See Philip Rosedale in SL This Thursday (5/15) at 11am SLT

Mark your calendar: This Thursday (May 15) at about 11am Pacific, Philip Rosedale will be in Second Life to speak at the Back to the future in the Metaverse meeting. First 80 avatars in get to attend: Click here to teleport to the site.

Immediately after Philip's 30 minute (or so) appearance (where he'll likely talk about his new virtual world project High Fidelity) Open Worm organizer Stephen Larson will be talking about his virtual life project which now has a Kickstarter. Plus after that, many more virtual world/VR figures: Go here for the full agenda .

Hat tip: Meeting organizer Giulio Prisco, who has thoughts on the future of the metaverse here. Excerpt:

This is a call to arms: let’s go back to the future in the Metaverse. I am organizing a meeting in Second Life to discuss the virtual renaissance and future initiatives, talks, workshops, conferences, transhumanist entertainment, events in virtual and mixed reality, and educational projects. I hope to see you there and, since this is beginning to sound like a manifesto, let me conclude with “We have nothing to lose but our chains to meatspace and mediocrity. We have infinite worlds to win.”

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[melponeme_k]

Well I guess Second Life isn't so dead that all and sundry won't turn up their noses at trying to steal some customers. XD

More Ready Player One and other dystopic junk. The big, funky glasses aren't going to change anything. They are willfully not seeing what VR is.

I hope I'm there, when they open their Snowcrash world...and it is deluged by tinies, barbies, furries and all the old folks(because most of us are pretty old)...it will be so sweet.

[Account Deleted]

@ Sings to melponeme

Yahoo Cloudparty Universe is right around the corner with a fall release!
i know they have a 55 member dev team working day and night

I suspect facebook is investing a few billion dollars in developers to create the perfect
3D universe headed by the other founder of SL that Philip helped him find the front door.
Cory wanted SL to evolve while Philip at the time wanted to max profits

Cory Ondrejka is vice president of engineering at Facebook. He also was the Chief Technology Officer of Linden Lab, makers of Second Life. With Philip Rosedale, Ondrejka co-founded Second Life and played a significant role in the architecture of the product.

His version will blow Philips away you will see
Ondrejka was known in Second Life as "Cory Linden," and created an avatar to appear in the 3D world as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. His activities in the world were characterized by Wagner James Au as "puckish" and playfully anarchic, often to the benefit of newbies

[Mitch Wagner]

Neat. If I can still remember how to use SL I'll try to make it.

[Dartagan Shepherd]

No can do, I'm having err ... warts removed, that's it.

Besides, I'm already in the Metaverse. It's not bad here. This thing called the web for my 2D work, games for escaping in 3D, dev tools for creating content and worlds.

And I can't go into the "world" of SL, because their ToS wants me to let them act as my lawyer among other other-worldly bits.

[melponeme_k]

Y'all are waiting for Godot. Godot Snowcrash. Godot Cloutdparty. What is his name now? Godot Oculus.

And Kurzweil is Lucky

http://youtu.be/uS5gU3-0giE

[Iggy]

Chains? What chains? I'm really enjoying meatspace. The garden is coming in nicely.

So, no thanks, Philip. The effects of the Kool-Aid have long worn off.

Makes me feel like a hippie in, say, '75 when he realized "dude, the Revolution! Oh, never mind."

/me high-fives melponeme_k and wonders if the transhumanists will instead find Lucky and Pozzo online.

[Giulio Prisco]

Thanks for posting! Iggy, old hippies like us keep waiting for The Revolution, and sooner or later they will storm the Bastille!

[James OReilly]

That makes 20 avatars per sim for a quad-sim arragement, it's not really Massive Scalability for such an event!

[Iggy]

Giulio, I'm solidly an Xer, not a Hippie. My cohort got Ford Pintos, not VW buses and free love. We got disco and punk, not Woodstock. We got cheap beer, not LSD.

So color me skeptical of utopian ideas, including the potential of virtual worlds to make us all live in cloud-cuckoo land. But for a while I did believe Philip's vision. After all, some appealing but finally half-baked ideas start in California. And some world-changing ones. We'll see what happens.

