The Isle of View, the “official” destination for Valentine’s Day reappeared on the grid earlier in the month (my thanks to Bixyl for poking me about it when it appeared), and on Thursday, February 12th, the Lab invited people to consider spending a part of Friday, February 13th visiting the isle.
Love is in the air and Valentine’s Day is just a few days away! Pink and red dominate, chocolate sales sky-rocket, and we’re reminded that the true hallmark of love is in the quality of time we spend with our loved ones.
Come to the Isle of View on February 13th for some Pre-Valentine’s Day fun. Meet up with other Residents and enjoy all the romance that Isle of View has to offer – boat rides, fireworks, kissing booths – a treasure trove of memorable moments just waiting to be made with someone special.
Why Friday, February the 13th? That’s a good question. Once upon a time, the Lab used to participate in Valentines Day through things like kissing booths (yes, you could get to kiss a Linden!). So, given the invite is for a week-day visit, does this mean those popping along might just find a Linden or two within the Isle’s kissing booth?
Will there be Lindens in in the Isle of View kissing booths?
The Lab is keeping mum on that; instead, all they are saying is:
Why February 13th? Because we believe in love, and there is still time to find a special someone for the big day.
If you’ve got a Valentine – bring them to the Isle of View. If you’re currently looking for a Valentine – come to the Isle of View. If you have several Valentines – well lucky you – bring them all to the Isle of View!
But you never know, after all, they did recently re-launch another staple of Lab / resident fun, the snowball fight. So, if Valentine’s day is your thing, why not pop along to the Isle of View on February 13th and find out. You can always visit again on the 14th with your loved one, if you don’t want them to spy you loitering around the kissing booths…
On Monday, February 10th, 2014, Ebbe Altberg officially took-over the reins as the CEO of Linden Research Inc. (aka Linden Lab).
The news of his appointment, which had been released not too long before his arrival, and after the Lab remained steadfastly silent after the departure of his predecessor had entered the public domain, tended to bring retorts of “who he?”, promoting me to pull together something of a profile on him from various sources, which tended to draw largely positive feedback. I also took the liberty of offering a couple of suggestions on the day he arrived at LL, which appeared to be appreciated:
So, now we are a year on, how have things been, overall?
For me, given I originally wrote that “open letter” to him on the subject of communications, the turn-around has been both noticeable and appreciated. At the first of his many public appearances with bodies of users and groups which marked his opening months at the Lab, Ebbe effectively announced at the 2014 VWBPE event that the door is once again open, and demonstrated as much by spending almost 90 minutes addressing questions from users.
Following that, we saw re-engagement through forums, further bridge building with educational and non-profit organisations, the re-opening of the JIRA, the lifting on the ban on Linden staff entering SL using their Linden accounts unless they were on official business, and fresh (and persistent) use of the blogs once more to present news, information and updates – such as Monty Linden’s superb range of posts on the HTTP work, or Landon Linden’s equally informative posts such as The Recent Unpleasantness. As the year progressed the Lab continued to open windows as well as doors, seeking to re-engage with the community through a variety of means, from pro-actively seeking input from users on potential improvements to SL through to something as simple as the return of the annual snowball fight.
Ebbe Altberg: one year in the Hot Seat
All of this has been to the good, even if some approached this “new” openness (actually more of a return to how the Lab used to be) with suspicion. Some of it was perhaps understandable; at the start of his tenure at the Lab, Ebbe’s predecessor seemed to initially breathe life into matters of communication (even then a priority in many people’s eyes) – only for the door to been slammed shut again within a few months.
Some might even argue that such re-engagement is trivial “in the scheme of things”; I’d say not so. Engagement and communication lie as two of the foundations of trust between a company such as a Lab and its user community; therefore putting them both back in place does do much to stem the erosion of that trust.
Elsewhere, things may seem to have been a little slower. While there have been changes for the better for SL in technical terms, it’s fair to say that these have been more incremental and evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. But then, SL is a decade-plus old platform; getting truly revolutionary with it isn’t that easy. Instead, what we’ve had is a continuation of approach started prior to Ebbe’s arrival at the Lab – and quite rightly, too.
Far better to allow projects of proven likely benefit to continue to their conclusion and then build on them, than to suddenly try to jump tracks and do something else entirely, even if it does promise lots of new shiny in the process. As it is, the improvements this work has brought to the vast majority of users are undeniable. What’s more the approach has meant the thorns long ignored, such as group chat issues (another pressing problem put to Ebbe when he arrived) are also getting attention.
