Category: Second Life

Lifted in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Feint and Bone: Lifted

Currently open at Feint and Bone, the immersive arts environment operated by Flower Rainforest and Tarhai Breen and curated by Bryn Oh, is Lifted, an environment by Kirumi Yoshikawa and Berkeley Burnstein that offers a lot to see – and to interpret; a place where apocalypse meets the realm of digital uploads.

The city of Korrosion was always pulsating with one Bass or another. One day while traversing the Galactic Meta, Rumi might have acquired more than anticipated with a new pet. She didn’t get the full instructions and the biggest no-no was NO BASS. Guess what ? We had BASS and it let the little pet she found grow to an unmanageable size. Bass was outgrowing the hunger so the city fell little by little, slipped into the sea. Uploading was the city’s last resort for preservation and this is where we are today; mid-upload while Rumi’s little pet devours the remains of the city.

– Kirumi and Berkeley describing Lifted

Feint and Bone: Lifted

Thus visitors are placed in a midnight setting that exists partially on land, partially under water and partially in the sky; individual island and vignettes interconnected by teleporters that take the form of closet mirrors – at least two at each location throughout the installation – that offer their own path through the story; although, as the artists note, those who prefer can walk through the region on their own voyage of discovery.

The landing point provides four of these teleporters, offering the most direct way to get around – but note that they may not deliver you fully into the next scene. Where this is the case arrows flicker along the ground may point you in the desired direction, indicators that are also useful for those exploring on foot.

The individual vignettes vary widely: one offers the remnants of the city mentioned in the description, buildings canted or sinking into the waters, kraken-like tentacles rising up through streets and structures; are these part of the oversized “pet” that brought doom onto the city, or do they belong to something else? The other vignettes offer gardens that lie under the waves, protected by domes, or which float in the sky, pulsating with light, whilst some bridge the space between in the air and under the water.

Feint and Bone: Lifted

What we make of these environments is a matter for individual interpretation. Some may well be parts of the failing city; others recreations sitting within the digital domain. Still others, gardens and buildings both, appear to be caught in the upload process – solid in form, but blue lines of light pulsating up into the sky like binary notations of their form moving from the physical to the virtual.

This idea of transformation sits further in the mirror teleporters. As well as offering a means to move through the installation’s vignettes, they present – as the artists note – a means of reflection. We stand before them in a “physical” form, and see within them an image of ourselves; thus they mirror, as it were, the idea of transformation as embodied within the installation’s story.

Feint and Bone: Lifted

Overlaid with a subtle rumble of bass that is again in keeping with the central  theme of the installation and rich in colour and

SLurl Details

  • Lifted (Feint and Bone, rated General)

A Scottish flower in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Flower of Scotland, October 2021 – click any image for full size

I’m not entirely sure why, but on my arrival at Flower of Scotland I immediately found myself mentally quoting the opening lines of Shakespeare’s Scottish play:

When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning or in rain?

I’ve honestly no idea why; while the region is intended to offer a taste of Scotland and there is rain over a part of it, the setting is very far removed from any notion of Scotland of old, and the theme is hardly one of vaunting ambition or anything one might associate with royal murder – although there is a touch suggestive of witchcraft awaiting discovery as one explores. Perhaps it was the mist swirling about me at the landing point, but whatever the reason, the misty landing point made for an atmospheric start to my visit.

Flower of Scotland, October 2021

Occupying a Full region, Flower of Scotland is a veritable tour of the highlands and more remote parts of the Scottish coast created for our enjoyment by Eloo Lionheart (Neutron Nebula). Within it, we can wander from a small coastal hamlet where fishing plays a major role, through to the uplands where an old fortification sits, the lands between home to farms, bubbling streams, lavender fields, ruins and even a beachy cove.

The landing point sits on the region north-east coast, a slightly rickety-looking bridge connecting the local farm with the aforementioned fishing hamlet, the mist rising from the waters that cut into the land to form a shallow inlet. While the village may only have a single waterfront street and small row of four houses, the wharves and warehouses standing at the far end of the street from the bridge suggest this is a busy place for fish processing / packing, as do the number of fishing boats either alongside or in the bay, while the concrete ramp up to wharves suggest this work is a modern addition to the simpler days of fishing that may once have been the village’s source of income, but that’s purely conjecture on my part.

Flower of Scotland, October 2021

On their arrival, the landing point uses local chat to inform visitors that the  castle offers further information on the region, referring to the fortification located up on the rocky hills to the south-west.

