Day: June 9, 2023

RFL 2023: it’s the Weekend to Relay in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Relay for Life of Second Life, Relay Weekend, June 10-11th, 2023

Saturday, June 10th and Sunday June 11th mark the annual Relay for Life of Second Life Relay Weekend, raising money for the American Cancer Society and their projects to help and support cancer sufferers and their families and caregivers the world over. With American Cancer Society (ACS) regions forming the anchor-point for the event, 35 regions have been combined to provide the weekend’s track, which all Second Life residents are invited to walk for a part of the weekend and show support for those who have been stricken by cancer and / or remember those in their own families / circles of friends who have been lost to the disease/ are living within its shadow.

The theme for this year is Hope Floats, and this is reflected in the multiple camps and places to visit which line the RFL walk as it loops through the regions. The event officially opens at 10:00 SLT on the morning of Saturday, June 10th, with the opening ceremony taking place on the ACS2 and ACS 3 regions. Immediately following this is the first of a continuous series of laps around the walk, which will continue through until the closing ceremony at 10:00 SLT on the morning of Sunday, June 11th.

This first lap of the track is reserved for those dealing with cancer or who have survived its impact on their health, together with their family members and caregivers. However, residents as a whole are encouraged to line the track and show their support for them as they make their way around it.  After it comes the Parade of Teams: those groups active within Second Life who are active in both supporting ACS through organising and running their own fund-raising events, and who help to make this weekend the  Relay Weekend the event it is.

Relay for Life of Second Life, Relay Weekend, June 10-11th, 2023 – learn about ACS Hope Lodges

After the Parade of teams, from 14:00 SLT onwards on June 10th, through until 09:00 SLT on June 11th, there will be a series of hourly themed walks around the track, open to anyone to join for as long as they choose. As always, participants are invited to join in with the theme, all of which are listed below (all times SLT).

Saturday, June 10th
 Sunday, June 11th
11:00
Survivor/Caregiver Lap		 00:00
Space Walk among the Stars
Kirk or Spock? Baltar or Six? Ground Control or Major Tom? Go sci-fi!
12:30
Parade of Teams		 01:00
Mount Up and Ride
Ye-haw! – but why stop with riding horses?
14:00
Purple Power Hour
The Name sez it all!		 02:00
Your Pets Want Out
Bring your pet for a walk.
15:00
Under the Sea
Are you mermaid? Merman? Grouper or Penguin? Seas creatures unite!		 03:00
Small But Mighty
Dinkies and Tinies unite!
16:00
Unicorns, Fairies, Fantasy+
Come as your favourite fantasy character or dressed for your favourite genre		 04:00
Wild Wild West
NOW is the time for horses, big hats and cowpokes!
17:00
Over the Rainbow & Into the Clouds
Clouds, rainbows, pride		 05:00
Skate into the Morning
Make like Marty Mcfly or don those rollerskates and roll!
18:00
Ride the Wave, Dude
Surf’s up and beach parties are the order of the hour!		 06:00
Fight Back Hour
ACS, Relay, or Team shirts
19:00
Relay Sock Hop
Poodle skirts, vinyl, diners		 07:00
PJs, Coffee, and Curlers
For the all-nighters: wear your coffee and drink your PJs (!)
20:00
Light It Up
Torches, candles, neon lights, etc.		 08:00
Making Strides
Pink, Strides (breast cancer) awareness
21:00
Luminaria Ceremony
~ Remember ~		 09:00
Floating to the Finish Line
Carry (ride?) balloons around the track
22:00
Fly Your Kite
– or that of your team, if you’re a team member!		 10:00
Closing Ceremony
23:00
Relay Snow Storm
Dress up warm or get those Xmas Hols glad rags out!		 11:00
Dancing in the Streets
make like Martha and the Vandellas or Mick and David and dance around the track!

Luminaria Ceremony and Lanterns

At 21:00 SLT on Saturday, June 11th, the track will be in darkness and silence, with all those in the Relay Regions are asked not to engage in open text or voice chat but to walk the track in silence or stand to one side, as the names of those to be remembered are read.

It is a time for each of us to reflect on how this disease has touched us personally.  And it is a time for us to look inside ourselves with quiet reflection and find hope.  Because no matter what our experience has been with cancer, we all share the hope that we will one day live in a world where our children, and their children, will never have to hear the words “you have cancer”.

– Relay for Life of Second Life event web page

Along the sides of the relay track are the Luminaria lanterns that can be used to commemorate and / or honour someone you know who has succumbed to or survived cancer. Lanterns can be lit for a minimum donation of L$50 (all proceeds to Relay for Life of Second Life). Donations can can be made by clicking  a lantern and then either selecting a set amount or typing in an amount of your choice. You can also optionally enter whether you are lighting the lantern in memory or in honour of someone, and also add their name and / or a message.

Relay for Life of Second Life, Relay Weekend, June 10-11th, 2023

So, get ready to join the fun and help raise money for a very worthy cause!

SLurl Details

  • American Cancer Society (American Cancer Society, rated General)
  • ACS2 (opening / Closing ceremony, rated General)
  • ACs3 (opening / Closing ceremony, rated General)

2023 SL Puppetry project week #23 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Puppetry demonstration via Linden Lab – see below.  Demos video with the LL comment “We have some basic things working with a webcam and Second Life but there’s more to do before it’s as animated as we want.”

The following notes have been taken from chat logs and audio recording of the Thursday, June 8th, 2023 Puppetry Project meetings. Notes in these summaries are not intended to be a full transcript of every meeting, but to highlight project progress / major topics of discussion.

