News-Opinion – Page 81 – Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld

Bright Canopy update

Posted on September 6, 2015April 6, 2020 by Inara Pey

On Saturday, September 5th, Bright Canopy held an in-world meeting and their island in Second Life to discuss recent events regarding the Bright Canopy service (you can read the background here).

In particular, the aim of the meeting was for the Bright Canopy team to share what they’ve learned since moving to launch the service on August 29th, and discuss the options needed to make the service sustainable going forward.

Both Bill and Jerri Glover (Chaos Priestman and Beth (Bethsael) Robbiani in SL) were present at the meeting, which was held in text, and a transcript of the chat log is available on the Bright Canopy website. What follows here is a high-level summary.

The meeting opened with Chaos providing some historical context of how Bright Canopy came into being, paying particular attention to how the service is structured, as this is important to grasp. In summary:

Bright Canopy manage the service and take the viewer and tweak it to run as a part of a cloud service
The Bright Canopy service is delivered to subscribers using Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) g2.2xlarge server instances (1 per user)
This delivery via Amazon is facilitated by Frame, a company with considerable experience in provisioning optimised Windows applications to users via the cloud.

All of this obviously involves costs – most notably with both Amazon and with Frame. In order to minimise the costs with Amazon, the most efficient means to provision Bright Canopy is using Amazon’s Spot Instance pricing mechanism. Since its introduction, this has generally pitched at around US $0.12-$0.15 per hour for g2.2xlarge server instances.

Unfortunately, at the start of August 2015, the Spot Instance pricing for the server instances started spiking, first in Ireland, then in both California and Virginia – the three Amazon POPs Bright Canopy would be using via Frame. These spikes meant that instance costs ballooned from under US $0.25 an hour to anywhere between $1.00 and $8.00 depending on the location.

Ireland was the first of Amazon EC2 centres used by Bright Canopy to be affected by sharp rises in Spot Instance pricing at the start of August

“Our business model was based on Amazon’s Spot Instance prices remaining below $0.25 as they had since they were introduced,” Chaos explained. “That’s just the cost of the instances. That doesn’t include Frame being paid or Bright Canopy being paid … This [spiking] broke our business model, but it looked like a temporary spike. We decided to continue with the planned launch. We believed the prices would come back down.”

To try to counter the unpredictability of the Spot Instance prices, Bright Canopy moved to Amazon’s On Demand pricing. This is far more predictable than spot Instance, but comes at a premium – US $0.80 an hour – leaving the service losing money.

“We hoped that usage would even out in such a way that we would lose money slowly enough to maintain our course until we could build out a solution that cost less on the back-end,” Chaos said of the move. “In the meantime we also hoped the Spot prices would come back down and give us some relief.”

The California Spot Instance pricing, which has only settled down again in the last few days — The California Spot Instance pricing also started showing considerable volatility at the start of August 2015

Following launch, however, user behaviour changed quite dramatically. People were spending much longer periods logged-in, both increasing costs and forcing the use of even more server instances.

“It became clear that we could not sustain the losses,” Chaos said. “Usage was just not the same as we had seen in Pre-release. We expected a difference, but we didn’t expect such a huge difference. We agreed to pull the plug and rethink things.”

More recently, the Spot Instance prices in the USA have showed signs of settling down once more. However, it is still too soon to know whether this is an indication that prices are resuming their pre-August levels, and Ireland has certainly remained volatile.

Like Ireland and California, Virginia, Bright Canopy's newest POP with Amazon, also experienced enormous volatility in pricing which has - like California - only recently showed signs of stabilising. Unfortunately, there's no guarantee this will remain the case — Like Ireland and California, Virginia, Bright Canopy’s newest POP with Amazon, also experienced enormous volatility in pricing which has – like California – only recently showed signs of stabilising. Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee this will remain the case

So what does this mean for the service?

Most immediately, it means that the service will not be back up for Monday, September 7th, the date Bright Canopy had indicated as being the earliest by which it might be resumed. Instead, things remain in what Bright Canopy is calling a holding pattern until such time as a consensus has been reached on the best, most sustainable means of moving the service forward for the benefit of those needing it.

