Tag: second life
Second Life Beach Bonanza Contest
by Frans on Aug.03, 2009, under Virtual Worlds
Today is the Last day of the Second Life Beach Bonanza Contest, that Linden Lab has been running on Facebook for a week. The winner is determined by the most ‘like’s on your picture, which I noticed, can be confusing for non native English speakers. Not realising when I ask them to ‘like’ my picture that they have to click on ‘like’.
I entered with a goofy shark attack picture and so far am placed second.
Click on the picture to go to the facebook page for it and click ‘like’ to help me win.
Update: And the contest is closed, I finished second place.
The Imprudence Project
by Frans on Sep.02, 2008, under Virtual Worlds
Jacek Antonelli announced today the Imprudence Project. Being disappointed with current slow pace of development of the SL viewer, Jacek and McCabe Maxsted have started a organised effort to create a user maintained viewer with a pro change attitude. From my own experience with watching the Jira it can often take weeks or months for user created patches to end up in a Release Candidate viewer let alone the Released client.
Jacek:
“This is probably the first you’ve heard about Imprudence, so I’ll take a moment to explain it. Imprudence is (or rather, will be) a major fork of the open source Second Life Viewer. Our aim is to greatly improve the usability of the Viewer through community involvement, thoughtful design, modern development methods, and a pro-change atmosphere.Why are we doing this? Because we, the Second Life Residents, need a better Viewer, and Linden Lab isn’t getting it done — not fast enough, anyway. “
To give their ideas shape and direction they created a manifesto. It explains more precise why they are doing this and what the goals and methods will be for this project.
“The primary goal of Imprudence is simple: to greatly improve the usability of the Viewer. In particular, there are 3 aspects of usability that we intend to address:
- Approachability. Improving comfort and ease of use, especially for new or non-technical users.
- Efficiency. Improving speed and ease of common tasks and workflows.
- Satisfaction. Improving the emotional effect of the software on the user. “
In many ways this is very exciting, reminding me of my early days in SL, when the scent of change was in the air. They are inviting everyone to help whatever your skill level or expertise. Non programmers are specifically invited, tell them what you think is important, or comeup with a new UI design, etc.
Though a project like this stands or falls by the community involvement and the original creators capability and desire to let it grow beyond themselves. But it seems like they are aware of that and have set it up in a way that it is very easy to continue or split off if so needed.
Let’s welcome their intentions, energy, hard work and help out where needed, and who knows what wonders will await us.
Head Tracking in Second Life.
by Frans on Aug.27, 2008, under Virtual Worlds
Our avatars usually are just standing around when we communicate via text or voice in Second Life, not adding any emotion or emphasis to what we say. Sometimes we enhance them with gestures or animations, but it never reaches the deep level of communication you can have with your real life face.
VR-Wear is about to change that, they have been working for several months now to integrate signal processing capabilities in the Second Life Viewer. The VR-Wear team is now able to connect a web cam and analyze your head motions in real-time and have them acted out in Second Life.
VR-Wear has released a short YouTube video showing the tracking of a head gesturing Yes and No. Their software will be released in September with a load of emotions and motions filters that will make your Avatar behave more like you. Maybe even exactly like you, but if really would want that is up for debate.
For the programmers amongst us will be the opportunity to participate and create their own versions. The project will be released under a dual license (GPL-like for non-commercial applications).
via Mobitrends.com
AjaxLife for the iPhone
by Frans on Aug.08, 2008, under Virtual Worlds
If you are unfamiliar with AjaxLife it is described as followed: “AjaxLife is a web app that allows you to log in to the Second Life virtual world from almost anywhere.”
Of course there are some limits to this, most notably that you don’t see the 3D world. Functionally you can do lot, for example chat, teleport, pay and tranfer inventory. This is usefull if you need to login to SL from a computer that doesn’t has or can’t run the Viewer.
To bring this functionality to even more devices and locations a iPhone version has been released. Though this version does not has as much functionality as the web app yet. So far you can Chat, send IMs to your your friends List and recieve IMs. This is a cool and quick way to say hi to a friend or answer a customer while you are on the road, or when you are at a boring movie for example.
