Oculus Rift – VR Update

There is an update on KickStarter.com about the status of the Oculus Rift, which is adopting the name Oculus VR. See the update here: Shipping Update, E3 2013 Recap and Oculus 0.2.3 SDK Release – Update #38 – July 4th, 2013.

This update is about the release of the 1080p developer’s headset.

Scroll down the page to the comments about EVE-VR. This is a tech demo of the EVE Online space adventure game. It blew people away and won awards. The reviewers are raving about the immersive quality of the experience.

And Yet Another Interview with Rod Humble 2013-27

These just keep popping up. Ciaran Level in Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble on Second Life’s Tween Years links to the article on AllThingsD: Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble on Second Life’s Tween Years (Q&A).

Rod Humble Interview
Rod Humble Interview

Also Jo Yardley has an article, up about the same interview: Oculus Rift in Second Life goes public late summer!

Again Rod comments on Second Life’s performance and how it has been a prime concern. Rod says that this year he believes he will be able to say, “Hey, performance is good.” I definitely will go with ‘better.’ But, I’m going to have see more before I’ll say ‘good.’ I also suspect it is going to be ‘good’ for SL.

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Update on SSA

Surely by now you know SSA is Server Side Appearance, which is about baking your avatar appearance. The Lindens have posted a second notice that SSA will be here next week. See: It’s Time to Update Your Viewer!

And they reuse their previous video:

[youtube jwglL3VXI80]

Please make sure all your friends know about the coming update and the need for them to be using a recent version of whatever viewer they use. 

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Firestorm Viewer 4.4.2-34167 Released

I see late yesterday the FS Team released viewer 4.4.2. There is an announcement on the FS Blog: Mandatory Firestorm 4.4.2 Update. This version fixes the problem of overloading the Linden stats servers. Users would not notice a problem. So, many might not update and stats indicate that would be the case. The result is this is a mandatory update.

Firestorm Viewer Download is here. Look in the right hand column, white area.

Firestorm Splash Screen
Firestorm Splash Screen

You may have found that your 4.4.1 viewer will no longer login. You get an update message on the splash screen. If you close it and attempt to login, you get another notice and the viewer does not login. If you close that one and attempt to login again, you find you are in a loop. The viewer is not going to login because the FS Team has told it not to. It is blocked by the FS Team. 

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Viewer Updates 2013-27

We seem to be coming to a crunch point in viewers. The Lab is changing things so quickly third party developers have a challenge keeping up. Henri Beauchamp does well with Cool VL Viewer, which is a viewer based on V3 code with a vintage V1 user interface.

Kitty
Image by Kitty Barnett

Niran seems to have leapfrogged the Niran’s Viewer to having all the latest Linden features by jumping to a recent SL Viewer V3 model. Niran’s Viewer is now Nirans Black Dragon viewer. Niran’s features from previous versions are being added to the new SL V3 Viewer code in Black Dragon. Eventually Niran will have Black Dragon on a feature par with his previous versions.

So, both of those viewers have materials. Firestorm 4.4.1 doesn’t and Tonya Souther of the Firestorm Team explains why, in a blog post: Tracking LL’s big changes, and why the 4.4.2… well now that there is an emergency roll out… 4.4.3 version won’t either. 

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