[Adeon Writer]

"I hope I'm there, when they open their Snowcrash world...and it is deluged by tinies, barbies, furries and all the old folks(because most of us are pretty old)...it will be so sweet."

That is entirely as predicted by Snow Crash.

Did you miss the chapter about American time zones having the world flooded with surreal avatars like giant walking phalluses?

[Dartagan Shepherd]

@Iggy Hope the garden is going well, ours is fighting us this year.

Something more practical than the Metaverse is the merging of tech. My washing machine connects to internet for diagnosis. Seriously ... my washing machine connects via wireless.

Why I'd need more of the Rosedale hair tonic I'm not sure. His new baby is designed from the ground up to monetize people even more starting with your bandwidth.

Personally I'd rather give that to SETI rather than be paid couch change in funny money for my spare bandwidth so that he doesn't have to pay for servers, but what do I know?

And you never known when your washing machine needs to phone home.

[Giulio Prisco]

@Iggy, who told that hippies didn't have cheap beer? We had both LSD AND cheap beer!

Well, I was a teen in the 70s so I missed the hippy era by a few years. But from what I heard the 60s were really a great decade, give me the free, daring, anti-authoritarian spirit of the 60s anytime, this age is geriatric.

Recommended reading: "How the Sixties Shaped the Personal Computer Revolution," by R.U. Sirius, in the book "True Mutations."
http://boingboing.net/2007/02/13/ru-sirius-true-mutat.html

[melponeme_k]

@Adeon

Except that all the crazy avatars didn't satisfy the Snowcrash mavens. We just didn't act like fantasy people in a fantasy novel.

Which is why everyone involved in VR needs a big reality check.

[Adeon Writer]

I seriously doubt HF isn't building itself based on what they have learned people like about SL.

The fact that the avatar system is even more open than SL's in what you can be is proof of that.

[melponeme_k]

@Adeon

The avatar system being open to different avatars isn't the issue.

The issue is, almost all of VR mavens keep expecting real people to act like FICTIONAL people from a VR book. That is the problem. And they will hit the same cement wall called reality in any new VR they make.

[Mitch Wagner]

James & others - Were you able to log in and check this out? I ran into technical and scheduling problems and couldn't make it. Did Philip have any interesting new information to share? Will there be a write-up here?

melponeme_k - What do you think is the future of VR then? Or of virtual worlds? Or do you see them as having a future at all?

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

I was there, I was surprised Hamlet wasn't. Draxtor probably got video or a transcript. They had technical issues and switched to google hangouts. The problem with voice/video is that you can't log it.

Philip talked a bit about gesture/facial animation capture with High Fidelity. Then that wormSim guy talked, I found that interesting even if I didn't understand it, but at least it's research into how neurons work.

The latter stuff was mostly the impractical typical Transhumanist Jibber-jabber. Stuff valleywags go gaga over but means nothing to the masses.

Mitch, VR doesn't have a future, other than as a niche. People want holodecks, they don't want to have to wear gloves, goggles, stand in front of a camera AND be tethered to a computer. VR tech simply is a solution in search of a problem. Virtual worlds on the other hand are a proven market. General purpose ones with user-created content are a niche, but in a way so are MMO's and walled garden game-ified VW's like Blue Mars or the PS3 Home application.

[Mitch Wagner]

IMO, the essence of what's good about Second Life -- and Philip's current project -- is the ability to create the powerful illusion of shared experience. The ability to create a convincing illusion that two people located far apart in real life, maybe on other sides of the world, are actually within arm's reach of each other. (Or maybe even closer than that -- is the X-rated continent still a thing?)

I don't know to what extent that is the focus of High Fidelity. Certainly all the discussion of brain-mapping and reducing network latency points in that direction.

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Forgot to mention my blog post:

http://ccslfashionista.blogspot.com/2014/05/event-fail-and-tos-violation-by-philip.html

[Giulio Prisco]

The event started as a major clusterf###, but continued as a very interesting event thanks to the fast reaction of David Orban.

So many people came that the Second Life server was overloaded and eventually (snow-)crashed!

The first 12 minutes of the video are surreal and fun: watch first the event organizer, then the cameraman and the founder of Second Life himself, ejected from Second Life!.

