November 2015 – Page 3

November 10, 2015

Second Life May Be Losing Regions But It’s Not In Betamax Territory Yet

“Betamax? Is that still around?” I pondered today as I read news on The Guardian that Sony are going to stop creating Betamax cassettes in March 2016. The main reason that Betamax appears have continued long after many felt it had departed is due to the use of Micro MV cameras, which use Micro MV cassettes in Betamax format. However all good things come to an end and over 40 years after its release and almost thirty years since Betamax lost the video format wars, Betamax finally seems to be going beneath the technical waters.

Which brings us on to Second Life. Daniel Voyager recently reported; Second Life regions drop under the 25, 000 mark. Daniel’s blog post was based on a report by Tyche “Statto” Shepherd over at SLUniverse, where Tyche announced :

Well as I predicted , a milestone of sorts was passed this week as the Grid dipped below 25,000 regions for the first time since June 2008.

The scores on the doors on November 8th were :

24,985 Regions
17,888 private estates
7097 Linden owned

The net loss of private regions for this year stood at 712 on November 8th. However let’s compare this to some previous years to try and get a picture of what’s going on.

11/11/2012 – Total Private Regions 21,334. Year to date loss of 2,523 private regions (-10.58%)
10/11/2013 – Total Private Regions 19,462 . Year to date loss of 1,530 private regions (-7.29%)
09/11/2014 – Total Private Regions 18,735. Year to date loss of 538 private regions (-2.8%)
08/11/2015 – Total Private Regions 17,888. Year to date loss of 712 private regions (-3.8%)

Therefore we can see that this year we’re seeing an increase in the rate of net losses of private regions compared to last year, but the rate of losses is still a lot lower than in 2012 and 2013. Let’s play about with some more figures.

Continue reading “Second Life May Be Losing Regions But It’s Not In Betamax Territory Yet”

November 7, 2015

Immersive Edge A Hypergrid Story Launches In OpenSim This Weekend

This weekend sees the launch of Immersive Edge, A Hypergrid Story. I initially took a look at this project a week or so ago; OpenSim Storytellers Are Developing Some Impressive Storytelling Techniques. The launch covers more than just introducing people to Immersive Edge, there will also be presentations from writers and designers regarding techniques and tools that can be used in bringing immersive fiction to virtual worlds utilising OpenSim.

Some of the techniques will also be good for other virtual worlds, but OpenSim has made some great leaps and bounds in making it easier for people to create immersive fiction than other platforms. Let’s take a look at the presenters for the launch, or more accurately, let’s take a look at Nara Malone’s blog post introducing us to the presenters; Meet the Presenters for Immersive Edge Launch.

Sande Chen

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer. Her writing work includes 1999 Independent Games Festival winner Terminus and the 2007 PC RPG of the Year, The Witcher. Sande was also nominated for a Writers Guild Award in Videogame Writing for The Witcher.

Sande is the co-author of Serious Games: Games That Educate, Train, and Inform and a contributor to Writing for Video Game Genres, Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing, and Secrets of the Game Business.

Sande was profiled as one of the top 100 most influential women in the game industry back in 2006 for her work as Director of Girls in Games, Inc. On top of that, Sande was nominated for a Grammy Nomination in 1996 for music video direction.

So that’s quite an impressive bio I’d say! Sande will be speaking on Sunday November 8th at 9:00am SLT. The title of Sande’s presentation is : “How Technology is Changing Storytelling”.
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November 6, 2015

Daden Awarded Grant For Virtual Field Trips, Second Life Is Good For Your Health & Bigger Than You May Think

I’m having a busy week with birthdays and visitors from the emerald isle, so I’m a bit behind on virtual world news but I will highlight a few interesting looking stories that are doing the rounds.

Hypergrid Business report : Daden awarded £230,000 for virtual field trips. I might need to acknowledge some bias here. I come from the same city as Daden. However I won’t allow that to cloud my judgement. The Hypergrid Business report article informs us :

Daden Limited – a virtual reality specialist based at the Innovation Birmingham Campus – has been awarded nearly £230,000 by Innovate UK for its Virtual Field Trips as a Service initiative.

The funding has been awarded in phase two of Innovate UK’s Design for Impact Competition, which aims to identify and then support innovative technology that has been proven in pilot projects in education, but is yet to have a national impact. Daden, working with The Open University (OU), the Field Studies Council and Birmingham-based Design Thinkers UK, has been awarded the funding to develop its Virtual Field Trips as a Service concept as a national service for schools and universities.

