Firestorm: A Joke… Not So Much

by
Firestorm Logo
Firestorm Logo

 The Firestorm Viewer Team is thinking. Their recent April Fool’s Joke about the Dynamic User Interface (DUI), the detachable control panels, has been the goal of many developers for some time. Now Firestorm Team member Nicky Dasmijn has built a proof of concept version of the viewer with those detachable panels. In this version window and panel layouts can be saved for later use.

There is no release version of this viewer, beta or otherwise. But the team is releasing the code some other developers can work on the project. The Firestorm Team is hoping the code will inspire developers to come up with new innovations for the Second Life viewer.

See the official announcement here: The real joke… DUI is no joke!

Read more

Second Life Money Exchange

by

In August of 2009 I wrote an article on the Linden Currency Exchange for Second Life™. See: XStreetSL Currency Exchange Tutorial and Second Life Currency Exchange Extended. Back then things were a bit different. There was competition in the Second Life money market. The US government has ended that. Now, Linden Lab is the keeper of L$ and the only company officially converting L$ to RL currencies. There are black markets in Lindens and there is a reason they are called black markets.

Buy Sell Orders 2014-15
Buy Sell Orders 2014-15

What has not changed is people not understanding currency or currency markets. Someone in the Answers section of the SL Forum was asking why their Sell L$1/US$1 order had  not been completed when other similar orders had been. 

Read more

Dwell On It: Marketing

by

Tateru Nino has an article up on Marketing and PR: Whatever happened to marketing and PR? If you have been around awhile or study marketing, you know things have changed.

I’ll suggest a couple of significant changes have come to our culture that have forced change in both Marketing and PR. First people coming out of our public education systems are much more poorly educated. Our education system is being politicized and whole fields of study are being nerfed. A year or so ago the ruckus was about educators wanting to omit teaching American history prior to Lincoln. Citizenship classes were a thing in my parents day. I now talk to many US born people that have no idea how the government is supposed to work or why. 

Read more

Second Life News 2014-15

by

Viewers

The main viewer is  version 3.7.4-288138.

Immersiva Photoshop Night Vision
Immersiva Photoshop Night Vision

This is the version that got the FMODEX fixes that solved a race condition. For the less geeky, a race condition is a common problem in multi-threaded programs. You can think of the threads as separate processes or programs that run at the same time. Once up on a time computers had only one CPU running programs and race conditions were not as common. Now with 2 to 8 cores (CPU’s) built into a single CPU chip the computer can do more than one thing at a time.

Read more

Oculus Competition

by

A company named True Player Gear, based in Canada, is making a competing or what will be a competing VR headset.  They call theirs Totem, which is a name taken from the movie Inception.

Totem VR Head Set
Totem VR Head Set

It looks neat.  The show Road to VR has an interview with the companies CEO, Bertrand Nepveu. Check it out here: Exclusive: ‘Totem’ VR Headset to Compete with the Oculus Rift, CEO Shares Inside Details.

The specs for this head set are similar to Oculus’ DK2. However the field of viewer is only 90 degrees. We have recently heard developers talking about how important it is to have a wide field of view. So, that may be a slight disadvantage.

They are going for the 1080p screens. That should give good resolution. Still, it is at the limit of what Michael Abrash thinks is acceptable for a good immersive feel. They say they are low persistence, but they don’t put a number on it.

They are planning to do a Kickstarter and put out a development kit.

Their claim to fame right now is they are  not owned by Facebook. Those that are abandoning Oculus because of the FB purchase now have a place to run to.

Microsoft VR Headset

by

Yeah, you knew this was coming, right? Well, there were two versions announced on April 1st  about Microsoft putting out home and enterprise version VR headsets. The enterprise version would be named:  Microsoft Office© Oculu 2014 Enterprise Edition™, yeah… that is a name the MS people would come up with. The home or consumer version is named Project Neo. OK, that is a bit more user friendly.

What supposedly leaked about Project Neo is:

  • 640×480 LCD Screen
  • 37 degrees Field of View
  • Custom 2DOF Tracking System called “DOF Mode”.
  • Exclusive to the Xbox One
  • Minesweeper VR to be launch title

I suspect using a Project Neo headset with specs like these would be like looking through a tube.

The enterprise version Oculu would be more Oculus Rift like. But, they tell of some nutty idea that looking at a flat Excel spreadsheet in a virtual environment is going to get an accountant’s panties…  er… heart throbbing. It’s not gonna happen. OutlookVR 2014… I don’t think so.

Read more