Author: Inara Pey

Eclectic virtual world blogger with a focus on Second Life, VR, virtual environments and technology.

Of nymphalidae in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Kaleidoscope, February 2023 – click any image for full size

A recent visit took me to a Homestead region called Kaleidoscope, the home of the Monarch Education Project, itself branded as a MORPH / SPARK Project undertaking, with Raven Banrion (RavenStarr) as the core designer. Raven is the name behind a range of projects in Second Life, including Ravenport Reclaimed (which I wrote about in February 2022) and The Pond (I covered in May 2022), and having covered them both, I was keen to take a look at Raven’s latest work.

This is a very different setting compared to the likes of Ravenport and The Pond, offering as it does a literal walk into the world of nymphalidae – butterflies, notably danaus plexippus, the monarch butterfly, and particularly the sub-family of D. p. plexippus, the migratory monarch butterfly found in North America.

Kaleidoscope, February 2023

This subspecies is amongst the most familiar of North American butterflies, its annual southward late-summer / autumn migration from the northern and central United States and southern Canada to Florida and Mexico, and their reverse spring migration back up into the central and northern United States. The Monarch  was the first butterfly to have its genome sequenced, and the first butterflies to be reared in space, after being carried up to the International Space Station (ISS) as pupae.

Offers as a walk through a natural setting, starting high on a tree-crowned plateau on the south-east of the region. From here a trail runs north along a ridge before turning west before it switch backs its way down from the high ridge by way of others topped by wooden walkways to reach the ground. Along the way are information boards offering those following the trail the opportunity to find out more about the monarch – including the migratory habits of D. p. plexippus, their lifecycle and the growing threat to their continued existence in the United States.

Kaleidoscope, February 2023

The latter us believed to be in part due to the increasing destruction of milkweed, the monarch’s natural breeding ground in North America and in changes to their overwintering habitats in Mexico. As a result – and given the butterfly’s role in pollination (which is admittedly as great as the role played by bees) – President Barack Obama issued a presidential memorandum entitled Creating a Federal Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators, which led to a national strategy in the United States to promote the health of pollinators in North America – and specifically identified the monarch by name. Even so, in 2022, the International Union for Conservation of Nature added the migratory monarch butterfly its red list of endangered species.

Kaleidoscope, February 2023

As well as the information boards, the walk leads visitor past flutters (or kaleidoscopes, if you prefer) of monarch butterflies. These flutter around the trail and board walks, circle trees and flitter in and out of sunbeams. The also hide within the region’s secret location (which can be easily missed – all I’ll say here is waterfalls 🙂 ). Also awaiting discovery are various places where visitors can sit and cuddle / relax and simply enjoy the ambience of the region, or for those who prefer, a walk along the canon floor around which the ridge path runs and descends as it departs the landing point.

Altogether an engaging and informative visit – and don’t miss the opportunities for you to get involved in helping monarch butterflies through the Monarch Joint Venture.

Kaleidoscope, February 2023

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ALS Awareness Week 2023 in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Harvey Memorial Ensemble ALS Awareness Week 2023

The 2023 Harvey Memorial Ensemble ALS Awareness Week has opened its doors, and runs through until Sunday, March 5th, inclusive.  Organised by members of Supporto Italiano, the event is dedicated to the memory of ALS victim and Second Life resident Harvey22 Albatros, and focuses on music, fun and raising funds for AISLA, the Associazone Italiana Sclerosi Laterale Amiotrofica for research into, and treatment of, Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

Sometimes also referred to as motor neurone disease (MND) or by the synonyms Lou Gehrig’s disease and Charcot disease, ALS is a specific disorder that involves the death of neurons that control voluntary muscles. For about 90-95% of all diagnosed cases, the precise cause of the disease is unknown; for the remaining 5-10% of diagnosed cases, it is inherited from the sufferer’s parents. There is no known cure, and symptoms generally first become apparent around the age of 60 (or 50 in inherited cases). The average survival from onset to death is three to four years. In Europe and the United States, the disease affects about 2 people per 100,000 per year.

Harvey Memorial Ensemble ALS Awareness Week 2023

Whilst visiting, people are encouraged to make donations to AISLA in any one of a number of ways:

  • By clicking the donations kiosks in front of the event stage.
  • By clicking on the AISLA information boards to go directly to AISLA’s donations web page, where credit / debit cards or a PayPal accounts can be used to make a direct donation.
  • By purchasing a Paola Mills tee-shirt design from the vendors on the west side of the arena, between the 2D and 3D art displays.
  • By purchasing one of the special Harvey Memorial Rabbit paintings by Terrygold (L$200 each) – these can be found on the west side of the events schedule board.
  • By entering the Ensemble Week prize draw to win a MotoDesign Chopper motorcycle  – the draw is a limited entry event (90 numbers), and located on the east side of the events schedule board – thewinning draw will be made in Sunday, February 27th, 2022.
  • By participating in the Art Auction.

100% of L$ donations and payments, with all winning bid payments from the Silent Art Auction, will be forwarded to AISLA a the conclusion of the event.

