Virtual Reality – Page 5

November 4, 2014

OpenSimulator Community Conference November 8th – 9th

If EndgagetExpand doesn’t tickle your fancy then there’s another conference taking place this weekend that is well worth keeping an eye on, it’s the OpenSimulator Community Conference, which takes place on November 8th-9th. Unfortunately inworld tickets are already sold out for the conference but you can register for a free streaming ticket.

The basics of the conference can be found on the about page of the conference website, but I’ll give you a brief snippet :

The OpenSimulator Community Conference is an annual conference that focuses on the developer and user community creating the OpenSimulator software. Organized as a joint production by the Overte Foundation and AvaCon, Inc., the conference features two days of presentations, workshops, keynote sessions, and social events across diverse sectors of the OpenSimulator user base.

The OpenSimulator Community Conference 2014 features four themed tracks and a Learning Lab for hands on hackerspaces, speedbuilds, and more:

Business & Enterprise
Content & Community
Developers & Open Source
Research & Education
Learning Lab

This conference features a lot of speakers whom followers of Second Life and virtual worlds will be familiar with. They include :

Philip Rosedale – High Fidelity
Nara Malone – Greyville Writer’s Colony
Steve LaValle – Oculus VR
John “Pathfinder” Lester – Reaction Grid
Maria Korolov – Hypergrid Business
Ilan Tochner – Kitely
Caledonia Skytower – Seanchai Library
Tranquillity Dexler – Inworldz
Latif Khalifa – Radegast, Singularity
Jessica Lyon – Phoenix Firestorm
Kim Anubis – The Magicians

There are many more speakers whom some of you will be familiar with, it’s a jam packed schedule full of interesting looking discussions.

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November 4, 2014November 4, 2014

Ebbe Altberg Off To The Big Apple To Speak At Engadget Expand NY

Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg will be one of the speakers at Endgadget Expand NY this weekend. The website also paints a nice profile of Ebbe and Linden Lab :

Ebbe Altberg is the CEO of Linden Lab, the company best known for Second Life, the most successful user-created virtual world, and Blocksworld, the free build-and-play iPad game for kids and adults. Under Ebbe’s leadership, Linden Lab has now also begun work on the next-generation virtual world, which will be in the spirit of Second Life while empowering creators to go far beyond what’s possible today.Most recently prior to joining Linden Lab in early 2014, Altberg was COO of BranchOut. Prior to that, he was part of the executive team at Yahoo, most recently as SVP of media products. His more than 25 years of experience managing teams that create world-class products and services also includes leadership roles at Ingenio (acquired by AT&T Interactive) and Microsoft.

Ebbe is scheduled to take part in a discussion on Saturday November 8th at 1:10pm, entitled; Back To Reality : VR Beyond Gaming and will be joined by

Matt Bell, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Matterport
Ben Gilbert, Senior Editor, EndGadget
Marte Roel, Co-Founder, BeAnotherLab

The blurb for the discussion states :

Rapid 3D visualization of physical spaces, social networking and gender swapping: This is what happens when virtual reality stops playing games and starts getting real.

I’m not sure what to make of that at all.

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October 29, 2014

High Fidelity Wants People To Interact In An Emotionally Normal Way

Whilst I was on holiday an excellent article on High Fidelity appeared in MIT Technology Review : The Quest to Put More Reality in Virtual Reality. Ok first of all let’s get a couple of questionable parts of the article out of the way. Tom Simonite seems to talk of Second Life in the past sense, which will rub many a Second Life user up the wrong way as Second Life is still going pretty strong, despite reports to the contrary. Then there’s this claim :

Some of what his company is creating is much the same as Second Life. You download some software and then enter a virtual space where you can steer your avatar around and build stuff. This time, though, building is much easier, the lag mostly eliminated, and the graphics more impressive.

Anyone who has had a peek at High Fidelity will know that the building is not much easier and nor are the graphics more impressive at this stage in the development of the platform. High Fidelity is making some bloody impressive strides right now but it’s still very much an Alpha product.

Then there’s the stock photograph of Philip Rosedale that is used, we need a new modern Philip photo, I’ve seen that one umpteen times! However the above aside, it’s an excellent article that captures so very well the fantastic enthusiasm Philip Rosedale has for virtual worlds. Admittedly I’m an unashamed Philip Rosedale fanboi, despite not always agreeing with him, but the man has a long held dream and it’s one that captivates me. Whereas some may think of Philip Rosedale; “Dreamer, you’re nothing but a dreamer, well can you put your hands in your head, oh no!” the answer to that is that with the right peripherals, in High Fidelity you can put your virtual hands in your virtual head, oh yes!

