Ciaran Laval

June 11, 2016

Live Music In High Fidelity

Last night I visited High Fidelity to watch Kevin M Thomas perform live. Kevin is not new to performing live music in virtual worlds, he has been performing in Second Life since 2007, see my previous blog post for more details.

Arriving at the location I was informed by way of a pop up that my LOD settings had been reduced due to the complexity of the scene, which is a nice touch. LOD means Level Of Detail, which will dictate what I can see and from how far away I can see objects.

I had not had to mess with my LOD settings for a while in High Fidelity so it took me a while to find them and this is exemplified in the image above, Kevin’s Guitar does not appear in this shot. I would advise people to stick with the reduced LOD settings in general in a situation like this, but I wanted to take some snapshots so I wanted to tweak those settings.

What we can see in the above picture is Kevin’s avatar and on the screen, the actual band, who were all in a room together to perform. This provided an excellent perspective to what exactly was going on here and highlighted the fact that real people were very much involved in the performance.

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June 10, 2016

Kevin M Thomas Talks To High Fidelity About Live Music In Virtual Reality

Kevin M Thomas is a name that should be familiar to fans of live music in Second Life. Kevin has been performing in Second Life since 2007 and has an inworld group with over 7,000 fans.

Being a musician of course is a portable skill and Kevin is taking advantage of that portable skill by taking his performances to other platforms. Today Kevin will be performing at a music jam event at 15:30 PDT in High Fidelity at hifi://open. That’s 23:30 British Summer Time … I think!

Kevin recently spoke to Caitlyn Meeks, Director of Content for High Fidelity and Caitlyn has posted some of that conversation in a blog post : Live Performance in High Fidelity.

There are some great points in this blog post and one of them is an issue I’ve raised before, the potential for Worldwide reach in virtual worlds, Kevin says :

Performing in VR requires incredible energy as a performer as you do not normally get the fan feedback as you would in real life, however the payoff is greater as you can build a much larger fan base in VR as no one is limited by where they live to attend a show.

Worldwide reach doesn’t just cover musicians, back in March I blogged : Comedian Sami Shah Exemplifies The Advantages Of Virtual World Reach. Storytellers, artists and film makers can all build reach via Virtual Worlds and as we move forward, more immersive Virtual Reality environments.

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June 9, 2016

Spoonful of Sugar Festival Now Accepting Applications For Sponsors

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, as well all know. A Spoonful of Sugar Festival 2016 also has links to medicine, it’s a Second Life based event to benefit Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders.

The event will run from September 9th – 25th and the festival organisers are now accepting applications for participation :

Due to the overwhelming positive response to this event we expect the spaces to go quickly and many have already been filled. Spaces are filled on a first come first serve basis.

To learn more about the event, you may go to the home page and watch the video so you can get a feel of what you are getting involved in.

MSF/Doctors Without Borders is thrilled we are doing this and very excited and impressed by our ‘community without borders’ here in SL and how we seek to use our time to the benefit of so many worthy causes.

The website has plenty of information about the festival, about the organisers and about MSF, some of the names will be familiar indeed, for example Harper Beresford is involved as blogger manager and I really need to ask Harper how she manages to fit so many hours in a day because she works so hard for so many Second Life events. Continue reading “Spoonful of Sugar Festival Now Accepting Applications For Sponsors”

June 9, 2016

Janine Hawkins Remembers Her Mother Via Her Saved Games And Virtual World Creations

Over at Giant Bomb Janine Hawkins has published an excellent post : Guest Column: My Mother’s Games. The byline of the article sums things up very nicely :

Instead of flipping through photo albums to reminisce, guest contributor Janine Hawkins loads up her late mother’s saved games.

The name Janine Hawkins will be familiar to some of you, Janine’s pseudonym, Iris Ophelia, may be more familiar as that’s the name she used when she wrote for New World Notes.

The article itself takes a moving and extremely interesting look at the games Janine’s Mom played and the memories those saved games bring back to Janine. The games listed include Journey, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age : Inquisition, The Sims and Second Life, which as we all know, isn’t a game but fits nicely into the article.

When it came to Second Life, Janine did not login to her Mother’s account to see where she had last been, she instead took a look at her Mother’s art folder and shares a screenshot from there on the Giant Bomb article. Janine explains :

So I didn’t log in to her account and take a screenshot of her avatar as she left it for this article. Instead went into her art folder, and picked a piece of hers to share. Her experience with Second Life isn’t about her game state or where she left off, it’s about what she made.

Janine’s Mother found Second Life to be an excellent avenue for her artistic expression, an expression that had been stifled somewhat earlier in her life.

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June 8, 2016

The Drax Files Episode 38 – Eboni Khan And Her Inspiring Smile

Episode 38 of The Drax Files : World Makers takes us to the world of Second Life fashion in the shape and form of the wonderfully inspiring story of Eboni Khan, owner of The House of Hucci brand.

Eboni simply radiates throughout the episode as she tells us how she overcame a rather large degree of adversity to prosper inside and outside of Second Life.

Eboni, a single Mom went to a Management Information School and progressed to a job as an IT Manager. Unfortunately, Eboni was laid off and it was then that Second Life and Eboni’s creative skills came to the fore. Eboni explains :

If it wasn’t for Second Life, I don’t know how I would have made it through the recession.

Eboni points out that Second Life has a low barrier to entry, which is more true today than it was many years ago because with the Second Life Marketplace, you don’t even need to own a plot of land to start selling your wares.

An Image Should Be Here

Eboni also discusses how it’s volume of sales that provides her with an income she can live on. Most items in Eboni’s store cost around a dollar, so you can quickly see that Eboni sells a lot of items and that there’s a market in Second Life that consists of plenty of people who are willing to engage in microtransactions.

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