Eventually everyone was ejected from Second Life, a real Snow Crash.

David was streaming the event to the Web via Google Hangouts on Air, and got most speakers to give their talks in Hangouts.

The talks start at minute 20 in the video:

Philip Rosedale
Stephen Larson
The Rev. Christopher Benek
David Orban
Natasha Vita-More

Watch the video here:
http://skefia.com/2014/05/16/video-back-to-the-future-in-the-metaverse-may-15/

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Giulio wrote: So many people came that the Second Life server was overloaded and eventually (snow-)crashed!

Eventually everyone was ejected from Second Life, a real Snow Crash.

##########################################

@Giulio:

The region didn't crash at all, I stayed in the region during the Hangout. I was there From 9 AM SLT to 1:40 SLT, 4 hours and 40 minutes. (The Hangout wasn't entirely glitch free either.) The region avatar limit was set at 80. The troubles started when the avatar count was about 49, I counted, that's when Philip crashed. Now the region may have appeared offline to some people, like my friend Zen, but it was most certainly still there. There was some glitch where the region's avatar limit did show as 0 for a while in the Region info, which may have been why some couldn't get back in, but again there were people still there. When the sim fps was in single digits, my local FPS was 28. The only real problem I experienced was the local chat lag, which surprised me. Everything else seemed fine. Voice chat was working fine for me.

I was running this version of the viewer:

Second Life 3.7.8 (289922) May 9 2014 19:05:42 (Second Life Release) That's the "Maintenance" viewer from the Alternate/Beta viewers page: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Alternate_Viewers

I run SL on this, which isn't that great at all:

CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 240 Processor (2800 MHz)
Memory: 3009 MB
OS Version: Linux 3.14.3-200.fc20.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue May 6 19:00:18 UTC 2014 x86_64
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GT 640/PCIe/SSE2 It's the faster rev. 2 (GK208) version with GDDR5 though, mine is the slightly overclocked EVGA version of that

http://ccslfashionista.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-evga-gt-640-rev-2-gk208-gddr5-sc.html

OpenGL Version: 4.4.0 NVIDIA 331.67

Graphics settings were:

Draw Distance: 256
Transparent Water: On
Bump mapping and Shiny: On
Local Lights: Off
Basic Shaders: On
Atmospheric Shaders: On
Advanced Lighting Model: On
Ambient Occlusion: Off
Depth of Field: Off

Shadows: None
Water Reflections: Everything
Physics: High
Max Particle Count: 4096 (That's actually higher than I usually run)
Max # of non-impostor Avatars: 65
Post Process Quality: High (by High, I'm saying the slider is maxed out)
Objects: High
Flexiprims: High
Trees: High
Avatars: High
Terrain: High
Sky: High

Avatar Impostors: On
Hardware Skinning: On
Avatar Cloth: On
Terrain Detail: High

Hardware button:
Anisotropic filtering: On
Anti-aliasing: 4x
Enable VBO: On
Enable S3TC: On
Texture Memory: 512MB (1GB GDDR5 card)

[Giulio Prisco]

Thanks for the info @CronoCloud Creeggan. I tried many times to get back in after crashing, with no success. Before crashing I was had severe chat and movement lag. Voice was OK. It would be interesting to find out what happened and why.

[melponeme_k]

@Mitch

You might as well include your question with is there an MMORPG future after World of Warcraft?

What people have to understand is that World of Warcraft and Second Life are out of left field success stories. Which will probably never be duplicated. While WOW is more commercial than SL, they are still niche products.

WOW niche? YES. Because it was discovered that the majority of players who left the game did not bother to find another mmorpg, that was the majority of the former 12 million subscribers in WOW's heyday.

You have to understand the audience for this small world. Right now, I just see techs creating their dystopic fantasy worlds than cursing the people who don't want them or change their focus (Second Life).

Reality Check...People use Facebook to PRETEND to keep in touch with people they really can't be bothered to keep in touch with. Isn't that true? I mean if you really wanted to keep in touch with your elementary school friends, you would still be seeing them face to face. Poking them on a computer chatboard is just formality.

