July 2014 – Page 7 – Ciaran Laval

July 3, 2014

Flickr Take A First Step On The Road To Redemption

When Flickr launched their new awesome last May I was far from impressed, indeed I pondered at one point whether Yahoo/Flickr were trolling their members. I wasn’t alone in this sort of view, as the official feedback demonstrated.

After this Flickr made more changes, changed groups, changed the layout of the photostream, changed colours, moved things around and generally seemed to be going out of their way to annoy me with their totally unnecessary bandwidth hogging designs and practices. As someone who is used to the Second Life experience and realises how unnecessary bandwidth hogging textures can undermine the user experience I was somewhat befuddled as to why Flickr were abandoning the thumbnail.

Putting this in Second Life terms, think of the initial rollout of viewer 2 and you may start to understand the horror I experienced. The big difference has been that Linden Lab were far more responsive than Flickr in terms of trying to get back on track.

However a few iterations later and Flickr seem to be showing signs of seeing a limited degree of sense with regards to their new Photo page. The new photo experience, or NPE as it is being dubbed, has been very warmly received. Flickr staff explained some of the thinking behind this latest change :

Because of the feedback from you, we’re moving the photo page in a direction that more closely resembles previous iterations of the product, but with contemporary design and the new framework that delivers photos so much faster than before.

These are the most important issues we have fixed from your feedback:
*Moving too much information to the right rail on the side of the photo.
*The narrow space for comments on photos that have lots of comments makes it hard to scroll and read them.
*The white text on black background makes it hard to read.

Now not everyone will like the changes, just as there were some people who liked the Flickr changes last May … I suspect these people may well be gluttons for punishment or members of the Flickr FIC (Yes it does exist), but some people liked the changes. The new photo page offers a fresher look, has comments below the photo and they are easy to read, the flow of photo, discussion, information all seems to fit together better with this design.

This is all very encouraging but Flickr is still a lot more annoying to use than it was prior to the changes of last May.

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July 3, 2014

Virtual Worlds As Sacred Places

Over at the Institute For Ethics & Emerging Technologies Giulio Prisco has a thought provoking post : Virtually Sacred, by Robert Geraci – religion in World of Warcraft and Second Life. The post is inspired by a forthcoming book by Robert Geraci : Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraft and Second Life. The book is pencilled in for an August 2014 release according to Amazon UK.

The book has a few chapters on Second Life and includes the virtual age old debate of Immersionists v Augmentationists. The basic difference is considered to be that immersionists see a virtual world such as Second Life as a place where they completely immerse a new self, one that is separate from their real life, a sort of parallel existence. Augmentationists are generally considered to be people who see Second Life as an extension of their real life, they will talk of their real life experiences, partners, job etc but will also embrace Second Life.

This used to be quite a hot topic in Second Life. Back in February 2008 New World Notes highlighted a brief discussion between the two camps with representations from Sophrosyne Stevenaag and Cyfish Traveler. Sophrosyne used to host some really interesting discussions on a Saturday evening back in the day too. Another name in these circles whom I haven’t seen or heard anything from for quite a while is Extropia DaSilva. I’d long forgotten about these sort of discussions until I read Giulio’s post today, they used to get quite heated to say the least.

Another subject at hand is that of Transhumanism, whereby people upload their brains to the machine. There are still plenty of discussions surrounding this today but not so much in Second Life as they once were. Giulio suggests a reason for this :

Transhumanists – techno-spiritual seekers who think that science and technology can and should carry humankind through its next phase of evolution – made a home in Second Life between 2006 and 2009, after which the pace of transhumanist events in Second Life slowed down due to the general Fall from media grace of Second Life.

I don’t quite agree with that theory, Second Life is still going well. I’d suggest that it may well have been that discussion groups have a hard time raising tier money, which is an age old problem for many communities in Second Life. The barriers are more financial.

Anyway back to the book, at its heart seems to be the theory that virtual spaces provide the means to build religious spaces in a fashion that 2D web pages simply can’t replicate. Furthermore they provide the means to provide spaces for new religions, as well as established ones. In his blog post Giulio explains this as :

One of Geraci’s central points is that shared virtual spaces provide a sense of place, direction, and orientation, which has profound implications for religious practice. Contrary to flat web pages, in virtual reality we can build holy places, cathedrals, and sacred objects, which act as a “physical” scaffolding to hold virtual religious communities together. While vision and hearing are powerfully engaged in consumer 3D virtual realities, the possibility to touch objects in virtual spaces “in which the brain regions associated with grasping can potentially respond as though to conventional reality,” isn’t available yet to most consumers, but this will change with new haptic interface devices. I am persuaded that next generation VR platforms, with support for haptics and full-immersion display devices like the Oculus Rift, will soon take virtually sacred spaces above critical mass.

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July 2, 2014

Phoenix Firestorm Q&A Session On The Future Of Second Life Featuring Oz & Pete Linden

Today’s Phoenix Firestorm question and answer session regarding the future of Second Life has been filmed and is on youTube. I will also in traditional style embed the video at the end of the post. I will point out that if you’re looking for a chat log, this blog will not include the droids you’re looking for. However the lovely Inara Pey may well provide a transcript in the near future.

The session was hosted by Jessica Lyon who was assisted by Lette Ponnier and featured guests Gray of the Lab from San Francisco (AKA Linden Lab’s Director Of Global Communications Peter Gray) and Oz Linden, Director Of Open development at Linden Lab and chief Second Life man now that some of Linden Lab are working on the new virtual world space. I will hereby label Oz “The Man Behind The Curtain“, because he is bloody important now in terms of Second Life, not that he wasn’t important before of course, but now he is really really important. Oz is the man behind the scenes, pulling levers, pressing buttons and keeping the magic in Second Life and things will stay this way as long as people believe in Second Life. Oz points out in the discussion that this was a position he really wanted, which is very positive indeed.

