January 2013 – Page 8

January 4, 2013

Avatar Skin Research Has A Bit More Depth Than Initial Reports Suggested

When I first blogged about reports of the research informing us that female avatars display a lot more skin than male avatars, I did so with a bit of surprise that such a survey had been conducted because the results were so obvious. One was left wondering whether the researchers would also conduct research into the religion of The Pope and what bears do in the woods. However I did comment in that blog post that the reports I had read lacked depth:

“Maybe if I could find the full report I’d get more context on exactly what the point of this study was, until then I only have the tongue in cheek reports that include such gems as thanking Laval University for reminding them that Second Life is still around”

Now, thanks to a forum post from Perrie Juran, I can read the full report and get more context, so too can you as the report is here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0051921

The report goes a bit further than merely stating the obvious but pretty much concludes that they haven’t yet found out why female avatars show more skin.

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January 1, 2013

Is It Time For A Linden Lab Login Account?

Back in 2009 Argent Stonecutter created a Jira suggestion that I very much agree with. SVC-6212 Create Master Account Name, Linking to Avatar Names. The idea here is that you’d login to Second Life and then select an avatar name to go inworld with, this would mean linking your alts, which could have benefits for issues such as Mesh uploads, which are currently on an avatar basis, so even though the person behind Ciaran Laval meets the requirements to upload Mesh, my alts don’t, this despite the fact that my alts are known by Linden Lab as they linked them for the cases of being adult verified back in the day when the requirements were more stringent.

I shouldn’t need to have payment info on all my avatars, having payment info on my overall account deals with this. However whereas this has merit for Second Life, it has even more merit now that Linden Lab are releasing new products. Patterns, Creatoverse, Dio and Versu are all Linden Lab products. There are different ways these products are delivered with some aimed at the mobile community and some web based but with Linden Lab producing multiple products doesn’t it make some sense for me to have a Linden Lab account, rather than a product specific account?

Blizzard do this, I have one login for World of Warcraft, the same one works for Diablo III and would also work for Starcraft II. This just makes the process of purchasing products easier, it makes billing easier. I’m already a Linden Lab customer, a bird in the hand and all that.

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