“We have worked with Frame on a proposed plan that we would be able to offer to a limited number of people at first,” Chaos said. “We have not come to an agreement yet on all of the details of that plan. If and when we do, please understand that this is just a stopgap so that the people who most need the service will have an option.”

This approach is intended to meet at least some of Frame’s costs (who up until now, as with Bright Canopy, haven’t received any income from the venture), as well continuing to meet Amazon’s charges. Bright Canopy will continue to work on the service unpaid, but will have to step back from 24/7 support and response and for the timing being to providing responses to questions and support requests within 24 hours.

The main presentation was followed by a Q&A session, which covered a number of topic areas, and I recommend those interested read the transcript in full to see both questions and answers.

Sinewave.space: a further contender for virtual spaces

Posted on September 6, 2015February 17, 2016 by Inara Pey

The above video has been gaining attention since first appearing on You Tube at the end of August. It’s advance promotion for a new virtual worlds platform called Sinewave.space, built using the Unity 3D engine, and which may be opening its doors to initial users in December 2015.

The company behind Sinewave.space is Sine Wave Entertainment, a name which may be familiar to many Second Life users, given it is also the company behind the highly successful Sine Wave animations brand in-world.

Spearheading the work is Sine Wave’s CEO, Adam Frisby, a man who has considerable experience with virtual world platforms, having been one of the founders of the OpenSimulator project. In Second Life he is probably better known as Adam Zaius, the man behind such ventures as Azure Islands and the DeepThink virtual worlds development agency, which operated in both Second Life and OpenSim.

Adam Frisby is perhaps more recognisable to many in SL as Adam Zaius

Nor are Sine Wave Entertainment new to the virtual worlds market. They’ve built and operated a number of virtual world spaces themselves, and they’ve produced virtual world spaces on behalf of clients, with all of their products created using the Unity 3D engine.

Perhaps the largest of their own environments is Wet.fm, a music-focused virtual environment claiming some 400,000 “live audience members”, 120 artists and some 600 music events held to date.

Chief among client-oriented spaces the company have developed is Flybar, a “multiplayer social game and on-line cinema for [the] globally distributed Spanish language soap opera Cuéntame cómo pasó“, and which claims 1.2 million unique visitors since 2012, together with the Gojiyo virtual world / platform The latter was originally developed for India’s Godrej Industries and boasts 1.7 million registered users. It also appears to have what might be called associated games or spin-offs, such as Jiyopets.

Sine Wave are responsible for the India-based virtual world, GoJiyo, for Godrei Industries, and which boasted 1.7 million registered users

Reading the available information about sinewave.space, it’s interesting to note the similarities in approach between it and Project Sansar. For example, both platforms are intended to be white label environments in which creators can build their own branded spaces, and then promote / market them directly to their potential audience, complete with sign-up portal, etc., without that audience necessarily being aware that the space they are entering is part of a platform providing many such spaces / experiences.

Further, both companies indicate the spaces within each platform could potentially be of unlimited size (Sine Wave indicate bandwidth, and Linden Lab the physics simulator, as being the only practical limitations to “land size”); both platforms will offer a mix of “in-built” tools as well as support for a broad range of 3rd party tools for content creation – although Sine Wave would appear to be significantly further down the road in this. Sine Wave and Linden Lab also appear to be steering a similar course in terms of offering central user account management, virtual goods marketing, etc., which can be used across multiple environments running on their platforms.

Sine Wave are offering a content creation tool chain which includes an advanced animation / gesture system and, as illustrated above, a “humanoid resizer” tool, designed to allow mesh clothing sized for “popular avatar skeletons” to be automatically resized to fit the primary Sinewave.space avatar skeleton

Which should not be taken to mean I think the two are in any way connected – I don’t. Rather, I find it interesting that two companies, each with their own approach to building and running immersive 3D spaces, have arrived at a similar conceptual approach as to how to build a platform aimed at being flexible enough in design and implementation to appeal to a wide cross-section of potential use-cases, without necessarily tying creators / clients / partners – or indeed, users – to a single branded environment.

Obviously, there are differences as well. For example, Sine Wave have indicated that among the worlds running on Sinewave.space will be a number of their own spaces – such as the aforementioned wet.fm, which is due for a re-launch under the sinewave.space banner in the near future – with the Sine Wave portfolio listing a number (all?) of such spaces which might be candidates for inclusion.