Meeting And Project Overview

  • The Puppetry User Group exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about the development of, and feature for, the upcoming Second Life Puppetry project(see below for details), bugs, and feature ideas.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
    • On Aditi (the Beta grid) at the Castelet Puppetry Theatre, commencing at 13:00 SLT.
    • Those encountering issues in logging-in to Aditi should contact Second Life support for assistance.
    • Generally on alternate Thursdays to the Content Creation meetings.
    • Comprise a mix of text and voice – attendees can use text only, if preferred, but should enable to hear comments / responses given in voice.
  • These meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the Puppetry project, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab. Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

General Project Description as Originally Conceived

LL’s renewed interest in puppetry was primarily instigated by Philip joining LL as official advisor, and so it really was about streaming mocap. That is what Philip was interested in and why we started looking at it again. However since Puppetry’s announcement what I’ve been hearing from many SL Residents is: what they really want from “puppetry” is more physicality of the avatar in-world: picking up objects, holding hands, higher fidelity collisions. 
As a result, that is what I’ve been contemplating: how to improve the control and physicality of the avatar. Can that be the new improved direction of the Puppetry project? How to do it?

Leviathan Linden

  • Previously referred to as “avatar expressiveness”, Puppetry is intended to provide a means by which avatars can mimic physical world actions by their owners (e.g. head, hand, arm movements) through tools such as a webcam and using technologies like inverse kinematics (IK) and the  LLSD Event API Plug-in (LEAP) system.
    • Note that facial expressions and finger movements are not currently enabled.
    • Most movement is in the 2D plain (e.g., hand movements from side-to-side but not forward / back), due to limitations with things like depth of field tracking through a webcam, which has yet to be addressed.
  • The back-end support for the capability is only available on Aditi (the Beta grid) and within the following regions: Bunraku, Marionette, and Castelet.
  • Puppetry requires the use of a dedicated viewer, the Project Puppetry viewer, available through the official Second Life Alternate Viewers page.
  • 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, requires additional work – refer to the links below.
  • There is a Puppetry Discord channel – those wishing to join it should contact members of LL’s puppetry team, e.g. Aura Linden, Simon Linden, Rider Linden, Leviathan Linden (not a full list of names at this time – my apologies to those involved whom I have missed).

Additional Work Not Originally In-Scope

  • Direct avatar / object / avatar-avatar interactions (“picking up” an apple; high-fives. etc.).
  • Animations streaming: allowing one viewer to run animations and have them sent via the simulator to all receiving viewers without any further processing of the animations by those viewers.
  • Enhanced LSL integration for animation control.
  • Adoption of better animation standards – possibly glTF.
  • Given the project is incorporating a lot of additional ideas, it is likely to evolve into a rolling development, with immediate targets for development / implementation decided as they are agreed upon, to be followed by future enhancements. As such, much of what goes into the meetings at present is general discussion and recommendations for consideration, rather than confirmed lines o development.

Bugs, Feature Requests and Code Submissions

  • For those experimenting with Puppetry, Jiras (bug reports / fixes or feature requests) should be filed with “[Puppetry]” at the start of the Jira title.
  • There is also a public facing Kanban board with public issues.
  • Those wishing to submit code (plug-ins or other) or who wish to offer a specific feature that might be used with Puppetry should:

Resources

Meeting Notes

  • The viewer remains at  version 6.6.12.579958, issued on Thursday, May 11th.
    • This update includes access to Rider Linden’s experimental attachment point tracking & forwarding to the server feature.
    • It also includes various incremental improvements to handling puppetry, such as support for parsing binary LEAP data from the LEAP script.
  • Work has slowed a little due to Linden staff being out-of-office recently (hence why no meeting since May 11th), and personnel on the Puppetry project also working on other simulator projects.
    • This has notably impacted Leviathan Linden’s work on Inverse Kinetics (IK), which has had a knock-on impact slowing Rider Linden’s work on LSL support for driving puppetry.
    • However, progress has resumed on the IK work and while described as currently “not stable”, and problems are still to be solved in situations where a target position is too far away for a joint in the skeleton to reach, or where multiple joints (e.g. 5 or 6) are involved.
    • One issue that is proving difficult to handle is the default avatar mesh joint weighting is incorrect along the forearm and wrist. What is required is two distinct joints at the forearm to do mesh bending correctly: a hinge at the elbow and also a twist constraint along the forearm bone, toward the wrist, rather than (as is currently the case) treating the wrist as a ball joint. This may be the subject of further internal discussion at LL as Leviathan gets more of the IK work nailed down.
  • WRT IK:
    • Leviathan is looking to solve the targeting issues first, then work back to ensure that there are no collisions between a limb and avatar body (e.g. reaching across the avatar’s body to pick something up, and the avatar’s elbow / part of the arm appears to go through the body).
    • Forward And Backward Reaching Inverse Kinematics (FABRIK) – which is the fundamental algorithm for suggesting new joint positions in a range of applications, including 3D modelling – is the route of choice of the Lab; however, adopting to FABRIK is taking some trial and error.

Additional Notes

  • Aura Linden is here but she is working on the Animation importer project which has been split off from the Puppetry project. Currently, the status is animations can be import import animations from some tools/formats, but others aren’t working yet.
    • It was noted at the last meeting, that for animation import, LL is looking towards using / supporting Assimp (github: https://github.com/assimp/assimp), which supports some 30-40 animation formats, converting them to it ownformat for ease of import to multiple platforms. Notably, it supports .FBX and glTF, so it fits with the Lab’s goal of utilising glTF for materials, mesh imports, etc.

Date of Next Meeting

  • Thursday, June 22nd, 2023, 13:00 SLT.