Virtual Reality – Page 4

September 22, 2017

Visiting Rustica and Beyond In Support of Maxwell Graf and Lyrric Fei

Saffia Widdershins has posted a blog about a serious situation : Can You Help Maxwell Graf and Lyrric Fei of Rustica?

Maxwell and Lyrric are in a very unfortunate and serious situation and if people can spare a bit of time to read Saffia’s post it would be appreciated.

I am not going to go into the details of the post here, but I will talk a little about Maxwell and his work in Second Life and beyond.

Maxwell Graf, in the form of Maxwell Graf at least, arrived in Second Life in October 2006, so he’s no stranger to the medium and has made good use of it.

Maxwell, sometimes sporting a funny hat or headgear, sometimes sporting a droopy moustache, but mostly sporting a laugh and smile has been to many events in between creating, throwing snowballs in years gone by.

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September 21, 2017

Sansar Official Discord Community Launched

Sansar Jenn has written a blog post which invites Sansar users to Join Sansar’s Community on Discord :

Today – we’re happy to announce the launch of Sansar’s official Discord community. Discord is a service that lets you chat (text and voice) in real time with other Sansar users, wherever you are – it works on the web, on mobile, and desktop.

Our Discord community is a way to connect with other Sansar users and make friends, plan meet-ups, ask questions, get feedback, share your ideas and creations, and more.

Discord, for those who are not familar, is a text and voice chat application that can be used on the desktop, in a browser, on mobile devices, so it’s a tool for chatting to people whether you’re inworld or not.

Associating your Sansar account with Discord is very straight forward. First you need to login to Sansar and then click the icon in the top right and go to your account :

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This will then take you to your account information screen, from there you click Link Discord :

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September 21, 2017

DigitalOcean Spaces Now Offering Object Storage For High Fidelity

Open Source Virtual Reality platform High Fidelity this week announced their support for DigitalOcean Spaces, an object storage solution that fits in with the way High Fidelity works.

Now if you’re not familiar with how High Fidelity works then the concept at play here will sound a tad confusing. In High Fidelity you don’t upload content in the way that you do with Second Life or OpenSim, your content is hosted on a server and this is where a solution such as DigitalOcean Spaces fits in.

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September 19, 2017September 19, 2017

Second Life Inspired Short Film Makes The Cut For Ottawa International Animation Festival

The Ottawa International Animation Festival runs from September 20 – 24 and the blurb informs us :

Every September, the Ottawa International Animation Festival presents the world’s most cutting-edge, quirky and important animation — and transforms Ottawa into the centre of the animation universe.

The festival features screenings, workshops, talks, competitions and more. One of those competitions is The Canadian Student Competition which will feature a short film entitled “Second Life“, directed by Benjamin Reyes and Joshua Fischle and produced by Ryerson University.

This short film, is not surprisingly, inspired by the virtual world of Second Life, as an article by Bruce Deachman at The Ottawa Citizen informs us; Ottawa filmmaker comes home with Second Life . The article is itself an interview with one of the directors, Benjamin Reyes, who explains :

“I was interested in these stories you would hear of people meeting each other through the Internet, through things like Second Life. That idea was bizarre and interesting to me, that you could know somebody strictly through this avatar and not even see their face or know what they look like, and you don’t really know who’s controlling them.”

The film appears to have been inspired by Second Life, rather than machinima filmed in Second Life but it’s interesting to see how virtual worlds can inspire other mediums.

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September 8, 2017September 8, 2017

Sansar Introduces Terrain Editing, .OBJ Import, Running, Web Audio Streams and More

Linden Lab’s Sansar have announced a whopping new list of features in their latest release notes; Sansar Release Notes for September 8, 2017.

Most eye catching will be features such as :

Terrain Editor
You can now sculpt your own terrain in Sansar! Make mountains and craters, which you can paint using Sansar’s default presents. Simply drag and drop the terrain plain from the system objects panel. Read more.
The ability to add your own terrain textures and height maps is coming soon.

I haven’t been able to look at this yet but this looks like a very interesting development indeed. The link to read more explains how you can create terrain in Sansar and then raise, lower, flatten, soften, harden etc. These terms will be familiar to those who have experience in virtual worlds such as Second Life.

.OBJ import
Sansar now supports .obj file import. See here for some .obj import tips.

Sansar had previously supported the .FBX format but this release means it now also supports .OBJ format, which I’m sure will please many creators as .OBJ is a very popular format.

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