Do you really think Oculus is going to change that? People are hiding from interaction not looking for more. We have all the interaction we want. Which is no one is screaming for avatar eye to eye contact in Second Life. The only people who would want this are people who suffer from various problems who need communication cues.

[Mitch Wagner]

"People use Facebook to PRETEND to keep in touch with people they really can't be bothered to keep in touch with. Isn't that true? I mean if you really wanted to keep in touch with your elementary school friends, you would still be seeing them face to face."

I think it's more than that. I live 2,500 miles away from my high school friends. I'm happy to see on Facebook that they're doing well, and to interact with them occasionally.

It's an exceedingly low level of interaction, but it's not pretend.

One of the things that intrigues me about the potential for VR is that I live so far away from my family and most of my friends and co-workers, and I do miss the opportunity for casual interaction. I don't expect VR/AR/VWs to substitute for RL interaction, but maybe it can evolve into something better than Facebook/email/phone.

I only know one or two people who are comfortable with Skype video.

BTW, I've tried to get back into SL a couple of times in the past week, but not successfully. If anything, it seems to have gotten even buggier and more difficult to use than the last time I was active, four years ago. I'm going to give it a few more tries, though -- I'm curious what people have been doing since I left.

[melponeme_k]

@Mitch

But you have to ask yourself, would you even bother looking up your old school friends if there was no facebook? Would you even bother to find them? Be honest, if the answer is no...then what is the purpose of Facebook than to create a false sense of community so that advertisers can scrape free data.

My family lives near by me, but something is really wrong when they would rather communicate via text/email/facebook rather than make time to meet. That is the norm not the exception for most.

Snowcrash as envisioned in fiction will only happen if people have their RL lives destroyed and can only hide inside VR. That is what the tech gurus want, a public with no options. They just won't say it out loud.

I use SL on two aging computers and have no problem. I rarely crash. The program has always been odd, much of it gerry rigged. That is no surprise in the tech business. We've dealt with the same problems for system operating software called Windows.

[Mitch Wagner]

I see my high school friends every few years, and have since long before Facebook.

[irihapeti]

@melponeme_k

can know what your bigger upstream point is. is also a tiny downstream point as well

Giulio said it perfectly in the pimp: "We have nothing to lose but our chains to meatspace and mediocrity"

when a person's meatspace is mediocre then so is any other space they might go. bc person

is a cruel world is reality. virtual or otherwise

[irihapeti]

ps

i think the tech/idea is pretty cool tho

how useful it will be dunno. but still cool

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Mitch wrote:BTW, I've tried to get back into SL a couple of times in the past week, but not successfully.
#########################

@Mitch:

Newer versions of the SL client are happier if your settings.xml file isn't very old. It can cause issues if you've had your settings.xml a while and tried to run a newer client with it. So delete it, restart the client.

#############
Mitch wrote: If anything, it seems to have gotten even buggier and more difficult to use than the last time I was active, four years ago.

###################

@Mitch:

SL is less troublesome than it was in 2010, though it might be more troublesome for you if you're using the same machine you were in 2010, without any upgrades. Check the system requirements:

https://secondlife.com/support/system-requirements/

######################

Mitch wrote: I'm going to give it a few more tries, though -- I'm curious what people have been doing since I left.

#####################

@Mitch:

The Same stuff they've always been:building, scripting, shopping, forming communities, socializing.

[Mitch Wagner]

CronoCloud - I appreciate the suggestions but it seems like I have spent half my time in Second Life not actually in SL but rather fiddling with settings and trying to get the software to work for me.

I am using a four-year-old computer. It is perfectly adequate to everything I care to do with it, except possibly SL.

[Hamlet Au]

Yeah. My 2010 laptop plays AAA games with high end graphics just fine on Steam, and I don't even have to edit a freaking configuration file. But unless I'm using SL Go, Second Life totally chokes. Like I mentioned in that post last week, it's amazing how many enthusiasts are so resistant to even acknowledging Second Life's huge issues.

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Mitch, Hamlet....how many times must we say this, but SL content is not optimized the way game content is. Game engines are seriously and heavily optimized for target hardware, Game assets are limited to what can be handled at a decent speed. SL is not, and all the user created content makes it even worse. As an example SL avatar skin is extremely detailed compared to skin in games, so yes you need a better system for SL than you do for games because SL does things no game engine designer would ever do.