Ebbe Altberg also worked to put Linden Lab and Second Life front-and-centre of the debate on the future of the metaverse through opportunities such as SVVR’s Creating the VR Metaverse panel, and in discussions about the future of VR outside of games through opportunities such as at Engadget Expand NY in November 2014 (above) where he joined Matt Bell, Marte Roel and host Ben Gilbert.
Where things have perhaps been radical have been outside of Second Life, such as the dropping of almost all of the products that marked the company’s attempts to diversify its portfolio and potentially generate additional revenue. Again, this was actually something started before Ebbe’s arrival, but which he supported – hence the axing of Creatorverse, dio and Versu, to be followed later in the year by the closure of Patterns development and the sale of Desura.
In truth, when first announced, the idea of the Lab looking to diversify its revenue stream through a broader product base was a good one; the problem was the follow-through never really matched expectation and became too much of a grand experiment.
Of all the products the Lab developed or acquired, only Blocksworld has demonstrated it has real legs, while Creatorverse and dio, always appeared to be far too limited in appeal to ever gain deep and lasting traction, so trimming them was a sensible move. It was also hard to see how the acquisition of Desura could offer the Lab practical revenue growth outside of meeting its own needs, or without on-going investment and development which would in turn offset the value of revenue gained. Even so, Patterns and Versu, did appear to offer potential. Versu has certainly since gone on under its own steam (full kudos to the Lab for allowing it to do so), while Patterns, even though still under development, built up a small but loyal following on both Steam and Desura, and the announcement of its passing did give rise to upset.
The little “Dorito man” headed off into the sunset in October, as Patterns followed Creatorverse, dio and Versu in being axed from the Lab’s nascent product portfolio. It was followed in November by news that Desura had been sold.
On Wednesday, February 11th, the Lab published a brief blog post seeking help from users in helping to pin-down issues related to inventory loss.
The post reads in full:
As we continue to improve Second Life, we’re looking into the issue of inventory loss. If you have experienced some form of inventory loss in the past 12 months – whether partial (such as a single object or subfolder), or full – please take a moment to share your answers via this quick survey.
Your answers will help provide our engineering team with information that will assist them as they make improvements to Second Life.
We greatly appreciate your time and want to thank you for responding to the survey.
The link will take respondents to a set of 7 questions covering when and how they might have suffered the loss of one or more items from their inventory, the kind of loss experienced (from single item through to their entire inventory, or the loss of a specific folder or items across multiple folders, etc.), details on their preferred viewer, etc.
These are then followed by an opportunity for users to supply any additional information related to their experiences with inventory they feel might be useful to the Lab, and an optional section which can be completed if users have no objection to the Lab contacting them for further information.
If you have suffered from inventory loss over the course of the last year, please do consider completing the survey.
An artist’s impression of ESA’s IXV lifting body attached to its upper sage booster during its first sub-orbital flight
On Wednesday, February 11th, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched a Vega rocket from their Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana, South America. The rocket has been Europe’s launch system for lightweight payloads since 2012, and in this capacity it has generally been used to lift Earth observation mission payloads into polar orbits, where they can see as much of the Earth’s surface as the planet rotates beneath them.
The February 11th mission was different, however. This was launched due west, out over the Atlantic and directly towards Africa. And, rather than carrying a satellite, the rocket carried a new, experimental spaceplane, very unglamorously called IXV, for Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle.
Dubbed a “mini-shuttle” by some in the media, IXV is more correctly a lifting body design. That is, it has no wings of any description. Instead, it uses its own aerodynamic shape to generate lift and stability during re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. This particular principle of flight isn’t new. Lifting body designs have been used for a number of experimental purposes over the years, including in the 1960s and 1970s as NASA investigated potential designs for a reusable space vehicle (although the evolving mission requirements for the space shuttle meant that a lifting body design was eventually rejected in favour of a delta wing configuration).
The IXV mission
In popular culture, and for those old enough to remember, footage of the crash and disintegration of a lifting body piloted by Bruce Peterson, was used in the opening titles of the TV series The Six Million Dollar Man. Unlike the fictional Steve Austin, however, Peterson survived his crash without the aid of bionics, although he did lose his sight in one eye … courtesy of an infection which occurred while he was in hospital after the crash. More recently, the use of a lifting body approach has been been demonstrated by Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser vehicle, which had been intended to fly crews to and from the International Space Station.
