High Fidelity gives up.

[Luna Bliss]

On 5/10/2019 at 7:41 PM, Madelaine McMasters said:

If sitting is the new smoking, VR might be a user killer case.

VR is typically very active, much more so than SL. Probably because of all the game-play that's part of it. In many cases people are jumping around an entire room as they play. Me, I've gotten to the point I can stand up and swat at things before needing to sit down..lol.

* What I've seen proposed is AR glasses that could be easily switched to VR if one is in the mood for total immersion.

Edited May 12, 2019 by Luna Bliss

[Madelaine McMasters]

20 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

VR is typically very active, much more so than SL.

But much less than RL. The desktop computer industry has been in decline for nearly a decade. Recent stabilization has come from business desktop sales, not consumer. This decline in fixed base computing coincides with the rise of mobile computing. I don't see that trend reversing. I grew up in a world where computers were on desks. The kids in my neighborhood are growing up in a world where the computers are in their pockets, on their wrists, in their ears and eventually in their glasses. This is why I think VR will be forever niche and AR is where future potential lies.

Edited May 12, 2019 by Madelaine McMasters

[ItHadToComeToThis]

15 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

I'm glad you're sympathetic toward the poor.
I still don't think your examples work however....there just aren't enough low-paying jobs where people aren't working very hard at them and so its not a  valid comparison (your belief that Capitalism is necessary for motivation lest people choose a low-paying job like handing out popsicles over a more stressful job with similar wages). Plus, Socialism doesn't rule out wage disparity as motivation, even if we'd become a totally Socialist country.
Plus, it's primarily what the Capitalist can squeeze out of the worker that controls the wages -- there's not so much choice as you put forth with your comparison.
 
What's wrong with Democratic Socialism? There could still be wage disparity and other possibilities for motivation enhancement without the individual ownership that is central to Capitalism.
Capitalism, by it's nature, always funnels power to the top (power begets more power, and the inequality and exploitation that follows). Sure, Capitalism could be regulated more (what I think you're calling 'Socialism', but look at the real world and how that's working -- we are wrecking the planet and can't control the individuals that just want more, more, more. Capitalism requires endless growth (an impossibility on a finite planet)...and so I think we need something new.
I see Communism and Capitalism at opposite ends with Socialism being the middle way.

Yes of course I am sympathetic towards the poor. I am not exactly rich myself and I am also THAT security guard I mentioned earlier 😅. And I also agree that democratic socialism might work. But what most people advocate for when you see them protesting is more like an anarchaic socialism without the democracy. We need democracy, some people in the world treat it like it's a swear word but I don't see it that way.

I will also give you the point on there not being enough positions for my examples. What I was mainly aiming for was the distinction between say...becoming a refuse collector vs 10 years to become a pharmacist in an economy where everyone achieves the same. One requires much more effort than the other for no reward.

Regarding capatlism, there are things I like as I stated. I like that I can progress up and amass wealth, it encourages innovation, a person can start out as nothing and progress up to something even if that might be difficult. There are things I hate. Disproportionate distribution of wealth resulting in poverty, pollution, diminishing natural resources, the nonsense that corporations try to pull on the consumer and capatlism is the reason why we have financial instability.

I think there are advantages and disadvantages to all of the systems and taking the best from each is the best approach but as you stated democratic socialism could work also. Whatever it is that eventually replaces capatalism it needs to be thought through very carefully before being implemented. I for one do not want communism, I don't even think those advocating for communism truly understand what communism would entail and there are plenty of examples through recent history to show just how well that went down.

[Luna Bliss]

41 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

1 hour ago, Luna Bliss said:

VR is typically very active, much more so than SL.

But much less than RL. The desktop computer industry has been in decline for nearly a decade. Recent stabilization has come from business desktop sales, not consumer. This decline in fixed base computing coincides with the rise of mobile computing. I don't see that trend reversing. I grew up in a world where computers were on desks. The kids in my neighborhood are growing up in a world where the computers are in their pockets, on their wrists, in their ears and eventually in their glasses. This is why I think VR will be forever niche and AR is where future potential lies.

