Now open in the gardens and piazza of Astral Dreams is an open-air exhibition by Mistero Hifeng, featuring his 3D art.
Caught is the grip of a frozen winter, the garden and piazza are an excellent setting for Mistero’s evocative pieces, and he has exhibited measured care in placing his work such that it appears as a natural part of the garden, rather than being simply placed within it.
Take Bruciando Ricordi (“Burning Memories” – at the top of this article) for example, as it sits within the slowly rotating cog set into the ground at the landing point. The latter is the first visible sign that Astral Dreams has a strong steampunk influence, but Bruciando Ricordi occupies the centre of the cog as if the two were intended for one another. Meanwhile, the two figures of Veglio su di te (“Watch Over You), which are bent over the piece blend perfectly with the frosted branches and leaves of the tall oak tree shading the landing point, they could almost at first glance be mistaken for tree trunks.
Given the theme of the gardens is that of romance (alongside the steampunk element), Mistero has also selected pieces which offer feelings of passion for the core of this exhibition. Along with Bruciando Ricordi, there is Ti respiro e ti trattengo rising from the nearby pond, while the stage is dominated by Le ultime frasi degli amanti and Tu hai l’anima che io vorrei, with La…chiamano realta’ and Aneladam occupying two corners of the dance floor.
This is not an extensive exhibit, but for those who enjoy Mistrero’s work or would like an introduction to his sculptures, it is an ideal one to visit. Should you do so, note that all of the major pieces are for sale, and do be sure to follow the untitled figure of the woman with the umbrella as it sits along the path away from the landing point, over the bridge and to one of the buildings at the edge of the garden – not all of Mistero’s pieces are displayed outside.
The first annual Kultivate Spring Fashion Event opened its doors on Saturday, February 11th, and runs through until Sunday February 26th, in aid of Feed A Smile / Live And Learn Kenya.
The event features over 50 designers and creators, a variety of fashion shows organised by event partners Amazing Impressions Modelling (AIM), a shopping area with exclusives, two special hunts, entertainment, and more! The Fantasy Angels will also present a special themed show as the grand finale to the event.
You can find out full details on participating merchants and designers on the Spring Fashion Event web pages, and the shows scheduled for the event are as follows (all time SLT, check the event schedule for any updates):
February 11th:
10:00 – Exclusives Show
16:00 – Bliensen & Mai Tai, Sonatta Morales, & The Bohemian Underground.
February 12th:
10:00 – Mahlberg Tailors, Virtual Diva, & Prism
16:00 – Tayren’s Fantasy Fashions, Feyline, & Spyralle.
Entertainment for the event will kick off at 13:00 SLT on Saturday, February 11th, with Dimivan Ludwig.
Two hunts will be running throughout the event. The Rose Hunt features 25 roses scattered across the event areas. Simply follow the hints and find the roses. The free-to-enter, HUD-based Fashion Quest offers a prize bag of 10 items for all who complete it. Someone has deliberately hidden much-needed items for an upcoming fashion show across the event areas. Can you follow the clues and recover them all to solve the Fashion Quest mystery?
Throughout the week, visitors to the event will also be able to donate directly to Feed A Smile via their official kiosks and / or by buying tickets to a special raffle.
You can find out more and keep up-to-date with the event via the Kultivate Spring Fashion Event web pages.
About Feed A Smile
Feed A Smile is a programme run by Live and Learn Kenya (LLK) to provide nutritious warm lunches for over 400 children every day, paid for entirely from donations to the project. Over a third of the money directed at the programme comes from donations received through Feed a Smile in Second Life – and that’s a remarkable figure.
The money is raised through fund-raisers like this, and through live music played at the Feed A Smile Region, which stages around 5 or 6 events weekly. At these music events, musicians donate their tips, and visitors are asked to donate just L$100 ($0.30), which is enough to purchase a filling meal for a child in Kenya, a fact that within itself is also quite mind-boggling!
If you would like to offer support to Feed A Smile through fund-raising, etc., please contact Brique Topaz in-world.
On Tuesday, February 7th, the Main (SLS) channel received the same server maintenance package a deployed to the three RC channel in week #5.
There was no planned deployment to the three RC channels for the week.
SL Viewer
Love Me Render
On Thursday, February 9th, the Lab released the first of the new branch of release candidate viewers focusing entirely on fixes an improvements for the viewer’s rendering system. To distinguish it from the current Maintenance RC viewer, the rendering RC has been called (for this release, at least) Love Me Render.
