Linden Lab – Page 108

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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July 1, 2014

Licences, EULAs and Scares, Oh My!

Back in the summer of 2009 a new menace appeared to be on the horizon in the shape and form of BuilderBot. The tool itself in some ways had noble aims, it was designed to assist a sim owner in making the move from Second Life to the Opensim world. Rezzable were the team wanting to make the move from Second Life to their own virtual world, they had owned some very popular sims such as Greenies and Black Swan. The problem was that initial reports suggested BuilderBot would also take with it content not owned by the sim owner. This was explained in a now archived blog post by the Rezzable team :

Our intention is to make tools for serious builders. So now someone can more easily take a copy of their build off SL and archive, keep it safe. Taking stuff linkset by linkset is really slow and painful. BuilderBot allows for a significantly better way to handle content. You can then save versions of builds to make a sorta library and then use these versions to make new iterations. It is your stuff, so now you can take care of it. The risk is that rippers can also use the tool to take unauthorized copies.

Rippers don’t seem to care much about DRM and already they can use copybot to take (and sell usually) illegal copies of content. In fact there is really no way to stop this technically. It is more about not giving content thieves safe haven to sell and benefit from their theft. I don’t think this is any different that issues with music being copied or dvd films. It is just a reality of creating digital content and virtual content creators need a better way to address rather than just filing DMCA protests.

BuilderBot will grab a copy of everything on sim–so you need to be careful on what is rezzed. You can of course delete stuff that you do not have rights to. But it is possible to grab stuff that you were not intending to have in your OAR file–and accidents do happen.

Unsurprisingly Second Life content creators were not impressed. Rezzable changed their mind and decided not to release the product as originally intended. Shopping Cart Disco reported on the issue, as did New World Notes. In the Second Life forums concerned residents were trying to get the then Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon to intervene. Eventually matters settled down, but this did open a wider discussion about virtual worlds other than Second Life and the rights people have to content. Some Second Life content creators started to stipulate their content could not be used outside of Second Life, others were happy for their content to go to other grids. This was unchartered territory because prior to this it really hadn’t been much of a concern.

Opensim worlds have grasped this nettle to a degree. Kitely’s market for example has permissions for export, which means someone can export the content outside of Kitely. Second Life is not part of the Hypergrid and so has not had a need to set such permissions. However there still seems to be some confusion as to what rights people have to their content.

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June 30, 2014

The Future Of SL Events Past And Future

Now you may get a sense of deja vu when you hear that Jessica Lyon is organising a discussion on the future of Second Life event. However fear not, there’s a future of Second Life event from the past and there’s one set for the future, although if you read this post after the date of the future event it will have happened in the past!

Inara Pey also reports on the new event and points out that the discussion is about the future of Second Life, not the future of Linden Lab’s planned new world. Personally I think they will have difficulty avoiding discussion about the new world but it would be better all round if those attending stayed on topic.

The full details of the event are :

A very special Question and Answer meeting is planned for Wednesday July 2nd at 7AM SLT in the Firestorm Auditorium with Oz Linden (Technical Director of Second Life) and possibly Pete Linden (Director of communications at Second Life (AKA Gray of The Lab from San Francisco)).

The discussion will ONLY be about the future of our current beloved platform ‘Second Life’ and will not venture into the new platform currently under development. Lets hear what LL has planned for Second Life as there is plenty of time for questions about the new platform at a later date.

Seating is limited, come early.

The event will be recorded and posted here once rendered, as well as transcribed and summarized by Inara Pey.

The event will be live streamed http://www.livestream.com/metaworld2 Questions will be monitored from the stream.

If you have questions to ask please leave them in a comment on the Firestorm blog post and Jessica will try to get through as many as she can during the show.

All questions must be on topic about Second Life and not the new platform.

Location And Time :

Wednesday, July 2nd at 7am SLT

SLURL : http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Phoenix%20Firestorm%20Support/171/128/4002

Obviously a lot of people won’t be able to attend the meeting at that time but that’s an issue no matter what time a meeting is held. However an interesting meeting has already been held on this subject, with Jessica Lyon leading the conversation.

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June 28, 2014

Ebbe Altberg Throws Down The Gauntlet Regarding Fixing Second Life Group Chat

I like Ebbe Altberg, he talks to the community, he’s not afraid to tell people they are angry :

Wow, you are an angry person. Ok, so, why are you so angry?

He talks to the press and has recently been talking to Re/Code in an article entitled : Second Life Creator Linden Lab Says Virtual Worlds and Virtual Reality Belong Together. Early on in that article we see that Ebbe has learnt how to talk the talk :

“We don’t call it a game,” says Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg, almost before our interview has begun.

He’s talking about Linden’s most famous product, Second Life, now 11 years old. That’s old by game — sorry, “virtual world” — standards, but its “significant revenue” means the 185-person company is profitable, Altberg said. Coming to Linden from BranchOut after the departure of CEO Rod Humble in January, Altberg does not mince words about Second Life’s past mistakes.

That article also talks about Oclus Rift usage in Second Life, including a shout out to Jo Yardley of 1920’s Berlin without mentioning her name :

“One creator went into her virtual world in Oculus for the first time and was crying,” Altberg said. “It’s very powerful stuff.”

Philip Rosedale also features in the article with talk of High Fidelity but I’m going off on a tangent here, the point is Ebbe engages and it’s very encouraging. However one of the problems with engaging is that everything you say is dissected, analysed and at times misunderstood. Then there’s the fact that what you say is remembered, especially on the internet. So it was with some surprise that I witnessed Ebbe getting involved in a Twitter exchange about group chat. Not only did Ebbe get involved, he actually suggested that group chat will be fixed before the new world launches, an extremely bold claim indeed.

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