April Fools Day for this year is past. We survived. From 2015 comes this old but way cute April Fools Prank.
Just too cute.
Category Archives: Virtual World News
Linden Lab pours MILLIONS into Second Life
Ebbe Linden has posted in the SL Forum. The post is titled Celebrating 14 Years of SL with Investments in Its Future. In it, he says they have budgeted US$ Millions for the coming year, which is awesome.
Cerridwens Cauldron_007 (URL)
He tells us about some of the coming changes to Second Life. Some we know about, others are new news.
One change is moving SL to the cloud. I have heard no details. So, exactly what this means is currently speculation. My speculation is this should significantly drop the cost of running the system. I imagine an empty region could be spun down and then only spun up as needed. Would this reduce land cost? It might. Continue reading
Second Life and Sansar in the News
The Irish Times has an article by Marie Boran, Virtual reality is giving Second Life a second lease of life. (4/13) Marie was a participant in Second Life™ in 2010. In the first few words she reports the Trump-Swastikas at a Bernie Sanders meetup. That mention should clue people to the possibility of the reporting being shallow. I’ll try to push the Sansar news deeper and provide some perspective on Second Life..
The Blarneystone in Dublin, SL – 2017
Marie moves on to point out that while there is an ‘underbelly’ to SL, that is often reported on, there is also a surprising number of ‘ordinary’ folks in SL. The real world is pretty much that way… so…
Next Marie says her 2010 outfit and skin had expired… I went back and tried some of my 2008 outfits, well, we didn’t have “Outfits” in 2008. So, I had to find some stuff from then and make an outfit to see if things still worked. They did. I looked horrible. We can’t be sure what happened to Marie. I’ll take this as being another nail in ‘shallow’. But… Continue reading
VR Latency
I suspect we have all heard about simulator sickness, akin to motion sickness, caused by latency/lag in providing images to VR headsets. Now NVIDIA is showing an experimental zero latency display. The site Road to VR has the story in an article: NVIDIA Demonstrates Experimental “Zero Latency” Display Running at 1,700Hz.
NVIDIA debuted their experimental display at GTC 2016. The current 90hz displays render an image every 11ms. NVIDIA gets an image on screen in 0.58ms. Wow. Continue reading
Oculus Rift Retail Pre-Order DELAY
Word is out that the Oculus Rift consumer version can be pre-ordered for a mere US$600. :/
What I find today is that if you order now, you MAY get your Rift by June… That is six months. If you have already ordered, you should see yours get shipped to you in the March 28th shipment, 3 months.
No one is saying how many were ordered. Lucky Palmer only said they sold in 10 minutes what he thought they would sell in hours… not very definitive. But, it does indicates sales were several orders of magnitude larger than expected.
We are told the online order system went down, it overloaded.
See: Oculus Rift Pre-Order ETA is Now June for New Orders. (Jan 8 – Road to VR)
At this point I am waiting for reviews of the Oculus Rift that compare its performance to other HMD’s. Is it really going to be worth $400 more than the competition’s HDM’s?
I’m almost due for a new phone. So, I may trade my S5 for a newer S7… and start with Cardboard.
Second Life in the News Week 42
Second Life is part of a presentation at the Burlington Performing Arts CentreI (Burlington ON, L7S 1T7). The performance calendar describes it this way:
Tottering Biped @ Burlington Performing Arts Centre – Oct 2015
The online virtual world of ‘Second Life’ stretches thousands of kilometers and millions of visitors. While searching for her lost sister, Jessica struggles to find out what – and who – are real. Life and its double are at stake in this multi-media exploration of loss in the digital age. The Second Life was devised by the company through workshops with light, movement, and text over a four-year period. The Second Life explores the increasingly fluid relationship between the real, the digital and the spiritual.
How Virtual Worlds Will Take Over Real Life
From a speech by by Philip Rosedale, former Linden Lab CEO – 28 minutes. Philip uses Second Life to show what is happening in virtual worlds and how it will affect society. His thinking is interesting and in some ways a bit scary.
The video is the basis of an NPR show TED Radio: Why Build a Virtual World? Follow the link to see the video. I can’t embed it, only the audio portion, which is 9 minutes. The video and audio have different content. Both are interesting.
NPR/KPBS presented a radio show titled Screen Time. Philip Rosedale was a guest for the show. The audio above is also here: KPBS: Screen Time. The video is where some of the sound track for the show came from. The video is more interesting than the audio. The radio show has more context and less content, the audio is only 9 minutes long. It is worth checking both. Continue reading
Who is Winning the Virtual Reality Race?
The financial people think it is Facebook and Apple that are positioned to win in the Virtual Reality War. But, it won’t be a fast war. It will last years. Quoting Chris Ciaccia :
[A] Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster stated that virtual reality is likely the next key trend in technology, writing, “We liken the state of virtual and augmented reality today as similar to the state of mobile phones 15 years ago. It likely will take a decade before mainstream adoption as necessary improvements in displays and applications as well as lower pricing are needed to drive demand.”
Breaking bad💵💵💵💵 by pokute Burt, on Flickr
They expect new virtual everythings to open up; gaming (obviously), live sports, concerts, immersive cinema and social experiences will have a VR version. The article, Facebook and Apple are Poised to Win the Virtual Reality Wars, gives us, at least me, some new ideas about VR can be used. Continue reading