The article further states :

From November 2014 to April 2015, Daden worked with teachers and students at Washwood Heath Academy in Birmingham, virtual world educators in Second Life, university lecturers at a Royal Geological Society workshop, and a range of other stakeholders to understand the potential, challenges and key features of any virtual field trip service.

David Burden added: “Virtual Field Trips as a Service is intended to support, not replace, physical field trips. It will help students and staff better prepare for a field trip, can provide additional context and gives a focus for post-field trip data analysis, revision, virtual visits to comparative sites, and provides a catch-up for those who may have missed the physical trip. Whilst this funded project is focused on UK education there are obvious opportunities overseas, particularly for virtual ‘exchange’ field trips.”

The issue of virtual field trips keeps coming up. Field trips are certainly seen as a good use case for virtual worlds and virtual reality so it’s encouraging to see a company who are embracing the concept.

Continue reading “Daden Awarded Grant For Virtual Field Trips, Second Life Is Good For Your Health & Bigger Than You May Think”

November 6, 2015

Can Virtual World Ventures Learn Anything From Blizzcon?

Blizzcon 2015 has started, a celebration of all things Blizzard related, including games and a movie. The opening ceremony was broadcast free to watch, although you wouldn’t have got caught up in the atmosphere like those in the Anaheim Convention Centre if you watched it via a stream. This means that many people who haven’t even got a virtual ticket have been able to view part of Blizzcon.

Blizzcon gives fans the chance to meet developers, artists, voice actors, view cinematics, engage in sports, cosplay and apparently there’s a tavern there too. Linkin Park will be making an appearance too, so it’s a costly affair to put together and I can’t think of a virtual world conference that would even scratch the costs of Blizzcon. However that doesn’t mean that virtual worlds can’t pick up some tips from Blizzcon.

The first point to note came to me whilst I was watching the opening ceremony via a Twitch stream. As noted earlier, the opening ceremony was a free to view affair, so it wasn’t a dodgy stream. As we all know, when it comes to Second Life, Twitch are the bad guys. However Twitch does have a rival in the shape and form of YouTube Gaming. Second Life has an auto generated channel there, but there’s also an official Linden Lab channel too, although I’m yet to see any live streaming from that quarter, but there is potential.

So why would you want to stream a virtual world conference via an external service? Well for a start, as much as we love being in the virtual world, watching a virtual world conference via a stream is likely to be more comfortable and less crashtastic than trying to cam in from a neighbouring region because the region where the conference is taking place is full. This should also leave room for me in said conference region to take photos as part of my role as the seeker of truth and justice!

Alternatively a live stream could be viewable on YouTube Gaming and also in other regions via media on a prim type solutions, so regions could share the load but have more people inworld watching the event.

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November 5, 2015November 5, 2015

Project Sansar Continues To Make The News

Linden Lab’s Project Sansar remains under a shield of secrecy, even on Linden Lab’s newly revamped website. We have picked up bits and pieces from interviews, such as when Tom’s Hardware spoke to Linden Lab’s Senior Director, Global Communications, Gray Of The Lab From San Francisco (AKA Peter Gray) :

Peter Gray likened Project Sansar for VR to what WordPress has done for the Web; the idea is to make it possible for anyone to create a virtual experience, without the need for a software engineering background. However the WordPress analogy may have fell just a bit short of exemplifying the message Linden Lab were trying to convey, so they’ve added a new analogy, YouTube.

John Gaudiosi of Fortune has been speaking to Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg and posted an article entitled; How ‘Second Life’ Developer Hopes To Deliver The ‘YouTube For VR’. The YouTube analogy is a good one because it encompasses more than just the creation aspect, as Ebbe Altberg explains in the article :

“Much like YouTube, Sansar will empower people to create, share, and profit from their own social virtual experiences,” Altberg says. “Doing that today requires an engineering team—it’s hard and expensive, and that limits the use-cases for VR. That’s similar to the old days of the web, so we sometimes also use WordPress as an apt analogy.”

Unless you work for Linden Lab or are in the top secret Alpha you won’t know which analogy works best, time will tell on that front. However YouTube is widely known as a platform where people create content and make money. Whereas that link between creation and income isn’t so clear when it comes to WordPress, although that route is available via use of WordPress too.

Continue reading “Project Sansar Continues To Make The News”