A few weeks back, I received an e-mail from Alianna Logan asking me if I would consider having this blog being syndicated on a new blog feed – LivingSL – which is, in her words “focused on the thoughts, feelings, ideas, expressions, explorations, etc. of SL residents, even mixing in real life at times.”
Intrigued by the offer, I dropped Alianna a line, asking a little more about why she’s started feed (and to accept her invitation!).
“I was one of those who was focused solely on fashion feeds,” she said in reply, “and then started to realize there was a whole world of blogs out there I was missing out on. It’s been on the back burner because of the other three I have.”
By the “other three”, Alianna is referring to her other feeds – DesigningSL, her feed for SL creators, bloggingSL for SL fashion, and HuntingSL for events and media in SL.
LivingSL has in fact been running for a few weeks now as mentioned, and I’m frankly honoured and delighted to have been asked to help get things going. If you take a look, you’ll doubtless see a fair few names from the blogsphere you recognise, and the cross-section of articles means that the feed does indeed cover areas not often found in SL-related blog feeds.
Alianna has just opened the feed’s doors to suggestions from readers on additional blogs which might be added to it. So if you do know of a blog that fits the criteria for the feed as outlines above, why not drop her a line?
If you’re looking for a central point by which you can keep up with SL-related news, commentary, thoughts and explorations, sometimes mixed with a dash of real life, make sure you bookmark LivingSL.
I came across a short interview conducted by the Linux-focused Root Gamer with Desura founder Scott Reismanis held shortly after the news broke that the Lab had acquired the digital distribution service, but which seems to have gone unnoticed elsewhere.
Since the announcement of the acquisition, there has been considerable interest in whether it means Desura / LL will compete more directly with others in the same marketplace – notably Steam. In a recent interview with Gamasutra’s Kris Ligman, which I also covered here, Rod Humble had a few pokes at this himself (although some of his comments on competition would appear to have a much wider context which includes Second Life). Reismanis sees the “competition” element of the acquisition in terms of providing Desura with much-needed additional ability to pro-actively attract games developers, rather than having to react to overtures from games developers, commenting:
Scott Reismanis
At the moment we are largely dependent on developers reaching out to us about getting published – that’s what our small team had time to do. With Linden Lab help we will expand our team working with the game developers helping us target and bring more on board.
In reading both Reismanis’ and Humble’s comments around the acquisition, it would appear that both are very much of the same mind in how they regard the Lab’s initial relationship with Desura and in terms of future plans.
Both, for example, couch the Lab’s role as initially being more supportive than directive; providing additional muscle in key areas to assist the Desura team to carry on with their business in a more structured and focused manner, rather than the Lab charging in and absorbing everything and trying to reinvent the wheel. In this, the approach appears to be more of a partnership more than an outright acquisition and, given the marketplace is new to Linden Lab, not an unwise move.
Not that this means there won’t be any visible changes. Work is already underway to overhaul (or at least update) the Desura client in order to make the Lab’s involvement more apparent. Exactly what form this will take isn’t clear at present, but the work is seen as priority, although dependent upon Desura (or the Lab?) bringing in new staff.
Desura and the Lab: proceeding more as a partnership? (image courtesy of Root Gamer)
The interview also hints that both Humble and Reismanis share the same grand ambitions for the future of a service – and that the ambitions may have been there prior to the acquisition (and by extension, might have been one of the reasons the Lab was attracted to Desura).
Commenting on the Desura blog about the acquisition following the formal announcement, Reismanis give additional insight as to what he believes this means for developers and customer using the service:
To date Desura has been built and run by a dedicated small team – and it’s grown to the point where we list over 1,000 games and have served over 1,000,000 customers. We are very passionate about the developers and community we represent, and I want to assure you now this policy isn’t changing.