Sine Wave also produce Convvirt, a business-oriented space built on Unity 3D. Whether it is to form a part of the overall sinewave.space "federation" of virtual worlds is unclear, but it is listed as a part of the also listed under the Sinewave.space portfolio, so one assumes so — Sine Wave also produce Convvirt, a business-oriented space built on Unity 3D. Whether it is to form a part of the overall Sinewave.space “federation” of virtual worlds is unclear, but it is listed as a part of the also listed under the Sine Wave portfolio bearing the Sinewave.space brand, so one assumes so

Sine Wave also have the advantage of building on an engine – Unity 3D – with which they have many years of experience of both operating and using to build virtual spaces, rather than starting entirely from scratch. Lessons learned from past efforts can be put directly to use. They are also well-versed in the tools an capabilities contained within the engine without having to go through an internal learning curve as a part of the development process, and they have experience in combining the tools within the engine with their own tools – motion capture, animation, etc. – to present creators with an integrated tool chain.

As it is, and as noted earlier, Sine Wave are seeking content creators – region designers, clothing designers, animators and gesture designers, vehicle builders, and more – and in doing so, they’re offering those signing-up a 70/30 (in the creator’s favour) revenue split on all content sold within the platform’s worlds when they are opened to users. Those interested should follow the above link to find out more.

It’ll be interesting to see how sinewave.space develops over the coming months, both independently as with Project Sansar as a possible frame of reference (and even vice-versa), and I hope to be able to provide updates on progress through these pages.

Note; this article was largely drafted prior to show #84 of the Drax Files Radio Hour podcast, in which Drax talks to Adam Frisby about Sinewave.space. You can hear the conversation starting at the 34:30 mark, with an introduction by Drax.

Lab adds “Latest Photos” to the SL blog

Posted on September 4, 2015 by Inara Pey

Latest Photos Inworld - the new addition to the blog contents page of the Second life website — Latest Photos in Inworld – the new addition to the blog contents page of the Second life website

Ciaran caught this ahead of me, but there is a new addition to the Second Life Community website Blogs tab. Entitled Latest Photos in Inworld, it displays – as the name suggests – thumbnails of the photographs selected by Xiola Linden from the Second Life Flickr pool to appear as the Inworld blog Second Life Pic of the Day.

The pictures can be seen in a number of ways.You can, to start with, either click on an individual image or on the View All link in the lower right corner of the banner. Both of these options will open a pop-up window which displays either the selected image or (View ALL) the most recent image posted as the Pic of the Day. You can then use the thumbnails under the main image to display other photos in the window, or use the arrow buttons on either side of the thumbnails to step chronologically backwards (right) or forwards (left) through all of the selected images contained in the blog.

In addition, with the pop-up is displayed, you can click on the Inworld link in the top left corner to go directly to the InWorld blog, where you can scroll through off the selected pictures, or you can click on the “Second Life Pic of the Day” link to display the selected image in its original blog post.

Also, in the lower right corner of the pop-up window are three buttons: a thumbs-up, allowing users to register their liking of a picture, together with a moderation button and a download button. Obviously, you have to be logged-in to the Community website to use the buttons, but the thumbs-up is a nice way of showing appreciation for the images shown.

Right now, the capability is only available on the Blogs tab, but while chatting with to Xiola about it, I learned that the capability to display images in this way might be extended elsewhere within the Community website. “We’re hoping to turn it on in forums as well,” she said. “But we have some technical points to address, so I am looking into work-arounds for them.”

Quite how this will work will be interesting. I imagine that trying to order and stream images so that they make some semblance of sense when displayed in forum headers or the main Forums tab of the community website (if that is where they’ll appear) isn’t that easy. But if it could be done, it might be a visual means to help draw people to forums threads on things like in-world destinations, fashion, etc. In the meantime, why not check the SL Blogs tab and have a look for yourself?

Bright Canopy: in-world meeting and service resumption

Posted on September 4, 2015April 29, 2020 by Inara Pey

Bright Canopy have announced they’ll be holding an in-world meeting at their home island in Second Life on Saturday, September 5th at 11:00 SLT.

