Second Life & Sansar in the News

Massively Overpowered (MO) posted: These Are The Companies That Are Trying To Build The Metaverse. While Linden Lab (214+ employees) is mentioned so is their competition; Altspace VR (20± employees), Facebook, and High Fidelity (). It seems Comcast and the Japanese company Tencent are investing in Altspace.

{ Down in the holler }
Down in the holler

Palmer Luckey is mentioned as talking about it being harder to abusive in VR than in the current 3D virtual worlds we have now. MO doesn’t exactly point us to where it is Palmer is talking. But, their article is inspired by an article on Re/code and they quote Palmer, “Virtual reality will make it a lot harder to be a total dick to somebody online.” Re/code says Philip Rosedale, co-founder of Second Life™ and CEO of High Fidelity, agrees. 

Read more

OSGrid Up 2015-09

Over on Hypergrid Business Maria Korolov is reporting: OSgrid is back.

New Firestorm Region in OSGrid
New Firestorm Region in OSGrid

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.

Convrge – Social VR

The Road to VR has an article about Convrge. Convrge is a social VR platform for the Oculus Rift. They have pictures of the world being built. It looks like Minecraft with triangles. It is promoted as a low-poly, high performance virtual world.

The avatars are a bit weird. At this point it is hard to know what they intend to build, witout digging deeper, no time for that. See: YouTube.

Interestingly the world can be streamed to a browser. That probably isn’t the Oculus image/view that gets streamed, but I’m guessing.

The big NEW THING is a 2D movie screen in a 3D world… uuuh, OK… I’m not excited… From what I am reading it looks like the developers plan to build the world and users create the events.

A Strangeling in Second Life

Strawberry Singh  has a post about a new game, Strangelings, expected to be out the first quarter of 2013. She says the Ozimals team has joined up with two former Lindens and a financial expert to form Flying Monkey Interactive, Inc. The team is developing a product platform called Toto that will run on iPad, the web, iPhone, and Facebook.

Strawberry Singh as a Strangeling

The Magic of Oz region has been remade to create a promotional and information spot in Second Life. It is an all mesh area. Check it out. Also bounce over to Strawberry’s blog and see the video she made. It shows the Strangling in all is awesome cutness: Strangelings & Mesh Oz! 

Read more

Second Life Viewer Comparison

Most viewer reviews are written for those using Second Life®. However, more grids are opening. For the people using alternate grids there is another blog looking at viewers: Excelsior Station. The author, Sarge Misfit, does a Second Life® style VIEWERS COMPARISON. SL users will gain some benefit from the comparison,

The most recent comparison is dated May 3, 2012.

Viewer Comparisons

The comparison is a cross between a viewer list and a feature comparison. One of the valuable points in the comparison is whether the viewer is multi-grid ready, does it have a grid manager, handy comparison point.

Read more