As I've said before that 330M in your laptop isn't that great, it's not even a match in some ways for my old GT220! And it does not run what self proclaimed "true gamers" would call high end graphics. Not even my GT640 can do that. I have a friend who suggests a GT760 as a minimum baseline card for SL. So really, a 2010 system might not really be up to snuff for SL. LL really should be more strict on the system requirements but they can't because of the userbase. I've upgraded my system twice since 2010 with 2 video card upgrades and I'm thinking about slapping in a quad-core CPU in the socket.

It takes only a minute to wipe a settings file and it's the same thing as checking the oil in a car. You want to run SL well, then you need to keep your drivers up to date, make sure your settings don't exceed your hardware too much and do other things.

As I've said before, I'm willing to try to diagnose and fix your SL issues remotely via something like Chrome Remote Desktop. Because SL doesn't choke for me, there's issues yes. (I think the current Linux builds have some nasty memory leaks), but you've seen my pictures, I can stay logged in for hours on a dual core system with 3GB of RAM and a GT640 Rev 2.

[Mitch Wagner]

CronoCloud - Thanks for your offer but I have no more time in my life to spend diagnosing Second Life issues. It's not the minute it would take the wipe the settings file this time . It's all the endless hours I've spent fussing with settings during the 3-4 years I was active in SL.

That said: A friend hooked me up with an OnLive subscription and I'm trying to get that working on my MacBook Pro. And hey guess what it crashes when I try to run it. So despite my better instincts, I'm once again dealing with a Second Life tech support issue.

[Mitch Wagner]

CronoCloud - Thanks for your offer but I have no more time in my life to spend diagnosing Second Life issues. It's not the minute it would take the wipe the settings file this time . It's all the endless hours I've spent fussing with settings during the 3-4 years I was active in SL.

That said: A friend hooked me up with an OnLive subscription and I'm trying to get that working on my MacBook Pro. And hey guess what it crashes when I try to run it. So despite my better instincts, I'm once again dealing with a Second Life tech support issue.

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Why why why do virtual world pundits insist on trying to run SL on old laptops! NO! Bad pundits! Bad Bad! SL is HARD on laptops and can cause them premature death because it stresses the hardware so much. I should know, RIP Gateway 500SP+ and HP DV6809wm.

1. Older Nvidia drivers did NOT check for updates on their own (didn't start doing so till the 290 series IIRC) and IIRC they were not included in Windows and OSX updates. You're both probably running older drivers. If you aren't running the 331 series at least, it's going to be a problem

2. Hybrid graphics. BAD BAD for SL, because unless you disable the Intel HD part, it can get enabled depending on how your power management is set up. If you're the kinds of fellows who use your laptops unplugged...well there will be issues because in many cases the laptop will disable the good graphics. If you've got Intel HD alongside Nvidia, disable the Intel HD in the bios and/or setup your power managment to NEVER turn off the Nvidia graphics. (I had to set power management to always use full capabilities on my old machines)

3. Some of the Nvidia 330M series use slower DDR3 system RAM rather than having their own faster GDDR3. Some of them only have 256MB too.

4. Don't even THINK about running SL or SL-Go on a 3G/4G/LTE connection, use REAL broadband.

I'm going to offer my services again, if Philip Rosedale's Coffee & Power was still alive...HA!....I'd tell you to set up a job there.

I'll even sweeten my offer, to either of you. Let me try to help you fix the issues remotely and if I can't do it in an hour or less...I will pay you L$1000. I make this offer out of nerd pride and a desire to have virtual world pundits use the virtual world more often.

You can easily reach me when I'm in-world Display name: Ms. CC Creeggan Avatar Name: CronoCloud Creeggan Don't even have to use SL search because I'm in the NWN group https://my.secondlife.com/cronocloud.creeggan

Primary E-mail: [email protected]
Gmail: [email protected]

I'm not kidding here, I'm offering what assistance I can to both of you (Mitch and Hamlet) to help you get in-world more and hopefully with fewer issues. Because how can one effectively write about the SL of the "now" if one doesn't use it regularly.