Version 5.0.2.323361 comprises a handful of updates – but as the Lab notes, changes to the viewer’s rendering system can be a little scary, and things can easily go wrong, so huge lists of updates for this type of viewer may not be common. This first round of updates comprises:
An improvement to mesh LOD calculation (account for CTRL+0).
A fix for a mesh avatar deformation issue, which was due to bounding box / LOD swaps.
A fix for the issue where some mesh becomes invisible when camming. This was due to an earlier fix for another issue (non-public JIRA MAINT-6125).
A fix for the bug where setting one avatar to Do Not Render (right-click avatar context menu) caused all avatars to become imposters.
The last item above is related to the Avatar Complexity code, which gets which also gets what might be the most important change in terms of rendering / performance. With this viewer, agents (avatars) which are rendered as “Jelly Dolls” should now have any attachments they are wearing render at 0 LOD.
This change is designed to prevent attachments with high render LOD from being loaded into memory, thus further deterring worn graphics crashers. Note that in order for this improvement to work, you must leave the debug setting RenderAutoMuteByteLimit at its default of 0.
Remaining Pipelines
The rest of the official viewers list remains as per the start of the week:
Current Release version: 5.0.1.323027, dated January 25, promoted February 3 – formerly the Maintenance RC viewer.
RC viewers:
Maintenance RC viewer, version 5.0.2.323359 released on February 3 – new features, improvements and bug fixes
Project viewers:
Project Alex Ivy (LXIV), 64-bit project viewer, version 5.1.0.501863 for Windows and Mac, released on January 10
360-degree snapshot viewer updated to version 4.1.3.321712 on November 23, 2016 – ability to take 360-degree panoramic images – hands-on review.
Obsolete platform viewer version 3.7.28.300847 dated May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.
Where Is Everybody?
Regular attendees of in-world meetings cannot help but have noticed that the majority of meetings this week were cancelled, mostly due to scheduling conflicts with internal meetings at the Lab. Normal service resumes in week #7 (commencing Monday, February 13th). As the cancellations for this week included the TPVD meeting for this week, this will also now take place on Friday, February 17th, 2017.
Anduril is a homestead region which has been designed as a collaborative piece between Asa Vordun and Marina Breen. I’ve long been a fan of Asa’s region design work, having first encountered it with Caprice and Easy A back in 2014, then following the development of Caprice, and after it, L’Arc-en-Ciel, which closed in 2015. So it was with a sense of anticipation that I hopped over with Caitlyn to see what this latest build might be.
Now, to be perfectly honest, with a name like Anduril, I was expecting a build which might exhibit at least hints of Tolkien or have something of a Middle Earth look or feel. However, this is not the case; which should not be taken to mean the region in any way lacks magic; quite the reverse.
Visitors arrive in what appears to be the main street of a small town. A hotel stand on one side of the paved road, a pub and warehouse-cum-cinema / club on the other. Close by, the rounded tower of a lighthouse rises from a blockhouse base, suggesting this is a coastal town, and indeed, it is surrounded by water, although hills are visible beyond, so perhaps it lies within the estuary of a great river.
Everything is caught in the filtered light of morning, the Sun to the east, masked by heavy cloud and casting a warming glow over the distant hills. Along the street lights gleam from windows or illuminate the fronts of houses. A sailing boat rocks gently, moored within the arms of concrete piers, and cars reflect the lights in their polished finishes. It is a picture of calm suburbia; only the soft moaning of the wind gives the scene an edge of suspense, leading to the question of, “where is everybody?”
A walk along the street in one direction will take you past the moored boat and to the white front of a ballet school, where a latter-day Marcel Marceau uses the lights illuminating the school to highlight an impromptu performance up on a balcony. Turn inland from the main street, passing under the bridge between lighthouse and hotel, and you’ll enter a rugged landscape, cut by a channel of water beyond which sheer, bridge-topped cliffs rise, reached via broad stairs, while rusted gates point the way to where a dirt track curls out over a blunt headland.
With the stairs, the track, and a low bridge spanning the dark waters, where you go from here is up to you – but be sure to explore all routes carefully. There is much to be discovered as you explore, be it wooded paths leading to reclusive places to sit and cuddle, the slender finger of old ruins bridging the gap between land and tiny island, the alone sentinel of a small hall sitting atop the vertical face of high cliffs, or the sheltered gorge where pandas play.
