Second Life News Bits Week 39

VR Headset Sales

Hypergrid Business has an article out on VR Headset sales. 300,000 headsets per month. That is 4+ million per year. See: Alibaba, Taobao selling 300,000 VR headsets a month for more details and which units are selling the most.

CtrlAltStudio Adds Interface for Oculus

CtrlAltStudio Adds Interface for Oculus

Bright Canopy Returns

Bright Canopy is the company replacing SL Go. They bring Second Life to tablets and other low GPU power devices. See: Bright Canopy. Run Second Life in your web browserContinue reading

How Virtual Worlds Will Take Over Real Life

From a speech by by Philip Rosedale, former Linden Lab CEO – 28 minutes. Philip uses Second Life to show what is happening in virtual worlds and how it will affect society. His thinking is interesting and in some ways a bit scary.

The video is the basis of an NPR show TED Radio: Why Build a Virtual World? Follow the link to see the video. I can’t embed it, only the audio portion, which is 9 minutes. The video and audio have different content. Both are interesting.

NPR/KPBS presented a radio show titled Screen Time. Philip Rosedale was a guest for the show. The audio above is also here: KPBS: Screen Time. The video is where some of the sound track for the show came from. The video is more interesting than the audio. The radio show has more context and less content, the audio is only 9 minutes long. It is worth checking both.   Continue reading

Net Neutrality – Sucks More

You’ll get your fill of legal issues today… Net Neutrality is back in the news, not the mainstream news for the low information people. But, in the channels of the activists where more is heard.

Failure To Thrive [ The Gray Child ]

Failure To Thrive [ The Gray Child ]

It seems T-Mobile came up with a great competitive idea. They would provide their users music. The music data download would not count against their data plan. Basically listening to music on T-Mobile was to be free, as in no data cost. Neat, huh? I know that would be really good for me as my car radio died… getting fixed someday. I use iHeart on my phone until then. Continue reading

How To Stream Second Life to YouTube Gaming

Streaming Second Life™ to YouTube Gaming (YTG) is easy. This is a tutorial based on my first successful try. It is not complete or as detailed as it could be and I’ll probably come back to it and add more or write another tutorial. Now lets get into the basic what we need to do.

The only geekie part is you may need to know your upload speed. You can find your actual speed by using SpeedTest.net. Mine averages 6.6mbps. A safe value for me to use is 80% of 6.6 = 5.3mbps. But, I never HAD to know that to make my first stream.

Go to YouTube Gaming (YTG) and create a channel. (You can search on Second Life to see what channels are already there. To do that, click the GO LIVE link (button?) in the upper right of the page. It is an odd button, which is really a drop down. The first time you click it opens and gives you two choices, GO LIVE and UPLOAD Video. Click GO LIVE again.

YouTube Gaming - Upper Right of Home Screen

YouTube Gaming – Upper Right of Home Screen

From there walk your way through the  instructions. You’ll enter your name and possibly a phone number, if your new to YouTube (YT).  Whatever name you enter for the account will be displayed on the channel.

At the bottom of the page is a section labeled Encoder Setup. You need to copy the Channel URL and Key shown here and save it. You’ll possibly need that information later, depending on the encoder you pick.  Continue reading

Second Life Bright Canopy Update

Inara has a good summary of what has happened and what is going on with Bright Canopy, the SL Go replacement. The TL:DR is simple. User behavior was not what the Bright Canopy peeps expected. The change from expected behavior drove up backend costs of the service. They were losing money and things had to change. Thus the service shut down.

See: Bright Canopy update

rho

rho

Basically, no one other than Amazon is making money from this project. If they cannot figure out how to turn that around, expect the doors to close.

There is a future in being able to stream high end games. With VR coming there will likely be more demand for the service. The challenges and/or symbiosis come from Intel, who is working to add more graphics power to their CPU, Apple and others wanting to challenge the NetFlix style streaming services and add gaming, those battling to take over cable and satellite delivery services, and others that want to add gaming as a facet of their entertainment services.

My point is there is industry interest in what Bright Canopy is doing. There may eventually be some way to deliver a SL/Sansar experience to lesser powered hardware.  But, as fast as hardware is developing/advancing the need deceases each year. That makes it hard to predict whether Bright Canopy will find an economic model that fits enough people’s needs for their service to remain viable. It is life and death for them, so the motivation is there. At some point the hardware and tech they need will be cheap enough, it is just a matter of timing.

New Intel CPU Released

Intel has released its 6th Generation iCore processor. You can read all the Intel® hype here: Our Best Processor Ever. I just cover the interesting stuff for Second Life™ users .

New 6th Gen iCore CPU

New 6th Gen iCore CPU

They say this CPU “…brings an immersive computing experience that will forever change our relationship with technology.” That sounds like Virtual Reality (VR). Continue reading

Apple to Challenge Sony and Microsoft

Second Life™ users know Apple lags in providing gaming support for SL type OpenGL games. But, that may change. The  news in the The Telegraph is Apple TV is going into the gaming market. See: Apple TV.

Just Keep Swimming

Just Keep Swimming

Whether or not this will cause Apple to provide better gaming support for computers, is still a question. But, I think, any attention shift toward gaming by Apple has to improve the odds for an improvement.

Apple is adding more processing power to their game machine, built into their Apple TV box, to handle complex graphics. That sounds like acknowledgement that VR is coming, at least I hope so.

The new box will directly compete with PlayStation and Xbox.

YouTube Gaming and Second Life

If you are wondering what YouTube Gaming is, click over to Ciaran Laval’s blog and see: YouTube Gaming Launches And Second Life Has Its Own Channel. The short explanation is this is Google’s answer to Amazon’s Twitch… and if you don’t know what Twitch is… well… you are hopelessly sheltered. To pop your bubble… Twitch is a site that allows gamers to stream their game play. People can watch a video stream of a person, in-game, playing in almost (?) real time.

The recent news is Jimmy Kimmel thought it was a funny idea and made fun of YouTube Gaming. As they point out, considering how poorly TV is doing these day he hasn’t much room to talk. But, I thought the video funny.  Continue reading