Thursday about noon the Lab announced some of the things that will be changing in Second Life™ viewers. We know viewers will change. But, never exactly what change is coming. See: Important Viewer Evolution Update.
Most of the changes mentioned, we know about.
Dark and Red
The viewer’s built in web browser is changing over to Chromium Embedded Frame work. So, it is basically a new browser, like Firefox or Chrome. This affects lots of things inside the viewer, search, profiles, etc. Most importantly it is part of the frame changing how streaming media is handled. There is an RC version of this change on the Alternate Viewers Page.
The avatars are changing and the RC version of the Project Bento Viewer is out, also on the Alt Viewer page.
I missed this when Aki released it three months ago.
The location for Project Bento meetings has changed from what is said in the video. They now meet in Hippotropolis, Agni (the main grid) on Thursdays at 1 PM SLT/PT. I think they moved to the main grid to make it easier for more people to get to the meetings.
Word is getting around that the Marketplace (MP) has shifted to the new search feature. There are some problems with the new search. I like it, but nothing is perfect.
Kitty From The Garden
One problem is items removed from the MP are showing up in search. Another is how title words and keywords are ranked in the search algorithm has changed. More weight given to title words. The fear is this will lead to cluttered item names. Some believe people will start cramming there keyword list into the items name, title.
Whatever the case on these problems, there is a place where you can discuss the problems you have with the new search. See the SL Forum thread titled: Marketplace Search Issues [ New ].
Thank you for experimenting with our Oculus Rift Project Viewer and offering your feedback. Unfortunately, the Project Viewer that we recently made available didn’t meet our standards for quality, and so we’ve now removed it from the Alternate Viewers page.
By definition, Project Viewers aren’t ready for primetime. The purpose of these experimental Viewers is to share with you the earliest possible version of what we’re working on, so that you can see what we’re up to, help discover problems, and provide feedback. In this case, though, we’re not ready for that, as those of you who tried it have seen.
We can’t say at this point when or even if we may release another Project Viewer for experimenting with the Oculus Rift in SL.
We want to prioritize our development efforts around initiatives that we know will improve the virtual world and bring more value to SL Residents, and due to some inherent limitations with SL, it may well not be possible to achieve the performance needed for a good VR experience. (In fact, this is one reason why we’re creating Project Sansar a new, separate platform optimized for VR).
We greatly appreciate the interest in trying SL with the Oculus Rift and are grateful that several of you took the time to try the Project Viewer. We regret that the quality was not up to our standards, and we will of course keep the community posted if we release a new Project Viewer for VR in the future.
Jo Yardley caught the post and published it on her site. Many of us are disappointed. But…