Europe’s IXV is an uncrewed vehicle, weighing just under 2 tonnes. It’s primary objective is to research the re-entry and flight characteristics of such a vehicle shape and to test the re-entry shielding technologies that ESA are developing. All of this is with a view to developing a new generation of reusable space vehicles that could be employed for both crewed and uncrewed missions. The first of these is likely to be PRIDE – the Programme for Reusable In-orbit Demonstrator in Europe – a genuine spaceplane using a combination lifting body / winged design.
ESA’s PRIDE aims to demonstrate the use of a reusable spaceplane in satellite launch operations
PRIDE is designed to be launched atop a rocket and, once in orbit, deploy satellite payloads prior to returning to Earth for a conventional runway landing, refurbishment and reuse. In this, it would be somewhat similar to the US Air Force’s uncrewed and classified X-37B spaceplane, which is capable of long duration orbital flights, notching-up some 1,367 days in space in just 3 missions between 2010 and 2014. However, unlike the X-37 programme, which is believed to be both an advanced technologies test vehicle and potentially capable of undertaking reconnaissance activities when in orbit, PRIDE would be a purely civilian operation.
Another potential use for the technologies seen in IXV is in providing the means to operate reusable boosters as a part of Europe’s next generation of launch vehicles, which would be capable of flying themselves back to a safe landing after use. Lifting body technologies and the re-entry systems used on IXV might also be used in missions to returns samples from Mars and the asteroids to Earth, and spaceplane technologies in general might one day form a part of ESA’s strategy for ferrying crews to / from orbital space facilities in the future.
The technologies being tested by IXV may one day be used in reusable boosters forming a part of ESA’s next generation of launchers
IXV’s maiden flight was relatively short – just under 2 hours in duration – and sub-orbital in nature. Boosted to an altitude of around 450 kilometres (281 miles), the vehicle cruised over Africa prior to initiating re-entry through the Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of some 7.5 kilometres per second (just under 16,800 miles per hour), using its shape to generate lift and stability, and two tail-mounted “paddles” for steering. Once through the heat of re-entry and slowed to hypersonic speeds, a special parachute deployed to slow the vehicle to subsonic speeds. This allowed the main parachute system could be deployed, which brought the car-sized vehicle to a relatively “soft” splashdown at just 7 metres a second (12.5 mph), so it could be recovered by the vessel Nos Aries.
The entire mission, from launch to splashdown, occurred almost precisely on schedule. Only a slight delay prior to lift-off causing the schedule to be adjusted. Ironically, recovery of the vehicle following splashdown took almost as along as the mission itself, and an overcast sky in the recovery zone presented images being captured of the vehicle’s descent by parachute.
Nevertheless, the mission was a great success. Now begins a long trawl through the data gathered by some 300 instruments and sensors spread throughout and over the little spaceplane.
All images and video, courtesy of the European Space Agency
On Monday, February 9th, the Lab issued a blog post outlining some of the upcoming improvements to Second Life.
In all six improvements are listed, five of which are user-facing, while the sixth should also yield benefits, although these may not be in terms of observable differences in how SL operates for most people. Further of the six listed, four have project viewer associated with them, three of which relate to visible viewer-side changes in terms of improved or new functionality. The remaining two updates should be appearing as either project or release candidate viewers in the very near future.
Regular readers of my weekly SL project updates will likely already be familiar with these improvements, at list in principle, but I’ll run through them here as well.
The first of the improvements which is already available for testing is the new Avatar Hover Height (AHH) feature. For those who remember it, this effectively sees the return of the old “z-offset height adjustment” found in many TPVs, which allowed users to adjust their avatar’s height relative to the ground, whether standing, sitting or kneeling, or when using poseballs, etc., to ensure they were correctly positioned relative to whatever they were standing / sitting / kneeling upon.
Now in a project viewer (and soon to be a release candidate: Avatar Hover Height provides a means of adjusting your avatar’s graphical height above the ground / floor / objects, as seen by yourself and others
I’ve provided a complete overview of the new functionality, which does not replace the existing Appearance panel Hover slider), and server-side support for it is now available grid-wide. So, if you want to try-out the feature for yourself, you can do so by downloading the Avatar Hover Height project viewer. I’ll continue to provide updates on this feature under the Avatar Hover Height tag in this blog.
