Make Avatars Around You Dance on Command With New Black Dragon SL

Black Dragon, a third party Second Life viewer with a cult following, has a new update which comes with a sort of silly but also pretty amazing feature: MANDATORY DANCING. In other words, you can make avatars around you seem to dance (or do any other animation) at the push of some buttons. As Black Dragon creator Niran Dean explains on his blog:

How it works? Go into a crowd, go to 'Dragon - World - Animation Control' select any avatar whose animations you want to save into your list, stop, restart, freeze or slow down. Hit the the 'Save' button if you want to save them. Down below you'll then find a list of all motions you saved and who they belong to, select one you want to play and select one or more avatars in the above list, hit 'Apply To' and BAM everyone does exactly what you want them to do.

So the operative word is "seem", because the avatars aren't actually dancing -- it just seems that way on your Black Dragon viewer. Niran tells me this is an expanded update to an already existing feature:

"Long ago I added the ability to change animation play speed for your own avatar," he says. "My next plan was to allow doing that to other avatars too, and now I finally got around to do it with a lot of extra functionality." As for what people will do with this feature: "Probably similar to what people already do, but it will make doing so much easier, faster, and offers additional options, potentially enhancing timing and quality of certain aspects of videos.

"Also funny pictures, lot's of funny pictures of people cartwheeling around."

I can definitely see this as a very useful tool for machinima makers, too. There's an interesting ethical component worth talking about at some point: If you can depict well-known avatars doing silly or even offensive things in screenshots and videos, does it matter that they're not actually doing them in Second Life?

Via /SecondLife.

Comments

[Tobias Roth]

"Malicious" things how i call them that are possible with this feature were thought about a lot but ultimately i decided to leave it up to every single user to do whatever they want to do with it.

Sure, you can go ahead and make a picture showing me doing Hitler's 'Sieg Heil' gesture and tell everyone i did that, even if i didn't but let's be honest, who cares. Well jealous lovers who question every move of their partner might care but oh come on, that's pure drama anyway.

And then there's the thing that you can theoretically play any animation without buying it, you just have to know the UUID and type it in every single time you want to play it locally but have fun doing that. Also for that to happen you first need to get the UUID either out of your inventory (which is only possible if you got all perms) or when someone is playing it but for that you first have to find someone, then write it down and even then it's still only local. So much work for a trivial gain at best and i might just obfuscate or hide the UUID in the list. So whatever.

[Han Held]

This totally doesn't violate LL's TPV policy regarding shared experiences or anything, either.

[Patchouli Woollahra]

I predict a new SL re-meme. Imagine the Harlem shake done in SL. The only thing that wouldn't be possible yet is applying silly props for the second part of the dance.

[Gysth]

Whoa, this is completely against Policy on Third-Party Viewers, highly problematic and potentially unethical.

[Tobias Roth]

Gysth, i've read the TPV Policy and i don't see any policy this violates against, as a matter of fact this does only use everything already available within the Viewer to some degree.

- You can't export animations (even if you did you could do it with permission according to the policy)
- You can't alter the shared experience since no one sees what you sees, it's a local effect that does otherwise not affect anyone unlike graphics can do to some degree
- This does not display any information not otherwise available through the Viewer (although with extra steps)
- This does not alter content metadata (names for example) nor can it give you anything you don't own. You still don't have the animations in question in your inventory, they don't belong to you and you cannot play them to the public either nor can you give them to someone else (other than playing it on your screen for them, which they really have no use for)

Pretty sure it's not against any of the TPV Policy rules but then again this is Linden Labs, we never know. I was told my "Volumetric Lighting" feature violates the shared experience rule (not by a Linden though i was told a Linden said it).

[Patchouli Woollahra]

Tobias: let's make one thing clear, the final arbiter on ToS infringements in SL, if you don't wish to escalate it to legal courts, is Linden Lab. So no worries if you weren't force-TPed into a Linden location and told "no". TPV Policy should never be turned into a Harrison Bergeron stick beyond the obvious rules for preserving intellectual property within SL.