The best route to reach the latter is to cross the bridge into the farm, and then follow the winding the road that makes its way through the setting, taking a left turn at the old telephone kiosk and then follow the footpath, trail up past a crofter’s cottage and outward up and around the shoulder of the hills to reach the castle. Following track and path will take visitors past several of the inland points of interest in the region: the ruins of an old chapel that is set – very appropriately – within a field of poppies, its more recent replacement lying just across the track, plus views over the fields and a second path that can be used to reach the southern beachy cove that backs onto the fishing warehouses and wharves.

Flower of Scotland, October 2021

Eastwards from the telephone box, the track leads to a rather fanciful cottage that is distinctly “unScottish” in its styling, but looks like the kind of place that one should be able to find when exploring the wilder parts of Scotland. Boards outside proclaim it to be an apothecary and place where psychic readings  are offered. Inside, it is curious mix of potion-making, magic (offering that suggestion of witchcraft that offers a tenuous link back to Macbeth), soft toys and bric-a-brac that is both oddly cosy and also eclectic, suggestive of the occupant’s nature without actually revealing them in person.

Beyond the cottage sits an old ruined tower on the hump of a low coastal hill. by far the tallest structure in the setting, it seems long deserted, although for the daring, an aging wooden stairway winds its way up to its uppermost chamber. Here, views back across the region can be enjoyed; in particular, this gives a good view of the northern coast, where the rain is moving in, and the local sheep show they are familiar with the turn of weather by making their way eastwards, out of the rain and over another bridge – this one covered – that provides a route back to the the farm.

Flower of Scotland, October 2021

All of the above barely begins to scratch at the wealth of detail within the region or the opportunities for photography it offers. Presented under an evening sky, the region lends itself to a wide range of EEP settings – I opted for more of a daytime look for the photos here – and comes with a rich sound scape to add to the sense of immersion. I would note that with many of the buildings in the setting being either fully or partially furnished, as well as the general landscaping, animals, etc., this is a texture / mesh heavy region, so those on mid- or low-end systems may need to adjust settings (I found it easier to turn off shadows when moving / camming around). However, this doesn’t detract from Flower of Scotland being well worth a visit.

SLurl Details

Burn2 2021: The Great Unknown in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Burn2 2021

Burn2 2021 opens its gates at 17:00 SLT on Friday, October 8th, 2021 and will run through until Sunday, October 17th, 2021. Possibly as a result of the 2020 event proving so popular amongst Burning Man veterans – that event went virtual due to the pandemic – this year’s Burn2 Octoburn is taking place over a total of 12 regions, double the usual number. Thus, there are more camps, more builds and more things to see and do.

The theme for this year’s event is The Great Unknown, once again matching the core theme of Burning Man, and the organisers of that event describe the theme in these terms:

This year’s Burning Man theme is an invitation to emerge from our collective isolation, to explore the unfamiliar contours of a changed world, and to reimagine ourselves, our community, and our culture in ways that might not have been possible before this period of plague and pause. After a long year adrift in the Multiverse, beset by angst and uncertainty, it’s time to climb up out of our escape pods and look outside to see where we’ve landed. On top of a mountain, like Noah? At the bottom of a rabbit hole, like Alice? Or are we on a vast and endless plain, ringed by ancient mountains, the sort of unfathomable territory that once caused mapmakers to throw up their hands and write “here be dragons” at the margins of the known world? 

And so it is that the eleven regions spread before and to either side of “base camp” at Burning Man Deep Hole have been given names designed to encourage camp and plot builders to go beyond the limits of everyday expression and into the cosmos of the imagination and those landscapes of the mind labelled Here Be Dragons and realms unmarked by borders or the constraints of the mundane.

Burn2 2021: Stoner Park

The Great Unknown will formally start with a “soft” opening featuring the Lamplighters, who will lead a procession through the event regions. Activities will then kick-off at 18:00 with music across the three event stages of Main, Bob, and Centre Camp. Details of all activities and entertainment can be found in the Burn 2 Event Calendar. Note that some of the individual plots may also be hosting their own events and entertainment.

As is traditional, the burning of The Man and the Temple will occur at 12:00 noon SLT on Saturday, October 16th, and Sunday October 17th, 2021 respectively.

When visiting, people can explore the regions in multiple ways: on foot, via balloon, and the familiar Department of Mutant Vehicles cars, whilst for the environmentally minded, horse are also available for riding. Also, the greeters at the main landing point have backpackers – clicking these backpacks will provide you with an inventory folder packed with info about the event, including landmarks to key points of interest.

Burn2 2021: The Temple

About Burn2

Burn2 is an extension of the Burning Man festival and community into the world of Second Life. It is an officially sanctioned Burning Man regional event, and the only virtual world event out of more than 100 real world Regional groups and the only regional event allowed to burn the man.

