Tag Archives: 360 Image

Firestorm Viewer 6.5.3 Released

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Wow! We have a new Firestorm Viewer Release. (3/21/2022) This one has a bunch of new stuff. The Firestorm Blog explains what is new and the changelog explains what has been fixed. As usual, Inara explains in more detail on the Modem World blog than Jessica does on the Firestorm Blog. However, for the quick read go with Jessica’s.

My Graphics Settings

The viewer is a quick download. It is now 140MB, up from the previous 120MB. The installation is simple. Launch the downloaded file. No clean install is needed.

The Splash Screen is of course the first thing you’ll see. It was first seen in the previous version. A bunch of people didn’t like it. That is normal for SL residents. No matter what one does about half of SL peps won’t like it and will complain.

The screen hasn’t changed much. There are ‘operational’ improvements. It works better. It is still a lot of information in one place. But it is easy to ignore.

The FS Team has taken a different approach to destinations than the Lab did. When the Lab first added ‘What’s Hot Now’ to their destinations list several people pointed out that busy places we often full. Clicking to TP to a full region resulted in a failed TP and people wondered how new people would see/react to the error. I don’t know how much testing the Lab did or didn’t do but I do know the Lab decided to limit entries in their list to regions that were not full. Thus, no TP fails. Noobs were protected.

Inside the FS Viewer, the destination guide uses the Lab’s destinations. So, only the splash page on viewer startup shows the really BUSY regions, like Exhale with 91 people in region. Versus the Lab’s panel showing Freebie Galaxy as the most populous with 28 people. Whether this is a good thing or not… you decide.

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Over Dose of CUTE

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There are neat places in SL. A few are cute or have cuddly animals. But, I stumbled on D-Lab searching for helicopters and they are over the top cute. They have an adorable little 2-seater helicopter that I saw near an airport. I tracked down the creator and found D-Lab’s Skyshop.

D-Lab’s Skyshop

Most of the stuff in the image they have for sale. Much of the really cute stuff is only visible inside the chop. They sorta have two showrooms. The fun stuff is in the shop shown above, the Skyshop.  Continue reading →

The Newly Revized 360-Snapshot RC Viewer is Out

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Alexa Linden talked about the 360 Snapshot Project Viewer at the Content Creators’ UG Meeting (2/22). We last saw this viewer update in week #27-2017 (July). This is the black sheep or Cinderella viewer. It is the one that gets pushed to the back when a fire breaks out and some big bad bug has to be squished. But, YAY! We have a new version. See Official Alternate Viewers.

This version handles the stitching… if you have built 360-images manually, you know what stitching is. It is taking a number of pictures in different directions and then piecing them together (stitching) to make a globe-shaped picture. Tedious.

But the new viewer is easy. Take a picture using 360-Snapshot and save it to disk, the picture should be ready to upload to Flickr and other sharing sites as a 360-image without further tweaking. Continue reading →

Second Life – The 360 Viewer – Add Image Metadata

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Taking 360 images is way easier with the new RC viewer. But, figuring out what to do with the image so you can see it is a serious PITA. I’ll give you HOW TO using Photoshop, which is pretty painless, and several other easy ways to make the image usable as a 360-image. The process works in most of the Adobe tools that allow you to access File Info.

First here is my first snapshot with the new viewer.

sl360 Picture - RAW Image

sl360 Picture – RAW Image

It kinda subtle (not), but you might notice this isn’t displaying as a 360-image. The problem is the metadata Flickr needs to know this is a 360 image. It is missing. The Lab is adding that part of the viewer code now. So, the latest version of the Linden 360-Viewer as I write this is version 5.1.0.506743. It stiches the image together for us. But, does not yet add the needed metadata.  Continue reading →

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Drax Does 360

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This is pretty neat! Check it out. Start the video then click and drag inside the video. You can pause the video and drag around too.

Some of these 360 images and videos have not worked on my site, but this one does. Drax, et al, did good. I don’t know if it will work with VR. Let me know if you try it.

Since the Samsung 7’s are burning up, in recall, and dropped from production any phone upgrade I was thinking of is on hold. I expect the next gen of phones to have better VR support, Daydream. So, I’ll wait.

PS: 10/15 – Inara has a good write up on how the video was made. See: The Drax Files 41: animating Second Life.

Second Life: Panoramic Cameras

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There are now two panoramic cameras we can use for making 360-Images. Everyone has written about Illiastra, Strawberry and Inara did good reviews. The other camera by Lalwende Leakey, I didn’t even know existed. Lalwende contacted me in-world and asked about leaving a comment on my article: Second Life: New Easy 360 Camera Coming.

IOL Panoramic Camera - Oct 2016

IOL Panoramic Camera – Oct 2016

In that article I included videos about making panoramas. My first take on Lalwende’s IOL Camera Panoramic is that it has more abilities for those more into the tech of panoramic photography. I get that from reading the manual. I haven’t tried the camera. Nor have I tried Illiastra. I can’t find Illiastra’s manual any place where I can read it. It is listed as part of the contents in Illiastra’s ad.  Continue reading →

Graphics Cards and VR

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The site Road to VR has an article about Nvidia and the changes they are making to improve VR performance and that tech moving into game engines. See: Unreal Engine and Unity to get NVIDIA’s New VR Rendering Tech.

Waiting for my ship

Waiting for my ship

Until recently video cards were given geometry (the mesh world), lights, and a camera position and they rendered an image. As the camera moved the geometry was reloaded shaded and rendered again with mesh and lights in relation to the camera. (Which is technically saying it backward. Consider the camera fixed and to change the view we move the world. Think of your computer screen as the camera. It sits on your desk never moving. Everything displayed on it moves. Thus the reason for reloading geometry.)  Continue reading →