Category Archives: NEWS

Second Life Shame?

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” Second Life is not a fart in a crowded elevator; it’s a fun, virtual world. Don’t be afraid to admit that you dig it, even if it can stink sometimes.”

I recently stumbled across a wonderful article about SL written on a hard-core gamer blog called “MMORPG” (that’s a clickable link). Many people, myself included, have considered SL to be the red headed stepchild of the gamer world and something that you admit only in shameful tones.

Several years ago, I needed to upgrade my computer to keep up with the ever-changing and fast-moving developments of Second Life graphics. I was using a laptop at the time (I’ve since gotten smart and switched to a desktop, but that’s another post for another day). I walked into the store, and a sales associate asked me how he could help me. I told him I was looking for a gaming laptop. “Oh, for your son?” said this 12-year-old (not really but geez). My cheeks burning in embarrassment, I said “No…umm… for me.” He looked at me oddly (me being this middle aged woman with grey in her hair) and said, “Oh…of course. What game do you play?”

I cringed. This was the question I’d been dreading. I hung my head. My cheeks burned with embarrassment. “Second Life” I mumbled.

He craned his neck forward, brow crinkling in concentration as he tried to understand what I’d said. “I’m sorry?” he inquired.

“Not as sorry as me” I mumbled to myself. Cheeks aflame, I looked into this young man’s face and stated, too loudly, “Second Life!”

Several patrons on the other side of the store looked up, startled. The clerk smirked. Then he snickered.

Oh God. I just wanted to die. Will the floor please open up and swallow me? Now? I covered my face with one hand and sighed.

Still smirking, the young man showed me several laptops. I chose one, made the purchase and scurried out of the store as fast as I could, the snickers following me out the door. I could just imagine the chat amongst the 20-something sales associates. “Oh god, look at that pathetic old lady gettin’ her jollies in Second Life” they would guffaw.

Oy.

However, as most SLers know, Second Life is more about just a 3-D sex site. Yes, there’s that too, but the user created content is what keeps Second Life alive and flourishing. The content creators. The musicians, the clubs, the landscapers, the causes that raise thousands of RL dollars from SL events — There is so much more to SL than just sex.

This article in the MMORPG website talks about the bad rep that SL has and how this platform needs to be taken seriously in the world of gaming and 3-D creation.

My favorite quote from the article is this: ” Second Life is not a fart in a crowded elevator; it’s a fun, virtual world. Don’t be afraid to admit that you dig it, even if it can stink sometimes.”

Read the article and see the Drax File episode that Beau Hindman did. Let’s all come out of the virtual closet and quit being ashamed of something that is so amazingly beautiful.

Here’s the link to the article: “There’s No Shame In Playing Second Life.”

Here’s the DRAX file episode:

I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers, ZoHa Islands Social Media

SL Go Announces Linden Dollar Payment Option

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SL Go
OnLive, the service that provides games, including hosting the SL Go site, announces that new users who sign up for SL Go inworld can use Lindens to pay for their service. Please note existing users cannot use Linden dollars at this time. However, it is going to be made available for existing users in the future.

Here is the blog post taken directly from the SL Go Blog found by clicking here: SL Go — Now Pay with L$

“You’ve probably heard of SL Go, the viewer that streams Second Life from the cloud in ultra-rich graphics, right to your tablet or low powered computer. You might have wanted to try it, but hate giving out your credit card info and personal information. Well, we now have a great solution for you!

For a limited time, if you sign up for SL Go with a NEW USER account you can buy weekly subscriptions in-world using Linden Dollars (L$). There is a private sign up booth where you can create your free SL Go account, and then pay for subscriptions using L$. Each week is only L$650, and you can buy up to 4 weeks at a time. Also, you can return and renew or extend your subscription in-world at any time.

Sorry, but existing users with monthly subscriptions will need to wait for this feature. It is much more complex to transition an account from US Dollars to Linden Dollars. We will be bringing this feature to you soon.

Paying for SL Go with L$ has been one of the most common requests we have received in our forums and chat rooms. We are very excited to offer this now to new users. We hope this makes it much easier for you to be a part of our growing SL Go community.”

Teleport here to Sign Up in-world:

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Sunny%20Dream/230/147/22

I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers, ZoHa Islands Social Media

High Fidelity Raises $11 Million

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One of the biggest things to hit virtual worlds is the idea of being able to experience it in the immersive Virtual Reality, or VR. High Fidelity is open source software for shared Virtual Reality, and they are the first to move forward with this technology in the virtual world environment. Second Life 3, or whatever it is going to be called, is going to be geared toward that kind of technology also, using the still rather clunky VR headsets such as Oculus Rift. While we are still in the early stages of the development of this technology, it is exciting to watch it grow and develop.

