Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Maria Korolov has an article on Hypergrid Business: How to set up your new mobile VR viewer. So if you have Google Cardboard and have been looking to get it working with a viewer…
There is a previous article titled: How to watch YouTube on Cardboard viewers.
No Secret Bloggers Club… Really!!! Honest! See: Exclusive – There Is No Secret Second Life Bloggers Club
I think this is funny. There are people that are friends with various members of the development community, Linden and third party. It isn’t so much that developers help out their friends more than others as it is familiarity with a person allows you tell when they are up to something or holding something back. That is a sign to start digging.
Often we know a new shinny is coming because people start clamming up.
Hypergrid Business has an article up on Linden Lab restricting use of the Linden dollar in other virtual worlds, OpenSim. See: Linden Labs halts use of Linden Dollars in other virtual worlds.
I doubt this is a competitive thing. L$ incurs a legal liability for the Lab. They have to be able to show the government where those dollars are going. This is a measure of the government trying to control currency and thereby control crime.
If your into philosophy and have read the Federalist Papers, then the fallacy of trying to control crime this way is probably apparent. But, it gives the government more control and feeds the bureaucratic and politicians addiction to power.
Whatever the reason, the reality is L$ are now going to be restricted to Second Life. Expect to see their current use in various places disappearing.
Over on Hypergrid Business Maria Korolov is reporting: OSgrid is back.
February 24, 2015 @ 6:45 PM the OSGrid folks tweeted the re-opening of the grid. Plus the blog has an announcement: OSGrid Online.
Yay! While this doesn’t mean OSGrid is completely up or stable, it is open to logins. They warn that there may be outages as servers are tweaked. But, they feel the grid should mostly be up and open and no more major problems.
For those that run their own regions, new server software is available for download. Also, there are some instructions in the OSGrid blog for getting existing regions back up. See the announcement link above.
As you might imagine, there is likely to be a rush of people logging in. This may place heavy load on the system and slow things down.
My recent article OpenSim News: Hypergrid Market 2014-12 drew more comments than most of my posts. Maria Korolov, WhiteStar Magic, and Ilan Tochner commented making good points I feel worth further consideration in regard to Kitely’s new market place.
Maria believes the Kitely market will help with the DMCA problems. Her thinking, if I understood, is that having a single market for many OpenSim grids it reduces the work one needs to do to file a DMCA take down notice. Rather than keeping track of all the grids and filing with each, a merchant/creative can file with just Kitely. This is a good point and addresses the concern I raised about the added complexity of the Hypergrid spreading products across a number of virtual worlds.
If each grid has its own market, we have to deal with all those markets and defend content in all those markets. I see that as a big problem. Maria is likely right that a concentrated market would simplify the problem and not present the massive work load I foresaw.
Filing only with Kitely does not get things removed from all the grids. But, that may be a temporary thing. They hope to be able to implement that feature with cooperation from grid owners. For now once an item is in a grid’s asset database it is there until the grid manager removes it. A DCMA take-down will stop sales from Kitely and that may be all one really needs to worry about. More about this farther on.
You probably know that in the Open source world of OpenSim they have a thing called Hypergrid. The basic idea is one can live in a grid and visit other OpenSim grids. The really neat thing is your avatar and it’s stuff go with you. So, if I put on my red dress in OSGrid and go to Kitely I look the same in both grids. My dress, skin, etc. came with me to the other grid.
IBM and Linden Lab were cooperating on building the Hypergrid. The problem was they could not find a way to protect Intellectual Property Rights. So, they gave up. As much as novices think: there must be a way, there isn’t. After 25+ years the movie and music industry have not been able to find a way to protect digital content from theft. They have spen millions trying to figure out a protection scheme. They have failed.