Second Life and Virtual Worlds
You might know that Havok is the physics engine used by Second Life. It is the part of the system that figures out when the avatar bumps into a wall or walks on a floor and keeps the avatar from passing through.
It is the part that figures out when a bullet collides with us or misses. It makes balls roll. We see it in operation not only in Second Life buy in Call of Duty, Halo, and is used in movies like the Matrix.
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
I thought it may just be me, but Flickr is NOT working well this morning. It is behaving like I imagine it would if it were inside SL…
Ping to LA is 13ms, download 59mbps, and up 6.7mbps. The Flickr servers are in Lockport, NY, USA. According to Flickr they use Content Delivery Networks (CDN) (Reference), according to a book titled Photography Applications for Cloud Computing. So, testing to New York: 108ms, 29,5mbps down, 6.5mbps up. So, not a network issue.
You can report problems with web sites and see when they are having problems. For Flickr use: Flickr Down? According to them problems started about 10:20 AM EDT 9/24.
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.
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 browser.
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.