Second Life Bits – Week 49

No Blogger Illuminati

No Secret Bloggers Club… Really!!! Honest! See: Exclusive – There Is No Secret Second Life Bloggers Club

Mezzaluna

Mezzaluna

I think this is funny. There are people that are friends with various members of the development community, Linden and third party. It isn’t so much that developers help out their friends more than others as it is familiarity with a person allows you tell when they are up to something or holding something back. That is a sign to start digging.

Often we know a new shinny is coming because people start clamming up.  Continue reading

Second Life Bright Canopy Update

Inara has a good summary of what has happened and what is going on with Bright Canopy, the SL Go replacement. The TL:DR is simple. User behavior was not what the Bright Canopy peeps expected. The change from expected behavior drove up backend costs of the service. They were losing money and things had to change. Thus the service shut down.

See: Bright Canopy update

rho

rho

Basically, no one other than Amazon is making money from this project. If they cannot figure out how to turn that around, expect the doors to close.

There is a future in being able to stream high end games. With VR coming there will likely be more demand for the service. The challenges and/or symbiosis come from Intel, who is working to add more graphics power to their CPU, Apple and others wanting to challenge the NetFlix style streaming services and add gaming, those battling to take over cable and satellite delivery services, and others that want to add gaming as a facet of their entertainment services.

My point is there is industry interest in what Bright Canopy is doing. There may eventually be some way to deliver a SL/Sansar experience to lesser powered hardware.  But, as fast as hardware is developing/advancing the need deceases each year. That makes it hard to predict whether Bright Canopy will find an economic model that fits enough people’s needs for their service to remain viable. It is life and death for them, so the motivation is there. At some point the hardware and tech they need will be cheap enough, it is just a matter of timing.

Hypergrid Business on Bright Canopy

Maria Korolov has written: Bright Canopy’s viewer in a browser supports voice, uploads, OpenSim grids. She is talking about the Bright Canopy beta that is in progress now. This version runs in an Internet Browser using the FRAME system. She explains how it works.

Serene Sanctuary

Serene Sanctuary by Loverdag, on Flickr

One of the challenges in using a streaming service is that the actual viewer is running on a remote server. Your computer is sort of doing remote control of that viewer. So, saving files (pictures) can be a problem as the local drive the viewer sees is on the server, not your home computer.  Continue reading