Virtual Worlds – Page 92

February 27, 2015

The Drax Files: World Makers Episode 27 – Nylon Pinkney

Episode 27 of the excellent Drax Files : World Makers features Nylon Pinkney, a wedding photographer. However a small twist in the introduction informs us that Nylon is a wedding photographer outside of Second Life but not inside it. There’s a clue on why Nylon made that choice later in the video.

Nylon informs us that she makes clothing, accessories and skins, Nylon even informs us that she once made some of the Second Life starter avatars.

Again we see the Second Life avatar and the real person behind that avatar, which is a technique Draxtor Despres uses regularly and to good effect. Seeing and hearing the real person brings an element of realism to the Second Life experience.

We see Nylon at work, hand drawing textures, which Nylon admits aren’t perfect but Nylon also admits that she isn’t looking for perfect and that’s a good point, imperfections often bring something extra to a creation.

Nylon’s mainstore is Nylon outfitters and is based on her sim, Tableau. Nylon also has a more upmarket stores known as Paper Couture. There’s also another brand mentioned in this video, the Wrigglesworth residents which is a line for people who, look a tad older than the traditional Second Life avatar.

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February 26, 2015

Colin Marchon Explores Our Technological Identity Crises With An Excellent Web Series

Colin Marchon, who currently attends Tisch School of the Arts at New York University for Film and Television Production, has produced an excellent documentary series : Our Technological Identity Crises. The series consists of three short, but very powerful videos :

The videos are short, each one coming in at around five minutes and they are all absolutely fascinating to me. As this blog is largely about virtual worlds I’m going to concentrate on Part 2, but all three are relevant. Part 2 is a good pick though because it has a brief discussion about Second Life as well as aspects that are dear to Second Life users and beyond, terms of service and identity.

The video opens with Federico Pistono, author of Robots Will Steal Your Job But That’s Ok. Federico has a view on life that some will feel is a bit too extreme, he sees his time away from the keyboard not as being in real life, but as being AFK. This is an interesting thought but I find it a tad too technologically based to embrace it myself.

Then the video moves on to augmented reality and an important question arises, if digital representations are going to surround us in the future, what makes the world inside our computers and phones any less real than the physical world? The point here being, I think, that augmented reality will contain digital representations that will be considered more real than the worlds inside computers.

Francesca Ferrando, philosopher of the posthuman, adjunct at faculty at NYU then adds her thoughts. Francesca talks of how we can connect with millions of other people with a body of your own imagination. The body of your own imagination that Francesca is talking about is your avatar. There have been many discussions about how avatars are in many cases an extension of ourselves. Francesca then makes an interesting comment about Second Life :

I’m telling you the truth, the first time my avatar flew in Second Life, I had chills in my physical body.

An interesting perspective. The flight thing is interesting, I was never bowled over by flight in Second Life, but then again I had played games like City Of Heroes before I arrived. On the other hand, when Gene Roddenberry Junior visited Second Life, he was very impressed by the fact that his avatar could fly.

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February 26, 2015

High Fidelity Raises $11m In Funding, They Are Hiring And Open Alpha Will Be Their Next Big Milestone

In a blog post entitled This One Goes To Eleven, High Fidelity reveal that they have raised a further $11m in funding from Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital :

We are happy to announce today that we have raised an additional $11M in funding, in a new round led by Vulcan Capital and with participation from other new and existing investors. This is certainly great news for us, but also great news for the overall VR ecosystem as we continue to see more and more validation from the investing community that VR presents enormous opportunities.

The point about validation is very important. At the moment I see a lot of hype and technologies emerging with regards to virtual reality but the proof of the pudding really lies in investment. Whilst investment is still rolling in, it suggests that many people really do believe that something concrete will emerge.

High Fidelity itself is still progressing at a nice pace. I’ve been impressed by the fact that they haven’t tried to rush into producing a product that isn’t ready for prime time. An article over at TechCrunch regarding the new funding exemplifies the point about High Fidelity’s progress :

The main idea driving High Fidelity forward is the ability to quickly generate a virtual space to meet in and interact with. While the interface is far from final, it’s already at the point where you can pick a template, choose a name, and instantly have a space accessible by others. Each space is essentially a small video game world, filled in with the same 3D models you’d build for a game built with Unity.

Creating your own world in High Fidelity is a lot easier than it once was, you can be up and running fairly quickly these days with some starter content already included. However High Fidelity is still very much Alpha and that should be taken into account if you see or visit a High Fidelity world. The TechCrunch article is well worth a read if you’re interested in High Fidelity. However back to the High Fidelity blog post :

Our next big milestone will be an open alpha version of our system which will allow everyone to start deploying interconnected shared VR spaces.

Although the blog post doesn’t inform us just how far away open Alpha is, it is encouraging to see the High Fidelity team mention this.

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February 25, 2015

A Visit To The Vortex Club In Second Life

There seems to be an impression that Dwarfins only spend time inside Second Life at taverns of a certain build, taverns that serve mead, taverns that welcome bar brawls or taverns that are frequented by female Dwarfins who will drink you under the table. This is a myth, sometimes Dwarfins step outside of their comfort zone and to exemplify this and tie in with Science Fiction being a theme in the Second Life news this week, I decided to head on down to The Vortex Club in Second Life to strut my funky stuff.

The Vortex Club is one of Second Life’s oldest clubs and was opened on the 3rd March 2006 by Kris Spade and Gemini Enfield. The current build has a distinct Loki Eliot theme to it. There’s also a distinct Science Fiction theme to the build too, with colourful displays and video screens prominent.

Moving towards the entrance you can see the lights coming from inside, but your first step through the entrance is a bit of a false dawn.

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February 24, 2015

Linden Lab Call On Educators To Share Their Success Stories

Linden Lab have issued a blog post in which they ask for Second Life based educators to Share Your Educational Success Stories. The post states :

Are you an educator seeing positive results from using Second Life? We’d love to hear from you! Please join us in this Education Forum thread to share your answers to the following questions:

What educational organization do you represent?

How do you use SL in your educational endeavors?

Most importantly, what positive results have you seen from using SL?

From direct conversations, press coverage, and the like, we’ve heard of a number of organizations seeing positive results using Second Life for education, but we’re always eager to hear more and we hope you’ll add your voice to the thread.

Thanks!

There are many educational organisations using Second Life, I’ve covered a few here myself.

Education should be important by everyone, even if you don’t consider yourself to be a student at this moment in time. The use of virtual worlds in terms of encouraging lifelong learning, helping those who find traditional educational surroundings difficult, encouraging those who find gamification appealing, reaching out to people all over the world and educating educators to utilise virtual world spaces are a small example of some of the concepts that make virtual world learning appealing.

There are of course many other reasons as to why education in a virtual world such as Second Life has advantages and hopefully Linden Lab will be able to solicit good feedback regarding compelling use cases.

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