Second Life – Page 52

August 7, 2015August 7, 2015

The Project Sansar Media Train Is Still Going Full Steam Ahead

The Project Sansar media train keeps on rolling as two more articles appear in the media and both of them also mention Second Life, although in more of a past tense when compared to Project Sansar. One of the articles is positive and one is rather cynically negative, but hey people are very much entitled to their opinion.

The first article is by Alice Truong over at Quartz; Could the Oculus Rift help give Second Life a second life? The headline is uncannily similar to a recent blog headline of my own, although my post wasn’t really about the Oculus Rift! This is a good article that deserves extra credit for taking advantage of Linden Lab’s Flickr pool, as do I in this post too.

The Quartz article makes comparisons between Project Sansar and Second Life and points out that it sounds like some of the concepts will be similar :

Some of Sansar’s rules will be slightly different, and the immersive VR graphics will be far superior (though it will still work on regular computers and mobile devices too). But like Second Life, Sansar isn’t a game with a clear objective. There are no bosses to defeat or princesses to rescue. Instead, people, playing as virtual representations of themselves, will carry out day-to-day, often fantastical, lives in a made-up world. They’ll explore, socialize, have cybersex, make art, perform, create businesses, build houses, go shopping, pay taxes.

The article does a good job of covering how Second Life works as well as looking ahead to how Project Sansar may work, with once again the concept of lower land taxes and higher sales taxes being pointed out.

This is an important point as it indirectly ties into a quote in the article from Bernhard Drax (AKA Draxtor Despres) who seems to feel that the corporations didn’t quite get Second Life :

“If you looked at it as a 3D billboard, Second Life did not work,” he says. But he notes the world flourished “as an artistic playground.”

I largely agree with Drax but would add that one of the barriers to Second Life being an artistic playground is the fact that the tier is too damn high! That is going to be addressed in Project Sansar. As for the corporations, I still feel they should have immersed themselves more with the community and rented spaces in shopping malls with other Second Life creators.

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August 6, 2015

Virtual World Interoperability Is Still One Giant Step Away For VR

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes recently posted : Cross-Platform Virtual Reality is Here: Watch High Fidelity Unite Vive, Oculus, and PC Users in the Same Metaverse. The post was regarding the High Fidelity post regarding users with different interfaces interacting in High Fidelity. I covered this in my last post. The development is an impressive one.

Hamlet’s headline was a tad misleading and some folk thought the post was going to be about people from different virtual worlds being able to interact in a single virtual world. This has been done before, but the potential was never fulfilled. I have talked about this before.

Just over seven years ago Hamilton Linden blogged IBM and Linden Lab Interoperability Announcement :

This is a historic day for Second Life, and for virtual worlds in general. IBM and Linden Lab have announced that research teams from the two companies successfully teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid into a virtual world running on an OpenSim server, marking the first time an avatar has moved from one virtual world to another. It’s an important first step toward enabling avatars to pass freely between virtual worlds, something we’ve been working toward publicly since the formation of the Architecture Working Group in September 2007.

This was quite big news, Linden Lab issued a press release. The news was covered by Antone Gonsalves at Information Week and Erick Sconfeld at TechCrunch. I will embed a video of the epic moment at the end of the post.

Alas things didn’t work out and the project seems to be dead and yet, as demonstrated in the comments on Hamlet’s post, there’s still a lot of interest in interoperability between different virtual worlds.

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August 6, 2015

High Fidelity On The Rig, The Metaverse And Hand To Hand Contact

About a month ago High Fidelity CEO Philip Rosedale posted a hat trick of fascinating blog posts. They cover immersion, the size of the metaverse and connecting to High Fidelity using different interfaces. They are all very interesting.

The first blog post is VR immersion through immobilization: ‘The Rig’. The Rig is a very important component in the history of virtual worlds and what makes that all the more impressive is that it never saw the light of day as a public product. The Rig was the first work Linden Lab conducted, as Philip explains in the blog post :

Andrew Meadows and myself spent the first 6 months or so building a room-sized device that immobilized a person’s head, legs, and arms while using a folded projection screen to deliver a high resolution VR experience. We called it ‘The Rig’, and our more fearless early investors and friends actually got to try it out.

The hardware required some software to go along with it, so Linden Lab started working on that too and that software eventually became known as Second Life and the rest, as they say, is history. Ok at one time the software was called LindenWorld but after that it became known as Second Life. The Rig is rumoured to be sitting in boxes at Linden Lab, although we don’t know if Philip Rosedale and Andrew Meadows took it to High Fidelity with them. This thought crossed my mind when I read :

The findings were fascinating and may be useful now as the race to create fully immersive VR interfaces continues.

