Watch this single-take scene featuring a girl going down into the depths of a sprawling cyberpunk city for some take-out, then tell me: What do you think the budget to create it was?
Read on for the answer:
Continue reading "Watch: Amazing Cyberpunk Scene Illustrates Democratization of 3D Graphics" »
|
|
Click here to register for a free ticket to BlockDown, the blockchain-focused tech conference kicking off today that’s being hosted in Sinespace’s Breakroom (a media partner to this blog).
As VentureBeat reported recently, the first BlockDown in Sinespace (video above) brought in a pretty impressive number of attendees to network, hear talks, and of course, dance in the after-hours club:
BlockDown is a direct response to the worldwide quarantine, which effectively canceled an April conference EAK Digital had been planning to host in Istanbul. CEO Erhan Korhaliller ... considered simply staging the event on a video conferencing system but found the options boring — especially at a time when most people are working at home and yearning for a colorful, engaging alternative to boost their spirits.
In April, Korhaliller held a pilot conference for BlockDown, attracting 1,000 people from around the world, who paid $25 each to hear talks and network online. The pilot event also had 10 paying sponsors, who set up 3D exhibit booths that automatically grab the details of visiting attendees.
This month’s BlockDown is free with an option to pay for premium upgrades -- plus some new features including a virtual world/LinkedIn contact exchange, and a giant party yacht. (Better than just watching a web video conference in your underwear.)
|
|
An overwhelming number of both Twitter and Facebook employees (76% and 78%) support Twitter's decision to add a fact check flag on Trump's recent tweet making false claims about voting. That's at least according to an anonymous survey launched last weekend by the development team of Blind, an anonymous messaging app for company staffers.
This data comes as controversy over Trump's behavior on social media has reached a fever pitch in the wake of nation-wide protests, a Trump threat of violence on Twitter (subsequently hidden by the company), and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's refusal to remove or flag Trump's inflammatory posts from his own social network. (Which has caused some Facebook employees to stage virtual walk-outs or publicly quit with a resignation statement against Zuckerberg.)
Another question in this Blind survey may shed light on this roiling tension within Facebook:
By a slight majority of 52%, Facebook employees disagreed with the notion that social networks shouldn't fact check political speech. Twitter employees disagreed at a rate of 57%, with half as many falling into the "somewhat disagree" category.
Blind's survey was taken by just over 1500 employees of major tech and financial services companies, with staffers at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook being the most represented. While the data sample is small, a couple things stand out: Twitter and Facebook employee's opinions in this survey are quite close to those among other colleagues in terms of fact checking Trump tweets -- while at the same time, the social network employees are much more likely to support fact checking political statements in general.
Here are the aggregate results across employees of all companies who took the survey:
|
|
"Miss Your Office? Some Companies Are Building Virtual Replicas" is a new Wall Street Journal story from Katie Deighton featuring NWN media partner Sinespace, creator of Breakroom:
Stay-home orders and the shuttering of workplaces have given corporate employees some respite from getting dragged into time-wasting water-cooler conversations.
But some companies and their employees don’t want to leave everything about the office behind, it turns out, and are replicating their offices in “SimCity”-like simulations online...
Sine Wave Entertainment Ltd. last month introduced Breakroom, a virtual-world product for remote workforces. It can accommodate all-hands meetings, secure one-on-ones and document sharing. Clients of the product include Virgin Group Ltd. and Torque Esports Corp.
Many customers initially assume they will recreate their offices, then realize they can make tweaks that would be impossible in the real world, said Sine Wave CEO Rohan Freeman.
“We spend our lives wishing we were working in open, sunny campuses with butterflies outside,” Mr. Freeman said. “Here you can realize that dream.”
Read the rest here. Speaking of which, here's a new video showcasing Breakroom's use for virtual world-based conferences and events:
|
|
Jeff Berg, a Webby Award winning designer, has a thoughtful and valuable Medium post on the etiquette of virtual meetings, especially the kind many of us in the quarantine age now have every day on video conferencing systems like Zoom. Berg brings his long experience as a UX designer to bear on what is, for most (all?) of us, an incredibly awkward and frustrating way of having meetings. With the web camera on, we feel like we're onstage, artificially emoting for an audience, but Berg says what we're really doing is grasping at a new kind of etiquette:
For virtual meeting spaces, acknowledging, understanding, and practicing new etiquette is not a wasteful formality, but is a formalization for defining space, rules of engagement, and a process for progressing discourse. There is nothing fake about utilizing the tool-sets we have available to us for optimizing communication. Being aware of your physical self in a virtual space as seen by others in that virtual space will maximize your experience and your own benefits from the interactions you have.
Key to Berg's experience with UX design, as longtime readers will know, is once creating masterpiece works of immersive art in Second Life under his avatar name, AM Radio. These art installations -- quiet, nostalgic, meditative -- tended to attract positive, impromptu conversations around them. Jeff tells me his experience as AM Radio was integral to the advice he's offering for virtual meetings now:
|
|
VR pioneer Jacki Morie, who advised XPRIZE's recent challenge to create a real life, robotics and VR-powered avatar, has a fascinating post on XPrize's blog where she considers the state of online technology now connecting us across borders -- especially while so many of us in quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic:
Will the human-to-human relationships initiated and maintained [online] provide what we fundamentally need? Certainly, these mechanisms of togetherness will allow us to communicate, to conduct business, play together, and to virtually travel and experience digital recreations and immersive video of distant destinations.
