Linden Lab – Page 114

June 4, 2014

The Challenges Of Oculus Rift Usage In Second Life

Digital mischief maker Loki Eliot recently posted an excellent blog post : Mapping a Gamepad to Second Life & OculusVR with Voice to Text. This post highlights quite a few issues and challenges for the usage of Oculus Rift within Second Life as well as highlighting issues with Oculus Rift and that level of immersion in any virtual world.

In the post Loki explains how he mapped an old game controller that is compatible with the xBox and mapped the buttons on that to control some of the menus within Second Life. Loki also used a voice to text dictation application to allow him to send voice to, well text, and therefore communicate with other Second Life users in text. I’ll embed Loki’s video at the end of the blog post but you should really read Loki’s post to get a good grasp of the issues.

Loki makes some points I’ve heard before, such as this one regarding the field of view and keyboard usage :

Instead they wrapped EVERYTHING around your field of view and expect you to be able to touch type which i know some superhuman SL users can do. Im not one of them unfortunately.

This emphasises a problem with trying to make Oculus Rift compatible with existing experiences, not just Second Life by the way but Second Life has an additional challenge that many games don’t face because communicating via text in Second Life is massive. That’s why people complain about Group Chat not working as well as they would hope.

However Loki’s use of a game controller reminded me of people I know who swear by game controllers. I actually have one but hardly ever use it, although it’s a chicken and egg situation because I’m sure if I used the game controller more often, I would be far more impressed by it. However the people whom are fans of game controllers in general are, gamers. No surprises there but as Second Life isn’t well known for attracting gamers, it highlights another challenge for Oculus Rift and Second Life harmony.

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June 3, 2014

June Highlights For The Years 2007 – 2009

By 2007 Linden Lab had moved their communications away from the forum and to a shiny new blog. At this point a few things should be noted, firstly, Linden Lab made great use of the blog and engaged in some excellent communications. However Second Life was growing, fast. This meant that blog posts attracted a lot of comments and many of those comments were of a negative nature.

Linden Lab employees must have found this frustrating and some people speculate that Linden Lab moved away from communicating due to the level of negativity. However users were engaged and negative though many comments were, they were of a cruel to be kind nature because people would not take the time out to be heard if they were not engaged with the platform. This sort of thorny situation plagues many a company when it comes to communications.

June 2007

Daniel Linden blogged Keeping Second Life Safe, Together. Ok, this was blogged on the 31st May 2007 but the ripples ran into June … ok feeble excuse but this was a controversial post. Daniel was asking for users to keep reporting questionable content. However some users felt that this post was a dig at adult content in Second Life full stop and took umbrage with the post. The controversy seemed to revolve around the term “Broadly Offensive” which was used in the post.

Torley Linden blogged First Look: WindLight update – beauty & bugs! This post, not surprisingly, concerned Windlight which was new at the time. The feature looked very exciting with talk of multiple suns, moons, region owners being able to control visitor settings and making it easier to edit presets. I think it’s fair to say that although Windlight was a great addition, it has never really fulfilled its potential.

Jeska Linden blogged Voice First Look Viewer Available for the Live Grid. Strange as it may seem these days, voice did not hit the grid until 2007 and was considered a controversial move. This blog explained that there was a voice viewer available and that Linden Lab would be seeking feedback. Ah they really did engage with the community back then.

Sabin Linden blogged Día de la Liberación and Het-Grid. Unfortunately the Second Life blog archive appears to have eaten that post, but it can still be found on the wayback machine. This was a bold move in which viewer updates would be optional and server updates were set to be released only to certain parts of the grid if circumstances dictated. This was of course the forerunner for what we see today with server channels for updates.

Sardonyx Linden blogged An open source community update. This was a post that thanked the excellent work they had engaged with to help fix bugs and add patches. The problem Linden Lab had was that they did not have enough developers to implement these updates, but this post suggested that developers had been hired which was allowing Linden Lab to implement these fixes. Many residents were credited for their help, far too many for me to list but they included the likes of Nicholaz Beresford, Alissa Sabre, Tharax Ferraris, Fremont Cunningham, Dale Glass, Able Whitman, Thraxis Epsilon, Peekay Semyorka, Argent Stonecutter, Jacek Antonelli, SignpostMarv Martin and Strife Onizuka.

Continue reading “June Highlights For The Years 2007 – 2009”

June 2, 2014June 2, 2014

June Highlights For The Years 2003 – 2006

Second Life officially hits eleven years old this month, although if you count closed beta it’s older than that. I’ve decided to delve into the annals of history and look back at some June highlights from the early years of Second Life.

I’ll take a brief look at some topics from June 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. This covered a period of major growth in Second Life, especially 2006 when users were no longer required to provide billing information, there also seemed to be a lot more competitions back in these years.

I provide this information courtesy of the old old old forum archive at : http://forums-archive.secondlife.com/120/1.html

There’s a lot more information there but I can’t fit that all in one post!

June 2003

Robin Linden confirmed that the NDA had been lifted and people were free to build Second Life websites, they even provided some resources to help with those websites.

