Saturday, October 31st marked the closing date for submission to this year’s combined 5th University of Western Australia’s (UWA) Grand Art Challenge and MachinimUWA challenge, Pursue Impossible.
The challenge takes its theme from the UWA’s clarion call to students in the physical world to achieve their fullest possible potential by studying with the university. Within the challenge, it calls on entrants to consider what their “impossible” might be. Perhaps it might be something personal, a goal achieved individually or by a loved one or friend. Or perhaps it is consideration of those things we deem to be impossible, but which we may still pursue and conquer as individuals or collectively. Perhaps it is itself a clarion call for us all to face the things we consider impossible and rise above them; or maybe it is an illustration of how virtual environments empower people to visualise, create and push the boundaries of the possible. There are many options and opportunities to consider.
There have been some amazing entries in both the art and machinima elements of the challenge, as I hope my coverage of Pursue Impossible n these pages demonstrates. With the closing date having passed, the task of judging the entries begins, and with it the opportunity for all residents in Second Life to share in the prizes on offer.
On Thursday, November 5th, the UWA announced the launch of the Pursue Impossible MachnimUWA audience participation challenge, with a prize pool of L$41,000. All you have to do to have an opportunity to win one of the five prizes on offer, which range from L$12,000 to L$5,000, is to watch the 45 machinima entries to the competition, then list those videos you think will finish in the TOP 10 in order 1st – 10th, as decided by the official judging panel.
Entries should be made via note card in-world, passed to Jayjay Zifanwe with your name in the title of the card, together with “MachinimUWA VIII Audience Event”. Alternatively, you can e-mail your list to jayjayaustralia-at-hotmail.com. All entries must be submitted no later than midnight SLT on Sunday, December 6th, 2015.
The full list of machinima entries can be found in the UWA’s Audience Event announcement linked to above. Remember, this is not a popularity vote. Your top 10 entry / entries should be your prediction of who the actual top 10 will be according to the official judging panel.
Winners will be announced at the Grand Finale for the challenge, which will be held 06:00 SLT on Sunday, December 13th 2015.
It’s no secret that I’m an admirer of Alex Bader’s creations in Second Life. I’ve loved his castles since I first encountered one by chance during my travels, and I have a fair few of his landscape and texture sets stuffed into my purse (aka inventory) as well as making a fair amount of use of them on the home island.
One of my favourite items obtained from Alex earlier in the year was his Luxury Forest Cabin, which has been my home since April 2015. It’s an outstanding and stylish design presenting a spacious 2-room living space, fully furnished and packed with detail (and animations) for a land impact of just 55, and a tidy footprint of 23.5 x 21.5 metres. However, as is the way of things in Second Life, it has now been retired to make way for a new house. And guess what? It’s again from Alex.
The Skye Beach House (steps by the pool my addition, using a copy of the original steps supplied)
Truth be told, I’ve been quite taken by the Skye Beach House for a while now, but haven’t had reason to invest in it as I have been very comfortable with the Forest Cabin. However, As a recent encounter has come to be something rather more, the desire to have a new home has grown.
This is a contemporary design with a similar footprint to the Luxury Cabin (24 x 19.5 metres), but benefiting an upper floor to provide a third room. Fully furnished and complete with a swimming pool, the house has an overall land impact of 61, and offers a lot of living space in a compact layout.
Plenty of interior space (sofa, cat and piano not supplied!)
To cater for beach locations, where the terrain can be uneven, the house and its deck are raised up on legs. This can leave the pool, located at the front of the house, looking like a bit of a brick, but overall, the approach works well and certainly overcame the unevenness of the rock-top location on our little island. Access is via a set of steps leading up to the deck, which has glass railings to two sides and offers a fair amount of space for additional outdoor seating.
Indoors, there is a large lounge which is pre-furnished with armchairs, tables, a dining table and 4 chairs, paintings on the walls, etc. Alongside of this, and up a set of three steps is the second ground floor room which is nominally the bedroom and opens-out onto the pool patio. The third room sits over the lounge and by default comes with armchairs, table and telescope. There are lots of other touches – lighting, picture frames (just drag and drop your own photos), books, etc., which make this a complete out-of-the-rezzer home, while allowing anything to be swapped out as required. A pose system allows for various poses (single and couple) to be used on the deck and on and in the pool
The house atop the island, replacing the Skye Luxury Forest Cabin
The house is copy / modify, making any necessary small changes relatively simple. For me, that meant a slight resizing of the pool and the addition of an extra set of steps alongside it to make access to the house easier. Convenience of use also meant shifting the bedroom upstairs, where the balcony also gives a great views of the setting sun :).