Throughout all of this there are statues by the likes of Bryn Oh, Kadaj Yoshikawa, Mistero Hifeng and Silas Merlin to be found, both indoors and outside. These perhaps mark Anduril as a place where art is highly regarded – and may even be symbolic. Whilst not all the building are accessible, those that are should be explored as well, as each sets out its own little vignette – although you might have to look carefully to find your way into the blockhouse on which the lighthouse sits!
Atmospheric, beautifully put together and married to a subtle sound scape, Anduril makes for an engaging visit.
The limos start to arrive at the spotlights roam the skies outside Caitinara Bar
On Wednesday, February 8th, we opened the new look Caitinara Bar with our monthly Music With Anthony theme night – an opportunity for friends and guests to dress up and come along to the bar and have a little extra fun and conversation.
As February is the month of the Academy Awards, we’d decided to have our own celebration of the music and songs from award-winning films over the decades, as well as music and songs from this year’s nominees. To help set the mood, we did a little decorating as well: spotlight swivelling across the skies outside, a red carpet extending from roadside into the bar, complete with photo backdrop for those wanting to grab a snap or two (we kept the paparazzi outside!), and Oscar himself adorning the walls.
Ylva, Patti and Kerena
As people began to arrive, so the music started to play – Anthony had selected some of the more recent hits from major award-winning films, and as more arrived so the requests came in as well. Of course, there were the classics, like Moon River (Breakfast at Tiffany’s), When You Wish Upon A Star (Pinocchio), Windmills of Your Mind (The Thomas Crown Affair, 1968), to the songs we perhaps grew up with, like Up Where We Belong (An Officer and a Gentleman), through to more recent ballads, such as Adele’s Skyfall – and many, many more.
Everyone took to the evening in style, the gents looking dapper and dashing, the ladies glittering in frocks and gowns, and the conversation flowed around the music. sadly, we didn’t get the red carpet photos we’d hoped, but the sekrit camera was floating around the dance floor, allowing me to capture the odd shot or two :). If you’re not included in the pictures here, my apologies – I’ll make sure to catch you at the next event!
Bou, Anthony, Sam and Sister
If you couldn’t make it to this month’s special event, our next is on Wednesday, March 1st, when we’ll be featuring the music of the New Romantics. BUT! Don’t forget we have music and dancing at the bar every Wednesday and Friday, from 4:00pm through 6:00pm SLT on each evening, with Anthony Westburn providing the tunes on Wednesdays and Joy Canadeo playing them on Fridays.
So, why not make a note in your diaries and come along and join us? And don’t forget as well, Holly Kai Park is always open for visits, complete with our regular art exhibitions and displays.
There have been a number of press reports on Sansar since the start of the year, some of which I’ve covered in these pages – such as in Road to VR (see here), Upload VR and Tom’s Hardware (see here). However, while I’ve read others, I’ve not made the time to write about them. so, in case you missed them, here’s a quick breakdown of notable coverage of the Lab, Sansar and Second Life.
On January 19th, Réalité Virtuelle, the French on-line publication for virtual and augmented reality carried a piece entitled Sansar: la vraie réalité virtuelle débarque en 2017 (“Sansar: the real virtual reality arrives in 2017″).
Penned by Farid Khedri, the piece covers familiar (to those following Sansar’s development) ground, but offers a very well-rounded overview of the Lab’s new platform – and something of a potted history of Second Life, including a look at French politics.
Farid Khedri
A nice touch with the piece is that it starts out with a 5-point summary, noting that Sansar gains the advantage of having the Lab’s long-term exposure to VR environments, thanks to Second Life, that Sansar itself is not “Second Life 2.0” (how many time do we have to emphasise that?), but it is geared towards “social VR” experiences.
The potted history of Second Life is dealt with briefly in the first two paragraphs, which offer a rounded view of the platform circa 2003 through 2007. It’s interesting to note that the platform has not only played something of a role in US politics and presidential elections, as Farid notes:
In France, many candidates in the 2007 presidential election, such as Jean-Marie Le Pen, José Bové, Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal, opened virtual campaign offices in Linden Lab’s metaverse.
Despite the bubble bursting in 2007/8, again as Farid notes, Second Life has – all things considered – been a success in validating the idea of virtual spaces for social networking, and as a means of learning, business and more. This serves to lead into a well-written piece on Sansar and the Lab’s reasoning behind it (including touching on a return to the company’s VR roots with The Rig – although it is not mentioned by name). As such, and whether you opt to read the original piece, or opt to use something like Google Translate, Sansar: la vraie réalité virtuelle débarque en 2017 is worth taking the time to sit down and run through.