The meeting will feature an update on the current status of the Bright Canopy streaming service, together with the decisions the company is facing to move forward.

“I’d like to invite those interested in an update on the status of Bright Canopy and its future to attend,” Bright Canopy founder Bill Glover (Chaos Priestman in SL) said.

“The goal is to share what we have learned with the launch and this past week of down time and to have a discussion with the community about what is needed to make this service sustainable and what our options are going forward.”

Those who have been using Bright Canopy will be able to catch up on events following the official launch of the service, and which forced the company to re-evaluate its pricing mechanism, prior to technical issues combining with pricing concerns and forcing the company to suspend subscriptions while matters were worked on.

Bill Glover: meeting to discuss matters and update Bright Canopy on Saturday, September 5th at 11:00 SLT at Bright Canopy Island

The technical issues have now been resolved, and Bright Canopy have indicated that in theory, the service could be back up and available on Monday, September 7th.

However, they are emphasising this is the earliest point at which the service might be up. The company has also indicated whether this in fact happens may depend in some degree on the decisions reached during the meeting.

As I recently explained, part of the issue Bright Canopy has faced is with the Amazon Spot instance pricing model. Generally the most cost-effective means of supplying services through Amazon’s infrastructure, this has been incredibly volatile over the past several weeks.

In the last few days, Amazon’s US Spot Instance prices have come down somewhat and are showing a little more stability, although the prices for Ireland remain volatile and unpredictable.

Given this, one possible option for Bright Canopy might be for them to split their service between the US West and East coast POPs they are using, and drop Ireland for the time being. However, this is also not without potential issues. There is no guarantee, for example, that the US pricing will remain stable – as Bright Canopy are only too aware; for another it could be months before Ireland has reached a point where operating through the Dublin POP is a viable option once more.

Thus there is a lot to be discussed, and so all those with an interest in the service are being encouraged to attend Saturday’s meeting. There will be plenty of scope for questions to be asked, and a transcript will be provided through the Bright Canopy blog for anyone unable to attend.

For those who would like to submit a question in advance, either because they cannot attend the meeting in person, or to guard against being unable to access the Bright Canopy region if there is a large turn-out, they can do so by e-mailing Jerri Glover (jerri-at-brightcanopy.com/).

Community Gateways set for a return to Second Life

Posted on September 3, 2015June 21, 2016 by Inara Pey

During the SL12B “Meet the Lindens” presentations, mention was made a number of times about the new user on-boarding process, and steps the Lab are and would be taking to try to improve the overall experience for those signing-up to Second Life.

There were two aspects mentioned during the talks which piqued my interest. One of them was the Lab’s use of new web landing pages – something I’ll be discussing with Peter Gray, the Lab’s director of global Communications, in an upcoming article. The other was the potential return of the Community Gateway Programme.

For those unfamiliar with the latter, at one time the Lab ran a programme which allowed communities to connect to the Second Life registration pathway, enabling them to steer incoming users directly to their own orientation / support environment, and thus provide them with assistance and hands-on support in getting started in SL. The programme was discontinued in August 2010, with the Lab citing several reasons for doing so, including issues around scalability and management oversight, together with question marks around the overall effectiveness of the programme.

However, there have been repeated calls from within the community for the Lab to bring the programme back, and this now appears to be what is happening, initially as a test to see how things go.

The new programme is designed to allow communities and groups bring users into Second Life, present them with help and support in getting started, much like the original Gateway programme, and hopefully present them with interests and activities to keep them engaged with the platform. These gateways will include web pages to attract new users to them, which will include a registration API to allow those users to sign-up to SL and create and account without necessarily having to go through the central registration process at secondlife.com. Additionally, if they wish, those running the gateway can provide dedicated links for downloading a viewer (official or TPV).

I caught up with Patch Linden on the matter at the end of July, to find out some more. “We are bringing back Community Gateways as a test, based on the positive feedback and indicators of success they had in the past,” he confirmed with me. “We have 20 Gateways with whom we’re currently in discussions, but we’ve not decided on all of the programme details yet and plan to take an organic approach to re-establishing things.”

