animats

Oh, I'll have to see that. I did the Drivers of SL drive through there, and the drive directions said use an "amphibious vehicle" for that section. Driving around the fantasy regions in a Larsson Logistics Hydro-Hauler, a heavy-duty amphibious truck, just felt wrong.

I was just flying over Bellessaria, and the cloud movement as you go from one environment to another is disorienting. That zippy cloud movement when changing environments needs to go. However, the storm outside the fantasy continent is great!

Probably more like the Hyperreality video. I've linked that before. It's more relevant now, because it seems to be Zuckerberg's vision - an overlay on the real world with Facebook-type info. That's where Google Glass, the Microsoft Hololens, and the other see-through headgear people may be headed. That's not the space SL is in, though. That's Augmented Reality, an overlay on the real world. Not another world such as SL. We're seeing more commentary on that in the New Yorker and similar intelligentsia-oriented publications. The same criticism has historically been aimed at books, movies, TV, the Internet, and smartphones - that people would detach from the real world in favor of involvement with some imaginary world. We do see that. People walking around looking at smartphones for a significant portion of their waking hours. That line leads to the AR/Hyperreality future. That problem is more on the passive entertainment side, though. "The great thing about television is that it's so passive" - Ted Turner (founder of TNT, CNN, etc.) Immersive virtual worlds and games require more engagement. That particular problem is less relevant to SL. It comes up a lot in fiction, because, in fiction, you can have "full dive" technology, where you really do feel that you're in the world. Nobody knows how to do that for real yet. Wearing a VR headset with tracking might eventually get close, but so far, wearing VR headgear is something people only do for short periods. Play Beat Saber for half an hour, fine. Spend 8 hours a day in VR at work, no.

There are various whiteboards on Marketplace. Not great, given the limitations of displaying text in SL, but sort of OK.

If you go to New Babbage, Babbage Palisades region, there is a shop called Graves Investigations, next to the Sphinx Club. In that shop, there are bookshelves and cases of curiosities. They're worth a very close look. Someone went to a lot of trouble. This is SL at its best.

Market Map of the Metaverse. Linden Lab, where are you? By the same author is this article, "The Experiences of the Metaverse". This focuses on what do you do in the Metaverse. Second Life can do all that. Yet SL isn't even seen as being in the game.

That's considered a "please do my homework for me" posting. If you want to do something useful, try taking a close look at the new user experience and its problems. Go to the places that offer new users help, and watch and take notes as people show up with problems. Go to Firestorm Help Island, or New Resident Services at Kuula, or Caledon Oxbridge. Just sit down within chat range of the action, watch, wait, and take notes. (Taking video of others without permission is not permitted by the terms of service, but you can take a few stills to illustrate your paper.) These places are all run by volunteers, not SL staff. Talk to the staff when they're not busy. The two standard new user problems are "What do I do now?", and "How do I fix this #!$% clothing problem?" Spend enough time in world to see both go by a few times. That will give you a sense of the UI / UX problems. What would you do to make that better? To get a better sense of games within SL, I'd suggest visiting two games - the Amazon River experience, and Cocoon. The Amazon River experience has a very elaborate new user tutorial and uses the Second Life experience system to enforce game rules. Do the tutorials and play a bit to get a sense of how they did that. Cocoon is a cyberpunk role playing space. it's complicated, it has a lot of rules, it has serious roleplayers, and it's visually striking. Interviewing people there would interfere with roleplay, but you can just tour. (Cocoon asks that you wear an out of-character tag, offered at the entrance, if you're just looking.) Those two are examples of places with a complex user experience which they try to explain to new users. Think about how that could be improved. Other useful places to visit are London City and Social Island 10. You can go there and ask new users your questions. To talk to some more experienced users, try visiting Builders Brewery, where people learn to build. There are usually people there and most are willing to talk. You might also sit in on a meeting of Server User Group or Content Creation User Group or Open Development User Group and meet some of the people who make the machinery go.

If you're looking for good places to start in Second Life, open the menu World->Destinations and pick something from the "Newcomer Friendly" category.

I'm not sure. It beats getting on a plane to go to another city to spend an hour in a meeting. I have yet to see a good convention in a virtual world. Someone must have done it by now. But nether GDC or SIGGRAPH, which actually charge to visit the "virtual exhibit hall" and presumably have access to good graphics people, did that at all well this year. LL has a large number of shopping events, and that works reasonably well. It would work even better if the viewers loaded assets faster and in a more useful order, so you spent less time staring at blurs.

Facebook has a new VR offering, "Facebook Workrooms". Facebook Workrooms is the office version of Facebook Horizons. Similarly, Breakroom is the office version of Sinespace. There seems to be a niche for these meeting systems. First reviews indicate that the visuals are poor (see above) but the spatial audio is very good. You can reportedly turn your head and talk to your neighbor without bothering others. They also have a usable whiteboard and presentation system. SL could be a player in this if the SL onboarding process wasn't such a botch. SL used to try for this business. Visit "Boardroom" to see the prim-era SL equivalent. (Why is everyone legless in Facebook products? To prevent any possibility of sex. Really.)

A real question is, will he have enough clout within LL to get sufficient resources to do anything with SL? Here are the current Linden Lab job ads. 7 for Tilia, 2 in accounting, 2 customer support people for SL. That's why nothing gets fixed.