Rachel Metz
January 27th saw Rachel Metz delve into similar Sansar territory for the MIT Technology Review.
While somewhat misleadingly entitled Second Life Is Back for a Third Life, This Time in Virtual Reality (Second Life is still very much on its first life, and – as already noted, Sansar isn’t “SL 2.0”, much less some kind of “Second Life Three”), the article offers a further general overview of Sansar and the Lab’s hopes for it.
Although there is nothing particularly “new” in the piece vis-à-vis Sansar, what I do like about it is that rather than being gung-ho about VR’s future, Rachel offers a measure of caution about how and where the brave new (VR) world might actually go:
Consumer virtual reality is still in its infancy—over two million headsets were shipped worldwide in 2016, according to an estimate from market researcher Canalys. That’s tiny compared to the several hundred million smartphones that ship each quarter, and we’re still figuring out what the heck to do with virtual reality.
And therein lies the rub. As I’ve stated elsewhere, while I believe VR definitely has a future – we just need the technology to mature in ease-of-use (size) and cost – I remain sceptical that it will be as all-pervasive as VR evangelists state – particularly when AR and MR would seem to have much broader practical applications which can impact our daily lives. Thus, Sansar is something of a gamble for the Lab, although Second Life is a long way down the road in demonstrating that if done right, and allowing for the potential for Sansar to fit a lot of suitable use-cases far more easily and affordably than SL has managed, the Lab’s new platform could have a comfortable future.
Going back to earlier in January – but offering a nice pivot away from Sansar and to Second Life, on January 8th, 2017, Alex Burnham examined how Virtual reality opens new doors in education for Florida State University (FSU) News. In particular, he looked at how the university has successfully leveraged Second Life in undergraduate programmes.
Alex Burnham discussing FSU’s use of Second Life for education
The work involving Second Life has been spearheaded by professors William Landing and Stephanie Dillon. Working with Chant Newall Development Group, CNDG, they have developed environments within Second Life to help students studying environmental science (under Prof. Landing) and chemistry (under Prof. Dillon).
The article highlights some of the challenges of virtual teaching, as noted by undergraduate student Chris Ortiz, but it also underlines the broad range of opportunities that virtual environments offer for achieving goals and allowing greater understand of, and involvement with, the subjects being taught – something I have little doubt will increase as the likes of Sansar come on stream and which also – equally importantly – demonstrates that far from being a thing of the past, as some pundits would have people believe, education is still a source of involvement and experimentation within Second Life.
Nadika Nadja
In Gender Binary: Second Life, First Loves (January 30th), we are presented within an exploration of gender and identity – two topics which have been much explored in the past through Second Life.
Here, the discussion and exploration – which also in passing touches on archaeological and historical recreation – is presented in a very personal form: the thoughts of Nadika Nadja. It’s a thoughtful, thought-provoking piece, one of a series written for GenderIT.org, poignant for their outright honesty and directness.
Given all that is going on in the world today, with so many fundamental human rights under threat and with so many living in the world who are unable to give expression to their inner selves, Nadika’s article is a powerful reminder of the freedoms inherent in spaces like Second Life we can personally experience – and how they can help us to grow and better understand ourselves and those around us.
This is an article I was tempted to write at length about – but anything I have to say is actually superfluous; Nadika’s own words need no filter; they are beautifully honest and open, and should be read directly. Instead, I’ll leave you with her closing comment – one which, I think it fair to say, will resonate in all of use who are engaged in Second Life, no matter what our backgrounds, beliefs, feelings or desires.
In turn, Second Life took all my love and gave me something else in return: a community I could depend on, a world I could belong to, an identity I could own.
The final article I’m turning to is Samantha Cole’s piece in Motherboard, Second Life Users Are Protesting With Their Avatars (February 4th, and later picked up by Glixel), a piece looking at Avatars Against Trump moment, established by Strawberry Singh and Cajsa Lilliehook in the wake of the increasingly divisive and negative Trump regime in the United States, and which also reference’s the Lab’s own statement on Trump’s immigration policy (which I reported here).
As noted earlier, politics are not uncommon in Second Life – we are, after all, all flesh and blood behind the screens, so it is only natural the line between physical and virtual worlds is naturally blurred. But as explored within the Motherboard article, Second Life offers a unique ability for people from all backgrounds, religious, geographic, political, social, etc., to come together in a virtual melting pot and – for the most part explore views, understand positions and even form bonds. And which it is required, the platform can also be as much a voice of social conscience as any other medium or activity.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 