Category: Linden Lab

The Lab’s most recent board members

Posted on by Inara Pey

In mid-March 2017, Linden Lab introduced a new member of the board of directors via a press release.

William “Bing” Gordon is a man with impressive credentials. The Chief Product Officer of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), where he serves as an advisor and General Partner, Gordon worked with Electronic Arts for 26 years from its founding in 1982, driving the company’s branding strategy with EA Sports, developed EA’s pricing strategy for package goods and on-line games, created EA’s studio organization, and contributed to the design and marketing of many EA franchises, including John Madden Football, The Sims, Sim City, Need for Speed, Tiger Woods Golf, Club Pogo and Command and Conquer. As well as EA and KPCB, he has He has served on the boards of public companies Amazon and Zynga, and was a founding director at Katango (acquired by Google 2011), ngmoco (acquired by DeNA 2010) and Audible (acquired by Amazon in 2008).

William “Bing” Gordon

One of the acknowledged experts in computer gaming, Bing Gordon was awarded the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011, and he held the game industry’s first endowed chair in game design at The University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. He is a robust thinker and, unlike many in the tech industry, retains a level head when it comes to the subject of VR – in 2015, he spoke to Fortune.com about the risks involved for companies leaping into the emerging VR market.

In joining Linden Lab, Gordon will will advise on strategy, product, marketing and other issues as Linden Lab continues to improve Second Life and brings to market its new platform for user-created social VR experiences, Sansar – with the Lab particularly emphasising the latter for understandable reasons, CEO Ebbe Altberg noting:

We’re honoured to have Bing join our board of directors and work with our team,” said Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab. “He’s helped to bring to life some of the most influential entertainment experiences in recent memory, and as we prepare to open Sansar for all creators, his insights, expertise, and counsel will prove invaluable.

Bing Gordon isn’t the only relatively recent appointee to the Lab’s board of directors. He joins Mark Britto, in adding his name to LL’s board. Britto is most recently the founder/chairman of Boku, Inc., a mobile on-line payments company he founded in 2009 and which now is the leading name in mobile payments, servicing 50 countries through more than 200 carrier partners. Mr. Britto also serves on the Boards of Angieslist, PayNearMe and Sonder.

Mark Britto

After starting his career in banking, Britto co-founded Accept.com, a peer-to-peer payments company which was purchased by Amazon in 1999, where it became the primary backbone of Amazon’s global payments platform. Britto himself worked for Amazon as a Senior Vice President of Worldwide Services and Sales, prior to departing the company to take over the helm of Ingenio, a communication and e-commerce platform acquired by AT&T in 2007, and more recently re-established as an independent company in May 2013.

From this, it is clear that Britto has a wealth of experience in developing and managing payment services which would appear to be of particular merit to Linden Lab as they continue to operate their micro-currency systems for Second Life and Sansar, together with their Tilia Inc., subsidiary.

Interestingly, Mark Britto joined the Lab’s board in August 2016. However, his biography notes only appeared on the company’s leadership page in April 2017, when it was updated with Bing Gordon’s details.

Together, Mark Britto and Bing Gordon join Jed Smith, Bill Gurley and Dana L. Evan as serving members of the board at Linden Research Inc.

Tutorial: filing Abuse Reports in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Griefing, be it through word, action, noise, or object (as seen here), etc., is one of the items covered by the Abuse Report
The following notes are drawn from a presentation Governance Team manager Tommy Linden and team member Corky Linden are making to various communities within Second Life as part of an initiative to better disseminate information about the Governance Team, and on filing Abuse Reports (ARs). The hope is that the information provided will give users a better understanding of what the Governance Team hope to see provided in an Abuse Report in order to fully investigate it.

Note that  official information on Abuse Reports can also be found in the Knowledge Base.

 Table of Contents

 

Governance Team: Quick Facts

  • The team is relatively small – under a dozen in size – but handles an average of 350-400 Abuse Reports per day.
  • All Abuse Reports get reviewed as the first stage of an investigation, with priority given to those seen as critical (such as an in-progress griefing attack).
  • All ARs that can be investigated are investigated. However:
    • How far the investigation goes largely depends on whether the AR is filed against something Governance is empowered to investigate, and how much meaningful information is supplied in it.
    • The Governance Team intentionally does not report back on the outcome of their investigations for a number of reasons. Just because the outcome might not be visible to the reporter / match their expectations when filing an AR, does not mean the report was ignored.
    • You do not have to be on the official SL viewer in order to submit an Abuse Report.
  • One of the biggest issues with incoming Abuse Reports is that they often lack the basic information required in order for an investigation to be properly carried out. While ARs do not have to be completed “in full”, please do try to give as much pertinent information as possible.

