Nalates' Things & Stuff

VR Catching On?

2016/08/29 by Nalates Urriah

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.

Blender Art

2016/08/29 by Nalates Urriah

I haven’t been working with Blender lately. RL work and sort of waiting for Project Bento to move into RC status. But, I do skim the Blender news and art. One of the interesting places to look is SketchFab.com. Where I came across this 3D picture.

The Probe – Plastics (without Sensor)
by MACHINƎ
on Sketchfab

If you aren’t familiar with 3D miages; the icon in the lower left is the clue it is a 3D image, click inside it and drag, roll the mouse wheel to zoom. Once the model is loaded you can click into VR or Full Screen.

Flickr Sharing vs All Rights Reserved

2016/08/29 by Nalates Urriah

Rights management is complicated. Photo sharing sites are by necessity complicated. Flickr.com has made it as easy as possible to share and manage rights. But, people still mess up, authors and consumers. Especially in an age where people are moving fast and using technology to speed things up.

Nal's Flickr Channel August 2016 — Nal’s Flickr Channel August 2016

New User Blender Tutorial on a Card

2016/08/28 by Nalates Urriah

Blender has a reputation for being hard to learn. After using it for 10± years I have say hard isn’t the word, never-ending is more like it.

In Second Life™ bloggers don’t take on training Blender noobies. We send them to YouTube and point them at various online tutorials. But, Blender changes fast enough that the noobie tutorials fall out of date quickly. Updates are slow coming. So… Learn Blender with a Poster: massive restyling is a handy new reference for beginners…

If I use it, does that mean I’m a beginner? Sometimes I think so. Whatever it makes me, I like the card and plan to keep it handy. I may even print it out on 11×17 for my wall.

Jump to the article for a link to the Hi-Rez copy of the image. I started with a smaller image and WordPress shrinks it some more in the upload. So, if you plan to print it, get the good source.

Second Life: Third Party Viewer Meeting

2016/08/27 by Nalates Urriah

Second Life: Third Party Viewer Meeting (video)

Current RC viewers are all having elevated crash rates. We’ll see new releases of them with various fixes as the Lindens try to get the crash rates down to what we have with the current default viewer, which dropped the crash rate significantly.

So, we very likely won’t see a viewer promoted to main status this coming week 35.

There is a new maintenance viewer coming. It should appear this coming week, but may be not. It could get hung in QA.

Oz Linden is expecting to get the 64-bit version of the viewer out as an RC soon. Oz says it is coming along and they are spending more time on it. There are some ‘corners’ to clean out according to Oz.