Did this mean those involved in the new programme would be able to bring new users directly into their experience, I asked, or would they have to go via the current sign-up page, and have new users connect to them via the existing Learning Island / Social Island portal system?

“We’d like to allow gateway creators to help bring in users,” Patch replied. “The idea is that the new registrant would begin their time in SL in the experience that matches their interest, instead of Learning Island.” He paused and then added, “However, adding Gateways to the end of Learning Island and/or Social Island are still being considered.”

Communities and organisations within SL have attempted to offer guidance to new users, including the UWA, with their education-focus guidance for students and teachers arriving in SL - find out more about it here — Communities and organisations within SL have continued to offer guidance to new users. The UWA, for example, offer the SL Educate orientation, designed by Carmsie Melodie and focused specifically at students and teachers arriving in Second Life. You can read more about it here

A look at the Firestorm Gateway

One of the groups involved in the new Gateway Programme is the Firestorm team. Together with a number of other groups offering new user orientation facilities, they participated in a 6-week experiment run by the Lab to monitor how new sign-ups faired as a result of passing through their orientation process, and gather comparative retention data. Following this, Firestorm were one of the groups invited into the upcoming new Gateway Programme.

“The Gateway idea is mostly based on a single region,” Jessica Lyon, Firestorm’s Project Manager said as she and Ed Merryman gave me a tour of their new user experience shortly after I’d talked to Patch Linden. “But you know me :). I wasn’t satisfied with one region – if we were going to do this, we wanted to do it right!”

The result is that the Firestorm Gateway comprises six regions in total, including the original Firestorm Support region, which has been re-purposed to fit with the Gateway approach. “One of the new regions is going to be a Firestorm Orientation for new sign ups only,” Jessica continued as we explored, “it’ll be a similar to our current orientation island.”

Firestorm are participating in the new Gateway Programme, offering an experience focused around their self-help orientation island — Firestorm are participating in the new Gateway Programme, offering an experience focused around their orientation island

The rest of the regions offer an assortment of facilities and activities intended to help new users get better acquainted with Second Life, using the viewer, and participating in some of the activities they can find during their in-world travels. A staffed support area provides practical help and support, for example, while users can also enjoy activities such as jet skis, sailing, boating, and flying within the regions, or try their hand at a scuba diving adventure.

There’s also an amphitheatre (under construction at the time of my visit) which will be used for events focused on new users, viewer Q&A sessions, and so on, while social areas around the island will offer new users the opportunity to relax and meet with established SL users as well.

Firestorm also aim to help people discover popular activities such as flying, boating, and boating in Second Life — Firestorm also aim to help people discover popular activities such as flying, boating, and scuba diving in Second Life

To help draw users to the experience, Firestorm will also be remodelling their website, allowing it to be linked to the Lab’s user registration process. Thus, people visiting the website will be able to sign-up to Second Life, select their avatar, download the Firestorm viewer and log-in directly to the Firestorm new user experience, reflecting Patch’s view that new users should be able to directly reach the experience which interests them. Other participants in the Gateway Programme will be able to offer similar sign-up / log-in capabilities for people to reach their experiences as well.

As noted earlier in this article, the new Gateway Programme isn’t quite ready for launch at present – but it will be soon. When it does so, the Lab will be publishing more information on it, including participation guidelines, and I’ll be offering a follow-up to this article at that time.

Similarly, the Firestorm regions are ready for opening just yet; when they do, I’ll be bringing you a in-depth review of the facilities and Firestorm’s approach to the new user experience.

My thanks to Pete Linden, Patch Linden, Jessica Lyon and Ed Merryman for their time and assistance in writing this article.

Bright Canopy: positive response forces change of direction

Posted on September 2, 2015April 29, 2020 by Inara Pey

Update, September 4th: Please note there will be a Bright Canopy community meeting in-world in Second Life at 11:00 SLT on Saturday, September 5th, at the Bright Canopy island. All those wishing to catch-up on the latest situation for the service are invited to attend.

Saturday, August 29th saw Bright Canopy, the new cloud streaming service delivering Second life (and the viewer) directly to your web browser, officially launch.

