Second Life and Virtual Worlds
The Second Life™ blogosphere is mostly silent on the state of VR in SL. A few blogs are covering the release of a sort of updated CtrlAltStudio viewer, version 1.2.6.43412. This is a viewer based on the Firestorm viewer version 4.6.9 from December 2014.
The viewer does support Oculus Rift CV1… the commercial retail consumer product.
Hamlet at New World Notes is pointing out David Rowe has a SL VR Viewer working. The page Hamlet linked to is out of date. The new news is in the comments where David says,
David Rowe Post author5 Jul 2016 at 11:22 am
Just tried LL’s Rift viewer and, well, it’s surprisingly un-good. It’s like the graphics are being fed from the wrong framebuffer object or the pipeline is being misconfigured when you switch into HMD view. Intentional or bugs? I suppose time will tell. The graphics should be able to be so much better (even if understandably the FPS isn’t so good)!
Links:
Note Jo Yardley’s comment about being able to use Vorpx with a regular viewer (i,e., like Firestorm, Alchemy, or LL’s regular viewer) to view Second Life in your Rift. I haven’t tried it myself but am told it can be used.
Oz Linden has spoken. See Oculus Rift – CV1 Support.
2016-07-07 12:14 PM
Thank you for experimenting with our Oculus Rift Project Viewer and offering your feedback. Unfortunately, the Project Viewer that we recently made available didn’t meet our standards for quality, and so we’ve now removed it from the Alternate Viewers page.
By definition, Project Viewers aren’t ready for primetime. The purpose of these experimental Viewers is to share with you the earliest possible version of what we’re working on, so that you can see what we’re up to, help discover problems, and provide feedback. In this case, though, we’re not ready for that, as those of you who tried it have seen.
We can’t say at this point when or even if we may release another Project Viewer for experimenting with the Oculus Rift in SL.
We want to prioritize our development efforts around initiatives that we know will improve the virtual world and bring more value to SL Residents, and due to some inherent limitations with SL, it may well not be possible to achieve the performance needed for a good VR experience. (In fact, this is one reason why we’re creating Project Sansar a new, separate platform optimized for VR).
We greatly appreciate the interest in trying SL with the Oculus Rift and are grateful that several of you took the time to try the Project Viewer. We regret that the quality was not up to our standards, and we will of course keep the community posted if we release a new Project Viewer for VR in the future.
Jo Yardley caught the post and published it on her site. Many of us are disappointed. But…
For some time people have debated the accuracy of the hype around the Oculus Rift. Now as competitors enter the market there is; hype, spin, rumors, and lies about the various Virtual Reality (VR) Head Mounted Displays (HMD).
LinusTechTips provides a video to give people a sense of what the facts are.
It appears HTC Vive is taking a lead. But, there may be more Google Cardboard mashups in use than all the other HMD’s combines. Vive ≈ 100k, Oculus ≈ hidden, Samsung Gear ≈ hidden. When companies hide their sales figures it usually means they are not meeting expectations.
Projections are Samsung will be the top seller, Oculus the second best, and Vive the third best.
Google Cardboard is reported to have 57% of all VR headset sales. (Reference) Samsung has 31%, Playstation 9%, and all others combined 3%. Oculus doesn’t even show.
So, do you think it is a good idea that the Lab is focused on supporting Oculus? Or… are they supporting the one device that is least likely to be used with Second Life™?
I’ve already said I’m waiting. I’m spending my money on a new computer. Then my first HMD is likely to be Cardboard or Samsung Gear… if we don’t count my trying VR with my S5, which was limited to one app a demo.
Surprise. There is roll of a new package to the main channel. I did not expect that the day after a Monday holiday.
This is the package that has been running on the RC channels. It contains security fixes… or a fix… depending on how and what one reads. Also, the Bento animation file size for animation uploads is increased. And there is some fix to email address problems from within scripts.
There is no roll to the RC channels this week. So, the entire main grid will be running the same server software.
Jo Yardley has obviously been watching the news about Oculus use in Second Life. It isn’t good. See: Second Life Oculus ready viewer released, fails to impress.
Seems performance with Oculus has degraded between the time the first Oculus viewer was released and this one. That is disappointing.
Jo provides links to SL Forum discussion on Oculus.