General Computer Stuff

CtrlAltStudio Releases DK2 Second Life Support

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David Rowe, lead developer for CtrlAltStudio’s Oculus Viewer and Firestorm contributor, has released preliminary support for the Oculus Rift DK2, developer’s kit 2. This is the improved Oculus with better head tracking and higher resolution screen.

Read more here: Preliminary Rift DK2 Support: 1.2.2.41183 Alpha.

In motion tracking the big change in the Oculus which requires changes to programs supporting it, is from adding tracking of head leaning/position. Head rotation is what was previously tracked. To understand the difference think of locking your shoulders against your seat back and moving your head by only flexing your neck. That is head rotation. If you bend at the waist and lean forward, you don’t use many neck muscles but you head moves a lot. It is this latter motion that has been added to the Oculus’ abilities.

Think of leaning out a car window to look at the ground. You will use a combination of head turning and body motion to see around the car door. It is supposed to be this sort of motion the Oculus has gotten better at.

Telling Second Life Viewers how to move the camera to simulate this type of motion is being added.

David does not have all of the new stuff working in the viewer. It is, as he writes, “…very preliminary”. But, it is a start for those with DK2’s.

512k Internet Slow Down

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There is currently a problem with the Internet. Some time ago I wrote of the change from IPv4 to IPv6, which is a change in the standard way of assigning Internet addresses to devices. We were running out of addresses. New hardware capable of handling larger addresses has to be added and has been being added for the last couple of years.

Now another growth pain is starting to impact users as the Internet grows more complicated. We are seeing slow Internet and sites we cannot connect to because the routers that direct traffic from place to place run out of memory. The older routers can typically hold 512,000 addresses. Sounds like plenty. But, that is what they thought about addresses too.

The problems are hitting in the USA and Canada as older routers max’d out. The problem right now is that Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)routing tables have grown too large for some top-level Internet routers to handle. The result is that these routers can no longer properly handle Internet traffic. The result is they get confused and fail to rout anything, forget some routes and stop forwarding traffic destined for those routes, or just ignores that traffic. Whatever they do, your connection slows to a crawl as the system tries to find a way to route you packet to the destination or fails altogether.

You can figure out if you are running into this problem by doing trace route testing. See my Troubleshooting your Connection. If you are hitting the problem you will see your packets fail to get past some router.

The problem has to be fixed by the Internet Service Providers, mostly the backbone providers. About all you can do is suffer and complain to your ISP. The Trace Route information will help them get THEIR complaints to the right people.

If you want more information, search on 512k Internet.

Understanding the Render Pipeline

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This isn’t a Second Life specific article, but SL is all about getting our world rendered and concepts are similar in all rendered worlds. Arton Rotaru found the blog page and posted a link in the SL Forum. So, if your are curious and wonder how hard can it be to render a world? Then this is something for you.

Lost-Eden_003
Lost Eden 2014

Also, if you are a creative type and hopping to optimize your builds to reduce lag, there are concepts you will likely find interesting.

See: Render Hell 1.0 – For discussion see the SL Forum: A lovely explanation of how a Render Pipeline works.

On the blog the top video is just the author’s explanation of what is come and why he made the page.

The rest of the page is an illustrated text. Some illustrations are pictures. Others are short animations or videos.

 

Oculus Rift DK2

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The DK2 (Developer’s Kit) is shipping and people are making videos of their experience with it. The increased resolution has them excited, as if it were possible to create more excitement than the DK1 did.

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The motion tracking is impressing. Being able to move forward and backward, leaning rather than moving, is apparently an impressive change adding to the sense of presence. Technolust is a virtual world/game demo that is revealing the color and presence that the OR delivers.

All is not perfect with the DK2. The motion tracking camera has limits and it is reported that when you reach the end of its field of vision the motion tracking stops, which reviewers found disconcerting.

There are still some visual artifacts and motion blurring here and there. But, the DK2 seems to be a big step forward.

Road to VR has numerous links to different ‘un-boxing’ videos and initial tests and reviews.

Internet News 2014-27

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Every so often I pass along news about the Internet. Mostly US centric. This summer lots of things are stacking up that are mostly never mentioned in the mainstream media.

Stop Drama w/Dramamine

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Facebook Guinea Pigs

This week news broke that Facebook experimented on 700,000 of their users without their knowledge. The idea was to see of ‘mood’  is contagious in the digital world. To do that they added either more positive news or negative news to the test subjects’ feed. So, you aren’t just seeing an unedited feed at FB. It can be manipulated. 

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Adobe CC 2014 Released

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Today Adobe released an update of their Creative Suite of graphics tools. I never expected to see a large update like this since the start of creative cloud and subscriptions. But, I was wrong there is a new one out.

If you have a product subscription and your Creative Cloud app is not showing the various CC packages with ‘(2014)’ appended, you need to log out of the CC app. The log out is in Preferences_>Account (tab). When you log back in, the new apps will appear.

My downloads this morning were very slow. In addition my computer was slow while the process was ongoing. So, you may want to wait to start your update until late this evening. 

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