General Computer Stuff

ODD: Intel Developers to use Second Life?

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In my reading I came across this article on the Intel Developer site: Unity Tip: Using Second Life As A 3D Modeling Package.

Quoting:

You may need to use 3D modeling to create objects for your project but do not have the technical experience yet to do so, or find that your package of choice does not provide the feature that you need (for example, creating spheres in SketchUp is very difficult).  There is an alternative, user-friendly solution though.  You can create your objects in the online virtual reality world Second Life

I think that is pretty interesting…

Even more interesting is they promote the Firestorm Viewer as the viewer of choice. Their reason for recommending Firestorm is the Collada export feature found in Firestorm.

The article provides a tutorial on how to export 3D items from Second Life™ using the Firestorm viewer.

VR Latency

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I suspect we have all heard about simulator sickness, akin to motion sickness, caused by latency/lag in providing images to VR headsets. Now NVIDIA is showing an experimental zero latency display. The site Road to VR has the story in an article: NVIDIA Demonstrates Experimental “Zero Latency” Display Running at 1,700Hz.

NVIDIA debuted their experimental display at GTC 2016. The current 90hz displays render an image every 11ms. NVIDIA gets an image on screen in 0.58ms. Wow. 

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Ebbe on VR

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Bloomberg Business talked about Virtual Reality (VR) a few days ago. In the show was a few minutes with Ebbe Altberg, Linden Lab CEO. The discussion of VR starts about 10:30m in.

My take away is that gaming adoption of VR is going to be slow. Mostly because of cost. Other uses of VR are likely to lead the adoption race. Medical and military use seem to be the leading fields for VR adoption.

In other news, the Oculus Rift is already behind the tech curve. Seems Sony is adding features to their Playstation implementation of the headset that Oculus don’t yet support. Wouldn’t that be an upset?

Also, Unreal has added in world modeling. You can build your game/world inside the world. Very Second-Life-ish. So, does that put them ahead of Linden Lab? I doubt it. I still give the edge to the Lab based on their experience with virtual worlds and economies.

Google Computers

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Ever wonder what Google’s ‘cloud’ farm looks like? Here is a 360° video tour of one installation. Click and drag in the video to rotate the view. I know this works with Google Chrome browser. I am not sure about others.

Some of what they are talking about is outside the frame. You will have to click-drag the view to see what they are talking about.

Feedly

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I’m a Feedly user. Feedly is a ‘News’ aggregator. It is the primary starting point for my daily information processing. Seems they are looking at new ways to explore the massive amount of information being generated. See: Introducing feedly’s New Explore Experience.

12 june: “REAL LIFE, SECOND LIFE, HALF LIVE - How many lives can a person have?”"
“12 june: “REAL LIFE, SECOND LIFE, HALF LIVE – How many lives can a person have?”

Their point is that SEARCH in Feedly could be better. No DUH! Feedly search is near useless to me. I either use Google or DuckDuckGo, with Duck being the being the escape from Google’s AI showing me what it thinks I want to (or should?) see. 

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