Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Are you having problems with Google Search? Gmail? Google Apps? You are not alone.
C|Net has an article up about the problems. See: Google Drive, Gmail hit by service disruptions.
I’ve run into several Google problems over the last couple of days. But, Google is saying they have it fixed now.
If you have a blog or web site, then you are under attack. Everyday someone is trying to steal your password and hoping it is the same as your banking passwords. Today Go Daddy posted a notice about problems a number of hosting companies are seeing right now.
Everyone is looking forward to a browser being able to support 3D games and worlds like Second Life™. Mozilla and Unreal have worked together to get Unreal games running in a Mozilla browser. The demo that is out can be found on the Mozilla Developer Network site: BannaBread.
To see the demo you will need Firefox. Or a browser with:
I think we tend to forget that the problems we experience in Second Life™ are not unique to just Second Life. The growing pains in SL are common to all human endeavors. A current good example of that is the recently release MMOG SimCity™ by EA, Electronic Arts™. Try SimCity Problems on Google, 33+ million hits.
Also, it is interesting to see people’s takes on what is happening with SimCity. Erik Kain, contributing to Forbes, writes:
Alan Green, a Software Engineer at Google, has posted an announcement that Google Reader is to cease operation July 1, 2013. (Reference) OUCH!!!
Google Reader is a primary tool I use to track events and happenings in Second Life, technology, and world politics. It reduces my reading time and provides a means of quickly finding important news. I love several fashion blogs and bounce through pictures of the latest fashion just for fun.
We have all heard about people putting text only viewers for SL and OpenSim in web browsers. The idea of using a browser to visit virtual worlds is to avoid having to download and install a viewer, thus making it much easier to get people into virtual worlds.
Well, it seems there is a full viewer being built on HTML5. It is being tested with OpenSim now.
Maria Korolov has an article up about it on Hypergrid Business: PixieViewer puts OpenSim in Browser. Now that is something.
Maria says, “Because it uses standard HTML 5 technology, it should be accessible on mobile devices such as Android tablets and iPads, though users were having problems getting it to work today.”
So, that could give us a 3D viewer for SL on mobile devices.
Maria says a special module is needed for Pixie Viewer to work. She says this module is server side. Whatever, she speculates it will not be compatible with Second Life unless Linden Lab adapts the module to SL. I would think that would be something the Lab would do. But, that probably depends on how much work it would require.
An interesting aspect of the technology is that a 3D scene in a browser can be sent to a 3D Printer to generate a RL model. Now isn’t that fun?