It was announced yesterday in an article posted on the techcrunch.com website, that High Fidelity, the San Francisco-based startup from Second Life founder Philip Rosedale, has raised another $11 million in funding in a round led by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital. The funding was noted in a SEC filing recently, and was confirmed to the TechCrunch website by Rosedale himself. Hi Fidelity is clearly a forerunner and a big player in this exciting, developing technology.

I’m quoting directly from the article below. But you can find the original posting by clicking on this link: Hi Fidelity Raises $11M

“Founded in 2013, High Fidelity is building deployable virtual worlds, combining the ease of rolling out a VM instance on a modern cloud platform with the interactivity of Minecraft and the immersion of virtual reality. Over the course of several hours at High Fidelity HQ yesterday, Rosedale demonstrated the state of the startup’s tech and the vision he has for turning it into a viable business.

“The main idea driving High Fidelity forward is the ability to quickly generate a virtual space to meet in and interact with. While the interface is far from final, it’s already at the point where you can pick a template, choose a name, and instantly have a space accessible by others. Each space is essentially a small video game world, filled in with the same 3D models you’d build for a game built with Unity.

“The startup has built enough logic that you can jump in with friends, have a quick virtual chat, and interact with the virtual space. If you want more stuff to do, you can grab or sculpt your own models and create logic in JavaScript to tell the world how interaction should work. Rosedale showed off this capability by dropping a billiards table he’s been working on in his free time into a world. Using two Razer Hydra controllers, you could pick up balls, roll them around, or throw them at one another and see them react with realistic physics. Similarly, the studio has invested a ton of time into naturalistic facial/gesture capture and 3D audio, making it the closest thing to the ideal virtual reality chatroom.

“If you can code it, you can build basically anything into High Fidelity’s worlds. Between alpha users and the team’s developers messing around in their own time, people have built procedurally generated cities and AI-powered animals that wander around realistically — and that’s just scratching the surface of what’s possible.

“As with Second Life, High Fidelity doesn’t plan to sell you a one-time license in exchange for unlimited play. In fact, the base of the experience is open source, letting anyone host worlds on their own machines with less of a hassle than even the kid-friendly Minecraft.

“Rosedale plans to monetize High Fidelity at the points where the community provides value to itself. While you can generate a temporary name to send to friends so they can quickly jump into a world with you, you’ll also be able to pay a fee to keep a distinct name for longer-term use — kind of like reserving a good URL for your site or username on Twitter.

“Since users can make all kinds of content for their worlds, High Fidelity also wants to host the go-to repository for models and code in a digital store resembling Unity’s Asset Store. Given the product’s open source approach, generous users can give out their offerings for free if they’d like, but if they want to charge money, High Fidelity will take a small cut.

“As I’ve noted before, advertising is probably going to be common in virtual reality. Some might hear that and groan, but in “contemporary” virtual settings, ads done right can actually contribute to immersion. Rosedale says the startup is looking to make ads not only feel natural in High Fidelity, but helpful: while there might be ads for “real” products on in-game televisions or billboards down the road, in the near-term you’re more likely to see ads for cool objects you can pick up from the asset store.

“Virtual reality allows for an infinite range of experiences, and the studios and hobbyists working on content for headsets from market leaders Oculus and Samsung have barely touched on what’s possible. For now, the majority of development in the space happens in traditional game engines like Unity and Unreal. High Fidelity’s deployable worlds put it somewhere between those professional tools and the most customizable video games, opening up innovation in the space to those who are willing to get technical but don’t want to build something from the ground up.:

We are on the cusp of some exciting developments!

I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers, ZoHa Islands Social Media

Inventory Loss Survey

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What is one of the major things we complain about in Second Life? “Grrr I’ve lost inventory AGAIN…. *#&$*#&$ Linden Lab!!!”

Linden Lab has recognized that this is an ongoing problem, and in order to help mitigate or alleviate this, they are asking residents for their help. Here is a cut and paste from their post on the SL website:

“As we continue to improve Second Life, we’re looking into the issue of inventory loss. If you have experienced some form of inventory loss in the past 12 months – whether partial (such as a single object or subfolder), or full – please take a moment to share your answers via this quick survey.

Your answers will help provide our engineering team with information that will assist them as they make improvements to Second Life.
We greatly appreciate your time and want to thank you for responding to the survey.”

