I’ve often said that I don’t classify myself a photographer or artist. While I do travel far and wide across Second Life visiting regions and art installations and taking photos, amassing several thousand images as a result, I do so more for the purposes of illustrating this blog than for any attempt at artistic endeavour on my part.
Similarly, while I do publish to Flickr, and occasionally share images in various groups there, I do so more because Flickr gives me unlimited storage space when compared to the limited space offered by WordPress, which I tend to use more for images and audio used with news, opinion and update pieces.
Nevertheless, all that said, in taking up curating art exhibitions at Holly Kai Park and Holly Kai Garden, I was given the opportunity to establish my own studio at Holly Kai Garden for displaying my work for those who might like to see it in-world.
Located between the koi carp pond and the public terrace at the garden, and facing the two art terraces, it provides me with room to display 26 images, and I plan to rotate those on display on a fairly regular basis. The split level design offers what I hope will be a cosy little seating area on the upper level, with armchairs places before a warming fire. A coffee machine on the shelf dispenses hot beverages for those in need of some caffeine 🙂 .
I’ve also added lighting to the studio to add a little atmosphere, so having advanced lighting enabled when visiting may add to any visit you might make, but you don’t need to necessarily have shadows enabled, so hopefully this won’t be much of a performance hit if your system does find shadows hard to handle.
The studio will be open alongside of art exhibitions on the Holly Kai Garden terraces, and while I can’t promise to always be there myself, I hope that those of you who do drop in to Holly Kai Park and / or the garden to enjoy the exhibitions staged in either, might also enjoy a visit to the studio as well.
And in terms of the park and garden, don’t forget Holly Kai Park features an outstanding group of artists in the first of the renewed Art at the Park series, which runs through until February 7th; while just opened at Holly Kai Garden is Paintings of the Dutch Masters, beautifully curated by Drw. There will be a celebratory party for the latter at the garden on Friday, January 29th starting at 16:00 SLT, featuring the music of DJ Anthony Wesburn.
You can follow all the latest updates concerning Holly Kai Park and its facilities via the Holly Kai website.
Christmas is upon us, and following not far behind, the year’s end, which is often a time of reflection as we look back over the old before pausing to await the arrival of the new. It’s become something of a tradition in these pages to look back over the virtual year’s events as I’ve seen and reported them through this blog, and offer a chance to revisit the ups and downs and the good and the bad the last twelve months have brought us.
To make things easier, I’ve been once again breaking thing down into three parts, this section look through the months of September through December. You can find January through April here and May through August here.
The Lab
Following-up on some comments made at the SL12B Meet the Lindens events, I spoke to the Lab about the (still) upcoming return of the community gateway programme on a trial basis. In October, I followed this up with a look at their focused web landing pages, designed to attract users from specific market verticals.
A part of the education landing page from the Lab, one of a series of targeted ad campaign landing pages designed to attract new users to SL, in operation since around June 2015
The Lab added “Latest Photos” to their blog in September and a photo contest was launched, offering the winning entrants the opportunity to have their images used in a Second Life marketing campaign. The latter was followed in October / November by a Halloween themed contest, this one with the usual L$ prize pool.
Also in September, those using credit and debit cards to make payments directly to the Lab were advised to update their payment information as the Lab transitioned to a new payment system. Was this the first indication of what was to come?
In November, and thanks to the initial sleuthing by Vick Forcella, I was able to report on – and speculate about – the Lab’s new payments and compliance subsidiary, Tilia Inc.
The Terms of Service get updated, and a fair few people get upset … about things that haven’t actually changed, but to which their attention has been drawn as a result of the things whichhave changed. In December the Lab also made what seemed to me to be an odd offer; fortunately, several people helped me understand things a little better 🙂 .
Second Life
While regions continued to fall off the grid, September seemed to be the month when some more notable region known to SL travellers vanished, such as The Forgotten City and Steelhead. News also came that the wonderful Mont St Michel would be passing, although it was still going in November (and still open at the end of the year).
On the technical front, the work on improving inventory management started to see the light of day, and the latest batch of HTTP updates reached project viewer status in September. Avatar complexity and the graphics pre-sets continued not to reach release status as the Lab continued to tweak things and splat bugs. The Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) work for media, however, did get to project viewer status.
