Oculus Rift – Ciaran Laval

April 4, 2016

Concerns Raised Over Oculus Rift Terms Of Service

The Terms of Service (TOS) that accompany the Oculus Rift have raised concerns from users and potential users. UploadVR report; Oculus ‘Always On’ Services and Privacy Policy May Be a Cause for Concern. Gizmodo report; There Are Some Super Shady Things in Oculus Rift’s Terms of Service. techdirt report; Oculus Users Freak Out Over VR Headset’s TOS, Though Most Of It Is Boilerplate.

The concerns raised will sound rather familiar in parts for Second Life content creators. This is especially the case for parts of the TOS such as this :

Unless otherwise agreed to, we do not claim any ownership rights in or to your User Content. By submitting User Content through the Services, you grant Oculus a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual (i.e. lasting forever), non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free and fully sublicensable (i.e. we can grant this right to others) right to use, copy, display, store, adapt, publicly perform and distribute such User Content in connection with the Services.

Sections of a TOS such as this can sound worse than they actually are. A lot of those rights are required for companies to carry your content and transmit it to other users. The article over at Gizmodo suggest that the result of the above is :

If you create something using Oculus’ services, the Terms of Service say that you surrender all rights to that work and that Oculus can use it whenever it wants, for whatever purposes

I’m not convinced that’s quite true but it’s not hard to see why people come to that conclusion. techdirt point out :

The problem with getting hysterical over the TOS is that this language is essentially boilerplate, and attached to the terms of service for pretty much every service in existence so they can make a sharing technology work without being sued over copyright. While certainly worded poorly there’s no real nefarious intent; it’s CYA lawyer language.

The UploadVR article takes a closer look at the privacy angle and the privacy policy that is incorporated into the TOS.

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January 15, 2015January 15, 2015

Virtual World Red Light Center To Support Oculus Rift

Dean Takahashi over at GamesBeat has an interesting article about the adult based virtual world of Red Light Center : Oculus Rift gets more virtual reality porn with Red Light Center. Now first things first, I stumbled across this article whilst trying to see if Linden Lab were in the news and, there is a reference to Linden Lab in this article, indeed it’s one that is surprising in many ways, although it’s not surprising to anyone who regularly uses Second Life :

Utherverse started development in 2003, and it opened its doors for the first time in 2005. Now the erotic community site consists of virtual nightclubs, hotels, bars, movie theaters, and stores. It also offers parties, classes, meeting rooms, live music with dancing, and art-gallery openings. It’s not unlike the virtual world Second Life, operated by Linden Lab, but this world is all about sex. The site has about a million monthly active users.

See! Dean Takahashi knows that Second Life is not all about sex, whereas I think it’s more difficult to argue that Red Light Center isn’t all about sex… actually that’s their selling point and they are not shy about it.

Now getting back to the article, it’s actually interesting even if you find Red Light Center a bit off, because it talks about virtual reality and Utherverse chief executive Brian Shuster make some bold claims about where Virtual Worlds are going in terms of Virtual Reality and graphics :

You’ll be hard-pressed to tell the difference between real people and the avatars. We use motion capture, and it looks realistic. The idea is that it makes you feel like you are actually there. You walk into a gentleman’s club and you feel like you are there. You can make it rain on the strippers on stage. And they are real people. That gets people worked up. Knowing there is a real person on the other end — that’s more stimulating than just watching porn.

I’m not convinced that this early in the VR cycle that this will be the case. However, although many people don’t like talking about it, adult entertainment will be a selling point in VR and there’s really no point in trying to deny this.

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January 8, 2015

The Virtual Reality Battle For Standards Is Coming

There’s a lot of excitement around about the future of Virtual Reality (VR from now on). There are a lot of gadgets, devices and potential. However there’s also going to be the inevitable battle to win the war on standards and protocols.

We’ve been here before in many ways, Blu-Ray v HD-DVD. Those of us who are a bit longer in the tooth can remember VHS v Betamax. There will be lots of other examples. Arguments will always rage about which format was the better one and why the better one doesn’t always win, but generally one format wins and the same surely has to be true for VR.

