July 2015 – Page 4 – Ciaran Laval

July 16, 2015

Viewer-Managed Marketplace Migration Scheduled To Start On July 23rd – Oh Hell No!

Linden Lab have announced Viewer-Managed Marketplace Released: Migration Begins July 23, 2015. This is a very important blog post for people who have a Second Life Marketplace store as the blog post explains :

Once your store is migrated, you’ll need to use the Second Life VMM Viewer to manage the inventory in your Marketplace store.

So first things first, when will the migration be taking place? Well let’s go back to the blog post for that information because the migration will not be an overnight change :

The Viewer-Managed Marketplace (VMM) Viewer is now a release candidate, and automated migrations will begin on July 23, 2015. Migrations will be done weeknights between 9:00 PM and 9:00 AM Pacific. Merchants with large stores (over around 5,000 listings) will be scheduled, and we will send an email (to the email address associated with your store) to provide you with advance notice.

For all Merchants, we will send an email at the beginning of the migration process, and another email once it has completed. Merchants will not be able to modify items in their stores during this time, but purchases will continue for any item that is not in the process of being migrated.

Therefore you will be notified before your store is migrated, but you should keep an eye on your spam folders in case emails are incorrectly flagged.

Continue reading “Viewer-Managed Marketplace Migration Scheduled To Start On July 23rd – Oh Hell No!”

July 16, 2015

Ask The CEO Featuring Ebbe Altberg – What We’ve Learnt So Far

Ask The CEO, featuring Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg is still in play on the official Second Life forum. However we’ve learnt a few things from the eleven pages of the thread that currently exist.

The first thing to do is to read the opening post, because that already includes a lot of answers that Ebbe gave at the SL12B meeting. That’s where you’ll find out that Linden Lab are planning to improve media on a prim in Second Life :

We are working on a significant upgrade to the media capabilities of the Viewer (watch for a Project Viewer release). The new support will be focused on supporting modern formats and HTML 5. Content creators should be preparing to convert any older proprietary media such as Flash or Quicktime to the newer formats soon. Longer sound files has not been on the list, but perhaps it should be?

With the recent problems Flash has been facing, many would say that this can’t come quickly enough! That’s also the place where you will learn a little bit about differences in the approach Linden Lab are taking with Virtual Reality Head Mounted Displays, in Second Life and Project Sansar. When it comes to Second Life :

We don’t have any specific plans at this time, but with our open source Viewer, third parties could certainly integrate new hardware and we’ll continue to experiment from time to time.

Whereas when it comes to Project Sansar :

Right now, we’re focused on making Project Sansar an ideal experience with the Rift. In the future, we’ll probably support other hardware as well, but some of the challenges we’re solving for with the Rift – latency, frame rate goals, etc. – are things we’d need to get right for any HMD, and we don’t want to diffuse our focus by integrating lots of peripherals right now, when there aren’t any consumers who even have the hardware.

This is understandable because Second Life is already here and would need a lot more work to optimise for use with VR HMD than Project Sansar, which is a work in progress at a time when these devices are coming to the market.

Moving on past the opening post, Ebbe, Pete and Danger have all provided more answers to additional questions. I’ll highlight some of the answers but not all of them. The thread is worth a read and if you read the thread, you may even have questions of your own

A very interesting question came up wondering whether Project Sansar you have instancing for terrain and inworld mesh objects, Ebbe replied :

Yes, we’re planning to support instancing of entire experiences.

That sounds interesting, very interesting. I hope it means what I think it means!

Continue reading “Ask The CEO Featuring Ebbe Altberg – What We’ve Learnt So Far”

July 15, 2015

Draxtor Despres Shows The Second Life Related Parts Of The Dr Phil Show

Draxtor Despres has published a video on YouTube of the Second Life related parts of The recent Dr Phil show. I’ll embed the video under the cut, if you’re already under the cut, then the video is at the end of the post!

I blogged about this episode of Dr Phil on Monday, the day before the episode was aired. I have not seen the full episode but the show featured the extremely serious issue of gaming addiction. The first thing to point out is that the young man who was the subject of the episode of the Dr Phil show is not a resident of Second Life. This isn’t to say that Second Life can’t prove to be addictive, but I feel it’s worth pointing out that Second Life wasn’t his game of choice.

The parts of the show that do relate to Second Life feature Dr Phil inworld with an avatar that looks like the real life Dr Phil.

Continue reading “Draxtor Despres Shows The Second Life Related Parts Of The Dr Phil Show”

July 15, 2015

Investors Appear Nervous Regarding VR Funding

Eric Johnson over at Re/Code has reported : At Investor Event, VR Startups Brace for Slow Growth. The article centres around venture capitalists who seem a tad reluctant to buy into the Virtual Reality hype cycle at this moment in time.

UploadVR co-founder Nick Ochoa told the venture capitalists that they looked nervous and a report being prepared by his site backs this claim up. 164 venture capitalists have invested in VR companies until now, but 142 of them have done so only once.

Caution does seem to be the order of the day, Eric quotes High Fidelity’s Philip Rosedale as saying :

We will probably see lower adoption than everyone expects in the next year or so, but it will pick up,……My advice is, don’t overspend right now. Stock up for three or four years.

This seems to be a very sensible stance to take. VR has a lot of potential and a lot of exciting scope, but it has not yet delivered.

Continue reading “Investors Appear Nervous Regarding VR Funding”

July 15, 2015July 15, 2015

Tottering Biped Theatre Take Cyberspace To The Stage With A Performance Entitled The Second Life

I was googling news about Second Life today when I stumbled across articles about Tottering Biped Theatre. One of the issues regarding googling Second Life is that you get a lot of results that are not related to the virtual world. There are plenty of articles about recycling and television shows that are getting a Second Life, but not so many about Second Life the virtual world.

This is sort of the case with Tottering Biped theatre itself, with the exception that they have a performance entitled “The Second Life“, which is about :

The online virtual world of ‘Second Life’ stretches thousands of kilometers and millions of visitors. While searching for her lost sister, Jessica struggles to find out what – and who – are real. Life and its double are at stake in this multi-media exploration of loss in the digital age.

‘The Second Life’ was developed over a 3 year period after winning honours at Ontario’s professional playwright development centre, Pat the Dog. After a sold out run at Hamilton’s Theatre Aquarius, The Second Life is coming to Burlington’s Performing Arts Centre Oct 21-31, 2015.

Now one would assume that this isn’t about Linden Lab’s Second Life, but it’s inevitable that due to the proximity of the subject matter, people will make that link.

Continue reading “Tottering Biped Theatre Take Cyberspace To The Stage With A Performance Entitled The Second Life”