In November came the surprising announcement that land set-up fees were reduced and changes had been made to the policy and fees involved in transferring grandfathered regions to a new owner. At the time, I suggested the former would have little real impact, and this seems to have been the case. That month also saw further update on upcoming server-side validation checks intended to help reduce problems users might experience, although some of these were delayed after niggles in the system were found, with deployment finally taking place at the end of the month.
The new range of “Classic” human avatars for Second Life, released by the Lab in November to broadly positive feedback
Christmas is upon us, and following not far behind, the year’s end, which is often a time of reflection as we look back over the old before pausing to await the arrival of the new. It’s become something of a tradition in these pages to look back over the virtual year’s events as I’ve seen and reported them through this blog, and offer a chance to revisit the ups and downs and the good and the bad the last twelve months have brought us.
To make things easier, I’m once again breaking thing down into three parts, this section look through the months of May through August. You can find January through April here; September to December will be following soon.
The Lab
At the end of April, the Lab put out a blog post reminding people of their Second Life Affiliate Programme, something I caught at the start of May. This is the programme allowing SL users to associate a sign-up link to Second Life in their own website, blogs, social media channel, etc., and earn a commission on new SL registrations (which meet set criteria) using that link. While not new, the blog post served as reminder that the programme is still running, and that LL are casting a wide net in their attempts to gain new users. July saw the Lab also launch resident-focused promo videos on YouTube.
Following-up on comments made at the Meet the Lindens event at Sl12B in June, I put together a brief profile on Bjorn Laurin (Bjorn Linden), the Lab’s (then) new VP of Product overseeing both SL and “Project Sansar”.
With the success of the Meet the Lindens event at SL12B (see below), the Lab invited users to ask the CEO via a forum thread in July. As a part of facing the media, Ebbe Altberg and Second Life appeared on the US TV series Dr Phil dealing with computer game addiction, showing to more beneficial side of engaging in computer games and, MMOs and immersive environments.
May opened with a feedback meeting for the ongoing Viewer-Managed Marketplace beta. VMM suddenly moved with a jolt in July, with the start of the final run of automated listing migrations which came earlier than expected. This was completed in early August, when VMM was considered to be fully “live”.
In May, those using Facebook were informed there would likely be problems in uploading SL images to that service as a result of Facebook taking time to convert to a new API, while at the end of that month, I tried-out the Lab’s New User Experience, which had been updated to make use of Experience Keys – at least on a basic level.
August 2015 brought the said news of the passing of long time resident Lumiere Noir, founder of the Ivory tower of Primitives
Premium members saw their group limit raised to 60, then in August Concierge support was extended to all Premium members, before the surprise news came that VAT charges were dropped for Premium memberships, and the monthly subscription was modestly reduced.
In June we got the news that there were no more updates or improvements being planned for my.secondlife.com (the Profile feeds), while to help those on Windows XP and versions of OS X older than 10.7, the Lab introduced the obsolete platforms viewer, which is still available at the end of 2015. Meanwhile, Avatar complexity and the graphics presets capability finally appeared in a project viewer.
In July I took another look at the Experience Keys viewer, as it reached release status, and the Lab issued the notifications project viewer, while the Dolphin viewer bid a farewell. August saw the Lab acknowledged ongoing issues with land damage following changes they’d made, and promised to get things sorted. August also saw first word that validation checks on mesh uploads, etc., were to be more directly enforced server-side in the near future.
The Virtual Pfaffenthal ramped-up in July to offer a look into a pivotal period of Luxembourg’s history, linking the physical world and the virtual in the process, a story Drax was able to cover brilliantly in the October Drax Files World Makers.
After the loss of SL Go at the end of April, Bright Canopy reached the end of a very rapid, but well-planned and managed development cycle, and launched at the end of August.
Project Sansar
During the end of April / beginning of May, speculation was mounting that “Sansar” might be the name of the Lab’s new platform for virtual experiences. I dropped a line to the Lab on the subject as I wrote about the speculation, asking them about both “Project Sansar” and “Sansar”, and on May 5th they replied to me and confirmed via Twitter that “Project Sansar” was an interim code-name for the new platform.
“Sansar” also featured during Ebbe Altberg’s conversation at the SL12B Meet the Lindens event, for which I provided a transcript, and also summarised the comments made about “Sansar” during Troy and Danger Linden’s conversation at their Meet the Lindens event, and from recent media reports.
