Oculus Rumors 2014-22

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Engadget originally reported that Samsung was racing with Oculus Rift to market a gaming VR headset first. Now the rumor has shifted. Samsung wants Oculus tech for media display not gaming and is apparently willing to give Oculus first priority on their high-definition display screens.

This seems to make lots of sense as Oculus was/is having a problem getting parts. Enough so that they delayed the release of the Oculus Rift DK2.

For more details see Road to VR: News Bits: Samsung Partners with Oculus on New ‘Media Focussed’ VR Headset?

Scripting Second Life Materials Testing

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We have a new aspect of Materials arriving, the ability to script materials as we script textures (diffuse map).

Simon Linden has posted in the Server Beta UG agenda about the coming Materials Scripting feature to allow script control of the new Materials. Quoting:

  • LSL support for materials is in testing
    • Certain Aditi regions (DRTSIM-253 channel, presently) have LSL support for materials
      • Regions “roller-test102” and “roller-test103” are on this channel
      • This is still a work-in-progress – testing is still underway
    • Materials can be added to object faces with llSetPrimitiveParams() functions
      • [PRIM_SPECULAR, integer face, string texture, vector repeats, vector offsets, float rotation_in_radians, vector color, integer glossy, integer environment]
      • [PRIM_NORMAL, integer face, string texture, vector repeats, vector offsets, float rotation_in_radians]
      • [PRIM_ALPHA_MODE, integer face, integer alpha_mode, integer alpha_cutoff]
        • Valid alpha_mode options are PRIM_ALPHA_MODE_NONE, PRIM_ALPHA_MODE_BLEND, PRIM_ALPHA_MODE_MASK, PRIM_ALPHA_MODE_EMISSIVE
    • Materials can be read with the various llGetPrimitiveParams() functions
      • [PRIM_SPECULAR, integer face] returns [string texture, vector repeats, vector offsets, float rotation_in_radians, vector color, integer glossy, integer environment]
      • [PRIM_NORMAL, integer face] returns [string texture, vector repeats, vector offsets, float rotation_in_radians]
      • [PRIM_ALPHA_MODE, integer face] returns [integer alpha_mode, integer alpha_cutoff]
  • Behavior for both getting and setting materials parameters should basically correspond to behavior with PRIM_TEXTURE
  • The color vectors use 0.0-1.0 as the range, as with llSetColor()
  • The integer parameters for PRIM_SPECULAR correspond to the same values that you see in the build tool
  • Components of a material can be ‘reset’ as follows:
    • PRIM_NORMAL and PRIM_SPECULAR settings are set to ‘default’ values by setting the texture to NULL_KEY
    • PRIM_ALPHA_MODE settings are set to ‘default’ values by setting the alpha_mode to PRIM_ALPHA_MODE_BLEND
      • mask_cutoff is actually reset to 0 unless the alpha mode is PRIM_ALPHA_MODE_MASK
    • When PRIM_NORMAL, PRIM_SPECULAR, and PRIM_ALPHA_MODE settings are all set to ‘default’ values, the material is deleted from that prim face, and LI may be updated accordingly
  • Known issues
    • There is a viewer rendering issue, where the face will not be rendered and you’ll see log spam (BUG-6187),
      • If the viewer has ALM enabled
      • and a prim face has a material on it
      • and PRIM_ALPHA_MODE is PRIM_ALPHA_MODE_BLEND (this is the default after a material is added)
      • and the diffuse texture does not have an alpha channel (e.g. plywood)
    • The version currently on Aditi lacks proper throttling, so there could be performance issues if scripts behave badly

You can test this new code in ADITI regions; “roller-test102” and “roller-test103”. These are mainland regions (meaning they are running the code currently on the main grid) in the ADITI grid.

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SpaceX Unveiling Dragon Mark II

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The US government under the direction of Pres. Obama gave up developing spaceships. This is an endeavor that has been pursued by private free market enterprise. Thanks to Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin suggesting the US use trampolines to get to the International Space Station (ISS), SpaceX is unveiling their new ship tonight (May 29) at 7 PM PDT.

This is a ship that can carry 7 astronauts or some mix of astronauts and cargo. Watch the announcement/unveiling here: Livestream.

For images of SpaceX’s current ships and rendering of planned future ships see: First look at Dragon V2: The first manned spaceship by SpaceX (Updating).

 

Scale for VR?

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In Second Life™ we talk about scale. Some of us are big on getting people and things to RL scales in our virtual world (VW). I’m a fan and I’ve written several articles about building to scale. Now people interested in Virtual Reality (VR) are thinking about scale at entirely new levels. The site Road to VR has an article up about how the fashion industry may use VR to allow people to model RL clothes in VR prior to purchase.

Second Life Fashion
Second Life Fashion

Imagine you could specify your avatar based on your RL shape… that could be a good or bad thing. :/ But, the fashion industry is thinking of using the idea to allow us to try on clothes in VR and decide if we like the fit. I suppose if it fits then we can order it and an Amazon drone will deliver it. Well, it is a dream at the moment. But, an Australian company has a proof of concept demo out for the Oculus Rift.

The idea is also to get away from sizes. Ladies know that sizes from various designers vary, often varying as a way to attempt to flatter the female ego. ‘Oh, I can wear a size 2…’ Personally the miss sizing for psychological advertizing just annoys me. 

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1920’s Berlin Birthday

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Jo Yardley has a post up reminding us this coming May 30 will be the fifth anniversary of her 1920’s Berlin project. See: The 1920s Berlin Project celebrates its 5th anniversary!

For the Open Door Day (May 29 – Thursday) Jo is saying that any attire will be permitted in Berlin. So, if you have put off visiting because you play as a furry, other non-human, or just do not have 1920’s era clothes then this is your opportunity to visit.

Also, on Open Door Day you will find Open House signs on some areas that are normally private. This means places we cannot normally visit will be open.

See the full schedule of events on Jo’s site here: 1920’s Berlin Project.

Visit 1920’s Berlin (SLURL) – Remember. Any day other than May 29 requires conforming to the region dress code; human only and 1920’s attire… and that is  not the Roaring 1920’s styles I think most Americans associate with the era. There are free clothes and retail shops with era clothes at the landing point outside the main project area.

 

Second Life News 2014-22

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Yesterday afternoon at 3:25 PM PDT Linden Lab posted to the Grid Status page that a previously planned service outage would be scheduled for this Wednesday. From 6:00 AM to 7:00 AM, so as you read this, the work is complete and an all clear was posted at 6:51AM.

During that time various backend services were offline and logins were offline. You can see the break in the graph of concurrent  users.

Graph via etitsup.com - 2014-05-28
Graph via etitsup.com – 2014-05-28

Presumably this was the outage planned for last Thursday, before Tuesday’s problem when the login servers ran out of assignable user numbers. (I am guessing that fix is still in progress, but there is no official statement.) If this is the rescheduled outage then some hardware change was being made to some of the many components of the various databases.

While the Lindens think there may be some small improvement in performance they also suspect it will be small and probably not noticeable. I call these types of gains ‘stop watch’ gains, because they are smaller than we normally can notice unaided.