New World Notes

Metaverse ProTips: Building With Second Life Specular Maps

Brookston Holiday has been building in Second Life for 10 years. You can view his work on the SL Marketplace here and his ProMaterials brand.

Specular maps are the part of the Second Life materials system which allow us to create “shiny” objects. They determine how rough or smooth the reflections on a surface appear. In the photo above, the red ball has a high speculartity, with a small, focused specular reflection; the green ball has a low specularity, the surface appears to be a more matte, or satin like finish.

Creating the balls above was easy: I just applied a blank texture to the specular texture slot and adjusted the glossiness parameter. However, as you try to get more complicated looking effects using specular maps, you are likely to run into some complications that have given Second Life’s materials system a bad rap. I think the confusion stems from important settings being hidden away. Today we will take a look at these “secret” parts of the materials system.

Let’s start with some simple white tiles and add some realism using specularity:

Overlook Research, Stealth Startup from SL Co-Founder & Facebook VP Cory Ondrejka, Now Hiring Designers & Devs

Speaking of founding Lindens, Second Life co-founder Cory Ondrejka, who quit his position as VP of Engineering position at Facebook at the end of 2014, has a new stealth startup called Overlook Research:

building better mousetraps since 2015

We are hiring designers and js developers.

If you think the second mouse gets the cheese, send a resume or portfolio link to [email protected]

That's all the site will reveal, and Cory himself is mum. But if you're a designer or dev looking for what's certain to be a cool gig, go here to consider applying.

Question is, what's the better mousetrap in this case?

Founding Linden & Top VC Hunter Walk Wonders if Virtual Worlds Need to Be Ultra-Realistic to Go Big

This is a really good and long interview with Hunter Walk, now an extremely influential venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, but who got his start in tech helping found Second Life in 2002. (A year after I joined the company as the "embedded journalist".) It's a excellent listen if you're also in the tech industry, but the Second Life and virtual reality stuff gets going around 8:30, starting right around Hunter saying, "Jokingly, you could claim Second Life is more profitable than Twitter, Uber, and Airbnb ever have been." (Though that's actually still true.)

A lot of what Hunter discusses from there is featured [shamelessplug]in my first book[/shamelessplug], but the points he makes about why Second Life failed to gain a mass market strike me as extremely relevant to the new wave of virtual reality-based worlds in the era of Oculus Rift and Vive -- i.e., for developers of High Fidelity, Project Sansar, and others -- and are really worth thinking about (around 23:45):

Vive Safety Guide Includes Cartesian Evil Deceiver Warning

Once you spot Descartes' Evil Deceiver lurking in the virtual reality industry, you can't stop seeing him. From HTC Vive's Safety and regulatory guide [.pdf]:

"[I]t is important to remember that simulated objects, such as furniture, that may be encountered while using the product do not exist in the real world, and injuries may result when interacting with those simulated objects as if they were real, for example, by attempting to sit down on a virtual chair.

Or like my boy René put it almost 400 fricking years ago:

Second Life Fashion Community Holds Massive Fundraiser to Benefit Victims of Orlando Pulse Shooting

Click here to visit the Second Life sim hosting a massive virtual fashion and style auction running until July 12, with all L$ proceeds converted to cash going to Equality Florida's Pulse Victims Fund on Gofundme. At the moment, the server is utterly packed with users (I tried three times to get in), so if you can't, SL blogger supreme Strawberry Singh has a full compilation of links of everything that's available for sale, including over 60 style items, and possibly even more fun, the chance to bid on the services of dozens of in-world celebrities:

Linden Lab Disputes Real Name Requirement for Project Sansar, But Unanswered Questions Remain

Last Friday, Linden Lab spokesperson Peter Gray responded to my e-mail to him from last Wednesday, asking if it was true, as original reports and an interview with CEO Ebbe Altberg seemed to suggest, that Project Sansar would require users to create accounts with their real life names. Peter insists that this is not accurate, but I haven't gotten an official response from Altberg himself, despite three follow-up e-mails requesting one.

"As Ebbe said [in the interview]," Peter told me, "requiring a user to provide their real identity to Linden Lab in order to create an account wouldn't preclude one from using a pseudonymous (or anonymous) persona when interacting with other users on the platform. This is quite clear in the quotes below: 'So I could go into a role-playing, or into an experience as an anonymous user in that context. But to the platform, I am not anonymous...It’s definitely something we’re thinking a lot about. But do I want that people in Sansar should be able to walk around anonymously? Absolutely!'"

However, in another part of the very same interview, Ebbe also suggested that the company is considering an identity system which integrates Facebook's real name policies with a pseudonymous one akin to Second Life and Twitter:

Fantastic Flickr Album of Virtual World Still Lifes

Pepa Cometa has curated this glorious collection of virtual still lifes shot in Second Life, images that make such fantastic use of dynamic lighting and SL's full palette of tools they hover right between the virtual and the real. Featured above is Mich Michabo's "Dust has a right too...", one of many images Pepa found in her wanderings through collections by Flickr's large community of SL photographers:

SL Users Raise Over $5000 USD in Donations for Pulse Shooting Victims - Major Fashion Fundraiser Starts 6/28

Big leap in donations over the weekend brings the total Linden Dollars raised for victims of the Pulse shooting to well over 1.3 Million in L$ -- well over $5000 USD at current market rates. After being converted to cash, that sum will soon be sent to the official GoFundMe Pulse Victims Fund for Equality Florida , which as of today, is still about $700,000 short of its $7 million goal.

Wouldn't it be awesome if SLers could substantially help Equality Florida meet that goal? Good news, we can -- starting tomorrow, there's a huge SL fashion fundraiser with over 100 designers participating:

Top Seven New World Notes Posts from Last Week!

• Open Forum: How Will Brexit Impact SL's Many UK Users?
• Oculus Rift Terms of Service Warns VR Exposure May Increase Risk of Injury "in the Real World"
• Project Sansar May Require RL Names, Suggests CEO
• VR Industry Risks Major Liability Exposure Due to Disorientation, Expert Warns
• Oculus Rift for Second Life Promoted on Official Site But Actual SL Viewer for Oculus Outdated
• Second Life Users Raise Over One Million Linden Dollars in Donations for Orlando Shooting Victims
• Watch Realistic Avatars Powered by Oculus & Vive Interact in High Fidelity

Open Forum: How Will Brexit Impact SL's Many UK Users?

Pictured: SL's London Village -- click here to visit

UK users, the floor is yours -- how will last night's Brexit influence your usage of Second Life? British SLers make up a large percentage of the active userbase, and most economists believe the Brexit will have a heavy negative impact on the British economy, so the overall influence is likely to be sharp and noticeable.

Your own take, UK readers? And come to think of it, as the Brexit will probably impact every user in every country, this open forum is open to all.