Linden Lab – Page 52 – Ciaran Laval

July 16, 2015

Ask The CEO Featuring Ebbe Altberg – What We’ve Learnt So Far

Ask The CEO, featuring Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg is still in play on the official Second Life forum. However we’ve learnt a few things from the eleven pages of the thread that currently exist.

The first thing to do is to read the opening post, because that already includes a lot of answers that Ebbe gave at the SL12B meeting. That’s where you’ll find out that Linden Lab are planning to improve media on a prim in Second Life :

We are working on a significant upgrade to the media capabilities of the Viewer (watch for a Project Viewer release). The new support will be focused on supporting modern formats and HTML 5. Content creators should be preparing to convert any older proprietary media such as Flash or Quicktime to the newer formats soon. Longer sound files has not been on the list, but perhaps it should be?

With the recent problems Flash has been facing, many would say that this can’t come quickly enough! That’s also the place where you will learn a little bit about differences in the approach Linden Lab are taking with Virtual Reality Head Mounted Displays, in Second Life and Project Sansar. When it comes to Second Life :

We don’t have any specific plans at this time, but with our open source Viewer, third parties could certainly integrate new hardware and we’ll continue to experiment from time to time.

Whereas when it comes to Project Sansar :

Right now, we’re focused on making Project Sansar an ideal experience with the Rift. In the future, we’ll probably support other hardware as well, but some of the challenges we’re solving for with the Rift – latency, frame rate goals, etc. – are things we’d need to get right for any HMD, and we don’t want to diffuse our focus by integrating lots of peripherals right now, when there aren’t any consumers who even have the hardware.

This is understandable because Second Life is already here and would need a lot more work to optimise for use with VR HMD than Project Sansar, which is a work in progress at a time when these devices are coming to the market.

Moving on past the opening post, Ebbe, Pete and Danger have all provided more answers to additional questions. I’ll highlight some of the answers but not all of them. The thread is worth a read and if you read the thread, you may even have questions of your own

A very interesting question came up wondering whether Project Sansar you have instancing for terrain and inworld mesh objects, Ebbe replied :

Yes, we’re planning to support instancing of entire experiences.

That sounds interesting, very interesting. I hope it means what I think it means!

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July 15, 2015

Draxtor Despres Shows The Second Life Related Parts Of The Dr Phil Show

Draxtor Despres has published a video on YouTube of the Second Life related parts of The recent Dr Phil show. I’ll embed the video under the cut, if you’re already under the cut, then the video is at the end of the post!

I blogged about this episode of Dr Phil on Monday, the day before the episode was aired. I have not seen the full episode but the show featured the extremely serious issue of gaming addiction. The first thing to point out is that the young man who was the subject of the episode of the Dr Phil show is not a resident of Second Life. This isn’t to say that Second Life can’t prove to be addictive, but I feel it’s worth pointing out that Second Life wasn’t his game of choice.

The parts of the show that do relate to Second Life feature Dr Phil inworld with an avatar that looks like the real life Dr Phil.

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July 15, 2015July 15, 2015

Tottering Biped Theatre Take Cyberspace To The Stage With A Performance Entitled The Second Life

I was googling news about Second Life today when I stumbled across articles about Tottering Biped Theatre. One of the issues regarding googling Second Life is that you get a lot of results that are not related to the virtual world. There are plenty of articles about recycling and television shows that are getting a Second Life, but not so many about Second Life the virtual world.

This is sort of the case with Tottering Biped theatre itself, with the exception that they have a performance entitled “The Second Life“, which is about :

The online virtual world of ‘Second Life’ stretches thousands of kilometers and millions of visitors. While searching for her lost sister, Jessica struggles to find out what – and who – are real. Life and its double are at stake in this multi-media exploration of loss in the digital age.

‘The Second Life’ was developed over a 3 year period after winning honours at Ontario’s professional playwright development centre, Pat the Dog. After a sold out run at Hamilton’s Theatre Aquarius, The Second Life is coming to Burlington’s Performing Arts Centre Oct 21-31, 2015.

Now one would assume that this isn’t about Linden Lab’s Second Life, but it’s inevitable that due to the proximity of the subject matter, people will make that link.

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July 14, 2015

Ebbe Altberg And Other Lindens Brave The Second Life Forum For Q&A Session

At SL12B Ebbe Altberg was interviewed live on stage by Saffia Widdershins and Jo Yardley. The fact that it was live inworld was emphasised when gremlins struck and delayed the interview, but Ebbe stayed past his allocated time to answer questions. The video of the interview was recorded by Chakat Northspring and can be found here. Inara Pey, posted a transcript of the meeting, which can be found here. I posted a hot off the press summary of the meeting, which can be found here.

However there were some unanswered questions and it seems a feeling that there may be some follow up questions. Linden Lab have now blogged that further questions are welcome in a blog post entitled An Interview and Q&A with the CEO :

The interview ended with some audience Q&A, but there wasn’t time to get to all of the audience questions, and of course not everyone was able to watch the interview live in the auditorium and ask their questions.

So, today we’re opening up a new Forum thread to address some of the questions we didn’t get to and to give everyone an opportunity to ask their own. We’ll answer some of the frequently-asked questions we spotted in local chat at the “Meet the Lindens” interview at the top of the thread, but feel free to add your own questions to the forum thread and Ebbe and other Lindens will endeavor to answer as many as we can. Join us in the Forums, here.

The forum thread, which I’ll link to again, is entitled Ask The CEO. Whereas it’s not quite a Reddit Ask Me Anything session, it does give Second Life residents the opportunity to ask question of the CEO, with other Lindens likely to answer some questions too.

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July 14, 2015

The University Of The Arts In Second Life

The Linden Endowment for the Arts (LEA) is an artistic program in Second Life with a very noble mission :

The Linden Endowment for the Arts (LEA) was established to help create a center of arts activity in Second Life. It is a collaborative venture between Linden Lab and the arts community. Guided by a dedicated board of renowned Second Life artists, the LEA is committed to providing access to engaging experiences in the arts for the Second Life community. Through its exhibitions, programs, and events, the LEA fosters awareness of artists’ contributions to our virtual world and encourages others to get involved and be inspired.

The LEA is run and organized by users of Second Life, with resources generously donated by Linden Lab.

Applicants put forth proposals for an exhibit and those who are selected by a committee get six months use of a sim for their project. In the latest round (round 9) one of the successful applicants was Carla Ives, who is creating a University of The Arts project.

The project will have exhibition space, with a young artist having a permanent exhibition there. There are also plans to incorporate a learning space within this project which will be designed to teach people how to make a dance show in Second Life. This will go through the process of building a set, choreography, use of particles and animations.

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