Here’s the link to the survey: Inventory Loss Survey

We encourage you to respond to the survey. This is a wonderful way for you to feel like you make a difference, instead of just complaining about it. I took the survey; won’t you?? 🙂

I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers, ZI Social Media

Linden Lab’s Improvements to Second Life

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LL Logo
Linden Lab announced today in their latest blog post that they are on the cusp of launching improvements to Second Life, and detailed some of the new things you’ll soon be able to enjoy. These changes include improving the way your avatar interacts with surfaces inworld, giving you more tools for managing your preferences for notifications and graphics settings, as well as improvements to make life easier for mesh creators and merchants. They offer links to download Project Viewers that will let you get an early look at some of these improvements.

Hover Height
As we all have experienced, sometimes our avatar doesn’t interact quite right in a virtual environment. Sometimes your body parts stick through furniture, your feet hover over or sink into the ground. Fixing this can be computationally very expensive, so Linden Lab has been working hard to find a workable solution, and the result is the Project HoverHeight Viewer. (Anything in orange is a clickable link). Between the introduction of this viewer plus some server changes, this new viewer will improve things in two ways: the order in which adjustments are made to your vertical position has been made more stable, and even if it’s not perfect, it will at least be predictable. Linden Lab also introduces a new final adjustment that is directly under your control: a new avatar right-click selection allows you to tweak your vertical position. Linden Lab states “This final adjustment is shared with everyone around you so that they too will see you correctly, and is saved locally by your viewer so that it persists between sessions. This new feature was inspired by a proposal from the Firestorm viewer team, and they’ve been helping with testing it.”

Notifications
One of the ongoing complaints and suggestions received through the JIRA by residents to Linden Lab was the need to have better ways to control and organize the many notices they receive: inventory offers, group notices, event invites, and money transactions all result in the same kind of pop-ups and notice chiclets and are all listed together. The blog states: “An upcoming Viewer release will add a new floater that provides separate displays for different notice types, and the ability to sort them. You can prioritize and organize what’s important to you.”

Mesh Import
Important to content creators, Linden Lab is upgrading the support for mesh import. An upcoming Viewer update will allow uploading models that have more than eight unique faces, and improved association of physics representations and LODs by name.

Viewer Managed Marketplace
Merchants will be delighted to hear that you’ll be able to manage the inventory in your Second Life Marketplace store directly from the viewer. Items no longer need to be loaded into the Merchant Outbox or a Magic Box; instead you’ll designate items to be sold directly from your personal inventory.

Graphics Settings
Linden Lab is introducing an open source contribution that allows you to save named sets of graphics settings, with a drop-down menu that allows you to quickly change between them. For instance, when you attend a performance in your favorite club, you can save settings optimized for rich display of your companions and environment, and you can save a set for exploring that trades off longer draw distances and better lighting effects for simpler rendering of details – whatever you think is important.

You can click on the following link for the blog post in its entirety: Check Out The Latest Improvements to Second Life.

Hopefully all of these changes and improvements will make for a better Second Life experience. It shows that Linden Lab is still invested in the technology for Second Life. And it is encouraging to know that the folks at Firestorm are continuing to work hand in hand with Linden Lab, which should result in the same improvements to the Firestorm Viewer, as well.

I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers, ZI Social Media

Captain Oculus Tests Oculus Rift in Second Life

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oculus rift logo
As Oculus Rift continues to grow and develop, it is interesting to hear about experiences people are having with it in Second Life. Kate Bergdorf, who has a blog called “The Bergdorf Reports” recently had a fascinating guest blogger who posted about his experiences with Oculus Rift in SL.

Recently, Kate bumped into a noob named Captain Oculus, and ended up having a discussion with him about Oculus Rift. Captain Oculus commented to Kate that he had just about run out of places to visit to test Oculus Rift. Kate gave him a list of places, and he agreed to do a post about it for her blog.

As Captain Oculus states in his opening paragraph, “My Second Life name is Captain Oculus and I am a Software Developer who spends free time in Second Life with the Oculus Rift Developer Kit 2 (DK2). I am not affiliated with Oculus, Facebook, or Linden Labs in any way, and merely provide a third party opinion about various things in the virtual reality.”

Since Captain Oculus apparently has no agenda to promote, his observations and experiences can presume to be unbiased as far as a corporate affiliation. Obviously no one is completely unbiased; we all come to the table with our own life experiences and thoughts and feelings, but Captain Oculus does an excellent job. He writes about his own personal experiences in SL using Oculus Rift, and he describes his experiences in depth and detail. It is well worth the read to learn more about Oculus Rift and this fascinating way of interacting with a virtual world.

His post can be found by clicking this link: The Experience of Oculus Rift.

I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers, ZoHa Islands Social Media