VR is much more active than most people's RL, especially when playing games (and that's the biggest use of VR at this point).

I don't see why one posits VR against AR in an effort to see which one 'wins'. Of course we have less time for total immersion and so VR would be used less, since with AR we will be able to participate in other daily activities. So yeah I agree it will most likely be the more niche market of the two. However, it would be nice to be using AR to complete tasks as one sits on the sofa, but with a flick of a switch slip into total immersion when the mood strikes -- similar to how I participate in the forum here or other activities on my PC, and then slip into SL for awhile.

But it's really not a mobile vs desktop issue. People have been able to slip phones into their VR headsets for a long while -- VR is already mobile.
Plus, the new Oculus Quest that ships out toward the end of the month is totally mobile with a snapdragon 'phone' built into it --  no connection to a desktop -- even the tracking is built into it. And the lens resolution for the Quest is already higher than first generation headsets, although games have needed some modification so as not to be too 'heavy'. Price is good too, at $399.
I think the Quest will create many more VR users, but time will tell.

Edited May 12, 2019 by Luna Bliss

[Luna Bliss]

33 minutes ago, ItHadToComeToThis said:

Regarding capatlism, there are things I like as I stated. I like that I can progress up and amass wealth, it encourages innovation, a person can start out as nothing and progress up to something even if that might be difficult.

I'm not sure it encourages innovation for most...maybe for some...

[animats]

1 hour ago, Luna Bliss said:

VR is typically very active, much more so than SL.

One of the most popular VR games is Beat Saber. Very simple, very active. It's a cross between Pong and Dance Dance Revolution.

Far more popular than Sansar.

(What you're seeing: player in front of green screen combined with graphics from game.)

 

[Coffee Pancake]

Beat Saber is the ONLY popular game. The rest are just things to do when you're not playing that. The concurrency of the top VR steam game is .. pathetic.

VR is dead, it was never more than hype aimed at selling a fancy techno dust trap.

 

source : https://vrlfg.net/

 

[mikka Luik]

Beat Sabre is probably the only thing I have seen that made me go - coo I'd like a go on that, out of all the VR stuff so far. Might be because its presented in that way - user actually moving against green screened game video. OK, so its dangerously close to exercise and I would want an Ace of Spades mod...

Compare it to how a lot of this was presented (the whole google glass cardboard thing - not here so much but elsewhere ) where it was an awful lot of low rez practically identical square images side by side. Still not shelling out a months rent on one though.

[Selene Gregoire]

2 hours ago, animats said:

One of the most popular VR games is Beat Saber. Very simple, very active. It's a cross between Pong and Dance Dance Revolution.

Far more popular than Sansar.

(What you're seeing: player in front of green screen combined with graphics from game.)

 

Nice! Can you chose the genre of music or do you have to use what comes with?

[Luna Bliss]

40 minutes ago, CoffeeDujour said:

Beat Saber is the ONLY popular game. The rest are just things to do when you're not playing that. The concurrency of the top VR steam game is .. pathetic.

VR is dead

Many people who use VR never log into Steam though. I never have. I always log into Oculus Home where I have my VR home setup, and then choose from my virtual desktop to play any number of games I've downloaded with Oculus. Vive has a similar home that's separate from Steam. Same with Play Station and other platforms.
Then add to that people involved in VR outside of playing games (schools, medical applications, etc.).
Plus, VRChat on Steam (not listed in your graphic) has over 6000 users by itself right now that needs to be added to the numbers you posted who are playing games @ Steam:
https://steamdb.info/app/438100/graphs/

[animats]

13 minutes ago, Selene Gregoire said:

Nice! Can you chose the genre of music or do you have to use what comes with?

There are official "song packs" you can buy, and a third party mod community which provides songs set up for Beat Saber.

