General Computer Stuff

High Fidelity – What will we use it for?

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Jason Dorrier writing for Singularity Hub, a site covering and analyzing technology, has an article up titled What Is the Metaverse? The real question he asks in the article is, what are we going to do with the metaverse?

While Jason published his article May 21 (today), he used this video from February 2015 to illustrate what a virtual world (VW) looks like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mNqaJOZoCM

Jason points out that the HyFy world is an open world and will be filled with whatever people create. I suppose that is somewhat a novel idea for those unfamiliar with Second Life™. 

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Bits of Stuff Around Second Life

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The Rock Closed

A ‘skill’ game in Second Life™ has been shut down by the Lindens. Named The Rock Trading, you can get that latest information here: IMPORTANT INFORMATION FROM LINDEN LAB, PLEASE READ POSTED BY ROCKERDUCK VELLA, 12-MAY-2015.

Untitled
Untitled by Mia Resident, on Flickr

Losing Linux

There is an update to the Linux story. The Lab has made a blog post on the subject. The link is iin an update I added to the end of my post: Second Life Losing the Linux Viewer? Inara Pey has also written about the update and included an audio clip of Oz talking about the change at the Third Party Developers’ meeting. I link to her in my update.

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The End of Second Life?

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Everything ends. It is just a matter of when. We hear this story of Second Life™ ending all the time. It is not new. Lots of Chicken Little. That SL has not ended, does not mean it won’t. The sky COULD fall. But, I think we will have plenty of warning should the end draw near.

mediterranean girl
Mediterranean girl by Annahyss Resident, on Flickr

I came to Second Life from Myst Online, which has closed and come back a number of times. So, I’m used to games I like closing. Rizom is another one I liked and played for a time. It too closed and came back. Others just closed. 

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Second Life: Catching Up

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Being gone for almost 2 weeks, there is lots for me to catch up on. These are the things I found interesting.

Mer étincelante
Mer étincelante by Nunie-SL, on Flickr

Scripting

I previously mentioned this. But, now the new avatar height and hover controls officially have their counterparts in the Linden Scripting Language (LSL): LLGetObjectDetails() and LLGetAgentSize(). See: New LSL support for Avatar Shape, Height and Hover.

A part of LLGetObjectDetails() is the flag: OBJECT_HOVER_HEIGHT – Gets the hover height of the avatar.
If id is not an avatar, 0.0 is returned. Normal values are in the range of-2.0 to 2.0 with a default value of 0.0. This value does not reflect the avatar shape’s “Hover” setting, only the dynamic viewer setting.

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Second Life & Virtual Reality

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We are getting closer to hands on. The Oculus Rift is to release in the first quarter of 2016. At this point I think the first round of pre-release technical challenges has been met. So, any possible delay would be from manufacturing and supply problems.

Now that the Samsung Galaxy S6 is in production the supply of display screens for the Oculus should be adequate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5XVq4NLnwk

Unity and Unreal, game engine platforms, are both announcing support of HTC RE Vive. This means game developers can move away from having to develop support for the various VR headsets and use the support provided by Unity and Unreal. This saves developer’s time and means new games will move through the development pipeline faster. 

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3D Display Devices

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For Second Life™ it is thought the Oculus Rift is the most interesting development coming for 3D viewing. But, that is in the future. We may possibly see a retail version this year, but probably not. Daily Tech reported in March that the release date was slipping to 2016. None other than Oculus VR founder and chief Palmer Luckey announced the release date was moving back to early 2016. There were the usual disclaimers… ‘unless something goes horribly wrong’ … ‘but, it isn’t and won’t’ …

HP ZVR Holographic Display
HP ZVR Holographic Display

Oculus is suffering now from feature creep and perfectionism. There is no lack of spin and hope. So, we can’t know when we will see it. 

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