Harvey Memorial Ensemble ALS Awareness Week 2023

The Art Auction this year features works by the following artists (2D) – Celestial Demon, Dadi88, Kika Yongho, Karma Daxeline  (karma.weymann), LikaCameo, Maddy (Magda Schmidtzau), Maloe Vansant, and Once Again (manoji.yachvili) and Terrygold; (3D) Dreams (barry Richez); Ciottolina Xue, Jipe Loon; Livio Korobase, Moki Yuitza and Moya Patrick (Moya Janus).

The 2D artists have donated multiple works as single auction sets, with the 3D artists donated a mix of individual pieces and small collections. To participate, right-click on the auction boards and then entering the amount you wish to bid. Winning bids will be announced at the end of the event. A raffle with gift cards valued at L$2,500 and L$5,000 is also running across the event.

Harvey Memorial Ensemble ALS Awareness Week 2023

The Harvey Memorial Ensemble ALS Awareness Week in Second Life is always an engaging and fun festival, with even more added to the mix this year yo make hopping along and participating even more worthwhile – so why not take the time during the week to do so?

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2023 SL Puppetry project week #8 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, February 24th, 2023 Puppetry Project meetings held at the Castelet Puppetry Theatre on Aditi. These meetings are generally held on alternate weeks to the Content Creation User Group (CCUG), on same day / time (Thursdays at 13:00 SLT).

Notes in these summaries are not intended to be a full transcript of every meeting, but to highlight project progress / major topics of discussion.

Project Summary

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 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:

Further Information

Meeting Notes

General Progress

  • LSL Integration:
    • See: OPEN-375: “LSL Functions for reading avatar animation positions”.
    • Rider Linden has not been able to get a lot done on the scripted control due to being out of the office. He does have the LSL function discussed in the last meeting so that it is correctly sending the necessary data down to the agent’s viewer.
    • He is now working now on how to feed that into the IK, and has a general framework, although he notes it’s been slow progress.
  • Simon Linden has been working on animation importing. This is additional work in terms of the Puppetry project, but comes as a result of discussions at previous meetings.
    • He is looking to add additional .BVH support, and possibly .FBX (e.g. .FBX using some specific skeletons and settings; the goal is to be able to get data out of animation tools and into SL without requiring 2 years of Blender skills). Given the general move towards glTF, this is seen as being more preferable (there is a possible appetite within LL for a re-write of the animation system, although it not on the immediate horizon (or a visible horizon at present).
    • Requests are still being made to allow animation priorities to be changed post-upload and edit animation values dynamically – it is not clear how much of this will be touched.
    • Changing the manner in which animation priorities currently work is not something LL are planning on touching.
    • Right now the messages that transmit what animations to play do not have a way to specify a priority, just the animation’s asset ID and the viewer will get the priority from the asset. This may change in the future, but the focus right now is on getting scripted animation control improved.
  • Leviathan Linden is continuing to work on animation streaming, but progress has been delayed due to bug hunting and fixing. However, he hopes to get the code into the Puppetry project viewer branch sooner rather than later. He has noted that this is very sensitive to bad framerate on the sender and on the simulator. This probably means that before animation streaming and/or puppetry could be “delivered”, some technical debt on the server at least.
  • The focus at the moment is on putting everything that has been worked on together and then making sure it all works within the viewer. After that comes the issue of making sure that things work between viewers (e.g. that 20 people running animation streaming in a scene does not result in the viewers collapsing or being unable to playback all the streams; ensuring the new capabilities paly nicely with existing “canned animation” systems (e.g. dance machines, etc.).

In Brief

  • It’s been noted that moving the simulators to 64-bit is being worked on.

Date of Next Meeting

  • Thursday, March 9th, 2023, 13:00 SLT.

Of the sea and the stars in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Sur-Mer / LunarVille, February 2023 – click any image for full-size

Shawn Shakespeare recently dropped me the LM to LunarVille / Sur-Mer. As the name suggests, this is setting of two parts. joined by a common theme which might be said to just touch on global warming:

Earth circa 2052.
All continents have been submerged by water, most life is extinct. The 1% have expatriated to Mars and the lunar surface. Some survivors have managed to survive and harvest the seas, they have scrapped all vintage and advanced technology.

From Sur-Mer and LunarVille

Sur-Mer / LunarVille, February 2023

The Landing Point offers advice on viewing the settings (in short: make sure you have Used Shared Environment active in your viewer) and a choice of teleport destinations The Hangar, Sur-Mer and LunarVille, all of which can be accessed via the teleport disk.

Which you visit first is entirely up to you; I opted to hop to Sur-Mer to start my visit; a place where the last remnants of human civilisation on Earth might be found, huddled along the span of an ancient bridge, surrounded by cold-looking water and a shroud of mist. Visitors arrive on a small deck below and to one side of the bridge, photographs on a panel showing what might have happened to Earth in our future history.

Sur-Mer / LunarVille, February 2023

It is a strange place where the bridge runs from a cut-open diesel loco has been converted into a stage show setting watched by a small audience and the bridge runs to a most unusual home. Given that technology both vintage and advanced have been scrapped, there are robots to be found, powered islands hovering over the waters and home to garden or wind turbines – and even a WW2 era Mustang fighter apparently coming into land (complete with its undercarriage arranged to resemble that of a Spitfire), while at the house a line of flying vehicles are swooping in for a landing.

