On Thursday, October 25th, 2018, High Fidelity announced FutVRe Lands, a one-day VR celebration featuring a host of activities and events to take place on VR Day, Saturday, November 17th, 2018.
Virtual Reality Day is a series of VR/AR events organized worldwide to help virtual and augmented reality become more mainstream. Any individual, company or organization can host a free public VR/AR event and become part of the Virtual Reality Day phenomenon. This is a completely voluntary and grassroots effort. It’s about bringing the energy and interests of the greater community together, and focusing that energy for the benefit of everyone on one special day.
– From the VR Day website
Billed as “a celebration of the communities developing in social VR. It’s an all-day binge of ground-breaking experiences”, the High Fidelity FutVRE Lands event will run from 12:00 noon through to 17:00 PST, and will include live music, performances. art, speakers, games and contests, ways to earn High Fidelity Coins (HFCs) and opportunities to win VR headsets.
Attendance is open to anyone with a home computer (via High Fidelity’s Desktop mode), VR headset or who uses Google Daydream. Attendance is free, but space is limited, so people are advised to reserve tickets sooner rather than later. Those in the San Francisco area can additionally register to attend the event in person.
Best Avatar Contest: show-off your best avatar creation and win US $1,000 (100,000 HFC), with two runners-up each receiving US $500 (50,000 HFC). Enter Here.
Favourite Domain Contest: do you know an amazing domain? Nominate it for the Favourite Domain Contest! The festival attendees will have an opportunity to visit it and vote for their favourite. The domain with the most votes will win US $700 (70,000HFC) Nominate Here.
Jason Gholston, who through social media and interviews, had become something of a public “face” for Linden Lab’s Sansar Social VR platform, has left the company for pastures new.
Jason joined the Lab in April 2012, working initially on Second Life before transitioning into the Sansar team as a Director of Product.
While working on Second Life, Jason Led the maintenance engineering team with a focus on customer retention and quality of service, and oversaw the attempts to integrate Oculus Rift with the platform.
On transitioning to work on Sansar, he worked on creating the Unity prototypes used to greenlight the development of Sansar. As Product Manager, he was responsible for management of the monthly releases of Sansar from the engine, rendering, audio, level editor, terrain editor, VR level editor, avatar simulation, and content pipeline teams. He also initially hosted the weekly VR meet-ups with the creator community within Sansar to gather feedback, help troubleshoot issues.
Jason was also responsible for establishing Sansar Studios, the content creation team for Sansar. This team has been responsible for developing a range of experiences on the platform designed to help demonstrate capabilities within the platform and for working with content partners to develop unique experiences.
From left to right: Jason Gholston, Drew Struzan, Greg Aronowitz discuss the Drew Struzan Gallery in Sansar during a Deviant Art livestream event with host Matthew Holt. Credit: Deviant Art
As a part of running Sansar Studios, Jason initiated and negotiated unique partnerships and content commissions between Linden Lab and partners, valued at over US $2 million. Some of these partnerships have included the development of experiences tied-in to the Ready Player One movie – Aech’s Garage and Aech’s Basement, the Star Trek ties-ins, Bridge of the USS Enterprise and the Roddenberry Nexus, and most recently No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man, a collaboration between Linden Lab, Intel and The Smithsonian American Art Museum.
The Bridge of the USS Enterprise – a social space where people can watch weekly broadcasts of the Mission Log Live series by Roddenberry Entertainment, hosted by Ken Ray (seen on the viewscreen) and John Champion. One of several collaborative experiences in Sansar Jason Gholston helped bring to fruition
In leaving the Lab, Jason has moved to work for UK-based Speech Graphics, where he takes up the role of Creative Director, working out of the company’s Bay Area offices. Speech Graphics is one of Linden Lab’s technical partners with Sansar, the platform utilising the company’s technology to provide accurate avatar lip-syncing and facial animations, driven in real-time as users simply speak into the microphones on their HMDs or audio headsets.
On a personal note, I had the pleasure of dealing with Jason on several occasions whilst preparing Sansar articles for this blog, and would like to thank him for his willingness to provide his time and assistance, and for supporting this blog through social media. I wish him every success at Speech Graphics.
La Frontera, a homestead region designed by Zaffy Bailey (zaffin) and Pete (PeteSunny), opened its doors to the public recently, offering an opportunity for visitors to spend a little time in a setting inspired by Spain’s autonomous region of Andalusia.
Focusing on a terraced village setting among the steps of high, sandy hills, the region presents a simple, elegant setting visitors are invited to explore and photograph – there is an invitation to upload images to the region’s Flickr group – and to enjoy the general relaxed ambience of the village and the beach below.