My point here is that what's getting used in VR is not virtual worlds. Nor social applications. Just well-made twitch games.

Edited May 12, 2019 by animats
Add

[Luna Bliss]

14 minutes ago, animats said:

My point here is that what's getting used in VR is not virtual worlds. Nor social applications. Just well-made twitch games.

There are over 6000 users in VRChat at this very moment, and there are many other social VR spaces.

The question is, why wasn't Sansar & High Fidelity able to attract these people:

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/insights-on-business/ibmix/vrchat-popular-whats-mean-future-virtual-reality/

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, Luna Bliss said:

Many people who use VR never log into Steam though. I never have. I always log into Oculus Home where I have my VR home setup, and then choose from my virtual desktop to play any number of games I've downloaded with Oculus. Vive has a similar home that's separate from Steam. Same with Play Station and other platforms.
Then add to that people involved in VR outside of playing games (schools, medical applications, etc.).
Plus, VRChat on Steam (not listed in your graphic) has over 6000 users by itself right now that needs to be added to the numbers you posted who are playing games @ Steam:
https://steamdb.info/app/438100/graphs/

I truncated the full listing from the site.

VR chat is not a VR exclusive game, most of it's users are not using VR.

Steam right now is managing 7K, the other platforms are smaller and don't publish their numbers (if they were higher than steam, they would totally be saying so though).

 

[Nextio]

15 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

There are over 6000 users in VRChat at this very moment, and there are many other social VR spaces.

The question is, why wasn't Sansar & High Fidelity able to attract these people:

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/insights-on-business/ibmix/vrchat-popular-whats-mean-future-virtual-reality/

VRChat got a boost from pewdiepie(?) and the ugandan knuckles meme.  Their playerbase is mostly composed of the anime and meme community now.  I briefly remember trying JanusVR, AltspaceVR, and VRChat before the popularity of pewdiepie and knuckles though, and they were just as empty as Sansar and HiFi.

In my opinion, Linden Lab should've just kept their SL VR viewer instead of developing an entire VR world from scratch.  VR should've been an additional feature, not the main product (to be fair though, Linden Lab was a unique case, because SL is an outdated platform for VR, hence the need for an entire VR world such as Sansar).

Most of these VR startups got it wrong and did things in reverse.  They should've developed a stable virtual world for desktop and/or mobile, then add VR as an additional component, not a requirement.

[Coffee Pancake]

VR comes with a lot of design decisions that kinda mean you do have to develop for it and then expand that offering to other platforms.

[Selene Gregoire]

2 hours ago, animats said:

There are official "song packs" you can buy, and a third party mod community which provides songs set up for Beat Saber.

My point here is that what's getting used in VR is not virtual worlds. Nor social applications. Just well-made twitch games.

I got your point. It had nothing to do with my question. 

If I have to pay extra to get the genres of music I like, forget it. They're not getting any blood from this turnip. 

[Coffee Pancake]

Well seeing as you need a $400 VR hat with room scale tracking (no, the inside out stuff isn't as good) and minimum of a grands worth of PC to drive it, paying for content ins't bleeding you dry, you're already knee deep. Even the cheapest option of a PS4 & PS4 VR is $600 before you have bought a single title.

[Selene Gregoire]

1 hour ago, CoffeeDujour said:

Well seeing as you need a $400 VR hat with room scale tracking (no, the inside out stuff isn't as good) and minimum of a grands worth of PC to drive it, paying for content ins't bleeding you dry, you're already knee deep. Even the cheapest option of a PS4 & PS4 VR is $600 before you have bought a single title.

Yeah, I don't think I can go a month without paying lot rent, utilities and food just to be able to dink around with VR. I'd rather have a roof over my head,  clothes on my back and food on my table than starve to death for something that doesn't exist in "meat space". Seems like a no brainer to me.