But something is missing in this imagined post-pandemic future. What happens to human touch—that physical connection—when our primary means of coming together is digital? In present day, we know that babies who are never touched fail to thrive. We, humans, require touch; our skin is our largest sensory organ and informs our very being and sense of self. Absent this, how do we thrive as humans in an immaterial world?
She imagines a not-too-distant future where we will use robotics-driven avatars to visit and interact with remote friends and relatives, and "touch" each other through Internet-enabled haptics devices. That technology itself already exists, and she has tried it out first-hand:
"A year ago I was able to try a product that three companies combined to make," Jacki tells me. "Their consortium is called Converge and with their tech one can put on haptic gloves and control a robotic arm (or two!) and actually feel the objects that the robotic hand is feeling. Quite amazing and convincing, especially for this early on."
But can artificial touch become a meaningful replacement for human-to-human touch?
Continue reading "Will We Prefer to Touch Each Other Through Real Avatars, Post-Pandemic?" »
|
|
It's news that probably won't surprise the many millions now working from home since the last few weeks, but here it is: Traffic to the website of Zoom, the remote conferencing services company, has strongly jumped since the end of January, when the WHO first declared the Coronavirus to be an international health concern. According to SimilarWeb, traffic jumped to about 14 million visits total at the end of February, representing 15% in growth. Curiously, the competing service Skype has seen a slight decline in web traffic over the same time. My interpretation: Since Skype is a much older service (founded in 2003, versus Zoom in 2011), most active Internet users already have Skype, and are visiting Zoom for the first time to download the client as they prepare to do remote work.
At New World Notes, we've been wondering if we'd also see a rise in online virtual world/social VR activity. But so far, not so much. Take a look:
|
|
Pictured: OnLive service SL Go streaming Second Life on an Android tablet in 2014
We talked about the problems of "updating" Second Life earlier this week (many readers are still talking about it!). Briefly summarized, Second Life runs on a 3D graphics engine that's nearly 20 years old, while upgrading to a new engine, such as Unity, would break most existing content: Creators would have to re-upload their mesh content, while prim-based creations would simply be lost. (And many classic SL regions are mostly or completely prim-based.)
There is, however, a third option to save SL as it exists: Give it an OnLive-type streaming subscription service, as it used to have four years ago. OnLive subsequently went defunct and was sold to Sony, but most everyone who did use OnLive's SL Go testified to its awesomeness: It not only enabled streaming of high quality graphics on iOS and Android tablets with little lag, it made using Second Life on low-end PC/Mac laptops a dream. (I helped launch SL GO as a consultant/media partner, but now that that disclosure is no longer necessary, I can affirm that, yes, it really was that great.)
But how much would it cost for Linden Lab to fund the deployment of a streaming service of its own? I put that question to Dennis Harper, formerly the Senior Product Manager at OnLive who led the design and production of SL Go, and is now a VP at analytics/entertainment company Asteri. Dennis tells me the scaling costs would be challenging, but then lays out a couple scenarios where it would work:
|
|
Well this is disappointing:
London tech startup Improbable saw its operating losses rise by almost two thirds to £63.7m million [i.e. about $82 million] in the year ending May 31 2019... Improbable is currently working on its SpatialOS cloud computing solution, which enables larger and more complex simulations. The poster child was Bossa Studio's Worlds Adrift [pictured], an MMO that permanently marked the consequences of player actions, such as wrecked ships and felled trees, and had a wildlife system that saw creatures continuing to more around and reproduce even when all players were offline.
But the studio announced in May 2019 it would be closing the game after just over a year in Early Access.
This was followed by the closure of Spilt Milk Studios' Lazarus and Mavericks: Proving Grounds developer Automaton Games entering administration. Without these titles, the only visible games applications of SpatialOS are Midwinter Entertainment's Scavengers and NetEase's Nostos.
This despite $500 million in funding! But quick correction to the Gameindustry.biz report above: Seed, the highly ambitious massive strategy MMO from Klang Games (which I consult for on occasion), is another SpatialOS project and is still strongly chugging along toward release, last I heard.
Still, the larger trend is not encouraging:
|
|
Philip Rosedale recently posted a cool hack for tracking system latency: Basically, you perform an action with the user interface, then track how long it takes for the system to register that action by recording cause and effect on your smartphone in super slo-mo, then counting up the total video frames, and doing some basic math:
Multiple the number of frames counted by 4.1 to give you the number of milliseconds of round-trip latency. For example, if you counted 10 frames, that would be 41 milliseconds.
He recently tested mouse latency on the new streaming services Google Stadia and NVidia NOW (see above) running one of the Witcher games, and came up with this startling figure:
Continue reading "Philip Rosedale Tracks Mouse Latency on Google Stadia & NVidia NOW" »
|
|
