Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Inara Pey noticed something in the recent Linden Lab press release that I passed right over. The Lab refers to Project Sansar as SANSAR™. Subtle.
Inara contacted the Lab and got a sort of left handed confirmation.
See: Lab confirms Sansar’s title and issues first Creator Preview invites.
They now have a Sansar Flickr Channel.
Tapple Gao is providing a free tool for those doing movement animations, e.g., walking. You’ll find a copy in the marketplace here: Walking and Turning Test Treadmill. It is free.
The idea for the tool was to provide a way to eliminate skate from animations you create. With some walking and running animations my avatar appears to skate across the floor/ground.
With this tool you can play the animation, as opposed to wearing and having to ‘move’ to play it, stand in place, start the treadmill, and see if your feet and the treadmill are in sync. If not you’ll need to adjust the time scale of your animation.
Handy.
I’m into math. So, I think it would be nice to have a control that would let me speed up or slow down the treadmill by a known percentage. While there aren’t any buttons for that. Apparently I could do that via the chat interface.
By knowing how much to speed up or slow down my animation I would be able to eliminate a lot of trial and error testing.
This morning an announcement appeared on the Linden Lab Press Releases page: LINDEN LAB BEGINS INVITING CREATORS TO SANSAR, THE PLATFORM FOR CREATING SOCIAL VR EXPERIENCES. (8/31/2016)
The Lindens say ‘more than 6,500 people have applied’ to participate in what I’ll call the beta phase of Project Sansar.
This will be a rolling invitation. Some will be invited now. More later and even more with time.
If you haven’t applied and you are a creator, there is a link on the PR page.
The opening day will be sometime in early 2017. I expect that will be when I get in for the first time.
While none of this is really new to those of us in SL, it is a milestone that it is happening now.
An interesting question is how tightly NDA’s will these invitees be bound?
A day after I publish my server and viewer updates the Lab releases a new version of the Visual Outfits Browser (VOB) viewer: 4.0.8.319143.
You can download a copy from the Second Life Alternate Viewers page.
This viewer adds a tab to the Appearance Outfits panel. In that panel an image is associated with each outfit. You can take a snapshot, upload it, and use it for a thumbnail of the outfit. Yes, you do have to pay for the image upload, L$10 (US$0.04+/-). But, you can use an existing snapshot and save the L$10.
It is a nice feature. I have just under 300 outfits (today – I have demos in my want-to-get folder that will become outfits). Something like 150 are older classic avatar outfits (those will get converted to outfits using my mesh body or likely be deleted). But, 300 x L$10 = L$3,000 or US$11.50 for the photos. So, provided the Lab makes a profit on image storage, this could add a bit of income.
I did create the outfits over the 2+ years we have had the outfits feature. So, I’ll probably spend US$2 to $5 per year on outfit images.
Not everyone will do that and some will already have done it. There are those that have been storing an image of their outfits in inventory along with their outfits. But, the possible income from one additional outfit image per week per user… 52 images per year times say 600,000 users (31 million images) times say 50% (15.6 million images) being interested in how they look enough to be into outfits would give the Lab a gross income from Outfit Images of 15.6m x L$10/L$260/US$1 = $600k. From that we have figure out what percent of the Lab’s labor, electrical bill, hardware cost, any additional hardware cost, bandwidth cost… should be subtracted from that income.
I doubt this is a big money maker for the Lab… It is going to save me a bunch of time picking outfits.
Now… if I could have folders for outfits…
No rollouts this week, main or RC channels. Caleb Linden says they will be returning to the regular schedule of rollouts next week. It is vacation time.
I think this is the third week the main channel region I live in has not been restarted.I think the last restart was 8/9. Caleb has posted that if you region is having problems contact support and ask for a restart or file a JIRA describing the problems.
Interesting uses of Virtual Reality Headsets are turning up. Some examples:
Obduction – Of course games. This is a big Myst sibling puzzle game where you are magically transported to an alien world and have to figure out how to get home. The graphics are awesome. All versions of the game will have VR support. The game is out and the VR updates will be sent along.
Sketchfab: Largest Social Media Site for 3D Objects Adds VR Navigation – This is the first web site I’ve heard of that is designed for VR. The highlight isn’t the VR oriented content but the VR oriented site design.
Hospitals Try Giving Patients a Dose of VR – They are using VR to help with pain management. It’s a distraction thing.
Paraplegics regain some feeling, movement after using brain-machine interfaces – Surprising.
Gear VR – Samsung is selling their nice headset for the Note 7 for US$99. I am eligible for a new phone… tempting.
Politicians and Photo-Opts – I didn’t see this one coming. I’m hoping Wiener doesn’t find out about VR.