The Marketplace listing panel is the viewer-side hub of the new VMM functionality
The second of the improvements currently undergoing testing is the Viewer-managed Marketplace (VMM). This is more specifically aimed at people selling goods on the SL Marketplace, and provides them with the means to manage their Marketplace inventory and carry out an number of Marketplace operations from directly within the viewer.
Server-side support for this functionality is only available on Aditi, the beta grid at this point in time, and I’ve also provided an overview of how it works, complete with a look of the viewer-side changes and how to use the test regions on Aditi for those interested. Testing of VMM on the main grid should be commencing some time in the next month (but not until after February 14th), and I’ll continue to carry news about it under the Viewer-managed Marketplace tag in this blog.
The third improvement that is available for testing and mentioned in the blog post is that of the new Mesh Importer (upload) project viewer. As the name suggests, this provides a modified mesh uploader with optional debug output, performs name-based LOD association, and handle models with many materials, allowing models with more than 8 unique faces to be imported.
A number of bug reports have already been filed for this viewer – see the JIRA filter list for details.
The remaining two updates which will be visible to users should be appearing in project or release candidate viewers in the near future are:
An improved means to control and organize the many notices users receive: inventory offers, group notices, event invites, and money transactions, which will offer a new floater for such messages, rather than simply having them arrive in the same pop-up / chiclet formats which make them indistinguishable to one another at first glance
A means for users to save one or more sets of graphics settings on a per-account basis, allowing them to quickly switch between different sets of graphics options to assist with performance as they move around the grid (so, for example, you might have a set of “low” graphic settings you could switch-on in order to maintain performance in busy regions, and a set of “high” graphics settings, with as many bells and whistles turned on as you like and in accordance with your GPUs capabilities,, for use in quieter regions). It will also provide controls for defining how other avatars are rendered in your field of view, by allowing you to define a limit above which the viewer will cease rendering avatars fully, and instead will render them as a sold colour imposter.
The last update mentioned by the blog post is that of the Lab’s extensive tool chain update and changes to the viewer autobuild process. While this won’t bring any noticeable changes to the viewer UI, etc., it should, as the blog post notes, “improve stability, performance, and the productivity of developers so that we can more quickly bring you an even better Second Life.”
As added benefit in this work is that it should in time allow TPVs to build their viewers using the same packages as the Lab a lot more easily. And, as a side note, it also potentially smooths the way for the Lab to produce 64-bit versions of the official viewer, although there are currently no plans in the pipeline for them to start doing so, due to the 32-bit versions of the official viewer being very stable on 64-bit operating systems.
An initial project viewer built using the new tools is already available, but note that this does not contain any functional changes compared to the current release viewer.
In addition, as the Lab’s blog post notes, a similar operation has been under way to update a number of the tools used to build the server-side simulator software as well.
On Wednesday, February 4th, Linden Lab announced the return of the Linden Lab Snowball Fight, together with the official announcement on the Fun Booth Fun Contest I’ve also blogged about under separate cover.
Ebbe, Get Your Gun! – my first encounter at Winter Wonderland was a snowball gun toting Ebbe Linden – now the Lab is inviting everyone to join them in some fun on Friday, February 6th!
The snowball fight announcement reads:
Come pelt some Lindens and fellow Residents with snowballs in a frozen field free-for-all at Winter Wonderland. That’s right – between 10 AM SLT and noon SLT on Friday, February 6th, we’re holding a meet-up in world at the Snowball Warzone. Get your free snow launching weapon, gather your posse, and prepare to say hello to some Linden friends for a full on flurry of snow-slinging fun.
The snowball fight, once a mainstay of wintertime fun involving the Lab and Second Life residents has been sorely missed over recent years, and the recent opening on the Lab’s new Winter Wonderland experience, which I previewed / reviewed at the end of January, brought with it renewed requests – such as this one from bizpfeffer – for the snowball fights to be re-launched.
Well, the Lab has heeded the requests!
So, don your winter woollies, get your weapons at the foot of the stairs leading to the Winter Wonderland Snowball Warzone, and then … lock’n’load with plenty of snowballs!
The Isle of View, the “official” destination for Valentine’s Day reappeared on the grid earlier in the month (my thanks to Bixyl for poking me about it when it appeared), and on Thursday, February 12th, the Lab invited people to consider spending a part of Friday, February 13th visiting the isle.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 