With Linden Lab’s support, we plan on expanding our team and providing you with more co-ordinated coverage, sales, marketing efforts, reporting, and assistance from us. We want to solve challenges like discoverability and giving your customers’ choice, and we look forward to doing so. We are going to continue to polish and innovate so Desura stands out and does its most important job better: getting your game into customers’ hands.
So far reaction to the acquisition from within the Desura community appears to be mostly positive, with those responding to the news wishing Reismanis and his team good luck, although there are obviously some questions about what it means in practice for game developers in terms of publishing, DRM, etc., – all of which are liable to only become clearer once the initial dust has settled and both the Desura team and the Lab have worked out priorities and directions and have settled into working together over long distances.
It’ll be interesting to see how this develops over time, starting with the roll-out of the new Desura client, and whether the approach does develop along lines of a partnership rather than a buy-out, and if so, for how long.
Blocksworld has been out a week now. I covered the launch on August 1st, but as I don’t have a iPad, I’m stuck with pining for its possible appearance as an Android app in order to review it myself (even though I haven’t got an Android tablet either *cough*).
This leaves me reliant upon reviews posted elsewhere. So, as with the early appearance of Creatorverse, I’ve been keeping an eye on the Lab’s press page and waiting for a number of reviews to pop-up there. It’s not an ideal way of doing things, but as the likes of 148apps and Kotaku do generally appear in the listings, I decided to see what comes up as well as Googling for reviews.
Overall, and allowing for it being early days, the reactions of reviewers seem favourable. Rob Rich over at 148apps gives Blocksworld a solid four (out of five) stars, noting that the interface is easy to grasp, building is relatively quick and easy to learn, and that the ability to create and build with blocks is something kids the world over can identify with. However, he also notes that there are some inherent weaknesses in the app: vehicles can be difficult to drive, and connecting blocks to build things is limited (you can only connect blocks face-on). As such, he notes that it is fun to play with, but in terms of using it as a form of a game, it’s not so much fun to play.
Mike Fahey over at Kotaku has a fair amount of experience in reviewing the Lab’s products. His reviews are always informative and also lighthearted at times, making them a fun read. It’s actually his reviews I turned to in order to get a handle on both Patterns and Creatorverse before I had access to either. In reviewing Blocksworld he notes that:
Linden Lab is all about creating, or at least they have been since Rod Humble took charge, transforming the company behind Second Life into a company that creates creativity. It was as if Linden Lab only made doughnuts before he arrived, and now they’re making a wide variety of pastries. The delicious, sexy, wildly deviant doughnuts are still there, but then so is Creatorverse and Patterns and Blocksworld and maybe, if we’re very good, some scones.
Blocksworld promotional image (courtesy of Linden Lab)
Like Rob Rich, he comments on the overall simplicity of design and that the UI is very easy to grasp. He also delves more into the mechanics of the app, noting that using it can be approached in a number of ways, from “dive in a build” through to using the supplied “kits” to learn how to build specific items and use specific capabilities.
Interestingly, both reviews touch upon a fact hitherto unmentioned here: that the number of blocks you can use is limited. If you run out, you have to either “win” more or purchase more.
“Winning” additional blocks is a case of using the in-built kits, each of which includes a puzzle / challenge. Build the kit, complete the challenge and your reward is more blocks.
The Linden Lab press page has links to a couple of short articles reporting on the use of Second Life to create virtual environments to both enhance their patient managements skills and to assess how well they apply those skills.
The research was carried out by the St. Marys Hospital Medical Faculty of Imperial College, London, and the results have just been published in the August edition of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons (the abstract is free, the full report costs $31.50, downloadable in PDF).
The Imperial College has a long history of involvement in Second Life
Previous RL studies have shown that the management of patient complications following operations is an extremely important skill set for surgeons to master. However, obtaining the required skills has generally relied upon experience gained in dealing with real patients in the hospital ward, emergency room or intensive care unit, which has tended to make learning a little haphazard.