What is an Abuse Report?

The Abuse Report (AR) is for reporting any individual or group of avatars or any in-world object engaged in an activity deemed inappropriate under the Second Life Terms of Service  / Community Standards and/or is in contraction to the maturity rating for a region.

ARs apply to: griefing, spamming, age play, assault / pushing / disturbing the peace, disclosure of personal information, fraud, harassment, indecency and Skill Gaming violations. In addition, there are Welcome Area Guidelines governing places like Infohubs, which contain restrictions on what should not be done in those areas with any violations also subject to ARs. Report.

There are also certain things that do not apply to ARs. For example, being banned from a particular group or region or parcel, or a dispute over rental payment between residents are not actionable via AR.

ARs can be filed by anyone suffering abuse, or by those directly witnessing an abusive act. However, this does not mean teleporting multiple people into a location and having them file reports as well. Rather than “speeding up” any investigation, it can actually slow down the entire process by forcing Governance to spend time reviewing dozens of additional (and possibly contradictory) reports.

What Is The Governance Team Looking for in a Report?

The Governance Team is looking for clear, concise and consistent information in an Abuse Report, as summaries in the image below and expanded upon in the following sections.

A “good” Abuse Report, presenting all the information and making good use of a screen shot – click to open the slide in a separate tab for easier reading. With thanks to Corky Linden

Accessing the Abuse Report Floater

The AR floater can be accessed via:

  • Menu bar > Help > Report Abuse.
  • By right-clicking on an avatar or object and locating / selecting Report Abuse from the context menu / pie menu.
    • Make sure you have the right avatar / object selected when doing this.
    • Launching the AR floater using either of these two options will auto-complete parts of the form.

The following guidelines are intended to help with filing an AR.

Screen Shots

Where possible, try to include a screen shot of the situation you are reporting. It can be the most effective means of illustrating what is going on, and gives the Governance Team clear visual proof / evidence of what has happened. It can also make up for information missed from the rest of the report.

The slide below outlines some of the key points to remember when using the AR floater to capture a snapshot – click to enlarge it in a separate browser tab for ease of reading.

Abuse Report snapshots: click on the slide to open it in a separate browser tab for easier reading

Note that most viewers do not have a refresh button for the snapshot preview, so try to make sure all the information you wish to capture is on your screen. If you are unable to get a screen shot for whatever reason, it is important you provide clear, accurate information in the Summary and Details section of the report (see below).

Object Picker

The Object Picker allows you to identify an abusive object (e.g. a particle / noise spammer, a weapon, etc.), and include its name and owner in the body of your Abuse Report. Instructions on how to use it are included in the AR floater, and this section will be auto-completed if you launch an AR by right-clicking on an abusive object. Remember you can further verify the item by including it in a snapshot with the Edit floater open to show the object name & owner.

Report Categories

The Abuse Report floater includes a pre-defined, drop-down list of categories which should be used when filing a report. Notes on the *valid* categories can be found here. Note that filing under the wrong category doesn’t prevent a report from being investigated, but it can slow things down, particularly if there is insufficient information provided elsewhere in the report.

Abuser Name

This allows you to grab the name of someone causing abuse from those around you. If you launch an Abuse Report by right-clicking on an object or avatar, this section will auto-complete (make sure you have selected the right avatar), otherwise click the Choose button and follow the on-screen instructions.

Continue reading “Tutorial: filing Abuse Reports in Second Life” →

Lab Chat #3 in 10-ish minutes

Posted on by Inara Pey
Lab Chat #3: Troy, Oz and Ebbe
Lab Chat #3: Troy, Oz and Ebbe

Friday, May 6th saw the third in the Lab Chat series take place in-world, featuring guests Oz Linden, the Director of Second Life Engineering, Troy Linden, a Senior Producer of Second Life and of course, Linden Lab CEO, Ebbe Altberg, in his alter-ego of Ebbe Linden.

You can find the full transcript, with audio extracts, as previously published in these pages by following this link.