The article explains how High Fidelity is taking a very different approach from Second Life in some areas and this is where I believe that High Fidelity is most definitely on the right track :

High Fidelity’s business model is less developed. Most of its software and platform will be open source, so anyone can use it or set up a virtual world using its technology. High Fidelity plans to make money by charging people to include their worlds in a kind of directory for the metaverse, similar to the domain name system for the Web.

I’ve said this before, more than once, but where I feel Second Life failed to adopt mass appeal is because it’s Second Life. Mass appeal may well come for a Linden Lab product running Linden Lab created technology, but I’m not convinced that mass appeal will come for any virtual world being a one stop shop. In terms of Second Life I’ve said that it needed to reach the stage where people weren’t thinking they were visiting Second Life, they were thinking of playing an elf on a platform running Second Life technology, or going to a concert, running Second Life technology. The technology being a discussion area for techie types and the experience itself being something people enjoy for the experience itself.

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August 26, 2014

Virtual Reality Potentially Taking Killer Apps Too Far

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes has posted a link to an excellent article in The Verge : The Rise And Fall And Rise Of Virtual Reality. The tag line for The Verge’s article is : In the wake of Facebook’s purchase of Oculus VR, can this revolutionary technology triumph anew?

The premise of the article, as the headline suggests is that Virtual Reality has never really got going yet. They see the internet as an alternative, not a version of virtual reality. This is not a short article, but it does make for fascinating reading. However the more relevant part of the article for people who read blogs such as this and Hamlet’s blog comes with the Facebook QA, which is an interview with Second Life co-founder and now Vp of Engineering at Facebook Cory Ondrejka.

In the interview Cory talks of the advantages of using a headset such as the Oculus Rift and how immersive it can be. People may be wondering how people are going to use these devices and Cory touches upon an area that links in with the Facebook theme but also offers an interesting use case :

So let’s say you have a friend getting married and you can’t be there. Today you’re going to get texts and videos. But what if you could put a 360 video camera in the audience? Then, what you have is an ability to really feel like you’re there, and look around and see what’s going on in a way that’s making an incredible connection. Moviemakers will take advantage of this. You think about what you could do with director’s commentary or additional scenes. What if you could turn around and have these 360-degree views of the set while they’re shooting? Wouldn’t that be the coolest thing ever?

I’ve seen people touch upon similar areas before in terms of a rock concert. Hey you can’t get a ticket to the live event, but how about a ticket for the virtual reality event? There’s potential there. I’m not going to reveal too much of Cory’s interview, it’s well worth reading if you have an interest in virtual reality, as is the whole article but let’s get to the killer app issue because the lack of a killer app has been cited as one of the failures of virtual worlds as we know them :

What’s going to be the killer app? While we don’t know exactly what it’s gonna be, we’re confident there will be a bunch of them. And that killer app is gonna be so much better than anything you can experience on a screen or phone.

However some people have a different view and we may have to rejig how we describe killer apps. In an article in Gamesindusty.biz, unrelated to the excellent Verge article,Cloudhead Games’ Denny Unger warns :We’re very close to having the first death in VR.

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March 22, 2014

The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 11 – Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Gray

Episode 11 of The Drax Files Radio hour opens with Bill May introducing the show and visiting Drax in real life. The show as usual covers a variety of topics, with the main attraction of this week’s show being an interview about virtual reality with Ben Lang of the road to VR Blog.

Ben talks about virtual reality hardware and its uses, where the technology is heading and why it isn’t as difficult to use some of this hardware as some may feel. This is a subject that Mona Eberhardt has been covering and Mona recently blogged : VR headset designs: Maybe we’re missing something? The interview with Ben makes for very interesting listening, this is something that Drax pulls off so very well.

They were due to interview Emily Short of Versu fame, but Emily has politely declined. Has Emily been knobbled? Has someone made her an offer she can’t refuse? Is this a case of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Gray wherein Emily is put in an impossible position by unknown forces? Well no, the reality is likely that Emily has said her piece on the subject and now wants to move on. I remain deeply disappointed by Linden Lab’s decision to turn their back on Versu, but the decision has been made and although it’s a massive loss, it remains Linden Lab’s right to make that call.

Then there’s the issue that has been irritating many people, especially Drax’s co-host Jo Yardley who recently blogged : Second Life advertising hits new low. The issue :

Second Life advert example — Second Life Advert

Bikini Babes without machine guns. Yes this is a tacky advert in many ways and yet it will appeal to some and that’s the aim of any advertising campaign. Are there better ways of advertising Second Life? Absolutely and Botgirl Questi touches this subject matter in a post entitled : Second Life Advertising: Beyond Bikinis and Vampires

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