Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Nalates Urriah There are gotcha’s in this latest main SL Viewer 3.8.4, in the mesh upload. You can use more than 8 materials now. Gaia Clary has changed AvaStar to export more than 8 materials. But, the announcement of that change comes with a warning: don’t.
Also Drongle McMahon commented on the problem and what happens when we exceed the allowable polygon limit per material for mesh items. See: Second Life’s Limits.
Miriam Pia writes about the recent Oculus conference on Hypergrid Business: Oculus confab features Gear VR, Minecraft, Netflix. The consumer version of the Oculus Rift was there.
Big news is Samsung is going to be cutting the cost of the Gear VR headset to US$99. The headset will work with all of Samsung’s 2015 flagship smartphones. They released the system requirements for computers driving the headsets. Click over to Hypergrid to see the video detailing the requirements.
There is also a video showing the Touch Controllers being developed.
Miriam writes about Medium calling it a virtual reality painting program. I would call it a sculpting program. Whatever, check out the article and videos.
Specs: Minimum i5 CPU, 8gb ram, NVIDIA 970… So, most users are being left behind. That doesn’t mean you can’t use VR on older rigs. It does mean you likely won’t be happy with it, if you do.
There are 4 or 5 generations of i5 CPU’s. I didn’t dig in to see which i5 will work or if all will. I expect 3rd or 4th gen CPU’s will be needed.
There are advances in the High Fidelity project. They have released a video to show us what they were up to in September.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8BPTMskaxA
RLV
Marine Kelly has updated the RLV Viewer which is now version 2.9.14. There are some fixes for RLV bugs. None of it seems earth shattering to me.
See: RLV 2.9.14
These changes will be making their way into other viewers, but it takes some time.
Updates have been a little slow coming because Marine was working on RLV related products. Check her blog for information on those (use link above).
Yesterday (9/30) and last Friday we got some updated viewers.
![Wooden [Quench me]](https://i0.wp.com/farm1.staticflickr.com/622/21659005550_0cc4ddcb24.jpg?resize=500%2C262&ssl=1)
RC Second Life Maintenance Viewer version 3.8.5.305531 – Release Notes: Big batch of Maintenance work to improve performance, fix bugs, address feature requests and give Second Life love. There are 97 fixes and additions.
Project Azumarill Viewer version 3.8.4.304871 – No change.
Project Notice Viewer version 3.8.4.305083 – No change.
Project Quick Graphics Viewer version 3.8.4.305380 – No change.
Project Oculus Rift Viewer version 3.7.18.295296 – No update – yet…
There are some dates for Rift delivery, a SDK 1.0 December 2015. Don’t confuse the DK1 and 2 with the SDK’s that have been coming out. The consumer CV1 Rift will finally be delivered, sometime in Q1 2016.
David Rowe believes the Lab will finalize their Rift Viewer when the consumer Rift has a release date. When that happens he plans to stop development of the CtrlAltStudio Viewer. Until then he says;