As with all of Alex’s work, the attention to detail is exemplary, and the use of materials exquisite; one of the most attractive things about both the Beach House and Forest Cabin is the manner in which the windows naturally “reflect” light, be it sunlight or from a scripted source.
Home sweet home (and note the sunlight reflected in the upper floor windows… I do so like that!)
All told, this is another fabulous product from Alex Bader, and one we have absolutely no hesitation in recommending.
“Project Sansar” has been getting noticed again. In Dublin, at the 2015 Web Summit, Ebbe Altberg, the Lab’s CEO gave a presentation about the new platform, the end of which included short video of the platform, which was captured by attendee Janne Juntunen. Following this, at least a couple of articles have appeared in on-line media outlets, with my colleague Ben Lang offering a brief write-up in Road to VR, while Fortune On-line, to which I was directed by Ciaran Laval, also carried a piece.
The Fortune article offers an enticing headline, How ‘Second Life’ Developer Hopes To Deliver The ‘YouTube For VR’, drawing on the Lab’s YouTube / WordPress analogy they’ve used in talking to the media over the last few months, but neither – beyond offering an image captured from “Project Sansar” and which can be seen on the Lab’s redesigned corporate website, has much that is new to those of us following “project Sansar” as closely we can.
An image from the Lab’s redesigned corporate website showing the Golden Gate Bridge model from “Project Sansar”, complete with flying vehicles moving around it – a moving versions of which was show at the Dublin Web Summit 2015
The YouTube / WordPress analogy is fitting, given that “Project Sansar” is designed to be pretty much a white label environment where clients and customers can come into the platform, develop their virtual spaces and then market them to their users under a brand of their own choosing, complete with dedicated access from the web.
Given most of the statements made in both articles will be familiar to those following Sansar, I was drawn to one statement in particular made by Ebbe Altberg:
We want to make it less expensive and less difficult for creators to get started with Project Sansar, while at the same time enabling them to create higher quality, larger, and more immersive experiences, reach larger audiences,and create much larger business opportunities—whether selling virtual items or monetizing entire experiences. In addition to supporting our community of creators we’ll give them tools to create and support their own communities and serve their customers and audiences. [Emphasis mine.]
The first part of this comment again doesn’t really reveal anything new; however, I’ve highlighted the last past of it because it presents another opportunity for some speculation.
A further image from the Lindenlab.com home page showing a scene which formed a part of the Lab’s Dublin Web Summit video
Yesterday, and thanks to a huge amount of legwork by Vick Forcella, I wrote about the Lab’s subsidiary Tilia Inc, and the filing of a trademark for Tilia, a payment processing system. Seeing Altberg’s comments about providing “project Sansar” customers / clients tools to … serve their customer and audiences”, I find myself wondering if “Tilia” might be intended to provide “Project Sansar” customers with a further white label environment in which they can build and brand their own marketplace presence and control the goods and services presented to their customers.
Thus, rather than sending their users to a generic “Project Sansar” marketplace where they might be confronted with a plethora of goods, including those from competitors or which might otherwise be unsuitable to their target audience, customers using Sansar could present their users with exactly the virtual good they wish them to see and use, a level of control which could be extremely attractive to the core vertical markets towards which “Project Sansar” seems to be being steered (e.g. education, training, simulation, architecture and business).
Ebbe Altberg presents a short video featuring footage shot from inside “Project Sansar” at the Dublin Web Summit 2015 (image via Janne Juntunen on Twitter)
In his Road to VR piece, Ben Lang focuses more on the technical aspects of the new platform, pointing-out that style and looks can be an integral part of a game or platform’s longevity, and that in his estimation of these initial screen shots, “Project Sansar” is hitting the nail pretty much on the head.
It is in the Road to VR piece that we do get an interesting insight. It has been previously indicated that “Project Sansar” will offer ways and means to optimise content to improve performance, rather than just shoving everything down the pipe and little the viewer try to handle it all. In discussing things with Ben Lang, Ebbe Altberg gives some indicators as to how this will be achieved.
We’ll do a lot of things to help users understand how to create performant content. There’s a lot of work yet to do, but we have plans for things like automatic optimization of content, polygon reduction of content that preserves quality at the same time, including showing users that create content some sort of visual indication of how performant their content is going to be across various platforms [i.e. clients].
