Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld
Second Life, virtual worlds and virtual realities
Linden Lab have issued a further mesh update, detailing the Mesh Upload status page is now available on Main grid user dashboards.
As I reported a week ago, the new status page can be located by logging-in to your dashboard at www.secondlife.com. When your dashboard is displayed, click on ACCOUNT in the menu at the top left and then Mesh Upload Status.
For an overview on getting yourself certified to upload mesh, see my earlier post on the subject.
Update, May 2017: These requirements have now been replaced. See: Second Life mesh upload prerequisites revised.
Back at the start of June, we learned that the ability to upload Mesh to SL is to be gated. You can currently take a peek at how this works by going to your Beta (aditi) Grid status page.
Click on the right-pointing arrow next to Account to display your account options, then click on MESH UPLOAD STATUS (located between SCRIPTED AGENT STATUS and CHANGE PASSWORD, as circled below).
To qualify for Mesh uploads, you must provide payment information to Linden Lab, and complete a Mesh Intellectual Property Right tutorial / questionnaire, which comprises a series of multiple-choice questions, as shown below.
The questionnaire is not mind-bogglingly difficult – and it shouldn’t be, the idea is to make people aware of what will not be tolerated and can lead to their ability to upload meshes being revoked; not to try and catch them out before they even get started. As such, it is possible to go back a step should you get any question wrong and then take the question again.
Completing the questionnaire results in you being informed that you are now cleared to upload meshes, and provides a link to some additional information related to trademarks and copyright under US law. I was actually surprised that there are (currently, at least) no links to Linden Lab’s own policies around mesh and IP.
Tateru Nino relays the news that Mesh imports to Second Life are to be separately gated. According to the SL wiki page on Mesh Upload Enablement:
“In order to prevent usage of intellectual property with the mesh upload tool, prior to uploading a mesh with a Mesh enabled viewer, 2 checks will occur before the user will be allowed to upload. The first check will be to verify payment information is on file and the second is a chance to educate the user with a short tutorial. After the user completes the tutorial, they will be enabled to upload content.
“A flag will be added to the CSR tool which will allow supoort [sic] to enable and if approriate disable the ability to upload mesh. The viewer will use the user’s enable mesh flag to activate the upload mesh capability. If it is disabled, a message will appear and a link to the secondlife.com link for the tutorial. The scope of this testing is to confirm expected results for this setting on Mesh and non Mesh viewers as well as test the tutorial and ensure it enables mesh ability accordingly.”
Once the criteria of having PIOF and going through the tutorial have been met, people will essentially be “licensed” to upload mesh creations. However, like any license, the ability to upload mesh can be revoked:
“If Lab determines user is in violation of IP mesh upload terms, user can be indefinitely flagged as not mesh enabled regardless of how many times they continue to complete the tutorial.”
Clearly this is intended to help deal with matters relating to IP and copyright violations, DMCA claims and suchlike, all vital to protect the authors of mesh files and content in the event of theft. Let’s face it, the whole issue of IP and copyrights are convoluted when it comes to mesh; therefore caution is required.
Take a look at the picture on the left. It’s a mesh model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Kaufman house, “Fallingwater”. It’s available on a website for $75.00USD. It can apparently be purchased legally.
But who actually owns the copyright? The website? The creator? Or the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation?
The question is important because the FLW Foundation is jealously guarding anything and everything it considers to be its intellectual property. Just last year, after cooperating with it, they issued cease and desist letters against the Frank Lloyd Wright Museum in Second Life, forcing it to close its doors. As such, who is to say that even a product like this, brought in good faith, will not land someone wishing to upload it to SL up in a world of hurt? And the FLW Foundation isn’t alone in guarding its property.
Right now, mesh is the elephant in the room; hard to ignore, but not the easiest thing to deal with. The risk of copyright violations, claims of illegal usage, the potential involvement of legal teams from major organisations is a risk; just a glance at all the Star Wars, Star TreK, DC Comics and other meshes available off the web has to give rise to the question, “Yes, but how much of it is actually licensed? Ergo, Linden Lab need to take steps to protect themselves against major upsets and openly discouraging people from knowingly uploading content they shouldn’t be bringing in-world – and making the accounts they use to upload said content personally linked to those using them is certainly one way of going about it.
But it also means that those creators who would stick to only uploading their own creations but who have preferred not to / been unable to give PIOF are going to find themselves ostracised, and this could well result in the new requirement being subject to upset and consternation.
Gating uploads also has a secondary potential benefit: mesh is both an unknown quantity and a complex subject. While it has been under extensive testing on the beta grid, its still not entirely clear as to what impact it might have on the main grid – and there is a risk that poorly-developed meshes could do more harm than good when it comes to sim performance. Ergo, providing a means of blocking ill-developed models from being imported until such time as the creator can improve their technique and keep within whatever parameters are required without having to block their account in its entirety would also seem to be a wise step to take.