[animats]

IBM blog: "The avatars that populate VRChat allow for immersive elements such as eye tracking and lip syncing. This isn’t new technology, but players accustomed to virtual environments like Second Life or World of Warcraft are often surprised when they interact with characters who can blink and dance and move their lips with a range of motion. This makes for surprisingly lifelike, often humorous interactions."

Would SL users want that? Many SL users don't even use voice.

 

[Coffee Pancake]

In typical use you aren't zoomed in on the face of the person you're talking to. It would make SL vloggers happy though. 

Typical WoW usage is even more laughable. You're fighting bosses the size of tower blocks, you need to zoom your camera all the way out and the look down from an almost birds eye view just so you can see your position in relation to the scene and rest of the raid. Typical wow character is .. less than 2cm tall on screen.

This kind of industry twaddle is why we can't have nice things, but we can have hyped up junk with no practical value, that will be forgotten for the next big thing in a couple of years.

[Resi Pfeffer]

On 5/10/2019 at 6:21 PM, rasterscan said:

Here's something that may or may not rekindle your interest in building. Build your object in prims, right click it >More > More >Save> as collada. Point the save to your desktop and you will see a shiny new .dae file.  Upload this file into sl with Build>upload>mesh item and upload the collada file. Bingo ! There's your build in mesh ! woohoo ! Heres my mesh funnel made using the technique.

 

 

Thank you.
Ill try some more complex objects.

Is there a guide value, how big/small the impact should be when its about polygons and vertices?

[ChinRey]

On 5/10/2019 at 6:21 PM, rasterscan said:

Here's something that may or may not rekindle your interest in building. Build your object in prims, right click it >More > More >Save> as collada. Point the save to your desktop and you will see a shiny new .dae file.  Upload this file into sl with Build>upload>mesh item and upload the collada file. Bingo ! There's your build in mesh ! woohoo ! Heres my mesh funnel made using the technique.

Just keep in mind that there are no advantages to doing it this way compared to simply keeping the build as a prim. Reimporting a Firestorm generated dae file directly will reduce the LoD, increase the download and often physics weights and not add anything of quality. But of course you can call your build mesh if that's important to you. 😉

Why do people still try to belittle the poor prim anyway? There may be limits to what you can build with prims but they are far more flexible than people seem to believe and generally what they can do, they can do betetr than mesh.

[Coffee Pancake]

11 hours ago, Resi Pfeffer said:

Thank you.
Ill try some more complex objects.

Is there a guide value, how big/small the impact should be when its about polygons and vertices?

No .. stop .. don't ... 

Finnnee .. at least skim read this and get an idea of what's involved in doing it right ..  I made funnels, exported from SL, bit O blender and back to SL.

Guess how low I was able to get the upload fee and final Li count with a minimal clean up.

 

(I was initially going to just reply here with some details. but it ended up waaay too long and off topic)

 

Edited May 13, 2019 by CoffeeDujour

[ChinRey]

11 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

(I was initially going to just reply here with some details. but it ended up waaay too long and off topic)

Thank you for illustrating what I was saying - and to move it to a new thread were it isn't off topic.

But just in case somebody reads this thread and somehow misses the point: Kids, do not try this at home - or anywhere else for that matter.

A direct reimport of Firestorm generated meshes is just about the most idiotic thing you can possibly do as a builder. Both prims and mesh have their advantages and disadvantages but what you get this way, is the worst of both worlds. So you loose a lot and gain nothing whatsoever.

 

Edited May 14, 2019 by ChinRey

[Resi Pfeffer]

10 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

No .. stop .. don't ... 

Finnnee .. at least skim read this and get an idea of what's involved in doing it right ..  I made funnels, exported from SL, bit O blender and back to SL.

Guess how low I was able to get the upload fee and final Li count with a minimal clean up.

Somehow i expected already it wouldnt be that easy, otherwise everyone would do it that simple way
I´ll try to read and understand the whole post you just wrote. Im an absolute mesh newbie, and maybe your pics and descriptions help me a bit.