In an attempt to separate wheat from chaff, I presented the first in a semi-regular series, The Sansar Summary, focusing on what had been said about the new platform, rather than looking at rumours and speculation. Meanwhile, in August, Ebbe sat down with a glass of red wine for a fireside chat with Upload VR’s Nick Ochoa to discuss SL and “Sansar” in a conversation uploaded to YouTube.
And while it may have been slightly later than planned, the Lab finally announced the “Sansar” closed alpha was officially under-way in August.
The Shire one of 39 regions and locations I explored in the first four months of 2015
Christmas is upon us, and following not far behind, the year’s end, which is often a time of reflection as we look back over the old before pausing to await the arrival of the new. It’s become something of a tradition in these pages to look back over the virtual year’s events as I’ve seen and reported them through this blog, and offer a chance to revisit the ups and downs and the good and the bad the last twelve months have brought us.
To make things easier, I’m once again breaking thing down into three parts, starting with a look back over January through to the end of April.
The Lab
The Lab kicked-off the year by announcing they had partnered with Skrill to provide users with further options for their payment activities, including buying L$ and paying account fees, as well as additional local currency options for those Residents outside the United States. Skrill actually gave word of the partnership ahead of LL, as I reported in my own article on the news.
February saw the photo booth contest open, with the Lab opting to try for a judging-by-panel approach to the contest, rather than simply operating a popular vote approach. A L$19,000 prize pool was on offer, although issues with contacting some of the users led to delays and a little confusion after the fact. As it was February and the month of romance, there was also an invitation for users to visit the Isle of View, or for those seeking a little more fun, there was the resumption of the of the Lab vs. residents snowball fight, which took place in the (then) recently opened Winter Wonderland.
Lindens in action: Torley Linden takes airborne aim; and a (possibly paranoid?) android from the Governance Team
The Lab also took the time to ask for assistance from the community. The first request was related to matters of inventory losses, and marked the start of a long-term project to try to improve inventory handling and management in Second Life. The second request was made to open-source developers to help maintain the viewer on the Linux platform.
February also saw me offer a brief look back over Ebbe Altberg’s first year helming the Lab, while confirmation came that Mitch Kapor had stepped back from an active role in the Lab’s board of directors, while remaining an investor in the company – a point which seemed lost to some following this confirmation.
During March, In the first of a series of moves, most of which appear to be driven by matters of compliance, the Lab called a halt to the use of Linden Dollars outside of their own platforms. Elsewhere, the Lab, in what was a good move, shifted emphasis on the perks being offered to those taking Premium membership, prompting me to one again mull over the idea of Premium perks.
Ebbe Linden as he appeared in-world at the VWBPE 2015 conference in March
Also in March, Ebbe Altberg was the opening speaker at the 2015 Virtual Worlds Best Practice in Education (VWBPE) conference, although he opted to take more of a Q&A approach, addressing questions on both Second Life and the Lab’s next generation virtual worlds platform.ahread of this, and in February, in keeping with moves to re-engage with the education community, a request was made for educators to share their success stories.
We also saw the first of what were to become semi-regular opportunities to meet the Lindens announced, which drew a fair number to the photogenic Meauxle Bureaux, as I reported at the time.
Second Life
My own thoughts on Second Life for 2015, started with further musings on the issue of tier – and subject which in some quarters still appears to be surprisingly misunderstood, as demonstrated in frequent comments on the subject which persist in comparing Second Life with much smaller operations.
Capabilities-wise, the start of 2015 saw a final farewell to the last of the legacy avatar baking code, the start of work to fix group chat, and confirmation that the Lab would be replacing llqtwebkit with Chromium Embedded Framework set to bring modern media handling capabilities to Second Life. Elsewhere, the Alchemy TPV developers revealed they had found one of the culprits behind issues of viewer texture thrashing; those little image icons displayed in chat headers, etc., can be quite obnoxious!
Playing with avatar hover height when it was released on Aditi, the beta grid, in February (and the reason I call my alt my “Crash Test Alt” – she suffers a lot!), the long-awaited Lab replacement for the much missed z-offset height adjustment. The capability reached release status in the viewer in March 2015
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 