However, I’ve been asked by a number of people if I could summarise things, rather than them having to read the entire transcript or just having a list of up–front links. I’ve therefore produced this summary, complete with links to the full answers within the transcript. If this approach proves popular with readers, I’ll adopt it as the lead-in to future transcripts.

Work in progress: Aki Shichiroji demonstrates a wearable wyvern utilising Bento bones for animation.
Work in progress: Aki Shichiroji demonstrates a wearable wyvern utilising Bento bones for animation.

Project Bento

  • How will creators make poses and animations for the new bones (wings, fingers, facial expressions, etc)? Creators will be able to use existing plug-ins (MayaStar, Avastar) to create animation content for Project Bento as is currently the case. Full answer.
  • Will there be any in-world tools for Bento pose and animation creation? At this point, Second Life doesn’t have any in-world animation creation tools, and Bento does not attempt to add them. Instead it leverages existing out-world tools. Full answer.
  • Will Bento have the ability to animate (or pose) separately?  Yes. Second life does already support isolating animations to certain parts, and Bento is no different.  Full answer.
  • Will any of the work on the Bento facial bones be incorporated into the default/system avatar for expressions, etc? The default system avatar has not at this point been re-rigged to use the new Bento bones. However, custom mesh heads, when rigged to the bones, will be able to make use of them. Full answer.
  • Will there be, or are there any plans to introduce animated mesh into Second Life (e.g. animated pets, etc)? No comment on whether or not animated meshes will be supported in the future. However, Bento bones can be used to provide a level of animation of creatures, objects, attached to an avatar (e.g. bats flying around your head). Full answer.
  • Will any attempts be made to have the new bones be scriptable for the use in user-created animation rigs like Anypose?  There are no plans to add scripting capabilities that are specific to Bento at this time. Full answer.
  • Can some Bento UG meetings be held at an “Asia friendly” time? It will be looked into. Full answer.

Second Life

The new Experience Keys based Social Islands
The new Experience Keys based Social Islands – see below
  • Can we have tools inside inventory to help manage it?  The Lab is focused on improving inventory operation robustness, and will have a new viewer offering this soon. Better inventory management interfaces and tools are a terrific idea, and something TPVs could even contribute. Full answer.
  • Will we see similar edutainment-type experiences as the new social islands, but aimed at more advanced users? Yes, very probably in time. Full answer.
  • Why doesn’t Second Life have gift cards which can be purchased in stores like other games? Probably more interesting to think of ways to sort-of refer a friend, maybe, with an associated gift card to get them into the world. But something to examine. Full answer.
  • Any plans to provide more robust photography tools similar to Firestorm’s Phototools? Will existing tools be updated? Lab prefers not to comment on things until close to release; photography floater updates an excellent opportunity for TPV / open-source contributions. Full answer.
  • Can sound files be increased in length beyond the 10 second limit? Yes, and animation file sizes can be increased. By how much isn’t clear, and the work will be dependent on moving the assets to CDN delivery first. Full answer.
  • Will we be able to texture more than 8 faces when editing mesh in-world?  The change made in Sept 2015 refers to allowing more than 8 textureable faces as a part of the upload process, not to in-world editing. No further changes planned at present. Full answer.
  • Will any similar incentive to the private island buy-down offer be presented to Mainland owners? Not at present. Time is required to analyse the other impact of the buy-down offer and determine its overall benefit (or otherwise). So nothing planned for Mainland at the moment or immediate future. Full answer.
  • Will anything be done to address vehicle region crossing issues, particularly with large vehicles, which have become worse over the past year? Lab not aware of any changes that should have made things worse, but will look into matters. However, large vehicles have always been problematic on region crossings, so no promises. Full answer.
  • Will RLV functionality be added to the official viewer? Longer-term, Lab will add more capabilities to Experience Keys which will be similar to, but not compatible with, RLV. Full answer.
  • Will Experience Keys be opened to Basic members to create Experiences? Experience Keys will remain Premium-only do to potential griefing abuse. Premium helps ensure accountability.  Full answer.
  • Will Experience Search (and other search) be improved? The  current focus is the Marketplace search beta, using Elasticsearch. This will likely become the default MP search engine soon. The Lab may then use Elasticsearch on other search capabilities. Full answer.
  • Will the Marketplace Listing Enhancement issues & JIRAs be addressed? The Lab believes they have a fix for a major cause, which is in the process of being implemented and may clear up most issues. Full answer.
  • Can the number of Estate Managers be increased? Will be looked at. Full answer.
  • What’s the best way to report group spammers? Single or Multiple reports? Via the Abuse Report, Quality of report, not quantity is important. Many reports aren’t actionable as they are incomplete. Full answer.
  • Does LL give employees time to use SL? Yes & all staff are encouraged to spend time in SL when first starting. Oz Linden also looks to recruit from SL users where possible. Full answer.
  • Any thoughts on Vulkan graphics support for SL? For SL, no. Sansar, yes.
  • Can we have an update on Linden Realms and the grid hunt games available through the portal parks? New Linden content is coming, but no details given.

