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.

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. 

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3 Reasons VR is to Fail Challenged

The Road to VR has an interesting article challenging 3 common ideas about why VR will fail. Well written and with rational challenges to the 3 common ideas about VR. See: The 3 Most Common Arguments Against VR and Why They’re Wrong.

Possibly Maybe...
Possibly Maybe…

One common thought about VR that I think has some merit is ‘gesture based’ control like Kinect is going to fail because users do not have enough room/space… or patience. 

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Windows 10 Update Week 34

As Second Life™ users you are likely to be interested in others experience with their Windows 10 installs. I’m working with a number of RL clients as I help them with their upgrades. We are mostly at the point of contacting the authors of the software they are dependent on.

Windows 10 Logo
Windows 10 Logo

I have found that the new Microsoft web browser is different. I am still figuring it out and I am undecided on whether I like it. My first impression is it is slow to load. After that it seems OK. Every menu item I use is in a new place.

Whatever, Shug has a post up on her experience upgrading 4 computers to Win 10. See: Windows 10 (and you thought Second Life updates were chaos!)

If you have problems with your DVD after a Win 10 update, these steps may help:

From Windows Support for the DVD drive:

  1. Run Command Prompt as an Administrator. Press windows key + x and choose command prompt (admin)
  2. Type following and press enter: reg.exe add “HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Controller0” /f /v EnumDevice1 /t REG_DWORD /d 0x00000001
  3. Reboot the system