The little village is split into two by the steps of the hill, with the landing point set in the terraza of the large part. As befitting the location, the building here are adobe-fronted, with some offering a nod towards Moorish architecture again in keeping with the inspiration for the region, while others are perhaps a little more Tuscan in styling. Bicycles are racked to one side of the fountained square, but to be honest, the cobbled and stone-stepped paths winding between and down from the village’s buildings are better followed on foot.
There are several of these paths, ranging from simple dirt tracks cut into a hill, others ancient stone steps, carefully cut and placed and suggestive that there may once have been something far older than the current houses sitting upon the hill, and still others rough stones loosely planted in the sandy soil. Each offers a route of exploration, either up or down from the terraza, making any exploration a matter of following where your muse leads.
Nor are the paths alone in finding a path down the hillside; a stream, rising up above the village, tumbles by way of falls, channel and sloping path down to where the sea awaits (a second waterfall drops more directly to the sea on the north side of the island). With its rushing, turbulent water crossed here and there by bridge and steps, the fast-placed stream may have, over time, played a role in helping to separate a low-lying sandbank from the rest of the land.
The home of scrub grass, a scattering of trees, wild flowers and tall reeds, the semi-circular sandbar offers a beach where a tan can be gained, and the skin cooled by either a dip is the sea or in the pools to be found on the sun-dried earth of the bank. It is connected to the rest of the land by two humpbacked bridges that stand almost guard-like, one either flank of what might have once been a walled orangery. This appears to have once been a part of a larger formal garden, although only the flagstones of a terrace and a central water feature now remains.
A wooden board walk also spans the arc of water separating the sand bar from the rest of the land. Follow this and it will take you to the near-hidden secret of the region: and underground music venue. Located inside a high-ceilinged cavern, this offers plenty of space for those wishing to dance. Zaffy tells me the plan is to make this the venue Whether this will be a “formal” venue for dancing / music is unclear to me; during my visit, Zaffy was either engaged in building or AFK, as my enquiry went unanswered.
Throughout the region are plenty of opportunities to sit and appreciate the setting, from the beach, through the gardens up to the village – including up on some of the roof tops and verandahs, all the way to the highest peaks (or higher still in the case of the windmill standing well above the land to the north-east). There is also a subtle sound scape to add aural depth to the region as one wanders the paths and trails.
Offering uncluttered charm, plenty of opportunities for photography and perfectly suited to being seen under a variety of warmer windlight settings, La Frontera is a delight to visit, and a reminder to those of us sitting on the cusp of winter that warmer days and days in the Sun really aren’t that far away.
The goal of this project is to provide a means of animating rigged mesh objects using the avatar skeleton, in whole or in part, to provide things like independently moveable pets / creatures, and animated scenery features via scripted animation. It involves both viewer and server-side changes.
Land Impact: a simulator bug has been found that is being fixed. In short, if an Animesh object has a conventional prim as its root, the required 15 LI for the Animesh skeleton is not applied. This LI is an aggregate value for Animesh skeletons during testing Animesh performance for a defined set of test Animesh objects across a range of systems.
This has led to some alarmist blog posts about prim returns, following a (somewhat sensationalist) forum post on Animesh being delayed by 2 weeks (itself guesswork) on the matter. Given that Animesh hasn’t reached release status, and there are few (if any) commercially-available Animesh objects at present, it’s not unfair to say both the blog posts and the forum thread are something of an over-reaction.
Performance Impact: (see BUG-225584 and forum thread). This is related to the new dynamic bound box used with Animesh. Beq Janus from the Firestorm team has been involved in investigations as to the degree of potential impact, and has discovered a potential baseline performance impact of around 8-10% between an Animesh-capable and non-Animesh viewer, regardless of the presence of Animesh.
The latest update to the Animesh viewer (version 6.0.0.520636 at the time of writing), should mitigate a lot of the performance impact resulting from the dynamic bounding box.
Animesh vs. Avatars: while there will be a baseline impact for Animesh objects, this should be less than the baseline impact seen with avatars, which not only have a skeleton, they also have a shape and appearance elements associated with them. The the complexity of a mesh body to an avatar (with a baselines of around 400 faces, plus mesh clothing, attachments, etc., and avatars tend to be a lot more complex than most considered Animesh should be.
Animesh follow-up: there has been a lot of talk about a follow-up project for Animesh since the project started. These include adding a body shape (allowing Animesh humanoid objects to gain slider support), which is viewed by the Lab as being possibly the preferred follow-on project, although it is acknowledged given the wide variety of arbitrary mesh forms that could be converted to Animesh, slider use might be limited. However, it is unlikely any follow-on project will be an immediate follow-on to the current work, as there are several other projects currently in the pipeline awaiting attention.