Continue reading “Lab Chat #3 in 10-ish minutes” →

Lab Chat #3: transcript and audio

Posted on by Inara Pey
Lab Chat #3: Saffia, Troy, Oz, Ebbe and Jo
Lab Chat #3: Saffia, Troy, Oz, Ebbe and Jo

Friday, May 6th saw the third in the Lab Chat series take place in-world, featuring guests Oz Linden, the Director of Second Life Engineering, Troy Linden, a Senior Producer of Second Life and of course, Linden Lab CEO, Ebbe Altberg, in his alter-ego of Ebbe Linden.

The session focused on a mix of questions submitted to an official forum thread ahead of the event, and questions taken directly from the audience, and this transcripts offers a breakdown of the questions asked and answers given.

Please note that in places the audio presented has been edited to remove asides, repetition or removed inaudible elements, and so may differ in length and content to the official recordings made of the session. However, no attempt has been made to alter the content or context of the answers supplied by Ebbe, Oz and Troy.

For ease of reference, the session has been split into two parts, and the following Quick links will take readers to any specific topics of interest to them, and further topics can be navigated to by either returning to this page, or using the Quick Links summaries provided within the Bento / Second Life and Project Sansar pages.

 

 

VWBPE 2016: Ebbe Altberg transcript with audio

Posted on by Inara Pey
Ebbe Atlberg, through his alter ego of Ebbe Linden, addresses the VWBPE conference
Ebbe Atlberg, through his alter ego of Ebbe Linden, addresses the VWBPE conference

On Wednesday, March 9th 2016, Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg appeared at the 2016 Virtual Worlds Best Practice in Education conference, where he gave a brief overview of matters pertaining to Second Life and Project Sansar over the course of the year since the last VWBPE conference, and to answer questions about either platform asked by the audience.

The following is a transcript of his session at VWBPE 2016, complete with audio extracts. Note that note all items are given in the order they are discussed in the video of the session. For ease of reference, I’ve split comments and questions between those specific to Second Life and those focused on Project Sansar. Also, where more than one question was asked on a specific topic, I’ve grouped the questions / responses together under a single topic.

The Summary

Click on the links below to go to the relevant section.

Opening Comments

Thank you  so much. Great to be here again; it’s an awesome event, I hope you’ve all have had great sessions and more sessions to come. I will just spend a little bit of time and just talk about what I am and what we here at Linden Lab are really excited about, and what we’re working on a little bit. Then as usual, very happy to spend most of the time actually talking to you with regards to your questions that you may have.

So, first of all, wow! What an incredible year it’s been. The virtual reality market that we’re sort-of been waiting for is actually in the process of happening. We’re now seeing incredible investments from a  very large number of companies, whether it’s hardware, software, platforms tools, that I’m sure many of you are very excited to get your hands on very soon.

We in the Lab have been playing a lot with the latest hardware that’s going to hit the consumer market soon, over the next few months, and doing a lot of work to integrate those into project Sansar, but there’s also work to get some integration of that into Second Life.

So we feel very fortunate to be having all this incredible experience, together with you all, of running Second Life. Having the opportunity to see what works and what doesn’t work, what works really well and what is not working at all, and what it takes to run a platform like Second Life. What makes creators successful, what makes businesses successful, because our primary goal here is to make creators of experiences as successful as they can possibly be, and share their success.