The Mesh timeline has been published. Well, “timeline” is a bit of a stretch, but the details are now out. To save you from clicking a link, here’s the announcement in full:
“Of all of the things that excite us about Second Life, and there are many, Mesh is near the top of our list. Since the Mesh Project Viewer has been available, many content creators have given it a try on the test grid and we have only seen a small glimpse of the unlimited creative potential that this technology brings to Second Life. On behalf of everyone at the Lab, we want to thank everyone who have participated in the test and created these cool videos demonstrating the power of Mesh.
“So, now that you are excited about trying it out on the Main Grid, we wanted to share the launch time line, as promised.
“In July, we will enable a limited set of regions to use Mesh and will it roll out, in a phased approach, throughout August. By the end of August, everyone in Second Life will be able to import Mesh objects. Of course, if we run into unforeseen issues or bugs, then this time line will need to shift.
“We know that you must have a lot of questions regarding policies, costs, and how Mesh objects will be weighted. Although we cannot share these details yet, we will continue to keep you informed on our progress and other relevant news on this blog.
“So buckle up and get ready for a whole new wave of creativity in SL.”
Or you can read the above here.
Mesh has been a long time coming – and the announcement is somewhat welcome, a little more depth-of-detail would have been helpful. I’m assuming at this stage that the regions for the initial roll-out will be connected to a specific Server Release Channel. If so, will sim owners on that channel be given the opportunity to opt out until later in the roll-out? Mesh is obviously a complicated subject, hence the caveats in this announcement – but I certainly hope we’ll be seening a greater depth of information as July draws closer.
It has been confirmed that Linden Lab will be publishing a timeline for the roll-out of Mesh at the end of May.
Note this is not the actual roll-out of Mesh itself; it is the timeline on what will happen when. It’s a good move on LL’s part: people have been hungering for Mesh for a long time, and all that has been happening on the Beta grid had increased overall levels of excitement / curiosity / confusion / demands to see it “now”.
Mesh is potentially one of the most revolutionary new aspects to be introduced to SL in a long time – at least in terms of content creation and technology. It will possibly completely redefine entire market sectors in terms of both the look of objects, how they are created and the skill sets required to produce them. It can be applied to almost anything – objects, building shells, vehicles, so the impact is potentially huge, although there do appear to be some limitations as to precisely what can be achieved – and how much will be modifiable – within mesh objects.
Take just one market sector, the one I’m most familiar with: buildings.
The potential here is mind-boggling: beautifully sculpted exteriors to buildings that mimic their real-life (or fantasy!) counterparts, and for the equivalence of a few dozen prims, and fitted-out inside with traditional prim-made floors, etc.
Avatars are another area where mesh could revolutionise things. While our current avatars are themselves mesh creations, they are somewhat limited; augmentation currently requires the use of prims and sculpties – both of which can be cumbersome. Mesh imports allow avatars to be massively altered / augmented – so the potential here is massive, although there are allegedly some initially limitations as to what can be done with such rigged meshes.
Given the sheer scope of impact mesh represents, then defining a timeline / roadmap leading to its roll-out is undoubtedly a good move. While there is much about Mesh that probably won’t become apparent until after it is “live” – precisely how popular mesh designs will be, what they will do to the market sectors where they are principally used, precisely what the initial limitations will be, how these will be overcome, and so on, there is still a need for people to have as much information in advance as it is possible to give. This can only be achieved through full and proper communication and avoiding the desire to give into pressure to simply “get it done”.
We’ve waited a long time for mesh – kudos goes to LL for dealing with its arrival sensibly and in a step-by-by manner that has fully engaged with the user community on the Beta grid, and which look set to continue now on the main grid. Hopefully, the new timeline will do much to clarify where everything stands with regards to mesh, and in the coming months, we’ll see even more engagement between users and Lab as we move towards it’s arrival.
Various questions have been floating around, re: Mesh. In the hopes of providing clarification, here’s a couple of points of clarification:
TPV users will not be able to see Mesh objects.
TPV users will not be able to upload Mesh imports
It’s by no means certain that the second point above actually happen; Linden Lab appears keen to ring-fence the ability to upload Mesh within Viewer 2.x. However, those TPV developers developing Viewers based on the 2.x have requested a means by which they can provide the means for users to upload Mesh objects, and Linden Lab have apparently agreed to look into the matter and see what can be done, without necessarily lifting the fence on the code completely.
One thing that is clear is that if the ring fence remains firm, those wishing to see – as well as upload – Mesh objects will, at some point, find it necessary to make the move to a Viewer based on the Viewer 2.x code. Both the Imprudence and the Phoenix teams are already moving in this direction – with Jessica Lyon of the Phoenix team going so far as to state that the upcoming release of Phoenix will likely be the last major release to that particular code base, with future releases being restricted to bug fixes and the like, while the focus within the Phoenix team shifts more to the Firestorm (Viewer 2.x-based) Viewer project.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 