The Burn2 Team operates events year around, culminating in an annual major festival of community, art and fire in the fall – a virtual echo of Burning Man itself.

Related Links

2021 CCUG meeting week #40 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Ilha Do Sol, June 2021 – blog post

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, October 7th, 2021. These meetings are generally chaired by Vir Linden, with dates available via the SL Public Calendar and the venue for the CCUG is the Hippotropolis camp fire.

A *very* short meeting, as Vir was unavailable, so the Graphics team could only update on their work.

SL Viewer

No updates to the current official viewer thus far through the week, despite hopes the Apple Notarisation viewer would be promoted to de facto release status. This leaves the current pipelines as:

  • Release viewer: version version 6.4.22.561752, formerly the CEF Update RC viewer, issued July 24 and promoted August 10.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Apple Notarisation Fix RC viewer, version 6.4.23.564172, issued September 24 – this should remove the warning messages which are currently popping up.
    • Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 6.4.23.564063, on September 21.
    • Simplified Cache RC viewer, version 6.4.23.562623, dated September 17, issued September 20
  • Project viewers:
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.4.23.563579, issued September 3.
    • Performance Floater project viewer, version 6.4.23.562625, issued September 2.
    • Mesh Optimizer project viewer, version 6.4.23.562614, issued September 1.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26, 2020.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.

Graphics Work

  • The Graphics team currently remain primarily focused on drilling down into the data being gathered by the Tracy debugger / system analyser, which is available internally to the Lab.
  • This has already revealed a number of high latency artefacts within the main loop rendering code.
  • The focus of the most recent work has been to either eliminate these or move them to secondary threads so they do not impact the primary rendering loop.
  • This has seen some “pretty good results” in improvement performance, but the internal testing is still at too early a stage for stats to be made public, and it is felt there is at least another month of work to be done before the work will start to come closer to being ready for a public appearance.
  • In difference to the last meeting, to now appears this work could well be surfaced in a project viewer of its own, rather than being merged with other in-development viewers. However, and as noted above, there is no time frame on when it may made a public debut.

Date of Next Meeting

Thursday, October 21st.

Terrygold’s Horror Museum in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Solo Arte October 2021: Terrygold – Horror Museum

I’ll say up front that I’m not a great fan of the “Halloween season”. Not because I dislike horror or anything; it’s just that I sit just on the side of the age divide (and also the Atlantic) where I look upon all the fuss and things like trick-or-treating as a dubious import¹. However, every so often something comes along that is related to the “season”, and which catches my eye – such as the first iteration or two of Linden Lab’s Haunted House or the odd region design.

One such place that did this for 2021 is a modest but engaging art installation by Terrgold, which is now open at Solo Arte  to form both an immersive art space and precursor to an event space that will likely see activity throughout the month.

Solo Arte October 2021: Terrygold – Horror Museum

Horror Museum is a small semi-interactive exhibit in which you can witness scenes associated if not with Halloween per se, then most certainly the annals of cinematic and written horror. The core element of the installation is a visit to a museum – or perhaps gallery would be a better description – offering a series of images drawn from the worlds and legends of horror. In one hall, for example, we can peer into a scene of Frankenstein’s laboratory; and another, Nosferatu stands as if in greeting as we pass, whilst others offer images of nightmare characters and creatures – clown and giant spiders – with more beside.

Solo Arte October 2021: Terrygold – Horror Museum

But these are not ordinary images; each is in fact a 3D setting in which visitors are invited to step and become a part of the story that has been captured. Most are fairly straightforward in their presentation of a scene, but one takes you a little further than the others, opening as it does into a chamber beyond its frame.

As well as the 3D images by Terrygold, the halls of the gallery include models of monsters and posters from a number of horror films, some of which compliment Terry’s art.

At the end of the gallery spaces is a picture called The Forest, a walk through what is often the favourite setting for horror films, a mysterious forest, this once complete with strange figures and creatures. A path winds through this forest, providing the way to the event space mentioned above.

If I’m totally honest, I’d have liked to have experienced poses within the various vignettes Terrygold provides that are more in keeping within each theme. But at the same time, producing custom poses is no easy task, and its not as if this diminish the content of  Horror Museum nor the fact it is an engaging installation. When visiting, do make sure you follow the instructions at the landing point to set your environment correctly.

1. Yes, you’re allowed to shout “bah! humbug! at me for saying this (even if that does belong to the end-of-year season!).

SLurl Details

October 2021 SL Web User Group summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday, October 6th, 2021.