Both articles offer good light reading on “Project Sansar”, even if they don’t offer anything especially new, with the Fortune articles also underlining a few facts, good and bad, about Second Life.
I remain intrigued by the direction the Lab is taking with their new platform. While it is early days, and given the fact I still tend to feel “Project Sansar” will end up niche product – albeit it a much larger niche than filled by the likes of Second Life and OpenSim today – I also tend to think that the Lab is far more one the right track in their thinking than those behind some of the other platforms currently in development out there.
November sees Gidgy Buckshot (Gidgette Adagio) arrive at The Living Room Gallery and music venue with an exhibition of work entitled LoveIs… – and it is a sheer joy.
Many may be familiar with the title, Love Is…, as being used in the cartoon series by the late Kim Casali. This is no accident, as Gidgy explains, “When I was a little girl, my Great Grandmother used to collect a comic strip called “love is”. She’d cut out the comics and tape them into an album. I spent hours looking through her scrapbook. This series is dedicated to my Great Grams. How I miss those moments with her.”
Taking their lead from the original cartoons, Gidgy’s pictures present a whimsical and delightful set of scenes shoot with her partner, Wilberforce Buckshot (WilberforceBuckshot). Some of these, like the originals, have been taken with the couple naked, while all of them express the joys of being in love, be it when greeting your partner as they return from a trip, caring for them whilst they are ill, sharing a daring pastime together, missing them when they are absent – even discovering one of their naughty secrets (the Interwebz have a lot to answer for, above right!).
In all, 13 images are presented, all of them for sale, and together they give a charming and touching insight into the lives of Gidy and Wilburforce as an older couple still very much full of the youthful joys of love.
As well as the Love Is… series, and located on the floors above and below it, are further examples of Gidy’s photography which reveal more of her talent, offering a set of visually stunning studies of avatars.
Love Is … is a wonderful display of art which captures the essence of the original comic series and offers it through the lens of Second Life in a way that cannot fail to bring a smile to the lips. Alongside of it, the display of Gidgy’s more formal work present a powerful contrast in styles and approach, and which demonstrate a formidable eye for composition and artistic statement. Together, the two aspects of this exhibition make it one not to be missed.
November will also see Owl, Daallee and Nora hosting musics events at The Living Room, featuring Billy Thunders at 17:00 SLT on Thursday, November 12th, followed by The Vinnie Show at 18:00 SLT. Then, on Tuesday, November 24th, Wald Schridde will be closing out Gidgy’s exhibition with a live show at 18:00 SLT.
As always, please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest information and feedback.
On Tuesday, November 3rd, the Main (SLS) channel received the server maintenance package previously deployed to BlueSteel and LeTigre, comprising a simulator crash fix
On Wednesday, November 4th, all three RC channel received a new server maintenance package comprising a fix for group invite throttle notifications, and an internal server code clean-up.
Part of the code-clean up for the RC channels deployment appears to involve a fix for the region edge issue I reported on in my week 44 report, with Simon Linden commenting at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday, November 3rd, “The new code going into RC has one interesting tool in it for our support staff … there’s a sim console command to reset the land edges to match what’s visible.”
SL Viewer Updates
The HTTP release candidate viewer (Project Azumarill) updated to version 3.8.7.306796 on Monday, November 2nd, possibly the last update before this viewer gets promoted to the de facto viewer in week #46.
Group Issues
There are a number of issues with groups the Lab is aware of, including those who are ejected from a group whilst in a group chat session still being able to continue using the chat until they close the window (see SVC-32), an issue not fully resolved when group bans were introduced.
This issue is one that the Lab is hoping to address, however, it is dependent upon some infrastructure changes being made, so may now happen in the immediate future, although the hope is to get the underpinning work done “pretty soon”.
Friend and fellow blogger, Vick Forcella contacted me at the end of October concerning some interesting items related to Linden Lab he’d uncovered in digging around a few places.
The first comes in the form of documents relating to a relatively new Linden Lab subsidiary company, and the second in a partially filed trademark.
The subsidiary company is called Tilia Inc., and at first glance it seems to be completely unrelated to the Lab, being referred to as being involved with ” Packaging Machinery”. However, an examination of the company’s papers will reveal it is registered at 945 Battery Street – the Lab’s headquarters, as a check on Buzzfile confirmed to me.