The Rig wasn’t like today’s HMD’s which track your movement, indeed the idea is that you don’t move, it works on force detection, as Philip explains :

As a simple thought experiment, imagine that you are looking at a computer screen, while holding onto the handle of a tennis racket which is bolted to a table…. you can’t move the racket handle a bit. But what you see onscreen is a racket in your hand that is moving perfectly smoothly in response to the forces you are putting on the handle. A ball drops from the air, and you move the racket to bounce it upwards. As the virtual ball connects with your racket, you can imagine that you need to apply a stronger force upward to the handle to keep the racket moving up. This change in applied force ‘feels’ to your brain very much like the sensation of the ball hitting the racket!

This sounds odd when you consider the way today’s devices work and yet, there does seem to be potential for this sort of alternative immersion device to prosper.

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August 5, 2015

Project Sansar Buzz Appears To Be Launching The Second Life Of Second Life

There’s an image for Project Sansar that is appearing on many articles regarding the project. I have no idea where people are getting this image from, have Linden Lab got a top secret media kit somewhere? I’ll use images from 1920’s Berlin and Everwinter for this post, 1920’s Berlin in particular gets a lot of mentions in the media.

There’s something very interesting going on with the recent media attention Linden Lab are receiving over Project Sansar, Second Life is making the news on the back of this too and in some cases, it sounds as if the way Second Life works has only just been discovered.

There have been a number of good articles about Linden Lab recently, my favourite recent written article I covered in my last blog post, it’s the article by Eric Johnson over at Re/code. However today I’ve discovered two more articles, one on Gamasutra and one on MoviePilot. Then there is a video interview from UploadVR, which is very impressive.

Christian Nutt over at Gamasutra has posted; True virtual reality: The race to build a ‘metaverse’. The article is very brief and refers to Eric Johnson’s article. Another article comes to us from Moviepilot and this one is all about Second Life; Second Life: How to Navigate an Online Virtual World (and Maybe Even Make Some Money) :

In 2003, Linden Lab, a San Fran-based gaming and VR company, launched Second Life. 12 years later, more than a million users around the globe play the online game – although Linden Lab insists that Second Life is not a game at all.

This is the sort of article that makes you check that it wasn’t originally published in 2008 and has now for some odd reason came back to the top of the news, but it’s not, the article was published on 5th August 2015. The article discusses creating items for sale, becoming a stripper, sex being a big part of the Second Life virtual world and also time travel.

The article really does sound like Second Life is relatively new, rather than over twelve years old and the article also makes Second Life sound quite exciting :

In fact, the possibilities of this game are almost endless. You can visit “Hell’s Asylum” (a landscape of fire and brimstone), “Everwinter” (a post apocalyptic wasteland based on the Chernobyl fallout zone) or – if you prefer something more serene – there’s “Irreplaceable”, a beautiful island paradise complete with a castle, forests and an underwater cave.

The article makes for a good read and is refreshingly honest in its approach of highlighting several different aspects of Second Life.

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August 4, 2015

Second Life’s Shadow Gives Linden Lab An Edge In Virtual Reality Future

For a virtual world that many people comment with surprise about it still being around, Second Life seems to still cast a mighty shadow over the virtual world scene. Over at Re/code, Eric Johnson has published an excellent article about how the land lies : Welcome To The Metaverse. I heartily recommend that people read this article in full.

The article opens with commentary from Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg regarding humans creating spaces :

Some spaces are mobile, like a bus. San Francisco is a space that was created by its users. Whether you go into a pub, a bar, a classroom, a bowling alley, an office, a library … We create spaces and we have people come together in those spaces, and then we communicate and socialize within those spaces.

These spaces are of course what people have been creating in Second Life too, in many and varied forms and guises.

Early on in the article Eric seems to be talking of Second Life in the past tense. This needs to be taken in context, Eric is really talking about how Second Life did not become the 3D internet that some hoped it would and how in the future, VR ventures will be hoping to go mainstream, become the next big thing and really get embraced by society :

A perfect metaverse, then, is more than just a video game or an application. Like a Web browser, or an operating system, it would offer users a means to do many things, and likely pay for them in many ways. That’s the Big Idea — that VR would be as transformative to the Internet as the World Wide Web — and it’s why so many companies are testing the waters. If one or more of them can crack it, they would unlock a great deal of virtual reality’s long-term potential.

Those of us who have already embraced virtual worlds know that the potential is there, but we also know that a large number of hurdles exist too.

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