These meetings are generally held on the first Wednesday of the month, with dates and venue details available via the SL public calendar. A video of the meeting, courtesy of Pantera, can be found embedded at the end of this article (my thanks to her as always!), and the following is a summary of key topics / discussions.

Web Properties Updates

  • Back-end / infrastructure work is still on-going and has taken up a lot of time through August.
  • A focal point of the above has been trying to make the Profiles system a little more robust, work that needs to be completed before the necessary changes can be made is support of moving profiles back into their own floater in the viewer (as per the current Legacy Profiles project viewer available through the Alternate Viewers page).
  • Marketplace improvements:
    • A number of “small” fixes have been implemented through the past month.
    • New feature: the ability to move items from your Shopping Cart to your Favourites (and thence to your Wishlist).

Premium Name Changes

  • A number of Last Names have been retired: Aviator, Caboose, Knickers, Orlando and Primless.
  • New “seasonal” Last Names have been deployed for Halloween: Ghostly, Lecter, Pumpkin, Treat and Trick. These will be available through until November 1st, 2021.

Upcoming Work

  • Once the infrastructure work has been completed, the web team will embark on a complete refresh of all web properties.
    • First in line for this is Search (search.secondlife.com), which includes in-world search as well.
    • The work will include both cosmetic improvements to how Search looks, and improvements to things like search results – relevance, etc.

In Brief

  • No updates for Mobile in the past month.
  • A reminder that multi-factor authentication is now active cross key Account options available through the Second Life dashboard.
  • A question was asked about having separate login names and user names, so the former need never be revealed. While not entirely ruled out, this would require some significant changes to the current log-in methodology and infrastructure (and likely widespread back-end changes across multiple services), ergo, it is not something that is likely to be undertaken in the immediate or medium-term future.
  • The subject of having more general in-world meetings with Lab staff, rather than just the current specialised user groups (e.g. with a mix of people  from the product teams, the engineering teams, the land team, etc), in order to encourage greater attendance by users.
    • This is something that would likely be welcomed by users, but if taken up, unlikely to be a monthly event.
    • Several years ago, LL did re-instigate quarterly Town Hall meetings (to the extent of re-vamping a set of regions to host them), which were immensely people and featured both the CEO at some, and a cross-section of senior staff at others. These were popular at the time, and could be beneficial if reinstated.
  • SL wiki updates (or the lack thereof in the case of many pages):
    • LL re-iterated that the policy is still to move more generic / maintained information to the Knowledge Base, and to focus just on maintaining those wiki pages of particular technical importance (and as the entire scripting portal and pages).
    • A problem with the Knowledge Base is that it is not as relevantly searchable as the wiki. There is also, frankly a vast trove of information on the wiki that, while useful, is becoming increasingly outdated or confusing appearing in multiples places and with different levels of information – a subject oft raised at Content Creation User Group meetings in relation to good building  / design practices, avatar-related information, etc.
    • It was pointed out that those with knowledge and understanding of capabilities, etc., can still apply for wiki editor access via support.
    • As an alternative, those who have specific updates that should be made to wiki pages, these can be e-mailed to Alexa Linden, who has headcount to help with wiki updates as time allows.
  • E-mail notifications based on on log-in location: a lot of web services will send a log-in notification if an attempt is made to access your account from outside of your “normal” location. This is something that could be done with SL web properties, but would require scoping and work. A feature request has therefore been requested for the idea.
  • A request has been made for “official” support for shopping events through the SL web properties. This would require careful work in terms of ensuring fair representation (including for non-shopping events) and how / where it would be presented, and as such a feature request has been asked for, although the matter will be raised internally at the Lab.
  • Marketplace related:
    • Categories and sub-categories were raised. Again, those who feel there should be additional categories or categories that could be better broken-out by sub-categories, are asked to raise a feature request with specific details.
    • As per the September meeting: a feature request, BUG-231142 “Questions and Answers’ tab for marketplace product pages” has been received and accepted by the Lab.
      • This would essentially allow questions to be asked of a product that can be answered by (for example) the listing owner, their appointed store manager(s) or perhaps even a customer who has actually purchased the item.
      • If this were to be implemented, LL would consider some supporting tools – e.g. the option for listing creators to explicitly indicate if they do not want the feature enabled for some of their products, or automatically disabling the option on free items listed on the MP, etc.
    • Animated gifs on the MP: another frequent request. The short answer is that this is not on the roadmap, simply because of the infrastructure required to store the (invariably) large file sizes & make them available to product listings.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, November 3rd, 14:00 SLT.