Second Life: In the NEWS – Week 17

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Business Insider March 2014

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? by Christina, on Flickr

I am not sure why some things come up so late in Feedly, like 4 weeks… This is a decent article about Linden Lab starting development on the Next Generation Platform. See: This company was 13 years early to virtual reality — and it’s getting ready to try again. Quoting:

Linden Lab is marshaling its expertise and experience in building immersive, functional virtual worlds to make a proper successor to the Second Life platform and take advantage of the bold new world of immersive VR. Specifically, Linden sees a huge opportunity in making it easier for people to build and share cool virtual reality experiences.

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Next Generation Platform-SL2: The Avatars

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Everyone is curious about what the avatars in the Next Generation Platform (NGP), or SL2, will be like and what we can do with them. Now we have some clues. High Fidelity is working on their avatars and has just release a set of improvements. See: Creating and rigging an avatar with Blendshapes in Makehuman. The information is somewhat compatible with the current Second Life™ and I suspect a hint of what is coming for SL2 or the Next Generation Platform.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZHyypkXDd4

This is a great video for designers. You’ll find references to a number software tools I have not heard mentioned in relation to Second Life. Some of those look to be handy for SL.

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Second Life: Attachment Problems

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There are problems and then there are the symptoms of problems. Just as many health problems produce a fever as a symptom, multiple problems can cause attachment problems.

Attachment Problems - 2015
Attachment Problems – 2015

That said, this symptom has been know for a long time. The image shows my hair appearing attached to my butt for a really sophisticated look… not. I’ve seen the problem on and off since I came to Second Life™ in 2008. Now I am seeing it again. For three or five weeks the problem pretty much disappeared.

This problem is generally thought to be a timing problem. The information coming from the server is lost or out of order or otherwise arrives in some way that confuses the viewer. The viewer doesn’t figure out that the hair goes on my head. It doesn’t really attach it to by butt. If I walk away the hair is left hanging in space.

This does just happen with hair. I’ve had a foot, hand, bracelet, dress panel, earring, or other attachment suffer this fate. 

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3D Display Devices

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For Second Life™ it is thought the Oculus Rift is the most interesting development coming for 3D viewing. But, that is in the future. We may possibly see a retail version this year, but probably not. Daily Tech reported in March that the release date was slipping to 2016. None other than Oculus VR founder and chief Palmer Luckey announced the release date was moving back to early 2016. There were the usual disclaimers… ‘unless something goes horribly wrong’ … ‘but, it isn’t and won’t’ …

HP ZVR Holographic Display
HP ZVR Holographic Display

Oculus is suffering now from feature creep and perfectionism. There is no lack of spin and hope. So, we can’t know when we will see it. 

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Star Wars Trailer

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I know a portion of Second Life™ users are into Star Wars®. We have tribute regions in SL. This Christmas a new Star Wars film is planned to come out. Today everyone is excited by the new trailer for the movie that just released. 🙂

Watch more than 30 hours of panels, interviews, and floor coverage, live from Star Wars Celebration Anaheim!

  • Today’s (4/16 ? 18) panel schedule includes:
    • 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PT: New Allies & New Villains: Star Wars Rebels Season Two
    • 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. PT: Smuggler’s Bounty – Original Star Wars Audio Drama by Kyle Newman
    • 6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. PT: Star Wars Fan Film Awards presented by StarWars.com
    • 7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. PT: Mark Hamill: The Return of the Jedi

Statistics: Second Life, OpenSim, World of Warcraft

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Hypergrid Business keeps many of us up to date on happenings in the OpenSim side of virtual worlds. They currently have an article up on expansion and contraction in the OpenSim worlds: Regions, grids hit new record highs.

Garden Party
Garden Party by Gorba McMahon, on Flickr

It is a good headline. In the first paragraph Maria, author, points out that active users on public grids fell by 909 to 30,000. So, even though I consider Maria a bit of a fan-girl for OpenSim, I consider her reporting accurate enough to give us the good and bad news. 

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