We have seen the recommended specifications for using Oculus Rift that came from the developers; 2 USB3 ports, NVIDIA GTX 970 or AMD 290, Intel i5-4590, and 8GB RAM. (Reference) That leaves a lot of us behind. The Sansar Beta should open up in early 2016. So, maybe it is necessary we start looking at upgrading so we can be Oculus ready.
Love is like the wind….
If you followed the link and read the article, you know this is the requirement for ‘sustained’ comfort and presence. It is not the minimum requirement. My Duo-Core2 Quad and NVIDIA 560 will power a VR headset, Oculus or other. How well, is the question. Will its performance be such that it will be likely to induce simulator sickness? Probably.
The main grid got a new package Tuesday 10/6. There is no update ready for the RC channels. So, the entire grid is running the same package. The package rolled out has fixed server crash and fixed the Region Debug Console help text. It also makes the new LSL functions for getting attachments functional grid … Read more
While there isn’t much new information, the author Derrick Schneider sees things differently than most. So, whether he asked different questions or just heard Ebbe’s talking points in new ways, I can’t be sure. But, I took some new thinking away from the article.
Quoting Ebbe:
“We do say that it’s [Sansar] in the spirit of [Second Life], but that’s where we stop. We don’t think of this as a 2.0. Sansar is its own thing. Some things will be similar, some will be completely different.”
…
“With Sansar, we explicitly said, the creator is king, and the creator is the customer.”
While we have repeatedly heard the creator is the primary target market for Project Sansar, how ‘creator’ is defined is likely different than we may be thinking. Ebbe gives us clear statements that ‘creators’ are not just those making 3D models with Maya or Blender. For Ebbe a person that furnishes a home is creating. While they didn’t necessarily build any of the things they bring into the home, they still built their living environment. So, to Ebbe such people are ‘creators’ too. It is this broader group of creative people that Ebbe is considering his target demographic. It is tools for them that he is building first.
I am fascinated with Second Life images appearing on Flickr. Many are strictly artistic, others erotic, many pornographic, and most just pictures. I’ve noticed some of the fashion blogs have very talented people doing the art, but how to categorize those images is debatable. While commercial art is still an art form there are the elitists that look down on anything that cannot be classed as fine art. Some going so far is to eliminate photography from the field. My thinking is there is nothing that says people have to be sane or even rational, especially when it comes to taste.
Pink Blueberries
Some like to use what I’ll call mood images in their promotional/commercial art that I think really increase the visual impact. I find it as artistic as any fine art and debatably more challenging to create as one must achieve multiple goals. I am impressed when I see people creating, basically, ads that I would class as art. Others are making promotional material that shows their products in purely functional ways with beauty is barely a consideration. That doesn’t mean that work isn’t artistic, at least for me, I just see other art as more.
You might know that Havok is the physics engine used by Second Life. It is the part of the system that figures out when the avatar bumps into a wall or walks on a floor and keeps the avatar from passing through.
It is the part that figures out when a bullet collides with us or misses. It makes balls roll. We see it in operation not only in Second Life buy in Call of Duty, Halo, and is used in movies like the Matrix.
I’m not an avid reader of the magazine. In fact this is the first time I’ve even looked at an issue. I see people posting about it in various places. But, I’ve never seen anything that intrigued me to look at it. But, I recently saw some architectural images on Flickr that were amazing. I thought they were Blender renderings. But, as best I can tell they were made in SL and possibly Photoshop’d, but even Blender images get Photoshop’d.
So, when I noticed this issue has a section on Architectural Art in SL and on Huckleberry Hax, a writer. Those two items were enough to get me to click and check it out.
The magazine covers art in Second Life™. It is more about art and where to see it than it is about displaying art in the pages of the magazine.
The images of the architectural art are less than I hoped for. I’ve seen better images in Flickr. However, this is likely just because of the image quality used in the magazine, which may be why it is more about where to find art than trying to show it to you. So, the article points to this work of art in Second Life named: Angel Manor by Kaya Angel.