Strange it might be, but the location is genuinely photogenic for avatar and artistic shots, whilst the scattered seating present plenty of opportunities to set and relax.

Sur-Mer / LunarVille, February 2023

LunarVille presents an equally intriguing setting. Central to it is the Moonbase where – presumably – some of the top 1% are living. It is certainly a cosy place and comes complete with its own nightclub – The Apollo Lounge. A second dance area is available within a hanger space – although the DJ will need a spacesuit.

Scattered around the rest of this setting are multiple points of interest for explorers – the module containing the teleport, the lunar equivalent of Area 51, a small meadow sitting under a dome where a cow and sheep graze and more, all of which offer further opportunities for photography.

Sur-Mer / LunarVille, February 2023

Unusual and curled into fun with a hint of a message, LunarVille / Sur-Mer makes for a light and quirky visit.

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Endless: images and quotes on life and feelings in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Kondor Art Centre: LikaCameo – Endless

Open at the main gallery space at the Kondor Art Centre through until March 10th, 2023, is Endless, an exhibition of original art by LikaCameo, and reflections on life, feelings, and the nature of time.

Split between the lower floor and the mezzanine level of the hall, this is in some ways an exhibition of two parts, woven together through the use of words. On the lower level is a total of 13 monolithic plaques (including the exhibition’s title piece). Each is semi-translucent with an image captured from within Second Life offered on one face in colour and the other in monochrome, each one offered with a quote.

Kondor Art Centre: LikaCameo – Endless

Twelve of these pieces represent the months of the year, each one bearing the colours / tones most associated with the month it represents. The quotes accompanying these images have been drawn from a number of sources ranging from Dr. Seuss (or possibly more correctly, Georges Duhamel, given Seuss appears to have used an English variation of words first used in print by Duhamel), Confucius, Vincent Van Gogh, Albert Einstein, David Viscott (although oft attributed to either Pablo Picasso or William Shakespeare), and more – I’ll let you research the for yourself. However, attribution here is less important than the content of each quote and what it has to say about life and how we live it.

Accompanying this collection is a series of white-on black drawings (also in places offered as glass-like etchings placed in front of some of the images). These drawings are reproductions of a further set of 12 images to be found on the upper level of the hall.

Kondor Art Centre: LikaCameo – Endless

The latter comprises 12 monolith plinths with a colour image on one side and a monochrome version on the other. Their positions match those of the plinths on the lower floor. Also like those, each image represents a month of the year, but rather than being accompanied by a quotes, they instead appear with an noun (primarily) or adjective as a means of defining a mood or feeling which may have an association with the month (e.g. January / Inception; December / Fate perhaps reflective of birth (the start of the year and our eventual demise (December)); however, I Ieave it to you to visit and decide.

Linking the two halves of these upper level at the head of the stairs  – and thus linking the twelve upper images with those on the lower floor – are the core lyrics to Circle of Life, perhaps one of the most poignant songs of life to be written for a Disney film.

Kondor Art Centre: LikaCameo – Endless

Evocative, layered and richly presented, Endless offers an engaging essay in images and words, marking it as a rewarding exhibition which should be witnessed for itself before it closes on March 10th (also, do note the blue sign regarding purchases of the pieces on the lower level of the gallery).

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2023 SL SUG meetings week #8 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Moruya Sanctum, December 2022 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, February 21st, 2023 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

  • There are no planned deployments for the week, so the various channels will just be restarted.
  • Release 578100, made to the BlueSteel RC channel had to be rolled back post-deployment as a result of BUG-233402 “Second Life Server 2023-02-02.578100 – LSO scripts not running on_rez() event.”

Available Official Viewers

There have been no updates to the current crop of official viewers to mark the start of the week, leaving the pipelines as follows:

  • Release viewer: Maintenance Q(uality) viewer, version 6.6.9.577968 Thursday, February 2, 2023.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • Project viewers:
    • PBR Materials project viewer, version 7.0.0.578161, February 14, 2023. This viewer will only function on the following Aditi (beta grid) regions: Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
    • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

In Brief

  • Whilst not simulator-related, there have been some additional requests for improvements to the particle system – see: BUG-233438 “Larger particle size limits”, BUG-233439 “Per-generator particle limits” – it is possible these and requests such as BUG-5307 “New Particle texture parameters (repeat/offset/rotation/animation)” might received some attention in the near future – although a request for more information on the first two has been made.
  • A possible reason on why objects don’t always rez on login-in / following a teleport has been identified. Essentially, on arrival in a region, the viewer must inform the simulator as to its camera placement and rotation. It does so via an AgentUpdate. However, this in turn requires the viewer to receive an ObjectUpdate confirming the avatar has arrived. As there is a delay in these two events, the interest list can start sending data ahead of the camera position being confirmed, only for the camera to “jump” once its position has been confirmed, and this leads to confusion as to the data the interest list needs to send, resulting in some data being missed, and thus objects failing to render. If this is correct, there needs to be better check on synchronisation between the viewer and simulator before interest list information is sent.