Transylvania Vampire Empire Is Turning Eleven

Transylvania

This week’s Highlights from the Second Life Destination Guide has some great locations but the one that stood out for me initially was the news that Transylvania Vampire Empire is celebrating its eleventh birthday in Second Life.

Transylvania Turning 11
The celebrations are already in full swing, as the Destination Guide explains :

Give in to your dark side and enjoy a week of Gothic-themed events as part of Transylvania’s eleventh birthday celebration. Transylvania is now one of the oldest communities in SL and features a thriving social scene where everyone is welcome. With live music, DJ’s, stage performances, a gothic formal ball and red carpet parties, there is plenty to see. Runs August 7th to August 13th.

Eleven is quite an impressive feat and this community were taking a bite out of Second Life long before the term “Spampire” was ever uttered.

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Virtual World Interoperability Is Still One Giant Step Away For VR

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes recently posted : Cross-Platform Virtual Reality is Here: Watch High Fidelity Unite Vive, Oculus, and PC Users in the Same Metaverse. The post was regarding the High Fidelity post regarding users with different interfaces interacting in High Fidelity. I covered this in my last post. The development is an impressive one.

Hamlet’s headline was a tad misleading and some folk thought the post was going to be about people from different virtual worlds being able to interact in a single virtual world. This has been done before, but the potential was never fulfilled. I have talked about this before.

Just over seven years ago Hamilton Linden blogged IBM and Linden Lab Interoperability Announcement :

This is a historic day for Second Life, and for virtual worlds in general. IBM and Linden Lab have announced that research teams from the two companies successfully teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid into a virtual world running on an OpenSim server, marking the first time an avatar has moved from one virtual world to another. It’s an important first step toward enabling avatars to pass freely between virtual worlds, something we’ve been working toward publicly since the formation of the Architecture Working Group in September 2007.

This was quite big news, Linden Lab issued a press release. The news was covered by Antone Gonsalves at Information Week and Erick Sconfeld at TechCrunch. I will embed a video of the epic moment at the end of the post.

Alas things didn’t work out and the project seems to be dead and yet, as demonstrated in the comments on Hamlet’s post, there’s still a lot of interest in interoperability between different virtual worlds.

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Project Sansar Buzz Appears To Be Launching The Second Life Of Second Life

Relaxing With Street Art

There’s an image for Project Sansar that is appearing on many articles regarding the project. I have no idea where people are getting this image from, have Linden Lab got a top secret media kit somewhere? I’ll use images from 1920’s Berlin and Everwinter for this post, 1920’s Berlin in particular gets a lot of mentions in the media.

There’s something very interesting going on with the recent media attention Linden Lab are receiving over Project Sansar, Second Life is making the news on the back of this too and in some cases, it sounds as if the way Second Life works has only just been discovered.

There have been a number of good articles about Linden Lab recently, my favourite recent written article I covered in my last blog post, it’s the article by Eric Johnson over at Re/code. However today I’ve discovered two more articles, one on Gamasutra and one on MoviePilot. Then there is a video interview from UploadVR, which is very impressive.

Christian Nutt over at Gamasutra has posted; True virtual reality: The race to build a ‘metaverse’. The article is very brief and refers to Eric Johnson’s article. Another article comes to us from Moviepilot and this one is all about Second Life;  Second Life: How to Navigate an Online Virtual World (and Maybe Even Make Some Money) :

In 2003, Linden Lab, a San Fran-based gaming and VR company, launched Second Life. 12 years later, more than a million users around the globe play the online game – although Linden Lab insists that Second Life is not a game at all.

This is the sort of article that makes you check that it wasn’t originally published in 2008 and has now for some odd reason came back to the top of the news, but it’s not, the article was published on 5th August 2015. The article discusses creating items for sale, becoming a stripper, sex being a big part of the Second Life virtual world and also time travel.

Time Travel?

The article really does sound like Second Life is relatively new, rather than over twelve years old and the article also makes Second Life sound quite exciting :

In fact, the possibilities of this game are almost endless. You can visit “Hell’s Asylum” (a landscape of fire and brimstone), “Everwinter” (a post apocalyptic wasteland based on the Chernobyl fallout zone) or – if you prefer something more serene – there’s “Irreplaceable”, a beautiful island paradise complete with a castle, forests and an underwater cave.

The article makes for a good read and is refreshingly honest in its approach of highlighting several different aspects of Second Life.

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Second Life’s Shadow Gives Linden Lab An Edge In Virtual Reality Future

Linden Village

For a virtual world that many people comment with surprise about it still being around, Second Life seems to still cast a mighty shadow over the virtual world scene. Over at Re/code, Eric Johnson has published an excellent article about how the land lies : Welcome To The Metaverse. I heartily recommend that people read this article in full.

The article opens with commentary from Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg regarding humans creating spaces :

Some spaces are mobile, like a bus. San Francisco is a space that was created by its users. Whether you go into a pub, a bar, a classroom, a bowling alley, an office, a library … We create spaces and we have people come together in those spaces, and then we communicate and socialize within those spaces.

These spaces are of course what people have been creating in Second Life too, in many and varied forms and guises.

Remnants Of Earth Hangar

Early on in the article Eric seems to be talking of Second Life in the past tense. This needs to be taken in context, Eric is really talking about how Second Life did not become the 3D internet that some hoped it would and how in the future, VR ventures will be hoping to go mainstream, become the next big thing and really get embraced by society :

A perfect metaverse, then, is more than just a video game or an application. Like a Web browser, or an operating system, it would offer users a means to do many things, and likely pay for them in many ways. That’s the Big Idea — that VR would be as transformative to the Internet as the World Wide Web — and it’s why so many companies are testing the waters. If one or more of them can crack it, they would unlock a great deal of virtual reality’s long-term potential.

Those of us who have already embraced virtual worlds know that the potential is there, but we also know that a large number of hurdles exist too.

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Screen Play: Life In An Animated World Features Second Life Related Work

The Albright-Knox art gallery in Buffalo is currently holding an exhibition, Screen Play: Life in an Animated World. The exhibition will run until Sunday September 13th and in part describes itself as :

Screen Play: Life in an Animated World is the first exhibition devoted exclusively to examining the work of contemporary artists who use the techniques, technologies, and tropes of animation as tools in their practices. This unprecedented exhibition gathers together almost fifty captivating film, video, and immersive installations created during the past twenty-five years by more than three dozen artists from nearly twenty nations, filling the galleries of the 1905 Building and its Sculpture Court as well as the Gallery for New Media and the Auditorium.

There are many exhibitors, including at least a couple who have had a presence in Second Life. One is Chinese artist Cao Fei, whose exhibit at the exhibition is a tour of RMB City, which once had a place in Second Life. RMB City generated a hell of a lot a publicity back in the day and it seems, it still causes quite a buzz as I see it mentioned in many articles.

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes is a friend of Cao Fei (AKA China Tracy) and was an unpaid adviser on the project. Hamlet posted quite a few blog posts about RMB City, here’s one : RMB City Opens In London and Second Life: Metaverse-Based Art In An Internationally Renowned Gallery.

The New York Times also seem to like the project, here’s an article from them : Flying Avatars Admire the Artwork.

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