Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Inara Pey has an article up covering the news that we may someday soon see real mirrors in Second Life. So, I’m not going to go into detail here. See: Reflections on a prim: a potential way to create mirrors in SL.
[youtube JhN2HnQl6g8]
Zi Ree of the Firestorm team is playing with implementing such a feature. See JIRA item: STORM-2055 – Real mirror reflections on prims.
Business Insider has an article up on Second Life: Second Life Has Devolved Into A Post-Apocalyptic Virtual World, And The Weirdest Thing Is How Many People Still Use It. Karyne Levy wrote the article. He/She (?) quotes William Reed Seal-Foss a regular on the Metaverse Podcasts with a generally negative stand on Second Life.
[youtube jQuoUEerTVY]
While Karyne distorts what SL is and misses much of what is going on, the article is not that bad. It is just the typical ignorant writer writing without bothering to do more than a minimal amount of research on their article. A basic noobie thinking they know what SL is.
You can join BI and leave comments several have. Jo Yardley comments at length. She and others referred Karyne to Flickr’s SL Looking Good, which has some awesome pictures from within SL. Jo and a couple of others refer Karyne to Drax’s World Makers on YouTube. The play list there is getting impressive.
Psyke Phaeton has an article up on the Lab’s new request for tax information. Since Psyke lives outside the USA (Australia) and is not a US citizen he does not have to pay US taxes. But, the US government forces Linden Lab to collect a 30% tax from foreign nationals making money in the USA. If the Lab cannot get RL tax information on an individual they cannot pay them and in some cases may have to close their SL account, which Psyke says happened to him.
Psyke made the Psyke’s Defense Systems® HomeSecurity™ Orb. You can find it in the Market Place here. The web site is here.
There is a new viewer in the pipeline called the New Login Viewer. I don’t know much about it or when we will see it on the RC Viewer page. I think this viewer is still running A-B tests with new users. As existing users we probably will not see it until the A-B testing is done.
Word is the Zipper RC Viewer is having lots of problems on older hardware. Oz says they are not sure at this point if they will continue with this viewer. He recommended that third party developers not merge this code into their viewers. That is a pretty clear ‘stay away’ from this version warning.
There are new versions of the Oculus and Experience Tools viewers. Both are going well. There is no ETA on when improvements from the DK2 may be seen. But, there is work happening in that area. So, I am guessing the Lab has received their DK2 units.
Lots of data is coming back from Experience Tools. There are some problems, but Oz says nothing big. So, that is moving ahead. My guess is we will see more users invited to the Beta or even a public RC Viewer.
The Library Refresh RC Viewer will NOT support Mac 10.6. Once it makes it to being the main viewer, the Lab will stop supporting 10.6 and older Mac operating systems. Otherwise this is the viewer using the newly rebuilt libraries.
Windows 8.1 users have amazingly low crash rates. The Lab is encouraging users to update their operating system if they are on older OS’s. Especially Win 8 users as the upgrade to 8.1 is free.
Maestro Linden is on vacation. Caleb Linden is handling the Server Beta meeting and Oz and Simon Linen were there. No new information on what server updates may be in the works. As all regions are running the same server package, the main channel is unlikely to get any updates and there may be no Tuesday restart.
The RC channels may get a restart and new package, but if they do we currently have no idea what that update may be. My guess is there will be no rollout/restart of the RC channels in week 32.
A new World Makers video (Episode 21: Editorial Clarity) is out: [youtube G921mMfJ4So]