Drax Files Radio Show #11: The Road to VR

Drax Files Radio Show #11: The Road to VR. This audio is interesting in that 40+/- minutes are an interview with Ben Lang, who is doing the Road To VR blog, link the article near 20 minute index marker. I found it insightful and Ben

As always this synopsis is what I heard. Before reacting to anything written here, take the time to listen to the original audio of the show.

Time marks are approximate, but they should get you into the audio before the subject’s starting point.

Virtualizer
Virtualizer

Jo Yardley has her Oculus Rift. Yay! We should get some interesting reports from her. I suspect there will be some stuff that is NDA by the Linden Oculus Rift project, but hopefully she’ll still be able to tell us some of what the Lab is doing.

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Second Life News 2014-12 #2

So far I only have bits and pieces of Second Life™ news.

On the technical side Oz Linden announced the closing of the codereview.secondlife.com instance of ‘reviewboard’. The same code review work is done using the JIRA and the bitbucket.org repositories. This only matters to those building viewers and/or submitting viewer code.

VR Glossary Explained

Hypergrid Business has an article explaining the Virtual World (VR) terms being thrown around by bloggers. See: Virtual reality: 5 terms you need to know.

Maria Korolov says you can order a Rift (the developer kit). But, I hear they are out of stock.

Whatever, Maria does a good job of explaining the terms.

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Pondering Skin Fair 2014

The fair is a big deal. For over a year I have looked for a new skin. I didn’t want to change my look, I just wanted a skin that photographed better. Also, I wanted a skin without makeup. This year it was easier to find skins that have natural, nude, or bare versions of the skin. I think vendors like Slink and others that use appliers creates an environment that encourages the use of skins without makeup.

Evolution of Nalates
Evolution of Nalates

Also, skins now come with some standard appliers, feet, hands, breasts, and now heads. I am also seeing more skins that include freckles.

I think each year skins get better. My Nomine skin was made for Windlight and was designed for the newest rendering features of the time. But, that was also an era of face lights. Times have changed. 

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AvaStar 1.1 Video Released

Gaia Clary has a new video tutorial out. This one uses Blender 2.70, which has been released. Using it and the newest test version of AvaStar Gaia shows us how to initialize weighting for Fitted mesh.

Blender 2.70 Released
Blender 2.70 Released

The work flow for moving existing weighted items to collision weighting is covered in the first part of the video. Mid-way in Gaia covers starting weighting from scratch. The later part of the video is about using the shape sliders to test your weighting.

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Alert

There is something going on with the SL system this morning (7AM-8:30AM). People in a large number of groups are talking about Bake Fail. It seems lots of people are staying gray.

There is no good work-around. Some have solved it by relogging. Some have solved it by waiting.

DO NOT clear your cache. That just makes it worse for you and everyone else.

I am not seeing the problem. So, it is not affecting everyone. But, it is affecting a large number of people.

Second Life News 2014-12

The news in Second Life™ this week is there is no Second Life news today, at least not much.

Servers

There are no roll outs this week, main or RC channels.

Server Scripting 2014-12
Server Scripting 2014-12

Viewers

I covered the viewers this weekend in: Second Life News 2014-11 #3. Today the main viewer is: Second Life 3.7.3 (287491).

I also see the wiki has updated (Mar 17 2014) for version 3.7.4.288045… this is the Google Breakpad version that has been added to the RC Viewers List, giving us 6 RC Viewers.

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