To use it you can browse with your iPhone or iPod touch to http://ajaxlife.net . Or if you don’t have a iPhone you can use http://iphonetester.com/ (seems to work best in Safari) and browse to ajaxlife.net/?iphone in it.
There was some trouble with posting this and had to redo it 2 times, my apologies for the repeats in your rss readers.
How to stop the Tools menu from Hiding
by Frans on Aug.07, 2008, under Virtual Worlds
The tools menu gets automatically hiding in the 1.20 release of the Second Life viewer. This was done to reduce the number of menus presented to the (new) users. It only becomes visible when the ‘Build’ window is open.
I like the idea of removing menu items, to make SL looks less daunting for the new User. It seems though that the change is unpopular with and it is going to be changed back in the 1.21 viewer. For the people who can’t wait to have it back, Jacek explained on her blog how to have the Tools menu back permanently with just some simple copy and paste.
This trick is a simple one. Since SL looks for the Tools menu by name to find which menu to hide, all you have to do is change its name, and SL won’t find it, and it’ll stay visible all the time!
The really easy way (download the replacement file):
- Download my pre-chewed XML file to “Second Life/skins/default/xui/en-us/”, replacing the existing one. On OS X, go to Applications, ctrl-click on “Second Life”, choose “Show Package Contents”, then put the file in “Contents/Resources/skins/default/xui/en-us/”.
- Restart SL, enjoy.
The slightly less easy way (edit the file yourself):
- Open up “Second Life/skins/default/xui/en-us/menu_viewer.xml” in your text editor. On OS X, go to Applications, ctrl-click on “Second Life”, choose “Show Package Contents”, then open up “Contents/Resources/skins/default/xui/en-us/viewer-menu.xml” with TextEdit (or your favorite text editor).
- Search for:
name="Tools"(it’s on line 590)- Change
name="Tools"toname="Toolz"or some other non-Tools word.- Save the file, restart SL, enjoy.
Voila, your Tools menu will now be visible all the time. Piece of cake
Second Life Statistics: 27-Feb-2008
by Frans on Feb.28, 2008, under Virtual Worlds
Statistics compared to Wednesday, February 20th:
Peak concurrency dropped 460 users, a decrease of 0.78%.
Minimum concurrency grew 317 users, a increase of 0.96%.
Median concurrency grew 51 users, a increase of 0.11%.
Second Life Statistics: 26-Feb-2008
by Frans on Feb.27, 2008, under Virtual Worlds
Statistics compared to Tuesday, February 19th:
Peak concurrency dropped 332 users, a decrease of 0.56%.
Minimum concurrency grew 286 users, a increase of 0.87%.
Median concurrency grew 551 users, a increase of 1.22%.
Second Life Statistics: 25-Feb-2008
by Frans on Feb.27, 2008, under Virtual Worlds
Statistics compared to Monday, February 18th:
Peak concurrency dropped 1,900 users, a decrease of 3.09%.
Minimum concurrency grew 168 users, a increase of 0.50%.
Median concurrency dropped 993 users, a decrease of 2.14%.
Second Life Statistics: 24-Feb-2008 – New Concurrency Record
by Frans on Feb.26, 2008, under Virtual Worlds
A new Sunday a new record.
Statistics compared to Sunday, February 17th:
Peak concurrency grew 896 users, a increase of 1.41%.
Minimum concurrency dropped 454 users, a decrease of 1.30%.
Median concurrency dropped 253 users, a decrease of 0.53%.
Second Life Statistics: 22-Feb-2008
by Frans on Feb.23, 2008, under Virtual Worlds
First time that we peak over 60 thousand users on a Friday.
Statistics compared to Friday, February 15th:
Peak concurrency grew 2,222 users, a increase of 3.81%.
Minimum concurrency grew 693 users, a increase of 2.12%.
Median concurrency grew 3,034 users, a increase of 6.75%.
