Now that most of you have had a chance to watch my interview with Linden Lab Ebbe Altberg, let me know how it's changed your opinion on the future of Second Life and/or Sansar (if at all) -- and suggest some follow-up questions I can ask the company.
Haven't seen the interview yet? Watch below!
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
KeKe takes dramatically spare photos, reducing the elements to their essentials. For example, this stunning untitled screenshot of Baobab trees silhouetted against a setting sun. They form a leading line directly to the sun. The horizon is placed according to the Rule of Thirds. The sun is placed by the Golden Mean and the baobab trees are consecutively one-fifth, two fifths, and three fifths from the left. The compositional elements feel organic, not staged, which is, of course, the goal of good composition.
Continue reading "Cajsa’s Daily Flickr Pick: Ke Ke's Beautifully Composed Pics from Star Citizen" »
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Update, 4/5: Bumped up for weekend viewing and discussion!
Here's my near hour-long chat with Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg during GDC week in March, a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation we had at Linden's HQ in San Francisco. Related to Second Life, we chatted about land discounts, the upcoming mobile app, cloud deployment, improving performance, and new user game mechanics for SL; related to Sansar, we discussed its low usage so far, its evolution as a PC-focused product, and finally, why Linden Lab is plowing profits from Second Life into Sansar. (Among many other topics.) Specific highlights include:
Many more highlights below:
Continue reading "Watch: Interview With Ebbe Altberg on the Future of Second Life & Sansar" »
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Here's a first-person shooter game design contest from Sinespace (a proud NWN partner) being judged by Valve veteran Erik Wolpaw, a key creative figure behind classic games Psychonauts, Portal 1/2, Half-Life 2, and Team Fortress 2. The contest is to create customized FPS maps for Sinespace using its new Unity SDK and its open source combat system (read all about that on Unity's blog). Erik will choose the submission with the most unique gameplay, impressive level design, and inventive use of Sinespace features -- the winner gets $5000 and a bunch of other benefits. (All the details here.)
Questions? Post in Comments below and I'll ping the Sinespace team -- and watch the tutorial video for an overview of the development process:
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Looks like congrats to Philip Rosedale and his team at High Fidelity are in order. Last February, HTC Vive announced the Q2 2019 launch of Vive Focus Plus, a standalone VR system for enterprise applications -- and last week, Philip announced (in the video above) that High Fidelity is working with Vive to make its open source VR platform available to the Plus.
Unless I missed it, this is the first social VR app that's been officially announced for the new system, which is already being used in enterprise-facing applications:
Continue reading "High Fidelity First Announced Social VR Platform for Vive Focus Plus" »
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
It is always fun to take a peek at the role-playing groups such as History Recreated. There you discover artists like Benoit de Montgelas whose photos show a strong effort to be historically accurate. I was drawn to this picture which is called “MdM Spring Collection” even though it clearly advertising his own creations by the cherry blossoms. They are opening here in Portland and the streets are brilliant with their blossoms along with the magnolias and camellias.
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Pillowfort is a new-ish social network with a charming name that gamers are starting to talk about, especially in the wake of Google+'s official death. (While it never caught on with the public, G+ had a strong fanbase of virtual world users.) Facebook and Twitter's problems with toxic users and bot manipulation remain epic, and Plurk, another social network with a cult following of virtual world fans, has been slumping in recent years. Will they prefer to help build a Pillowfort?
"It seems rather more locked down than Google," says Pillowfort fan, virtual world expert, and social media power user Patchouli. "It doesn't offer Google's +1 Likeish button, it doesn't do Events proper (though you can probably do blogposts listing events and tag them accordingly so that's a workaround), and it hasn't wound its tentacles throughout multiple services like G+ did. It's also lacking in anything resembling 'Social Search'. You can only look for stuff within Pillowfort. The only connections you can forge with other social networks are direct HTML links in your posts.
"A lot of this is probably a function of how much more work needs to be done to bring Pillowfort close to the standards we're used to in our other socmedia toolset. That and the fact that many social media networks enable cross-network sharing only through mutual contracts (and when these break down, it more often than not turns acrimonious at best - remember when Instagram links suddenly degraded from TwitterCards to obscure HTML links after Facebook bought Instagram out?).
"So in short, G+ refugees will be faced with not having a lot of things, but Pillowfort has core functionality that matches up quite well to what any service without a direct tie-in to the Google ecosystem can probably manage."
So that's what Google+ users can expect. For folks from other social networks:
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In this latest interview by "Syrmor", VRChat's best embedded reporter, a guy in a Bugs Bunny avatar shares with him and Winnie the Pooh a cascade of brutal stories from his real life, starting with FBI raid on his house, family abuse, his mother's meth addiction, from which point it gets worse -- and in the end, possibly, just a bit better.
When I started reporting in virtual worlds over a decade ago, among the very first people I profiled casually told me they were homeless in real life; that and many, many more similar experiences hasve informed my sense that virtual worlds are among the few mediums where people can share heartbreakingly intimate aspects of their lives that they couldn't comfortably speak honestly about elsewhere. Or as Syrmor put in when I profiled him:
“I'm legitimately interested in hearing strangers share their stories so I think my interest shines through and makes them more excited to share,” Syrmor says. “Also in VRChat there isn't as much social anxiety cause you can just leave the conversation without consequence whenever you like.”
Syrmor has such a large and dedicated viewership (nearly half a million YouTube subscribers now!), he has an anonymous commentator who posts graduate level philosophical analyses of his videos:
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