Initially we’ll probably find experiences optimised for the Oculus Rift, or optimised for a rival headset. Eventually, for the sake of consumers, that optimisation for a brand will need to be replaced by optimisation for a standard. For example consumers won’t want a headset for Second Life, a headset for Linden Lab’s next gen Virtual World, a headset for OpenSim, a headset for a game or MMO and so forth. Consumers will want a choice of headsets that work pretty much across the board. Obviously some headsets will be better than others but they should all work to a set of standards and protocols that mean software developers optimise their product for those standards and protocols.

At CES 2014 the BBC reported that Valve were making steps in this direction :

Valve designer Brian Coomer says the company is “days away” from releasing a VR software development kit that will give game makers a standard way to provide an interface for VR controllers.

I’m not quite sure what happened there because I haven’t heard much about this since. However at CES2015 noises are being made in this direction by Razer with their Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) Hacker Dev Kit.

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December 29, 2014December 29, 2014

2014 Reviewed Part 1 : January To June

In this post I will review 2014 from a largely virtual world perspective for the months January to June. This is part 1 of 2 as part 2 is still a work in progress but will hopefully appear tomorrow. I’ll combine both posts into another post for easier future reference once they are both completed. These posts will miss lots of big and interesting stories because the nature of the beast demands some brevity. These post may well look longer than they actually are at first glance because of images and pictures. The aim of posts such as these are to give a brief overview of the year, rather than an in depth review. An in depth review is too long for a blog post, it may make for an interesting book.

Anyway, on with the show, as they say.

January

January started with a look back to 2013 and the number of private region losses. The scores on the door from Tyche Shepherd displayed a slow down on the number of regions leaving the Second Life grid, something that would continue during 2014.

2012 Net Private Region Losess – 2865 (12.0%)
2013 Net Private Region Losses – 1719 (8.2%)

The virtual world of Kitely moved to a different pricing model which largely did away with the pay by the minute options as these had not been popular.

Blackened Mirror poster should be here — The Blackened Mirror Poster

Season 2 of The Blackened Mirror was taking a mid-season break but would return by the end of January. The show was recorded in Second Life.

Linden Lab were Raising The Roof : The HTTP Project. This project, which had started in 2012 was aimed at improving HTTP communications to improve the end user experience. Linden Lab would continue working on improvements during the year.

Second Life users were getting frustrated by tax and account information requests from Linden Lab. They would continue to be frustrated by these requests throughout the year despite Linden Lab improving their communications and information on these issues.

Second Life got a mention in the comedy show, 2 Broke Girls.

Then came the storm to warm up many a chilly January evening, Cloud Party announced that they would be closing their virtual doors on February 21st.

This was quickly followed by even more news to warm up January, Aston Villa fan and Linden Lab CEO, Rod Humble, was leaving Linden Lab. This created a Twitter storm.

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November 7, 2014

Digital Cybercherries Use Oculus Rift And VR To Take Us Back To An 80’s Style Arcade

Over at New World Notes Hamlet Au recently posted : James Cameron: Virtual Reality a “Yawn” Until it Gets Mass Market Growth, Non-Gaming Experiences. The inspiration from the post comes from the following quote from movie director James Cameron regarding virtual reality :

The question that always occurred to me is, when is it going to be mature, when is it going to be accepted by the public at large, when are people going to start authoring in VR and what will that be?” Cameron said. “What will the level of interactivity with the user be other than just ‘I can stand and look around,'” he elaborated, adding: “If you want to move through a virtual reality it’s called a video game, it’s been around forever.

He has a point, but things are happening with devices such as Oculus Rift and whereas the example I’m going to highlight is game related, it’s game related in a different manner than you may expect. The example I’m highlighting has been talked about on The Road To VR and Gizmodo.

Digital Cybercherries are taking us back to our youth, well some of us, it may be going to a time before you were born for others. They have developed a retro arcade complete with playable arcade machines from the 80’s and early 90’s, playable gameboys, basketball nets, darts, a two lane bowling alley. In short you’re immersed in an 80’s style arcade which you walk through.

Then there’s the icing on the cake, that little bit of extra polish that makes this look so bloody awesome. The retro arcade has cassette tapes with 80’s music which you put into a cassette player and then listen away to those old favourites (or not so favourites). The wonder of this is exemplified in the Gizmodo blog post :

You can even find cassette tapes with ’80s music and stick them into a boombox, then carry it around the arcade with you. Because what’s cooler than playing Missile Command while jamming to The Final Countdown?

Come on, you’ve got to admit that sounds cool!

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