[Hamlet Au]

"Why why why do virtual world pundits insist on trying to run SL on old laptops!"

I think you're missing the point he's trying to make.

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Hamlet wrote: I think you're missing the point he's trying to make.
##################

@Hamlet

What, that you and Mitch are expecting SL to be like the other applications you use? Maybe in a perfect world, but we don't live in one. SL isn't like other applications and expecting it to behave like one is futile.

For example, just because one could install Skyrim on something with a Nvidia 6150se, doesn't mean you "should" run it on that. And just because SL's system requirements page mentions an i945 as the minimum doesn't mean you should run SL on it. And just because you "can" run SL on a laptop from 2010, doesn't mean you should. If you run SL on a laptop you should expect to have to upgrade to a newer one more often. In fact, I don't recommend running SL on laptops at all, except on a temporary basis.

If you want to run SL and report on SL, you should be using a desktop. It's that simple.

To be blunt. If push comes to shove and yourself (or Mitch) really just don't want to write about SL anymore (or goof off in SL for personal time) and resent your names being tied to it in people's eyes...then hand over NWN to Iris, throw an SL "retirement party" for "Hamlet Au the Avatar" at NWN HQ, had over the "keys" to Iris, and ride off into the virtual Windlight sunset.

But if you DO want to write about SL and want to spend more time in-world but your tech issues are preventing you...then my offer to help stands. What have you got to lose, a little time? I can understand resenting having to take the time tweak SL and your system for SL, but again, SL isn't like other applications. You should, however, be able to run SL at medium settings with framerates in the teens to mid 20's by my guess, I'm not exactly sure. You'll have to leave shadows, ambient occlusion and depth of field off though. If I can help you do that, that's "a good thing".

[Mitch Wagner]

CronoCloud - I'm not a Second Life pundit. I stopped being that years ago. And I never considered myself a pundit, just a journalist and blogger.

I am in no way affiliated with New World Notes. I am not a contributor to this site, other than to the comments threads. I'm just a fan of the site.

I maintain a connection to Second Life out of nostalgia and out of the instinct that the future is in Second Life somewhere. Not SL as we know it today, but in some way. Second Life is to the future as Usenet ca. 1990 is to today's social media.

Hamlet says you may be missing the point I'm trying to make. And he's right. The point I'm trying to make is the one I'm explicitly making; I have no hidden agenda, metaphor, or meaning. Second Life doesn't run well on my current computer. It didn't run well on the three other computers' I've had since I started using SL in 2007 -- a ThinkPad running Windows XP that I had then, a new iMac I bought a few weeks later and another iMac I bought new in 2009 explicitly for the purpose of running Second Life better (it was an improvement, but still had problems). I'm sick of fiddling with configuration files and settings to try to make Second Life run, I'm sick of wasting my time and the time of generous people like you who have offered to help with the settings. I'm done. If SL won't run on my machines, then I'm just going to do other things.

And despite all that I've been sucked into OnLive, trying to get THAT running on this machine. And gosh, I'm thinking, maybe if I just spend a few minutes with tech support it'll all run smoothly after that. I never learn.

[Hamlet Au]

"I'm sick of wasting my time and the time of generous people like you who have offered to help with the settings. I'm done."

Agreed. And I'm sick of not being fully transparent about Second Life performance being almost totally unusable by and most definitely to a contemporary mass market.

Mitch I hope you get a chance to work with the OnLive folks on getting it to run on your Mac -- even SL Go aside, it's really cool.

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Hamlet wrote: And I'm sick of not being fully transparent about Second Life performance being almost totally unusable by and most definitely to a contemporary mass market.

@Hamlet: It's 2014, we don't have to worry about the mass market because VW's are a niche market. Maybe some people thought they were going to be, and/or still want them to be, but it's not going to happen.

As for SL performance, there are people who use SL every day without too many issues. I won't say zero issues, because the client is what it is. As I said, I was in that region that Mitch had problems with for 4 hours and 40 minutes. So if there are people who can log into SL and do their thing for hours on end and you two can't, the problem is either with your hardware or your software configuration, or both and you can't blame the client for that.

I made an offer to help, in good faith, and it still stands.