
Above: "Vastly more realistic lighting. This is a sunset in Crystal Frost."
SLer Berry Bunny (Kallisti#2038 on Discord) is a longtime developer who's been working on various Second Life projects for well over 15 years. Along with some impressive in-world games, she's done mixed reality projects for Italia Telecom and a nursing school experimenting with Second Life as a distance learning tool, among others.
Her new project, however, is somewhat more ambitious:
Crystal Frost, a new third party Second Life viewer that runs on Unity.
Yes, that means Crystal Frost should (eventually) work on mobile, displaying Second Life on a smartphone.
If she succeeds, Crystal Frost would also offer a substantial leap in graphics quality for Second Life. (See the images in this post, courtesy Bunny, including the comparison with Firestorm below.) But Bunny has even greater ambitions than better graphics:
"Having a modern graphics engine that's multi-threaded, easier modability, implementing ray tracing and proper VR is super easy," as she explains. "I have ideas about how to implement VR and make it feel like VRChat. But I need to make the client stable and get rigged meshes working before I even attempt it. Also, theoretically better performance than the Linden Lab-based viewers, if I do it right."
VRChat is actually a large part of her motivation for taking on this project: "'[I'm] wanting to see SL become better, and wishing that VRChat had something comparable to SL's robust inventory and modular avatar system." (And also she's bored and wants a fun challenge.)
Above right is a pic via Bunny showing off another feature: "Local light support, translating SL's old school lights to real world physically based material type lights, specified by lumens, via Unity's HD Rendering pipeline."
How is this even possible, and what does Bunny need to get this project hopping along faster? (Sorry.) Read on:
Who's Afraid of Second Life's Data Gathering Bonnie Bots? (Comment of the Week)
There's been lots of interesting conversation and debate spurred by my post on BonnieBots, the new website tracking genuine Second Life activity. While Bonnie's bots don't violate any Linden Lab policy that I'm aware of, the sheer amount of information that both her avatar and web-based bots are able to collect and surface on the site has generated much surprise and controversy (including in comments here).
Reader Kate Nova argues that much of the pushback is based on a very understandable distrust of surveillance provoked by very real abuses by the Internet giants:
Some concern has been raised that Bonnie's bots also pull data from user profiles available in search, but Kate argues this is not the intrusion some say it is -- and that overall, the site is incredibly valuable:
Continue reading "Who's Afraid of Second Life's Data Gathering Bonnie Bots? (Comment of the Week)" »
Posted on Monday, January 23, 2023 at 01:55 PM in Comment of the Week, Economics of SL, Social Structures, Social Upheaval | Permalink | Comments (16)
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