Already extensively previewed by SL bloggers – you can catch my overview of the service here – the launch was given a further boost when the Lab also blogged about it. announcement of the formal launch led to a huge amount of interest being shown in the service.

While there were the inevitable hiccups which tend to accompany such launches, it was the overall demand which perhaps caused the fledgling company the most problems. So much so, that Bright Canopy have been forced to revise their subscription model, and suspend the service while they do so.

The news of the change to the subscription model came via an e-mail to existing subscribers which was also posted to the Bright Canopy blog. Currently the plan is that:

From Sunday, September 6th, those signing-up to the service will be charged $17.00 a month for up to 20 hours of use. Additional time will be charged at $0.013 per minute
From now until 12:00 am on Sunday, September 6th, those who signed up for the service will be charged $7.00 for 20 hours, then at the $0.013 per minute
All existing subscriptions have been cancelled, and all existing users will need to subscribe to the new plan once the door is open to subscriptions once more.

Bright Canopy are the first to admit this is hardly an ideal situation, and the hope is that it will be an interim measure, until more favourable terms can be introduced in the future, once a few more things have been put in place.

Discussing the situation with me, Bill Glover, Bright Canopy’s founder said, “It’s been a whiplash weekend. We had more than 1000 sign-ups in just a few hours and that actually worked really well.”

However, there were some niggling issues as the launch progressed into the weekend. Transitioning those users who had been on the beta / pre-launch service raised a few problems, as did the migration for those users best served by it to Bright Canopy’s US East coast POP, which also came on-stream as a part of the launch. It was while working on these issues the alarms started ringing around unconstrained cost risks due to the volume of use, forcing Bright Canopy to take action.

Bill Glover: remarkable response to Bright Canopy forced a re-think in approach

“The alarms required us to throttle down use,” Bill told me. “When the experience suffered long wait times, I pulled the plug [on accepting subscribers]. We’re not going to charge people unless we can be sure this is going to be there for them and they will get value for the money.”

The throttling also meant that over the launch weekend, users were limited to one hour’s in-world time before they were disconnected and had to re-log. To compensate people for this, Bright Canopy have indicated they’ll not be charging anyone for their time over the weekend of 29th / 30th of August.

To understand why the pricing structure change was required despite the good response, it is necessary to understand how Bright Canopy is provisioned. Currently, when logging-in to the service, users are hosted on individual servers, supplied by Amazon’s Spot Instance bidding system. The problems here are twofold.

On the one hand, using an entire server to host just one user isn’t terribly efficient; Frame, as Bright Canopy’s infrastructure partner, are already working to offer more efficient means of hosting without impacting individual user’s experiences with Bright Canopy. On the other, and as I’ve previously reported, Amazon’s Spot Instance mechanism, so long the most cost-effective means of obtaining server space, has become subject of bidding wars which have caused sudden and unpredictable spikes in service pricing.

Spot Instance pricing with Amazon is making it difficult for Bright Canopy to firmly pin-down their monthly subscription price – click for full size — Volatility with Amazon’s Spot Instance pricing has caused huge fluctuations in pricing, making it had to predict how realistic fees charged by small start-ups like Bright Canopy are in meeting costs – click for full size

While Bright Canopy were aware of this, and developed contingencies they hoped would be sufficient to handle pricing fluctuations, etc., until such time as better hosting options were ready to roll, the sheer volume of demand for the service meant that these contingencies were burnt through in the course of the first weekend, thus prompting the current situation.

As noted earlier in this article, Bright Canopy hope the new plan will be an interim measure. The problem here of course is that 20 hours + $0.013 a minute isn’t going to be that attractive an offering to users – something Bright Canopy is all too aware of. With many users spending tens of hours a week in-world, the additional costs could easily mount up, and so people are understandably going to be more focused on the potential for additional costs than on the potential for improved pricing down the road.

As a result of the overall situation, Bright Canopy have opted to keep the service suspended while discussions on the situation continue.

The announcement that Bright Canopy will remain down as they continue to try to work through the price / cost issues, as Tweeted and delivered via in-world message

“We are verifying and double verifying so that when we come up, we stay up,” Bill said to me as the announcement was sent out.

I’ll have more updates on this as further information becomes available / announcements are made.

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A look at the Firestorm Gateway

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