Tanya Linden announced that someone had won the free use of an Island for three months as well as as well as an NVIDIA nForce™2-based computer, including an NVIDIA GeForce™ FX 5900 graphics card, courtesy of NVIDIA. The computer comes equipped with the Cordless Elite Duo, state-of-the-art wireless mouse and keyboard, courtesy of Logitech.

Hunter Linden announced that groups would now need to consist of at least three people after three days of existence or they would be disbanded.

Haney Linden announced that the payouts from voting stations would be increased from 10,000 Linden Dollars to 12,000 Linden Dollars. Now if you’ve ever wondered what the purpose of those voting stations around the grid was, this gives us a bit of a clue.

James Linden announced that there would be some downtime to roll out patch 0.9.1. Highlights included Trying to link a tree to a primitive does not crash the simulator (it will quietly fail) and a rather worrying look at how things used to be in the shape and form of Sandbox simulators being tax free.

June 2004

Robin Linden announced that Philip Rosedale would be appearing on CNN News.

Catherine Linden announced that someone had won a lifetime membership which came with a free 4096M parcel.

Robin Linden announced a big technological breakthrough that would allow content developers to tie in-world objects together with programs written in languages like Perl, Python, PHP, or Java. XML-RPC was fully functional and live.

Haney Linden announced that there would be a gala to celebrate Second Life’s 1st birthday. Highlights included a parade, which attracted so many attendees that it pushed Second Life past its technical limits, as Haney explained :

This afternoon’s parade attracted so many viewers that it pushed past the limits of Second Life’s current technology. The brave float drivers experienced major problems especially at sim boundaries.

Problems at sim boundaries hey …….

Magellan Linden announced that a resident needed to be sacrificed to satisfy a newly discovered volcano of Mt. G’al. I do like Magellan Linden!

Continue reading “June Highlights For The Years 2003 – 2006”

June 2, 2014

Has Rod Humble Gone Techno?

When Rod Humble left Linden Lab he did so with a statement on Facebook that said in part :

I am starting up a company to make Art, Entertainment, and unusual things! More on that in a few weeks.

Since then, many many weeks later, we haven’t heard a lot. Puzzled by this I decided to do some investigating but could only really find links to articles about Rod Humble leaving Linden Lab. I had heard a whisper that I should be looking for a chap in a hat, but that really didn’t take me far. I did find one or two odd links, links that left one saying “No, that can’t be him.”

I was about to call for assistance, I was halfway through writing a telegram to Inara Holmes when a certain odd link cried out to me :

Can I pimp my own stuff? I just released a techno / EDM album on iTunes & Amazon, woot!

My bands name is Chaphat and my Album is Outsurge.

This leads to an album on iTunes called Outsurge by a band called ChapHat.

Now you may be wondering what on earth stood out about that link, well it was the user who posted it, a certain Rod Humble, AKA Rodvik, from the San Francisco Bay area who also happens to be a fan of Aston Villa. Coincidence? Identity Theft? Neither can be ruled out, but there’s more.

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May 29, 2014May 29, 2014

Palmer Luckey Unsure Of Second Life Future In VR Age

I’m not Palmer Luckey’s biggest fan, this largely stems from the lack of understanding and lack of giving something back to the Kickstarter community after Oculus landed on their feet with the Facebook deal. In the wider scheme of matters this wasn’t exactly a huge let down and certainly didn’t merit the level of vitriol the decison received, I mean he’s certainly not in the Nick Clegg league when it comes to being a complete and utter let down and let’s face it, the future looks extremely bright for Palmer Luckey and Oculus Rift, the same definitely can’t be said for Nick Clegg, the future doesn’t even look as if it will be orange for him.

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes has managed to get some really interesting comments from Palmer Luckey regarding Second Life:

I think that virtual worlds are going to play a big role in the future of Oculus and VR on the whole, but it remains to be seen how big of a part of that future Second Life will be.

Second Life is of course approaching its official eleventh birthday and is therefore an older platform, it’s not young and exciting but I still believe Second Life can be a platform that takes advantage of technology such as Oculus Rift because Second Life is a very dynamic platform. Second Life is a platform whereby you can wipe the slate clean on a parcel or sim and start again, therefore I believe that people could create builds that are optimised for technology such as Oculus Rift, but being Second Life, that would also mean vast swathes of Second Life aren’t optimised for the technology and that could very well prove to be a stumbling block for widespread adoption of the technology in a virtual world such as Second Life.

Oculus Rift will probably be better served by a virtual world that is created with Oculus Rift in mind from the start. Hamlet asked Palmer Luckey what Second Life most needed in order to transition to the Oculus/VR age, and be relevant in it? Palmer replied:

I don’t think anyone will know for sure until VR has more time to mature, lots of poorly understood problems right now.

This brings us back to the point I was making earlier that Oculus Rift will probably be better served by a virtual world built with Oculus Rift in mind. This is a point that I’ve seen Adeon Writer make time after time regarding existing games and virtual worlds, the advice is that trying to fit existing virtual worlds and games into the Oculus Rift umbrella is likely to be more pain than its worth.

Continue reading “Palmer Luckey Unsure Of Second Life Future In VR Age”