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Graphical viewer for iPad? Nexus 7?


Rodford Steinbeck
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We could use viewers for iPad 3, since it has a quad core GPU and the Nexus 7 has 12 cores in its GPU. We can definitely handle the graphics. I'd love to take part in more than chat and seeing my inventory. Second Life for these portable devices and others would benefit science types, art types, business and education minded and more. Plus those that like SL for the social aspect would benefit too. I'd even beta test it. If this isn't the right spot to ask for that, can you please point me in the right direction? Thanks.

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Rodford Steinbeck wrote:

We could use viewers for iPad 3, since it has a quad core GPU and the Nexus 7 has 12 cores in its GPU. We can definitely handle the graphics.

I agree with the first statement, I am sure it would give the grid a boost. The second however....

The number of cores is completely irrelevant, but if you want to look at those, the minimum requirements say you need a 6600, which has 8 processors, no idea if those have multiple cores. I am pretty sure though the iPad GPU is nowhere near the requirements for SL as it is now (or the cpu or the amount of relatively slow DDR2 memory, plus the fact it is wireless which doesn't help).

I'm confident LL will be able to make a viewer, but it will be a whole lot harder than simply porting it to the tablet.

Someone else had a go at it, I hope it doesn't burn the electronics on a tablet, I haven't tried it myself:

lumiyaviewer

It's a start.

 

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  • 1 month later...

Lumiya runs on Driod tablets and phones that clearly do not have the horsepower of a desktop/lap top machine so there goes that theory. You can see your avi, inventory work poseballs etc ... 

I have a feeling LL won't be the ones developing it. We just need someone to writie it for the IOS platform and not just a chat client. 

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Zoe Aria wrote:

Lumiya runs on Driod tablets and phones that clearly do not have the horsepower of a desktop/lap top machine so there goes that theory. You can see your avi, inventory work poseballs etc ... 

I have a feeling LL won't be the ones developing it. We just need someone to writie it for the IOS platform and not just a chat client. 

There goes what theory? In my post I even link to Lumiya.

I said it WOULD be possible to write a viewer for tablets. I also said it can't be a simple port of the normal viewer which only runs so so on a high end desktop with tons of memory, fast CPU's and powerful GPU's. All of which aren't found on a tablet. That means there are compromises.

Anyway, good to see Alina is making progress with her viewer.

 

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I asked someone what was the difficulty in porting and the answer is that the existing viewer is built around the Intel x86 architecture.  Because the chips used in tablets/phones use a very different base architecture (i.e. RISC) any viewer would have to be built differently from the ground up (different instruction sets and libraries) - and this is not an easy task.


Incidentally, Lumiya runs vvery well on the Nexus 7.

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  • 1 month later...

Totally true. It is not about how many core you have or how many thread in a processor. N1 is are you supporting that kind of processors because they are totally different in term of architecture... Which means another way of conception and developpement. But hey I'm not saying that it is not possible, YES it is possible if LL decides to rewrite the software from scratch.

Let me say that there is another way to have SL on a tablet but you swill have to give up on yours... Microsoft reimagined the computer and made a hole new concept I think that you all heard about it Computer/Tablet or in another way said hybride. the best example is the next surface pro that will be released by MS on the beginning of 2013. It is based intel architecture (x86 and x64) That would make it easier for SL. How? What they have today can be launched on that tablet...

Anyway it is a big subject that depends on SL marketing vision... Also there technology vision... Who knows they might be prepering SL Tablet :P Everything is possible ;)

i forgot to mention Apple doesn't allow Adult Content Apps it is part of there policy... It might be one of the reasons that is stopping or holding SL from releasing an iPad version.

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Kwakkelde Kwak wrote:


Zoe Aria wrote:

Lumiya runs on Driod tablets and phones that clearly do not have the horsepower of a desktop/lap top machine so there goes that theory. You can see your avi, inventory work poseballs etc ... 

I have a feeling LL won't be the ones developing it. We just need someone to writie it for the IOS platform and not just a chat client. 

There goes what theory? In my post I even link to Lumiya.

I said it WOULD be possible to write a viewer for tablets. I also said it can't be a simple port of the normal viewer which only runs so so on a high end desktop with tons of memory, fast CPU's and powerful GPU's. All of which aren't found on a tablet. That means there are compromises.

Anyway, good to see Alina is making progress with her viewer.

 

Since this thread has already been necro'd I'll chime in an add that the screenshots from Lumiya are a good example of those limitations. Notice in those screenshots the drawdistance is limited to 16 meters at most. The web site also says the following.

Limitations:

  • Terrain and sky are not textured.
  • "Mesh" is not supported. Sculpted objects are supported.
  • Textures are heavily downsampled to comply with Android memory usage limitations.
  • Particle systems, local lighting and other fancy features are not supported.
That's hardly what I'd call a fully functional graphical viewer. It is not intended for exploring or viewing any of the wonderful creations people have made in sl. It's a glorified text browser that has a very limited 3d viewport solely to allow you to interact with objects.
 
Content in sl is horrendously unoptimized and hand held mobile hardware just isn't up to the job yet.
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But Lumiya is much more complete than it was just a couple months ago, so I wouldn't conclude that all the limitations are hardware-related. It's not as if our app purchases on Google Play are funding a big development team for it.

I do think there are significant challenges to successfully adapting SL to a touch interface. It's certainly doable, but as people get more experience with touch-screen Windows, I think they'll become more aware of some of those subtleties.

 

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My concern isn't the UI, it's 3d performance. IMHO the only real selling point of sl is the shared virtual space full of user made 3d content. If you can't see and interact with that 3d content at a reasonable level of quality then there's just no point in using sl as opposed to say msn, irc or a mud.

So with that in mind there's a minimum level of 3d performance that I consider required in order for something to be called a fully functional graphical viewer. Last I checked tablets just weren't up to the job, I don't even think older desktops with intel integrated graphics are up to it for that matter. Admittedly I haven't tested the latest generation of tables so maybe they are good enough, but given the kind of performance I saw last time I tested and some rough guesses based on moore's law and the hardware specs I've seen I don't think they are.

I'm not saying a mobile viewer is worthless, obviously you don't need to see the 3d content every single time you log in. There's lots of tasks that only need a viewer with limited graphics or even just text. I'm just saying I don't think they're good enough for anything more than those limited tasked right now.

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