Virtual Reality – Page 10

June 22, 2016

Robin Hanson’s Book “The Age Of Em” To Be Discussed In Second Life On Sunday

Away from Second Life’s 13th birthday celebrations we move into an area that used to be discussed a lot more in the earlier days of Second Life; Transhumanism. Over at The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) Giulio Prisco has a published a post : Paradiso and Inferno in Robin Hanson’s ‘The Age of EM’.

The post discusses a book by Robin Hanson, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth. The topic has long been considered controversial, but it’s a discussion area that was once very vibrant in Second Life. I am surprised we have not seen more of a resurgence in this area of discussion within the Virtual Reality hype cycle.

The blurb from the book tells us :

Robots may one day rule the world, but what is a robot-ruled Earth like?

Many think the first truly smart robots will be brain emulations or ems. Scan a human brain, then run a model with the same connections on a fast computer, and you have a robot brain, but recognizably human.

Train an em to do some job and copy it a million times: an army of workers is at your disposal. When they can be made cheaply, within perhaps a century, ems will displace humans in most jobs. In this new economic era, the world economy may double in size every few weeks.

Giulio, in his post, gives us more information regarding the content of the book :

Robin’s future em world is derived from our world with one – and only one – big change: the arrival of operational and cheap mind uploading technology, sometime in this century. Robin’s methodology is to take our world as it, with all the facts and trends that we can see in technology, society, politics, and economics, and add mind uploading technology to scan living people and copy them to “ems” – software emulations running on suitable computing hardware.

This is very Science Fiction and if you’re not familiar with the topics, you may find this all a bit daunting, odd, scary or all three.

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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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June 7, 2016

Educators Should Look To The Past Before Moving Forward With Education In Virtual Reality

Back in February 2010, Jeffrey R. Young published an article on The Chronicle Of Higher Education : After Frustrations in Second Life, Colleges Look to New Virtual Worlds. The article, as the title suggests, delved into areas of frustration for educators such as performance, navigation, ease of use and :

Plus, a lot of decidedly nonacademic activity goes on in Second Life, and it’s difficult to limit access so that only students can enter a classroom there. Online vandalism is so common that there’s a name for it (“griefing”), and it’s easy to stumble into areas designed for virtual sex that is, ahem, graphic.

Jeffrey makes a far point about griefing but I’m sure that part of the reason his article rubbed many Second Life users up the wrong way was due to the complaint about nonacademic activity. Second Life was not created as an education product.

A very interesting and very telling point from Jeffrey’s article though was the willingness of educators to look at alternatives, continue with Second Life and persevere with the goal of virtual education :

What surprised me the most was that, despite these challenges, educators appear more interested than ever in the idea of teaching in video-game-like realms. A group of college folks interested in virtual environments organized by Educause, the higher-education-technology organization, has a growing membership. Tellingly, though, it recently changed its name from the Second Life group to the Virtual Worlds group, in part reflecting an eagerness to find alternatives.

I was actually subscribed to the mailing list at the time when the change of name was made from Second Life to Virtual Worlds. This wasn’t solely due to educators wanting to explore other virtual worlds, there was also the issue of Linden Lab’s branding policy regarding the use of the Second Life name at the time, but many welcomed the move to discuss and explore alternative virtual worlds.

This week Jeffrey has published another article on The Chronicle of Higher Education regarding Second Life, Virtual Worlds and education : Remember Second Life? Its Fans Hope to Bring VR Back to the Classroom. The headline and opening text is likely to rub Second Life users up the wrong way. Jeffrey has experience of this as he discussed his 2010 article in the more recent article :

In 2010 I wrote an article for The Chronicle pointing out that some colleges were moving away from Second Life, arguing that the virtual world hadn’t lived up to the hype. I got more hate mail for that article than for anything else I’d ever done. And in one of the strangest moments of my journalism career, I was invited to discuss that article in a forum within Second Life called Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable.

As we can see from the link to the discussion, Jeffrey got a hostile reaction. I will say at this point that disagreeing with Jeffrey is fine, but sending him hate mail is not. Second Life users have hopefully grown thicker skins by now.

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June 1, 2016

The Future Of Virtual Reality Must Be Social

For far too long, Virtual Worlds have been lumped into the gaming category, when they are more than games. There are games within Virtual Worlds, but Virtual Worlds are not just games.

The user generated content aspect and potential of Virtual Worlds has also for far too long, been overlooked or treated with contempt. However as the Virtual Reality hype cycle keeps gaining traction, people are finally starting to talk about more than games.

This brings me on to two articles I’ve been reading today, one about a platform called ROBLOX, which I will confess I’d never heard of before but I’m glad that I now have and the other is about AltspaceVR, which I have heard about before and I’m pleased to see that AltspaceVR is making interesting strides. There are differences with the approaches of these platforms, but they both seem to agree that the future is social.

Before I highlight the article on ROBLOX, it’s probably a good idea to mention what ROBLOX is, so I’ll quote their blurb :

ROBLOX is the best place to Imagine with Friends™. With the largest user-generated online gaming platform, and over 15 million games created by users, ROBLOX is the #1 gaming site for kids and teens (comScore). Every day, virtual explorers come to ROBLOX to create adventures, play games, role play, and learn with their friends in a family-friendly, immersive, 3D environment.

ROBLOX founder, co-created and CEO, David Baszucki, has posted an article on The Huffington Post : Why Co-Experience Is the Ultimate Killer App for Virtual Reality. David is an enthusiast, early on he talks about The Metaverse, Snow Crash and more. David talks about how storytelling has evolved and continues to evolve.

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