January 2015 – Page 4

January 19, 2015

Oculus VR And Linden Lab Both Hiring As Development Of VR Gathers Pace

A sign of a healthy market can sometimes be found in the number of vacancies in that sector. Sometimes a number of vacancies can indicate that a company is not the best place to work because there’s a lot of churn. However, let’s be positive here.

Oculus VR and Linden Lab are both hirng and both list plenty of vacancies. Both companies also have plenty of perks. Reuters have reported : Facebook hiring spree hints at ambitions in virtual reality and beyond. Whereas this indicates Facebook hiring going beyond Oculus, there are an impressive number of job listings at Oculus :

Oculus Rift, the maker of virtual reality headsets that Facebook acquired in a $2 billion deal last year, is among the key areas slated for growth, with 54 jobs listed on its website, according to a review by Reuters of listings.

Oculus are advertising positions for Software Engineers, Hardware Engineers, Content, including a game designer, Resaearch, Recruiting, Operations, Sales, Marketing, Design & User Experience, Interns and Co-ops and University Grads, Masters & PHDS. Whereas this doesn’t give us a clear indication of where Oculus are going as a team, it is interesting that they are advertising for Unreal Engine and Unity engineers. Are Oculus planning on making games or are they planning on making sure games work well with Oculus?

Oculus offer some interesting perks :

Perks include flexible hours, free food, happy hours, team trips, free Oculus hardware, and much more. We offer competitive salaries and a full range of benefits including comprehensive health care and 401k.

Some of those perks I’ve seen cited as being a barrier to entry, but I’ll come on to that later. Oculus also state that they are an equal opportunity employer :

Oculus VR, LLC is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Employment with Oculus is governed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.

Very noble indeed. As for Linden Lab, their careers page lists around a quarter of the number Oculus do, but that’s still a very healthy 14 positions.

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January 17, 2015

Visit The Timekiller Goth Festival Before It Runs Out Of Time

Linden Lab’s continued excellent promotion of The Destination Guide alerted me to the Timekiller Goth Festival. Alas this also alerted me to the fact that the festival is running between January 9th – 18th, which means if you want to visit, you’re almost out of time!

The festival is taking place on the parcel of SL Goth Magazine, whom I didn’t know existed. This is another good reason for holding events or getting yourself in the destination guide.

The event is supported by a host of creators, whom I shall list from the SL Goth Magazine website :

Black Arts – BYRNE – Biscuit Clothing – Cute Poison – Cherished Memories Wedding Store
Dark Passions – DEADPOOL – Devae – Galactic Wunder Nails – Ghost Story – Howling Asylum – ImmateriA – Morphe Inc. – PIXEL BOX – Stargazer Creations – Thanks for All the Nebulae and more!

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January 16, 2015

High Fidelity Talk About The Ease Of Setting Up High Fidelity Local Servers

Dan Hope of High Fidelity has blogged this week : Stack Manager Makes Local Servers Easy to Setup. The post is aimed in the main at those who have been in High Fidelity Alpha and have attempted to setup a local server before. However the post is also worth a glance from those who may want to know where High Fidelity is heading.

Stack Manager is the name of the application that allows people to setup a local server in High Fidelity, this amounts to running a server on a local machine. The application has been through a lot of changes, and in the past people found it a bit cumbersome. However the latest version makes setting up a local server a breeze, as High Fidelity engineer Stephen Birada explains in the blog post :

Basically, in less than two minutes — from download to installation to running the Stack Manager — you will have a local server, and you can start to build with it.

Basically that’s it, you download the application, run the setup and then start the server and you have a High Fidelity world running on your local machine. At the moment you need be an alpha tester to download and try Stack Manager I believe. However in the future anyone will be able to use Stack Manager, as the blog post explains :

After creating a new world, the next step is to invite people to visit, and Stack Manager is designed to streamline that process. Create a temporary place name — even without a High Fidelity account — and connect friends without making any firewall/NAT changes to your router or computer. If you like the domain, buy a place name in our directory to preserve it.

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January 15, 2015January 15, 2015

Virtual World Red Light Center To Support Oculus Rift

Dean Takahashi over at GamesBeat has an interesting article about the adult based virtual world of Red Light Center : Oculus Rift gets more virtual reality porn with Red Light Center. Now first things first, I stumbled across this article whilst trying to see if Linden Lab were in the news and, there is a reference to Linden Lab in this article, indeed it’s one that is surprising in many ways, although it’s not surprising to anyone who regularly uses Second Life :

Utherverse started development in 2003, and it opened its doors for the first time in 2005. Now the erotic community site consists of virtual nightclubs, hotels, bars, movie theaters, and stores. It also offers parties, classes, meeting rooms, live music with dancing, and art-gallery openings. It’s not unlike the virtual world Second Life, operated by Linden Lab, but this world is all about sex. The site has about a million monthly active users.

See! Dean Takahashi knows that Second Life is not all about sex, whereas I think it’s more difficult to argue that Red Light Center isn’t all about sex… actually that’s their selling point and they are not shy about it.

Now getting back to the article, it’s actually interesting even if you find Red Light Center a bit off, because it talks about virtual reality and Utherverse chief executive Brian Shuster make some bold claims about where Virtual Worlds are going in terms of Virtual Reality and graphics :

You’ll be hard-pressed to tell the difference between real people and the avatars. We use motion capture, and it looks realistic. The idea is that it makes you feel like you are actually there. You walk into a gentleman’s club and you feel like you are there. You can make it rain on the strippers on stage. And they are real people. That gets people worked up. Knowing there is a real person on the other end — that’s more stimulating than just watching porn.

I’m not convinced that this early in the VR cycle that this will be the case. However, although many people don’t like talking about it, adult entertainment will be a selling point in VR and there’s really no point in trying to deny this.

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January 14, 2015January 14, 2015

Whatever Happened To Second Life Demographic Metrics?

When I was a lad in Second Life Linden Lab used to publish statistics galore. They still make plenty of statistics available in terms of the economy, you can find those over at Tyche Shepherd’s Grid Survey site : http://gridsurvey.com/economy.php

However along with the economy stats Linden Lab used to publish statistics on age, gender, country of origin yadda yadda yadda. They stopped doing this some time ago. A report published in April 2008 by Janet Lo, Law student, University of Ottawa, commissioned by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada contains some statsics :

Age Of Users

13 – 17 (Teen Grid) – 0.96%
18-24 – 24.50%
25-34 – 35.43%
35-44 – 23.35%
45 or older – 15.25%
Unknown – 0.51%

That’s quite a vast age range of users. Gender was also quite interesting :

Gender Of Users

Male – 59.02%
Female – 40.98%

I seem to recall seeing a statistic where the gender balance was a tad closer, something like 57% – 43% but I can’t find a reference to this. I’m not sure why Linden Lab stopped publishing these statistics, they were good talking points and in today’s climate where diversity is a big thing, they may well be interesting. However as Linden Lab’s published statistics were, well, statistics, many people argued that we were in lies, damned lies and statistics territory. However that’s part of the fun of statistics!

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Month: January 2015

Oculus VR And Linden Lab Both Hiring As Development Of VR Gathers Pace

Visit The Timekiller Goth Festival Before It Runs Out Of Time

Timekiller Festival

High Fidelity Talk About The Ease Of Setting Up High Fidelity Local Servers

Virtual World Red Light Center To Support Oculus Rift

Whatever Happened To Second Life Demographic Metrics?