CEO Rodvik Humble Shares What's New in Second Life

[Void Singer]

I'm not sure if that was a compliment or a swipe lol

either way, I like it =)

[Maryanne Solo]

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Randall Ahren wrote:

Fooled you all. I'm actually an AI from an alternate universe. I came here because the humans showed me no love.

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Oh come ON! I knew from the moment you started posting.

You have no tag ^.~

*eyes Randall off suspiciously.... Word has it that a certain Brokli has the hawts 4 u :matte-motes-tongue:

[Ethos Erlanger]

To: Rodvik Linden

Subject: What's New in Second Life 10-3-2011  --  The State of Motion in SL

 

Greetings,

Under the heading of Shiny New Things, You state: “Because worlds feel most vibrant when they are full of life, our next project for Second Life is the ability to make “life” within it.  …<snip>…   – however, our creation tools have not made it particularly easy for the content creators to build high-quality entities.”

 

If any AI will enhance the simulation of life, it should also enhance the simulation of self control.  By this I mean the control over our avatar’s own actions.  To date, residents have not been given any really useful control over avatar rotation or my pet project avatar velocity.

 

In 2010 I had written and predicted that nothing would change in the next two years to improve avatar movement.  My prediction will have come true as February 2012 is fast approaching.  For you to use AI for obstacle collision avoidance, I am asking that you also include the ability to control avatar speed in SL. Artificial Life that is as frenetic as worker bees is not applicable to the simulation of the lazy life of a Great Pyrenees or the slow curious gate of an Arctic Penguin.  The proper caution of a guide dog cannot be seen as a good simulation when both its owner and it must travel at a fixed speed of 7 MPH.

 

Please read below my detailed commentary of February 12, 2010

 

It’s Not About the Viewer – The State of Motion in Virtual Worlds

Posted by Ethos Erlanger on February 12, 2010

Time for a short rant.  A new viewer will never make virtual worlds any better than they are.  What we need are better motion controls.  Does this sound like a broken record?  It is.  All my searching has been in vain.  There seems to be no way to truly exert the proper motion control over an avatar that adequately simulates walking up stairs or the side of a hill.  There seems to be no way to simulate the grip of your hand if you were climbing a mountain.  The granularity of all of the various virtual worlds is still extremely “course”.

Based on the apparent lack of interest in true simulation of body mechanics, my prediction is that 2 or more years will pass and I will still be in search of a “slow walk”.  A walking speed suitable for a leisurely stroll through a park or museum.  I am looking for an avatar speed slow enough to feel like the underwater simulations of swimming with the ocean marine life is slow enough to be believed;  Or, the altered physics and slow motion of a moon walk as we saw it on television 40 years ago.

Have you seen the speed of the old person in a walker?  Or an octogenarian with a cane?  It is not captured properly in virtual worlds.

See you in two years and we can catch up on the status of the State of Motion in Virtual Worlds.  (unless I reprise this topic sooner)

Enjoy your Virtual Life,

Ethos Erlanger



[Charolotte Caxton]

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Maryanne Solo wrote:

---

Randall Ahren wrote:

Fooled you all. I'm actually an AI from an alternate universe. I came here because the humans showed me no love.

---

Oh come

ON

! I knew from the moment you started posting.

You have no tag ^.~

*eyes Randall off suspiciously.... Word has it that a certain Brokli has the hawts 4 u :matte-motes-tongue:

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I just had a talk with a certain Brokli, lets just say she's... over it now

[Kerry Streeter]

Being one of the silent ones who just goes about my business, I have to say I regard announcements like this with the feeling that things are going further down the tubes.  I'm here to interact with people.  A city street scene bustling with non-interactive zombies might be thrilling the first time or two and then worse than an empty sim because a constant reminder of how empty in general all SL now is.  No doubt the unpopular ballrooms will be populated 24/7 by elegant couples, the stages of the strip clubs with the most enticing but brain-dead dancers, and the art galleries by wraiths bobbing their heads at the walls.  How about a special membership level for those who just want to watch the show without being able to interact...an invisible voyeur avie capable of tping sim to sim but unable to interact, pose, IM, or otherwise engage more than the camera...totally engrossed in the visual feast arrayed before them.  Kind of like a colorized silent film.  I'm with many of the others.  Give us a viewer that works and some sense of the strategic, not just a host of new features, some of them trivial or laughable, others potentially catastrophic.  And by the way, despite my "new resident" tag, I've been here in this avie 4 1/2 years so I have some sense of what goes on.

[Venus Petrov]

Dance clubs that fill with these things will lose popularity and die.  Likewise other places.  There are useful applications for such tools, also.  I prefer to withhold judgment until I see it happen.

[Bristle Chesnokov]

i recently started a virtuals web pages with the goal of building a  client with mostly ai it in. part of it involved npc, because the virtual can be controlled by a human or server. so i see npcs as a first step and i hope it will continue.

more games companies now are streaming their graphics. recently i was on eq2extend and found their streaming was as good as the old method. so it can be done.  for variable regions, that can be handle too, but the price has to come down or hypergrid to other servers that can handle it, like opensim or a lite sl.

with meshes, npcs with ai, variable regions, xml and plugin for clients, we could have a  second life 2.