Animesh attachments: another long-term request has been to attach objects to Animesh creations. A problem here is that attachments are managed by the simulator-side avatar agent – and Animesh objects do not have an avatar agent associated with them, so they don’t have the back-end support for tracking attachments. This is an issue that needs to be solved before attachments on Animesh can be handled – and even then, there is the question for potential performance impact. Various alternative ideas have been suggested to allow for attachment support n Animesh, but these may also have their own issues, and are unlikely to be adopted.
Animesh “assembling” issue?: we’re all familiar with the way mesh bodies “assemble” when logging-in / teleporting to an occupied region: the various mesh elements stack-up, usually at their default attach points, while some may appear offset or oversized, then the position, rigging, LOD, etc., data is received by the viewer and things “assemble” into an avatar. This behaviour can occur with multi-part Animesh objects as well, and there is a report that sometimes the Animesh “assembling” can leaves parts floating around for up to a minute before “snapping into place”. Thus far, the problem has only manifested with one creator using the pre-release of the Firestorm Animesh viewer, so it’s not clear whether there is an underpinning issue with Animesh or not.
Environmental Enhancement Project (EEP)
Project Summary
A set of environmental enhancements allowing the environment (sky, sun, moon, clouds, water settings) to be set region or parcel level, with support for up to 7 days per cycle and sky environments set by altitude. Uses a new set of inventory assets (Sky, Water, Day) that can be stored in inventory and traded through the Marketplace / exchanged with others, and which can additionally be used in experiences. A new set of render shaders to support atmospheric effects such as rainbows, crepuscular rays (“God rays”), better horizon haze and fogging (but will not include rain / snow). The ability to change the Sun and Moon and cloud textures with custom textures.
As per my week #43 SUG update, a simulator update has been updated to fix the issue of racing skies when EEP-enabled regions are seen on non-EEP viewers. In addition, Rider is working on the first pass of the LSL support for EEP.
Bakes On Mesh
Work is continuing with fixing the Bake Service issues. however, as Anchor Linden, the lead for the project, is on vacation, this work will likely remain open until his return.
Other Items
Animations: there have been multiple requests for improvements to the animation system, including: allowing animation constraints to be set; extending the .ANIM format, animations by .DAE file and support for animation scaling. The Lab is aware of the requests being made, although not formal project has been defined at this point.
Morph Targets: there have been requests to allow morph targets within the avatar shape so that the shape sliders can be manipulated via LSL (so an avatar “gorging” itself at a scripted meal gets fatter, as a simple visual example). There are concerns that opening the body shape parameters to LSL manipulation could result in over-use and performance impact (e.g. rapid LSL adjustments to “animate” an avatar rather than using an actual animation), but some ability to allow morph targets is seen as potentially “interesting” – although this is not to say it will become a project.
Date of next meeting: due to the start-of-month internal meeting at LL, the next CCUG meeting will be on Thursday, November 8th, 2018.
I received noticed of the second Mysterious Paradise Event in support of World Animal Protection (WAP) that is taking place in Second Life.
Running through until Sunday, November 4th, 2018, the event features shopping opportunities and an entire region to explore, with a day devoted entirely to entertainment to support the fund-raising, on Friday, 26th October, 2018, to raise funds for WAP, although visitors can donate to the cause throughout the duration of the event, via the landing point kiosk.
This is something of a short-notice event, the organisers explaining:
As it’s Glen’s [g13n, the director of the event] real life 30th birthday, instead of having a general party, he wanted to do something meaningful by actually making a difference and helping real-life animals affected by recent earthquakes, major storms, etc.
The first event held by the organisers on behalf of WAP in March 2018 raised L$60,000, and they are hoping to exceed that total this time around.
The event region is richly decorated in a tropical theme, with both above ground and undersea areas to explore, opportunities for photography or to simply chill out and appreciate the tropical theme of the setting – and of course shop and raise money for WAP.
The merchants participating in the event and / or sponsoring it are: Anarchy, Blueberry, Cerridwen’s Cauldron, Evhah, Figure 8, Havana, Grandeur Décor, Love Lace Designs, Love Nature (landscaping by Felix VonKotwitz), Mysterious Designs, Patron (Eliza Weirwright), PopSugar, Sources, Surfer’s Bay, The Boardwalk, T | L | C, and 3D Trees.
Each is offering selected items for sale with 100% of proceeds going directly to the fund-raising total, or have donated gift cards that will be handed to those making significant donations through the main event day. In addition, some creators have also items that are included in the random gift giver to be found within the Mysterious Paradise region.