“The way we learn in residency currently has been called ‘training by chance, because you don’t know what is coming through the door next.’ the study’s co-author, Rajesh Aggarwal, MD, PhD, MA, FRCS, a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) clinician scientist in surgery, explained in a press release accompanying the study’s publication. “What we are doing is taking the chance encounters out of the way residents learn, and forming a structured approach to training.”
For the study, the research team created three environments within Second Life to simulate a hospital ward, an intensive care unit and an emergency room. Within each of these environments. modules were created for three common surgical scenarios: gastrointestinal bleeding, acute inflammation of the pancreas, and bowel obstruction. Surgical residents (interns, junior and senior residents) together with attending surgeons were then tasked with assessing and managing the virtual patients in each of the simulations. Tasks assigned to the surgical staff included recording patient history, carrying out physical examinations, diagnosis illnesses, interpreting lab test results using X-ray and CT scans and defining an appropriate treatment / management plan.
In all, 63 surgeons participated in the simulations, with the performance of the experienced attending surgeons being used as a benchmark against which the performance of the surgical residents could be assessed.
“What we want to do—using this simulation platform—is to bring all the junior residents and senior residents up to the level of the attending surgeon, so that the time is shortened in terms of their learning curve in learning how to look after surgical patients,” Dr. Aggarwal explained.
The results of the research suggested that the environment created within Second Life was a remarkably accurate test of a resident’s abilities, with all three scenarios revealing similar levels of competency between the different groups of surgeons (intern, junior and senior), allowing the researchers to identify where skills need to be further refined and enhanced within each group.
It is now hoped that further research will see the virtual environment used to more effectively and efficiently train surgical residents from hospitals across London in post-surgical care of patients, allowing them to gain the skills they can take back to their working environments and become even more effective in handling patient management in real clinical situations, thus helping to improve patient safety.
“Going through these different steps is not going to teach residents everything they need to know for every patient with bowel obstruction, for example, but it is going to teach them about the majority of patients that he or she is going to look after and it’s going to do it in a much more education-efficient and appropriate manner,” Dr. Aggarwal said.
It is also hoped that that simulations can be used as a means of a refresher course, allowing residents to maintain the skills and understanding they gain from the initial training in a more efficient manner than might be achieved through day-to-day activities at their place of work.
Inside one of the wards at the Imperial College’s presence in SL
Long History
The study doesn’t mark the first time that Imperial College has used Second Life for their research. They have been using the platform for several years, as the following video from a 2008/9 study demonstrates.
On July 31st the Google Affiliate Network GAN) closed-down. In terms of Second Life, the significance of this is that Linden Lab offered their own affiliate advertising through GAN. However, all is not lost for those who wish to advertise SL through their websites with the potential to generate modest income as a result of doing so, a fact Ciaran Laval pointed me towards.
The Lab has entered into a relationship with Commission Junction (who have themselves been running a programme to capture advertisers and publishers who had been using GAN) to provide a new affiliate service to those wishing to advertise Second Life on their websites.
Recently the Lab has been e-mailing those already using the affiliate programme with details on how they can make the switch. For those who have not previously used the affiliate programme and wish to do so for the first time can do so in one of two ways depending on whether or not you already have a publisher account with Commission Junction.
The new affiliate programme banner
If you do not have a publisher account with Commission Junction, you can sign-up using the form linked-to from the Lab’s affiliate programme page. Do note, however that the form represents a contract between you and Commission Junction, not Linden Lab. As such, the Terms of Service displayed as a part of the sign-up process is for Commission Junction (and their associated entities) as well, and therefore should be read through. It would also likely be a good idea to check the Commission Junction website for further background information (details on how the system works for publishers, payout terms, etc.).
Once the sign-up form has been submitted, an e-mail will be sent with instructions on how to activate your new Commission Junction account.
If you do already have a Commission Junction publisher account, you can apparently add Second Life to your account via the Commission Junction member’s area.