Tilia Inc appears to be a defunct corporate entity, first registered in 2002, which has been acquired by the Lab. This, and the further registrations of the name across several US states as a “foreign” entity (meaning the filing is by an existing corporate entity registered in another US state), tended to suggest the Lab might be using the company to leverage certain tax advantages – a common practice among corporations around the world. Further support for this appeared to come from the names of the directors: the Lab’s CFO, Malcolm Dunne, their Legal Counsel, Kelly Conway and, from outside of the Lab, Benjamin Duranske, founder of PayCom Consulting, and LeAnne Hoang, the Lab’s former Chief Compliance and AML Officer.
Companies registered at 945 Battery Street, the Lab’s HQ, via Buzzfile. Note Philip Rosedale’s “Coffee and Power” sitting in the middle – and its associated industry description!
Obviously one way to get more of a clue was to ask the Lab directly. So I did.
Tilia is a subsidiary of Linden Lab, focused on payments and the compliance work associated with operating virtual economies, and it will provide services for both Second Life and Project Sansar.
Peter Gray, Director of Global Communications, Linden Lab
Following my initial enquiry (which is not to say it is related to it), the list of senior personal at Tilia Inc., dramatically increased. The additional appointees comprise: Bjorn Laurin (Bjorn Linden), Vice President of Product (Blocksworld, Second Life and Sansar), Landon McDowell (Brandon Linden), Vice President of Operations and Platform Engineering, Jeff Peterson (Bagman Linden), Vice President of Engineering, Pam Beyazit, Senior Director of HR, and Peter Gray.
Tilia Inc is said by the Lab to be focused on the compliance work associated with operating virtual economies, and will provide services to “Project Sansar” and Second Life
The trademark, USTPO document 86374264, originally filed on August 22nd 2014, relates to the name of “Tilia”, which is described as, “Computer software, namely, electronic financial platform that accommodates multiple types of payment and debit transactions and the transfer of funds to and from others, in an integrated mobile phone, PDA, and web-based environment.” A further document located by Vick pertaining to the trademark application reveals even more information, and makes for interesting reading on its own.
What this all adds up to is still hard to determine. “Tilia” and Tilia Inc., might be totally coincidental; as such what follows might be pure unfounded speculation; then again, a lot of it also seems to hang together.
As indicated in June 2015 by Ebbe Altberg, the Lab has been focused on four areas of activity, one of which has been that of compliance (see the quote on the right).
This work appears to have been overseen by LeAnne Hoang, prior to her departure from the Lab in July 2015. More recently, the Lab has also transitioned to a new payment processor for credit and debit card payments, which may be related to this work.
Again the two – the compliance work and the new payment processor – could be entirely unrelated. However, given that “Project Sansar” and SL will both operate virtual economies possibly based on the same virtual currency, it would make sense for the Lab to develop a central transaction and payment system capable of supporting both. Doing so could reduce the complexities of managing two payment / transaction systems (or any least manage any exchange mechanisms between two separate currencies) and in managing updates to match evolving compliance and anti-fraud regulations and requirements. If so, could “Tilia” be the proposed name for this new service? But why run it under a separate entity? Why not simply run it under the “Linden Lab” umbrella? Is it a matter of compliance, as stated be Peter Gray in his response to my initial questions? Perhaps so.
Another option might be that the Lab be considering making the Linden Dollar and all its attendant services a pre-packaged solution / service they can offer to other companies wishing to operate a virtual currency, with Tilia Inc., as the nominal operating company for that service. After all, they have made much of their leadership in matters of virtual economies and compliance, so spinning it out and offering it to others might be a means of generating additional revenue, although admittedly, given the complexities potentially involved, this might be seen as a bit of a stretch.
As a believer in Occam’s Razor, and moving away from idle speculation, I can’t entirely let go of the idea that Tilia Inc., might be wrapped in matters of compliance and potentially a means of leveraging tax advantages.
After all, The Lab have made it clear that “Project Sansar” in particular will rely on generating the majority of its revenue through the sales of virtual goods and services. So, spinning out the systems and services that make this possible into a subsidiary registered in states with advantageous tax regulations might be a way for the Lab to reduce its tax exposure on those revenues.
Following Peter Gray’s reply to my original enquiry of a week ago, I have placed follow-up questions with the Lab, but have yet to receive a response. Updates will be forthcoming if a reply is received or should the Lab reveal more themselves.
And why “Tilia”? I would guess it’s to do with the fact that tilia is genus of trees also referred to as linden trees.
My thanks to Vick Forcella for doing much of the digging into Tilia Inc and “Tilia”, for passing the information to me, trusting me to blog about it, and for his patience as I chased down various information myself, sought answers to questions. Thanks also to Johannes1997 Resident for his input on US corporate tax activities.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 