Convrge – Social VR

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The Road to VR has an article about Convrge. Convrge is a social VR platform for the Oculus Rift. They have pictures of the world being built. It looks like Minecraft with triangles. It is promoted as a low-poly, high performance virtual world.

The avatars are a bit weird. At this point it is hard to know what they intend to build, witout digging deeper, no time for that. See: YouTube.

Interestingly the world can be streamed to a browser. That probably isn’t the Oculus image/view that gets streamed, but I’m guessing.

The big NEW THING is a 2D movie screen in a 3D world… uuuh, OK… I’m not excited… From what I am reading it looks like the developers plan to build the world and users create the events.

Firestorm’s Tool Tip Tuesday 09

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It was Tuesday again. Seems to happen every week. This last Tuesday another FS Tip came out.

In this one Jessica is teaching us about the command line available in the Firestorm Viewer’s chat. This is one of the way neat things about the Firestorm Viewer. There are plenty of neat features. But, this command line thing is something power users will likely use several times per login secession.

These tip videos are getting about 9,000+ views after a couple of weeks. This is a very small percentage of the Firestorm users. Since Firestorm is used by more than half, closer to three-quarters, of the users of Second Life that means very few people know about TTT Videos. Pass around the link to the YouTube Channel.

Net Neutrality Explained

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It has been hard to get people to think about or research what Net Neutrality actually is. Also, few have noticed who is in favor of it. This video does a pretty good job of explaining it, except for free speech and government control aspects.

PS: If you haven’t heard of the Canadian Supreme Court ruling on healthcare see: The Canadian Supreme Court’s Ruling on Private Health Care. (2005) Text: Chaoulli v. Quebec.

Changing Windlight & HDR in the Second Life Viewer

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In the Designing Worlds how (previous post) Honour McMillan explains a problem solution for photographers using the SL Viewer. The idea is we often just want to just tweak a region’s settings. In Firestorm that is easy. You just do it. In the SL Viewer it doesn’t work. The settings are grayed out until you select a preset, which changes everything. The region’s settings are effectively hidden. But, there is a work-around. (Lindens: don’t break this!)

HDR vs No Adjustment
HDR vs No Adjustment

Honour explains in the Designing Worlds video:

  • Open the environment Sky Preset editor and select any preset. World->Environmental Editor->Sky Presets->Edit Presets…->select any preset.
  • Next open the Water Preset editor, select any water preset, X it out or cancel.

You’ll see the region switch back from the Sky Lighting Preset you selected to the region’s settings when you cancel the Water editor. Now your Sky Presets editor is using the region’s settings and settings in the editor are still enabled. Good work-around.

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Second Life Photography Tips

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Prim Perfect has done a couple of shows with Strawberry Singh, Honour McMillan and Wildstar Beaumont that are about SL Photography. The first is here: Designing Worlds looks at Second Life Photography with Strawberry Singh, Honour McMillan and Wildstar Beaumont. (Video is here: Part 1)

Designing Worlds Logo
Designing Worlds Logo

The second is here: Second Life Photography Part 2 – After you’ve taken your picture: A Designing Worlds exploration with Strawberry Singh, Honour McMillan and Wildstar Beaumont. (Video is in post)

If you are looking to improve your photographic work check out these two shows/videos. The first is about taking images and the second about processing them.

One of the things Strawberry points out is that over the last year she has started showing people she is photographing a screen shot of their self before starting. She has found it is the only way to know if everything they are wearing has rez’d. Too many times she had to redo shoots because something was not rendering. This is a more recent problem and over the last month seems worse.

Honour gets into more tech and details about what she is doing. I cover that in a separate article. It will publish about noon today. I haven’t figured out how to link to an unpublished post… and have it work once posted. I’ll add a link here later… sorry.