Event Schedule
At the time of going to press, the schedule for the core event day on Friday, October 26th, 2018, was as follows – but please refer to the event board in-world for updates / changes. All times SLT:
Mysterious Paradise is participating in the MadPea Halloween Hunt, so if you’re taking part in that event, please consider showing your support for WAP while visiting the region.
About WAP
World Animal Protection seeks to improve the welfare of animals around the globe – wild or domesticated – through public awareness, education, animal protection, animal rescue, animal welfare, and more. Based in Australia as a registered charity, WAP operates a number of region hubs across the world, in Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe, North America and Latin America. From these they are able to mount a range of campaigns to support and protect animals, which include better education in matters of animal welfare and husbandry, vaccination programmes, support for government programmes for more humane means of animal care and the treatment of disease (such encouraging the management of dog populations through anti-rabies vaccination and through neutering programmes, rather than annual dog cullings), and ensuring animals are provided and cared for as a result of, or the event of, a natural or other disaster.
Note: the organisers of Mysterious Paradise are not directly involved with WAP or represent it directly in-world. However, the event is entirely non-profit, with 100% of all funds raised to go to WAP, and proof of payment to the charity, etc., will be provided after the event, via the Mysterious Paradise web page.
Mysterious Paradise event: a region to explore while helping raise money for World Animal Protection
Opening on October 25th, 2018 at Nitroglobus Roof Gallery is How Isolde Got Lost, by Arete of Cyrene (AretevanCyrene). It is a complex piece, a story in 14 part;, a story in images dealing with the complex subject of love, loss and healing.
Narrative in art is not unusual; I’ve often referenced it when writing about exhibitions in these pages. But with this particular exhibition, the story is presented through the chronological order in which the pieces are presented, the start indicated by the sign The Story Begins Here, located on one of the inside walls of the gallery space, then progressing from there in a clockwise direction.
As Arete states in her liner notes, mourning is a deeply personal experience, influenced by a number of factors: our closeness to the lost one; their place within our circle of family and friends and how they react to the loss; religious and social factors, and so on. In her book On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross outlined what she saw as the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. A sixth was later added, in the form of shock, preceding the other five. But as Arete also notes from her own experience the stages of loss can be more complex and can extend beyond just six stages.
In particular, the images here have not only been specifically created for the exhibition, they chart Arete’s on experience with loss (one of which also touches on Dido’s story, notably in She Found a New Home….). Nevertheless, the story here in one that is going to resonate with anyone who has suffered loss and grief. Through them, we travel not only through the six acknowledged stages of grief, but also through the situations and actions that can both move us through them – or return us to one of them.
In this, Arete presents a simple, but forgotten fact of mourning: by labelling loss in terms of 6 “stages”, we tend to look at them as a linear progression: a series of steps from shock to acceptance by way of the other stages, all neatly in order. But the reality is, beyond shock, while we may well initially travel through the remaining stages in the order they are offered, we might also travel back to different stages of grieving. This can be as a result of a number of factors; perhaps as a result of finally packing possessions away, or clearing a closet of clothes that will no longer be worn, or simply witnessing something unexpected through the course of everyday life.
The healing process can also be found within the images, the return to “everyday” life; the support of family and friends; the taking up of new activities and filling the void as best we can. Given the personal nature of the images, and the nature of loss, singling out individual pieces in the series isn’t easy. However, it is the smaller, personal aspects of the story – such as Boxes – or the need to talk to the one now gone (which can be a vital part of the healing process: acknowledging that while a loved one might be physically gone, we can still keep them with us through memory as an integral part of us), that particularly struck a chord with me.
Love, listen.
To understand death, she so often talked with him to find spiritual acceptance.
Her words send to address unknown:
“Love listen, I must go on…but when I laugh, I feel guilty. When I forget you in a moment, I feel guilty. Please, try to understand, I love you and miss you so much but I have to let go of that guilt. Love listen, walk with me each day and we make that day together. Sleep with me each dark hour and share my dreams till we walk on the same soil.”
There is more here as well; the images are not only unique to this story and exhibition, they are wonderfully constructed in 3D. To see the intricate layering of this, I recommend enabling Advanced Lighting Model and setting graphics to at least High. Also, do make note that the story can also be followed through a website created by Arete, and accessed by clicking the first image in the series for a link.
An exhibition of enormous depth and message, How Isolde Got Lost is a must see. And please note that while individual image are available for sale, all proceeds will go to The Catboat in Amsterdam, the only animal sanctuary that literally floats, sited on a canal. A tip jar for the charity is also available in the gallery.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 