Yes. I get that problem with the ZiSwim swim HUD, which rezzes ripples. If the ripples hit a ban line, I get an error message. (ZiSwim also tries to phone home to some long-gone web server, which produces other error messages. I need a new swim HUD.)

Too early to say much. Does he have a Linden name yet?

Yes. All the different levels of detail, and the physics model, are stretched to have the same bounding box. This was supposedly intended to prevent greifing through creating physical obstacles much bigger than the visible object. It's an annoying headache, because no 3D creation tool works that way.

We're sorry, but a temporary technical error has occurred which means we cannot display this site right now. Connection refused I've been getting this intermittently for the last few hours. A few retries usually get past it. Second Life Status says: All Systems Operational.

If you ask support nicely, and you're very clear on what you want, and you correct them when they misinterpret what you said, you can usually get your inventory copied over from the main grid to the beta grid within a few days.

You can do most of that with an experience, although it's a bit tricky. Visit the "Amazon River" roleplay areas. The experience makes you wear their HUD, which restricts camming. You can still move the camera, but the HUD notices and puts up objects to block your view while threatening to eject you. Camera control in SL needs work. You should never sit down and find yourself with your camera stuck behind a wall. I'd like to see SL support more controls. The full set of HID-compatible devices. (Joysticks, game controllers, etc.)

Facebook-style ad tracking, of course. Real Names. There are now, it seems, two competing visions of the metaverse. Hell, and Heaven. Hell looks like that video Hyperreality I've mentioned before. Run by Facebook. Ads overlaid on the real world. "Branding". Someone is now working on contact lenses for this. Heaven looks like Luca Grabacr's latest video, which Strawberry Singh just linked today. That shows Second Life at its best. That's what the Metaverse should look like. LL just needs to make Second Life run all the time as well as it does at its best. This is hard technically, but far, far easier than cold-starting a new world. As Sansar demonstrated. (The whole NFT thing was a fad that peaked last February. Some of the suckers haven't figured that out yet.)

If you like amusement parks in SL, try the Unknown Park in Rivula. Riding the flume ride at night at the Unknown Park. There are about twenty rides, some very large and elaborate. It's rarely visited. Spend half an hour there. Can you do better?

Forbes has some good things to say about Second Life today. One Metaverse already exists. Second Life, a web based 3D virtual world, has been popular for two decades. It still has a million monthly users. It has an economy. People buy and sell virtual real estate and digital goods. It is spatial (3D). It has persistence. It is social. You have an embodied presence, an avatar. Second Life may already be a metaverse. But, as we know, it is not the metaverse. The distinction is incredibly important. The Guardian is negative on the Zuckerberg vision of the metaverse. Tech oligarchs like Zuckerberg, with his Sauron-like ambition to own the One Ring to rule them all, seem like the worst choice to put in charge of building a new world. The Zuckerberg vision seems to be people wearing goggles all their waking hours, logged into Facebook. That may seem insane, but look how many people walk around glued to their phone screens. While wearing iDweebs in their ears. Pushback against that vision is growing. Bloomberg has a video about an Korean telco's metaverse. It looks like Second Life from years ago, but it does have better avatar tracking. Second Life remains well positioned in the metaverse industry.

Yes, there are still some bad spots. The SLRR needs a track geometry car, something with which you travel over the track and get reports of the bad spots on the track. Track geometry car. Real world version. SL could use something like this - a vehicle with scripting to detect and log misaligned guide rails, gaps, switches that don't operate properly, and the other little problems that cause trains to get stuck or derail. There's an SLRR standard for track, so we know what the proper dimensions are.

No, it's the old bling.

You'll probably have to do it the other way round. Set it up so that whatever triggers the object rising also triggers the animation. Animations in SL happen in the viewer. The server (which is where scripts run) just tells the viewer "run this animation file", but the server has no idea what the animation does. This has many implications. Animations have no effect on collisions. They can't cause anything to happen that the server sees as an event. So they can't trigger much of anything. You can't even tell when they're done, except by keeping track of when they started and how long they run. There are restaurants in SL which do what you want to do. One of the better ones is the Brunel Hotel in New Babbage. Go have dinner there.

There's the Confederation of Democratic Simulators. It's six regions run by officials elected every six months by the landowners. They've been quietly doing this for 17 years now. Visit Neufreistadt and start at the town square.

I appreciate SL's ethos, which does come from its early years of hope. The hands-off, we're just the municipal government attitude does help. I want SL's traditions to play a strong role in defining how the metaverse looks. Otherwise, we get something awful like Zuckerberg's AR goggles with ad overlays on everything, or totally censored and monitored life from the Roblox people. I listened to the SIGGRAPH "Metaverse" panel today. Mostly people talking about plans, not actuals. Anyone can watch for free in a month. It cost $50 to watch it live. Lots of interest in graphic object standards from NVidia and Kronos. They like Pixar's USD content format, which is a superset of glTF. Roblox has big plans. 5 years to the metaverse. NPCs with AI, 10,000 avatars in a space, automatic voice language translation, 100ms automatic censorship for saying bad words. (Roblox is very kid-oriented and has a huge army of moderators.) Epic just sent some guy from Quixel, which is scanning everything in sight, like Google Earth at super high rez. Nobody from Facebook. Nobody from the NFT crowd. It's early days. I'm encouraged to see the progress on graphics standards.