Anyway on to the discussion, it runs for almost an hour but if you don’t have that sort of patience you only need to watch the first few minutes to hear Peter Gray reiterate that Second Life is not closing down, Linden Lab have no plans to close Second Life down, investment and development will continue. Rumour has it that if you play this part of the video backwards at the correct speed you will also hear the phrase “The Tier is too damn high” uttered”, but I haven’t been able to confirm that!

Oz makes an early point that is one I’ve long agreed with, people criticise Second Life because they care about Second Life. Oz also talks about the challenges of working with a smaller team and admits that in some ways this is helpful because it helps the team to focus on the important issues. Oz also confirms that whereas the team working on Second Life are smaller than they previously were, it’s still a significant number of people. Oz also adds that the numbers in the team may be dynamic, some people working on the new platform will at times be called upon to work on Second Life and vice versa.

Oz talked of the new experience keys beta, the fact that Linden Lab really are working on improving group chat including hardware upgrades for servers. However there is no quick fix here, it’s going to take a while but they really are working on this. Another part of the team are working on improving the web framework in the viewer where they are moving from webkit to the chromium embedded framework.

There’s also news that they are working on improvements to texture and mesh loading speeds as part of the HTTP Project. Inara Pey touched upon this in her Server Updates blog post.

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July 2, 2014

Linden Lab Seeking Creators For Experience Keys Beta

Linden Lab have issued a call to arms as they announce they are Seeking Creators for the Experience Keys Beta. Now the first thing you may be wondering is what the hell is the experience keys beta. I will try and explain and I’ll also embed a video at the end of this post where Torley explains matters too.

Experience keys are those messages that pop up when you touch scripted Second Life objects, you know those ones that ask if you want to receive an item, or if you want to allow something to take control of your avatar or attach something to you etc. These messages that keep popping up every time you log back in are important but sort of ruin the immersion in a game like experience and make things feel a little clunky. There you are charging through a dungeon chased by skeletal warriors when you have to stop and allow permission for an item to do something, by which time the skeletal warriors are upon you and cackling manically.

Now experience keys is a development that is aimed at making experiences in Second Life more fun. The idea is that you’ll go to a place and opt in to that experience. Then you won’t be bothered by those pesky messages asking about attaching huds or animating your avatar and to make this even better, if scripted correctly when you teleport out items that are related to that particular experience will be removed from you as you teleport away, this also means you should be able to outrun those skeletal warriors too.

When you return to said place you won’t need to opt in again, you’ll have already done that. Now you may thinking this could get a bit out of control and what if you don’t like what happens to you within an experience? Well the new viewer will allow you to revoke rights to that experience or even block it.

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July 1, 2014

Gizmodo Reporter Experiences A Less Than Immersive Experience Of Second Life With The Oculus Rift

Jordan Kushins of Gizmodo has a refreshingly honest report on using Second Life with an Oculus Rift : I Explored Second Life’s Forgotten Worlds With An Oculus Rift. The report has a realistic review of life with the Rift, demonstrating that work needs to be done to incorporate the technology not just into Second Life, but into pretty much any experience.

The report also has some excellent pictures of Second Life, but Jordan confesses these were provided afterwards by Peter Gray and looked a lot spiffier than the scenes he witnessed live. This isn’t a trick, Second Life is extremely capable of displaying some excellent graphical representations of the virtual world, but you need a damn good graphics card to pull it off.

The report starts with some positive commentary on Second Life :

You’d think Second Life is a ghost town by now. And yet! One million people still actively inhabit the digital universe, a number that’s stayed impressively consistent since its early heyday. Over the past decade, those loyal early adopters have created over a petabyte of user-generated content in the form of—well, anything and everything you could possibly dream up: replicas of real-life locations where it’s possible to fly, triple-X adult zones where it’s possible to get filthy, and detailed scenes inhabited by avatars who may or may not resemble their flesh-and-blood counterparts.

Personally I was quite enamoured by this opening, there is still plenty going on in Second Life and there is content of an extremely wide range. Obviously Peter Gray didn’t take the reporter on a grand tour of Zindra. However Peter Gray did allow Jordan Kushins to take control of his avatar to experience Second Life via an Oculus Rift. However there is evidence Linden Lab missed a trick here, because Jordan wanted to create his own avatar to enter the world. However he was happy enough to explore as Peter.

Now at this point I should point out that Jordan’s experience of Second Life via the Oculus Rift wasn’t smooth, but that’s fine because it’s early days for the Oculus Rift and early days for Second Life via the Oculus Rift. The issues absolutely do need to be pointed out.

Jordan donned the Oculus Rift and then found himself stuck in the corner of a mansion, with a plant between him and the wall. Jordan tried turning around but ultimately needed to take off the headset to get a better view of his surroundings to work out why he was stuck.

Jordan explains how he had difficulty with viewing the world whilst wearing the Rift, looking inside his body, instead of outside at the world and then he talks of an issue that I’ve seen repeatedly made regarding Oculus Rift usage :

Also: When you’re wearing something over your eyes that completely obscures your vision, you can’t see the keyboard. When you can’t see the keyboard, you have to be a super solid touch-typist to manipulate your avatar, which requires tapping the arrows and spelling out sentences to chat (if you’re not using vocal commands). It’s obviously not impossible, but there is a fundamental disconnect that seems important to address with a work-around.

This is going to be a challenging issue for any virtual world going forward. Keyboard communications are extremely important and many people aren’t ready to switch to voice or voice to text solutions yet, many will never want to switch to such solutions.

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