First Virtual Experience Creators to Project Sansar Testing. I’m not going to publish the press release in full, but I will quote parts of it, starting with :

SAN FRANCISCO – August 18, 2015 – Linden Lab®, the creators of Second Life®, today announced that a small number of creators have been exclusively invited to be the first to help test its new platform for virtual experiences, codenamed Project Sansar.

Slated for general availability in 2016, Project Sansar will democratize virtual reality as a creative medium. It will empower people to easily create, share, and monetize their own multi-user, interactive virtual experiences, without requiring engineering resources. The platform will enable professional-level quality and performance with exceptional visual fidelity, 3D audio, and physics simulation. Experiences created with Project Sansar will be optimized for VR headsets like the Oculus Rift, but also accessible via PCs and (at consumer launch) mobile devices. Users can explore and socialize within Project Sansar experiences through advanced expressive avatars, using text and voice chat.

This isn’t surprising news. Linden Lab have stated for some time that a small number of hand picked creators would be invited to test Project Sansar. The early users are expected to be people who can create architecture and have access to Autodesk Maya, as that’s the software Linden Lab seem to have been using inhouse.

The use of Maya as a tool in Project Sansar was discussed by Ebbe Altberg recently in a video interview with UploadVR :

UploadVR: What does that workflow look like for Sansar?

Ebbe Altberg: For starters, it will be quite technical, you will register, you will log-in, you’ll install this application which includes some add-ons for Maya, and you’ll use Maya to create the content. You’ll create a full scene, very large scenes, and you just publish that and we host that on our servers, and then that experience you can send links out to, and people follow the links and walk into that experience.

UploadVR: Just like that, straight from Maya?

Ebbe Altberg: Straight from Maya, push a button, and then you have a virtual environment that you can share.

People should not get too concerned about this. Project Sansar is in the very early Alpha stage, things can and probably will, change quite dramatically before it’s in beta, or even open Alpha if they have one. At the moment Linden Lab are going with what they know works, which at this stage is Maya.

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August 15, 2015

Remembrance & Celebration Gathering for Lumiere Noir Will Be Held On Sunday 16th of August

Avi Arrow of The Ivory Tower Library of Primitives has announced that there will be a remembrance and celebration gathering for Lumiere Noir on Sunday August 16th at 1:00pm SLT :

A *Remembrance & Celebration* gathering for Lumiere Noir will be held at 1:00pm (13:00) SLT on Sunday 16th of August at the Ivory Tower Library of Primitives http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Natoma/210/164/28 (G-rated) . Bring fondest of memories and dancing shoes.

Xiola Linden yesterday blogged : Second Life Community Remembers Lumiere Noir – Creator of the Ivory Tower Library of Primitives.

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August 15, 2015

High Fidelity Announce Stem VR Challenge Recipients

Back in July High Fidelity lanuched its Stem VR Challenge. The challenge was :

High Fidelity will be awarding up to three $5,000 grants to teams or individuals who, using the High Fidelity platform, can create a unit that is:

HMD (e.g. Oculus™) featured

High school age appropriate

STEM focused

Social (can be experienced by >3 people together)

In addition to the dollar amount awarded, grantees will have access to technical support directly from High Fidelity and the option to have their content hosted.

Yesterday High Fidelity announced who the recipients would be, they have chosen two projects to receive the grants. They are T.C.a.R.S: Teaching Coding – a Racing Simulation and FTL Labs PlanetDrop-VR. Both projects look very interesting.

TCars is a combination of code and fun and is described as :

An awesome racing game where you get to interact with JavaScript to customize your car’s handling, create unique power ups and optimize performance through editing the programme code with the use of the Blockly API.

The idea behind TCaRS is explained as one that wants people to learn coding by having fun :

The idea for TCaRS is based on the thought that learning coding can be boring but playing games is fun: “I want to learn to code… but….the road from typing, ‘print my name’ to making ‘Grand Theft Auto’ seems huge and demotivating”

Schools around the world have been using tools like the Raspberry Pi to teach kids coding and it’s an essential part of most High School curriculums these days, but the output from tools like this is often pretty basic-looking.

With High Fidelity, we have the chance to change this by creating the first gaming platform where users get to see and interact directly with elements of the code in order to gain
advantage – so the more you learn, the better you do. And with the benefit of VR to create a genuinely immersive experience.

The people behind TCaRS are High Fidelity Alpha users Thijs Wenker (Thoys in High Fidelity) Programmer / Web Developer (JavaScript, PHP, C#, C++) and Dan Grundy (Judas in High Fidelity) Lecturer in 3D modelling using Blender. There’s a lot more detail in the link.

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August 15, 2015

H.P. Lovecraft Festival 2015 In Second Life Is Open

The 2015 H.P. Lovecraft Festival in Second Life is now open and early visitors were treated to a visit at the landing point by Arik Metzger, who founded the H.P. Lovecraft roleplay group back in 2012.

A map of the region can be found on Flickr, that gives you information about vendors and other locations such as the cabaret, warehouse, Asylum, Egyptian exhibit and the carnival.

Like many events in Second Life, the H.P. Lovecraft Festival has entertainment with the entertainment opening at 8pm SLT today (I think!) with a vintage style mix of dark cabaret and electro-swing by DJ Fitch Lekvoda! I say I think because Google Calendar does odd things with time.

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August 14, 2015

Fusion Fail To Do Their Homework Regarding Education In Second Life

I’m not quite sure what to make of Patrick Hogan’s article over at Fusion; We took a tour of the abandoned college campuses of Second Life. Patrick does not seem to have done his homework, but I’ll come to that later. The article paints a picture of Second Life from its hype cycle back in 2007 :

Colleges were among those that bought the hype of the Linden Lab-developed virtual world. Many universities set up their own private islands to engage students; some even held classes within Second Life.

Most of these virtual universities are gone –– it costs almost $300 per month to host your own island –– but it turns out a handful remain as ghost towns. I decided to travel through several of the campuses, to see what’s happening in Second Life college-world in 2015.

There are some glaring problems with this paragraph. Linden Lab reintroduced the 50% discount for educational and non-profit organisations in July 2013, meaning the cost is not almost $300 a month. Now there’s no doubt that Linden Lab’s initial to remove the 50% discount and the ageing platform did reduce the number of universities in Second Life, but even a casual glance at the Education & Nonprofits section of the destination guide reveals that there are more than a handful of universities in Second Life.

I’m a bit bemused at the timing of Patrick’s article too, he visited American universities, so term times are probably different to the UK, but the middle of August does not seem the ideal time to go looking for university classes in action to me.

Patrick does make a good point regarding the design choices of universities in Second Life :

The college islands are bizarre. They mostly are laid out in a way to evoke stereotypes of how college campuses should look, but mixed in is a streak of absurd choices, like classrooms in tree houses and pirate ships. These decisions might have seemed whimsical at the time, but with the dated graphics, they just look weird.

And weird is the overall theme of this trip, which begins in Arkansas.

Bizarre is actually good, the idea of a virtual world space should not just be to recreate the physical world space, virtual worlds provide the opportunity to do things you can’t in the physical world, that’s a plus, not a minus.

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