VWBPE 2016
VWBPE 2016

Second Life Overview

Second Life has made a lot of good strides over the last year since we last met. Performance is continually improving, and we have some more performance improvements in the pipeline to come out soon. Quality is improving, stability is improving, and we’ve also managed to roll out some nice improvements. New avatars, and you have the new, better web control or media on prim, that’s now a really modern browser technology, which hopefully will be really helpful for educators.

New Registration API

We also have a lot of interesting things coming in the pipeline. [An] improved registration API, so that it will be easier for institutions to bring on their customers or clients or students in a more pre-configured way: choosing what avatars they can select from, getting them set-up in the proper groups, and taking them through a whole custom on-board experience.

Back to index

Compliance Work

We’ve also done a huge amount of work in what seems boring but is very, very, important to us, and even though you might not realise it, very important to you all as well, which is around compliance, and making sure that all the things we do fiscally within the Second Life virtual economy, and what it takes for people to redeem to fiat currency, US dollars or whichever currency you prefer around the world. We’re doing a huge amount of work to improve all the tools and fraud controls, etc., to make sure we’re running a clean, tight ship where there’s no money laundering or anything of that sort.

We’ve gotten far enough that we’ll be able to soon improve the time it takes for people to redeem money, so we can do that in hopefully just a day or two for most people. We’ve blogged about that, so you might already know about that.

Back to index

The SL Team and Other Things Coming Up

So, I feel really good about the Second Life team. Just a few weeks ago we had the whole team together in Seattle. We keep switching spots; sometimes we do it in Boston and this time we did it near the offices in Seattle. And it’s a very tight group, they are very passionate about Second Life, with Oz heading-up on the engineering side, and just a great, tight crew who really just want the absolute best for Second Life and for you all. So I feel very good with what that team has been able to do over the last year, and what they’ll be able to do in the coming years.

Some cool things coming in addition to the registration API. We have a way for, institutions that have had interruptions of viewer updates when it wasn’t something they were completely prepared for can now sign-up to be on an EDU channel, where we can better manage viewer updates.

We’re working on an update to get the current Oculus viewer working with Second Life, and we’re also working on this Quick Graphics viewer (version 4.0.2.311103 a the time of writing), so that you can manage when people show up in your regions with way too much clothing or too heavy of an avatar and still get good frame rates within your regions if there are avatars that are too heavy.1 Those will all roll out over the next weeks and months.

Back to index

Continue reading “VWBPE 2016: Ebbe Altberg transcript with audio” →

Lab Chat #2: Ebbe Altberg – transcript and audio

Posted on by Inara Pey
Lab Chat #2, January 21st, 2016 - Jo Yardley, Ebbe Altberg and Saffia Widdershins
Lab Chat #2, January 21st, 2016 – Jo Yardley, Ebbe Altberg and Saffia Widdershins

Update Wednesday, January 27th: The official Lab Chat #2 video is now on-line, and is embedded at the end of this article.

Thursday, January 21st saw the  second in a series of discussions called Lab Chat, billed as “an opportunity for you to ask Lindens your questions during a live taping that will be recorded and archived for everyone to view.”

As with the first show, the session featured the Lab’s CEO, Ebbe Altberg in his alter ego of Ebbe Linden. In preparation for the recording, Second Life users were invited to ask questions about the Lab, Second Life, “Project Sansar”, etc on a forum thread.

Over 80 questions were asked, all of which were reviewed by the Lab Chat production team, and from which the list of question to put to Ebbe was drawn. The questions select were those the production team thought would be of most interest to the attending audience, or represented those questions which were asked multiple times by different people.

The following pages offer a transcript of the show’s recording session, which has been split into three parts:

  • Those questions and answers those related to Second Life
  • Those focused more on Project Sansar
  • Additional questions & audience Q&A.

The first two sections are presented in chronological order – as the questions were asked during the recording of the show. The additional questions have been grouped together (where possible) by subject matter, for ease of reference.

The Quick Links below will take you directly to each of these three sections, or to any of the individual discussion points within them. Each question / answer includes an audio extract of that question and response for those who wish to listen rather than read.

Quick Links

Concerning Second Life

Concerning Sansar

Additional Questions

Closing Comments

Note: this is not a transcript of the entire recording session. The focus is on the questions asked and responses given. Also, the audio extracts are from a recording which was cleaned-up following the show to remove repetitions, pauses, trailing comments which otherwise break the flow / context of replies. However, no attempt has been made to editorialise or in any way alter the context of any response given to questions.