Drax Radio #9

Drax Files Radio

Drax Files Radio

This show is mostly about the new service SL Go provided by OnLive™. Drax has been trying out the SL Go service on a tablet and in another scenario using the LEAP Motion controller. Check his site for a video on LEAP.

Drax Show #9 download – right-click.

Twitch

Twitch is mentioned as going mobile (05:00+/-). It is another game streaming service, sort of. You can put or will be able to put your video captures of 3D game play on Twitch to show others. Provided game companies incorporate the features into their games as they are currently releasing a developers SDK.

They are thinking it will work by capturing the game play and optionally a  picture within a picture of you as you play from the front facing camera. For those that would like to promote Second Life™ or their Second Life products this seems an interesting possibility.

Tango

Project Tango (06:15+/-) as mentioned by Jo is, I think, Google’s Project Tango: 3D mapping on a smartphone. (BBC) They have an interesting 2-minute video that explains the tech pretty well and alludes to future possibilities. From Jo I got the impression this was something I might do with my smartphone. But, the Google device requires stereo cameras capable of infra-red detection and an infra-red emitter. Some digital cameras commercially available, like the Sony 717, use infra-read for focusing (distance measurement) and night vision shots. So, the tech to accomplish this is off the shelf. It is Google’s software that is new and innovative.

The ToS discussion by attorneys on Inara Pey’s site is mentioned (07:30+/-). Their reference is about the October meeting of UCCoSL. Drax Radio Show #8 is about the ToS. I covered the meeting at the time in: Second Life ToS Meeting Summary.

SL Go

The SL Go discussion starts at 07.45+/-. Drax & Jo’s guest Nate Barsetti (formerly a Linden) explains how they are handling the latency problem. It seems they have data processing centers in major cities. So, it isn’t like we have to reach across the continent to connect. Signal travel time is usually hundreds of miles rather than thousands. So, they can keep lag to a minimum.

Nate plays RP/combat games within SL. These games run amazingly well on SL Go. From what he is saying I would think SL Go is eliminating most of the lag. But, playing in a region with a large number of combatants firing automatic weapons at 12 rounds per second… with 30 players that is 360 new items rezing per second. That is 360 item updates that go to 30 players or 360×30=10,800 updates per second. Consider the server has to get an update out per server frame or ideally once ever 22ms for 45 FPS, which is actually10,800×45=480,000 updates per second. I don’t see SL Go being able to take that load off the SL region server. But, they may have more tricks.

At 14:00 Nate talks about having their servers in the same data center as Linden Lab’s servers. This makes for a very fast connection to SL. This suggests to me the SL Go player will have a timing advantage over non-SL Go players during combat.

18:00 – Interface for SL/SL Go. Nate says their biggest challenge was security of sensitive SL stuff, i.e., passwords, inventory.

Nate explains that taking a snapshot in SL Go and saving it to inventory saves a hi-rez, or at least high quality, image. Remember. SL downsizes all images to 1024 for storage. Since you own the item (have full permissions), you can download the awesome image from SL when you return to your desktop.

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