SL GO

[kingkong112]

any opinions?

have u tried it?

 

[Sassy Romano]

n

y

 

[Nalates Urriah]

Yes, I've used it on a Galaxy S4 and 5 phones. You need a stylist for a screen that small but it works well.

[Inara Pey]

Used it extensively, having been a part of the pre-release beta testing, and have since continued to use it on my Google Nexus 7 HD.

It's really best suited to screen of 10-inches or larger, but can be used on smaller screens if you don't mind a lot of pinch-zooming and scrolling or have a stylus-enabled screen (hence why the recently released iOS version is aimed at the iPad). Streaming is fast and reliable, and obviously as you're getting the full viewer with all the bells and whistles ringing and whistling, it can look very sharp.

The payment options aren't actually that bad if you really do need to access SL on the go a lot, and require all the capabilities of the SL viewer at your fingertips (for uploading items to the Marketplace, say), and subscriptions include a 7-day trail period (but *not* pay-as-you-go).

However, if you're an Andrioid person, and you simply need occasional access to SL while on the go & are not overly concerned about having all the deep graphical richness of the viewer with full windlight, ALM, etc., then Lumiya is worth considering. T graphics are more than acceptable for short-term use and it has all the major features you're likely to need for just getting around and enjoying SL (Including fitted mesh support). What's more, it can be yours for a one-off payment that's equitable to a couple of hours or so on SL Go.

At the risk of tooting my horn again, you can poke around at SL Go for yourself via my coverage (reviews, comparisons, hand-on with hardware).

[Rhys Goode]

(oops, necro post.  Still, SL GO is in the news again, now supporting Firestorm, so I will let it stand)

I tried it for a day, just cancelled the account though.

The rendering was impressive!  And to was easy enough to use.  30 fps in a lively sim about the best I saw, still impressive.  It did not like my mouse very much, it was way more touchy than in any application I have seen, but that is a very minor nit.

But ....

No way to upload mesh or textures or photos.  No local textures.  Hmmm, I did not try taking a pic, not sure it would have worked, seems like the viewer can only access SL GO drives. So, chat and IM logs are virtually unusable, at least the way I use them.  

And it only runs in full screen  mode.  I guess there is no need to have the Gimp layer clickable, no uploads anyway.

But for me, the real show stopper its enormous use of data.  I had some hope that having them compute the 3d image and send me the 2d frames would reduce the amount of data I use.  I often rely my wireless hotspot for weeks at a time, and was hoping it might reduce data use.  So I was surprised to see that I used 5 times as much data last night than I had on any night in the last month.  

Made some quick comparisons. First in a poplular music hangout.  My regular connection was using about 5 MB/min, SL GO, used about 36MB/min

Then I went to  my building platform, all alone up in the sky.  SL GO was blazing away at 150 fps!  And using about 110 Mbps to do it.  Throttling back the max frame rate to 25 helped a bit, dropped the data rate to about 75 Mbps.  Using my own set up, I was getting 100 fps, but it took less than 1 Mbps to do it (I had my music off).

So, exquisite rendering vs no building, and enormous data use.  Not worth it for me.

 

[Qie Niangao]

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I had some hope that having them compute the 3d image and send me the 2d frames would reduce the amount of data I use. 

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I've always assumed the opposite, which turns out to be correct for SL, but I never really examined why data representing the 3D objects should be so much more concise than their 2D rendering. Thinking about it now, it seems that's a feature of the current, relatively sparse amount of 3D data being represented. I mean, if the scene included every leaf and every grain of sand, it would save a lot to render it first into some 2D video format, necessarily losing most of the information by simple occlusion, if nothing else.

The reason this isn't a completely theoretical consideration is that it's much harder to steal 3D object models from 2D images, so a virtual world viewable only by video stream would be one way to protect intellectual property. (Although there are apps that compose a model of, say, a building interior based on video, that's quite a different and more "lossy" process than just ripping a perfect copy of the model from the OpenGL data stream, pre-rendering.)