2022 SUG meetings week #35 summary – Puppetry

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, August 30th, 2022 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

Server Deployments

For the most up-to-date information, please refer to the deployment forum thread.

• On Tuesday, August 30th, the simhosts on the Main SLS channel were updated with simulator version 574550. This release fixes an issue with some system textures being unavailable – notably the default water map being absent, resulting in totally flat glassy water or view-transparent mode having everything look solid..
• On Wednesday, August 31st, all simhosts on the RC channels will be updated with simulator release 574611,which includes the above fixes + additional fixes (release notes pending at the the time of writing.

Available Official Viewers

On Tuesday, August 30th:

• The Profiles viewer, 6.6.3.574158, was updated to de facto release status.
• The Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.3.574545, was issued – see below.

The remaining official viewers stay listed as:

• Release channel cohorts:
  • Maintenance P (Preferences, Position and Paste) RC viewer version 6.6.3.573877 issued August 15.
  • Izarra Maintenance RC, version 6.6.3.573920, August 15.
  • Maintenance 3 RC viewer, version 6.6.3.573882, August 5.
• Project viewers:
  • Love Me Render (LMR) 6 graphics improvements project viewer 6.6.2.573263, July 21.
  • Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.5.4.571296, May 10.

Puppetry

See also: the official blog post Introducing Second life Puppetry.

Previously referred to as “avatar expressiveness”,  Puppetry is intended to provide a means by which avatars can mimic physical world actions by their owners through tools such as a webcam and using technologies like inverse kinematics and the  LLSD Event API Plug-in (LEAP) system.

We are excited about Puppetry’s potential to change the way we interact inside Second Life.  For example, using a webcam to track your face and hands could allow your avatar to mimic your face animations and finger movement, or more natural positioning of the avatar’s hands and feet against in-world objects might also be possible.  Alternative hardware could be used to feed information into Second Life to animate your avatar – a game controller or mocap equipment.  There’s a lot to explore and try, and we invite the Second Life community to be involved in exploring the direction of this feature.

– from the official blog post

Note that this capability is still very much experimental / in development and is not feature-complete. Also, the following should be noted:

• The Puppetry viewer is very much experimental,  and is required to view any puppetry animations – viewers without the supporting code will not show them.
• The back-end support for the capability is only available on Aditi (the Beta grid) and within the following regions: Bunraku, Marionette, and Castelet.
• No other special needs beyond the project viewer are required to “see” Puppetry animations. However, to use the capability to animate your own avatar and broadcast the results will take more work.
• For further information, check out the documentation links below:
  • Knowledge Base article: Puppetry: How it Works.
  • Second Life Puppetry wiki page.

Again, please remember this is very much a “alpha” implementation of Puppetry:

• Linden Lab is looking for feedback from the community in determining potential use cases and onward development.
• The Lab will be hosting an open discussion on Puppetry on Thursday, September 8th, and 13:00PM SLT. This will take place at the Puppetry theatre in the Aditi  region of Castelet.

Please refer to the video for further discussion on the capability.

Update, September 1st

• The discussion on puppetry mentioned in  the above articles will be the first such meeting, and if there is demand for it, there will be a similar meeting on Aditi on alternate Thursdays from September 8th onwards, to be held in the theatre on Aditi Castelet region.
• These meetings will (initially) be very development focused rather than creator / user focused, given the overall status of the project.
• It is advisable that attendees use the Puppetry project viewer when attending these meetings (available from the Alternate Viewers page), so that they might see any demonstration which may take place during meetings.