Either way, please take the time to read the Lab’s initial FAQ on the affiliate programme page as it includes some important information on the programme – including the fact web sites based in the US states of Arkansas, Connecticut, Illinois, New York, and North Carolina are excluded, presumably for tax liability reasons.
As I’m on WordPress.com, this programme is not for me – but if you self-host, and want to add SL advertising to your site, it might be for you. Commission Junction has a large number of advertisers, so there is no reason why you cannot include other suitable ads as well in order to try to increase your opportunities for revenue generation. Apparently, the minimum payout amount is considered high, so as with everything of this nature, mileage is liable to vary as to the return gained through the programme when all factors (traffic, ad selection, etc.) are taken into account.
Ever since LL announced they were actively working on integrating Oculus Rift into Second Life, there has been a lot of upbeat blogging and speculation as to what it will do / mean for the platform. Reading some of the more enthusiastic posts on the subject, it’s hard not to escape the feeling that we’re apparently standing on the edge of a new age in virtual worlds interaction, and that Oculus Rift is going to bring new depth, new meaning (and new users) to Second Life.
Not all agree with the upbeat messages surrounding the headset and SL. Coinciding with the appearance of a photo showing the Lab’s CEO trying-out the headset, Mona Eberhardt and Will Burns each blogged on the Oculus Rift and some of the factors which could limit its wider use with SL. Both of them raise some valid points, and while I don’t agree with all their arguments, they do present food for thought.
Rod Humble tries out Oculus Rift in a photo released on July 18th, 2013
Oculus Rift is a first-person experience, and this could immediately limit its appeal. The problem here is not so much interacting with the UI or in-world objects – the UI can be updated to handle such shortfalls; some TPVs already allow far greater access to the UI view and to in-world objects than the official viewer when using the first-person (aka Mouselook). Firestorm, for example, presents users with the toolbar buttons in Mouselook which can then be used to display and interact with various UI elements, and it also allows right-click/menu interactions with in-world objects. Ergo, it’s not exactly that hard to re-work things to make them more accessible when using something like Oculus Rift. Similarly, the upcoming updated / new experience tools could also provide the means for better interactions with in-world objects such as teleport portals.
Rather, the problem is that most people seem to intrinsically prefer the third-person view, with the greater freedom (e.g. camera movement, etc.) it presents for the vast majority of their in-world interactions and experiences. Coupled with the price tag for the headset (something I’ll return to in a moment), this could possibly count against the Oculus Rift in terms of general use.
Then, as Mona and Will point out, there is the problem that the headset isolates the wearer from the primary means they have of interacting with other people: the keyboard. While the conversations floater can easily be displayed (CTRL-H), it still leaves the problem of actually being able to see the keyboard in order to type accurately. This leaves those wanting to use Oculus Rift either needing to become very proficient touch-typists, or they’re going to have to settle for using voice.
SL is inherently keyboard-focused for the vast majority of users (image courtesy of Prad Prathivi)
Will Burns points to issues of headsets and open microphones as being a problem when it comes to voice. but I tend to disagree with him. For one thing, it’s not as if a headset / microphone combination can’t be worn with the Oculus Rift. More particularly, and from the in-world meetings held in voice I routinely attend, people actually do leave their microphones open, as the barking dogs, ringing ‘phones and the clicks of lighters being flicked in the background tend to demonstrate. No, the problem is actually more basic than that.
It’s this: since its introduction in 2007, voice tends to have been avoided by what seems to be the vast majority of SL users. Many simply will not use it, period. So if voice is seen as the means for person/person interactions when using Oculus Rift, then it is quite likely to further marginalize take-up with the headset, no matter what the promise of Exciting New Things it might bring.
In his piece, Will also points to the limitation of the headset when trying to perform tasks such as building. Such critiques might appear to be unjustly harsh and leave people saying, “Well yes, but Oculus Rift isn’t designed to be used for everything!“. However, while such a reply is true, it actually underlines Will’s central point: that the headset is liable have niche applications in Second Life which could further limit its appeal among the wider user base.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 