Earlier in May I reported on Dave Rowe’s work integrating the Xbox 360 controller with his CtrlAltStudio viewer, allowing it to be used with the Oculus Rift or Stereoscopic 3D viewing options in that viewer, as well as with the normal display mode.
On Saturday May 24th, Loki Eliot tweeted that he’d been working on a similar approach, using the Xbox 360 controller and a dictation feature of OSX Mavericks to provide greater control over his avatar when using the Oculus Rift.
Since tweeting, Loki has produced a blog post on his work, including links to the software he’s used and tutorials to help get things sorted out. his original video was posted to Telly, which WordPress.com doesn’t like, embedding-wise. However, Draxtor has, with Loki’s permission, reposted it to You tube, and so it’s that version I’ve embedded here.
Loki is the first to admit this approach doesn’t solve all of the Oculus related issues when using Second Life – he has a few wry observations as to where things will “suck” (his expression – not mine!). He also gives some musings on how technology might further assist things in the future.
Loki’s work on integrating the Xbox 360 controller for use with SL and the Oculus Rift (image via Loki Eliot)
The use of HMDs brings with it a lot of challenges – some of which, the Lab freely admits in releasing its Oculus Rift project viewer, it has yet to really tackle. Seeing experiments like this is therefore interesting, as they demonstrate potential alternative (and not necessarily hyper-expensive) means of providing control over basic aspects of using SL with a headset which are not reliant on the keyboard and mouse and, in this case at least, also not dependent upon in-world voice (which many people don’t like to use for a wide variety of reasons). I wonder if approaches like this and Dave Rowe’s work with CtrlAltStudio might raise an eyebrow or two of interest at the Lab …?
We’re all aware of the recent unpleasantness which hit Second Life over the past few weeks and which culminated in the chaos of Tuesday, May 20th, when the disruption not only caused issues with log-ins, but also caused both a curtailment in server-side deployments on Tuesday and a rescheduling of both deployments for the rest of the week and the postponing of a period of planned maintenance.
As noted in my week 20/2 SL projects update, Simon and Maestro Linden gave an explanation of Tuesday’s issues at the Serve Beta meeting on Thursday May 22nd. However, in a Tools and Technology blog post, Landon Linden has given a comprehensive explanation of the broader issues that have hit second Life in recent weeks.
Landon begins the post:
When I came to Linden Lab over five years ago, Second Life had gone through a period of the coveted hockey-stick growth, and we had just not kept up with the technical demands such growth creates. One or more major outages a week were common.
In my first few months at the Lab, we removed more than a hundred major single points of failure in our service, but several major ones still loomed large, the granddaddy of them all being the core MySQL database server. By late Winter 2009 we were suffering from a core database outage a few times each week.
It is that core MySQL database server that has been partially to blame for the recent problems, having hit two different fatal hardware faults which forced the Lab to stop most SL services on both occasions. As the blog post explains, work is in-hand to remove some of the risk in this database becoming a single point of failure by moving it to new hardware. This will be followed over the coming weeks and months to try to further reduce the impact of database failures.
But the MySQL issue wasn’t the only cause of problems, as Landon further explains:
A few weeks ago there was a massive distributed denial of service attack on one of our upstream service providers that affected most of their customers, including us, and inhibited the ability of some to use our services. We have since mitigated future potential impact from such an attack by adding an additional provider. There have also been hardware failures in the Marketplace search infrastructure that have impacted that site, a problem that we are continuing to work through.
Landon Linden: explaining why SL has suffered servere issues of late
He also provides further information on the issue which impacted users and services on Tuesday May 20th, expanding on that given by Simon and Maestro at the Server Beta meeting.
At that meeting, Simon briefly outlined Tuesday’s issues as being a case of the log-in server failing to give the viewer the correct token for it to connect to a region, so people actually got through the log-in phase when starting their viewer, but never connected to a region.
Landon expands on this, describing how the mechanism for handing-off of sessions from login to users’ initial regions is a decade old and relies on the generation of a unique identifier (the “token” Simon referred to). Simply put: the mechanism ran out of numbers – but did so quietly and without flagging the fact that it had. As a result, the server team took four hours to track down the problem and come up with a fix.
Referring to this particular issue, Landon goes on:
Having such a hidden fault in a core service is unacceptable, so we are doing a thorough review of the login process to determine if there are any more problems like this lurking. Our intent at this point also is to remove the identifier assignment service altogether. It not only was the ultimate source of this outage, but is also one more single point of failure that should have been dispatched long ago.
Such open honesty and transparency about technical matters is something that hasn’t really been seen from the Lab since the departure of Frank (FJ Linden) Ambrose, the Lab’s former Senior VP of Global Technology, who departed the company at the end of 2011. As such, it is an excellent demonstration of Ebbe Altberg’s promise to re-open the lines of communication between company and users, and one which is most welcome.
Kudos to Landon for his sincere apology for the disruption in services and for such a comprehensive explanation of the problems. Having such information will hopefully aid our understanding of the challenges the Lab faces in dealing with a complex set of services which is over a decade old, but which we expect to be ready and waiting for us 24/7. Kudos, again as well to Ebbe Altberg for re-opening the hailing frequencies. Long may it continue.
The scheduled maintenance planned for Thursday May 22nd, which would have seen Second life logs-in suspended for about an hour from 07:00 SLT onwards, has been postponed.
The announcement was made as an update to the original Grid Status page maintenance announcement, and reads in full:
[Updated 10:46 AM PDT, 21 May 2014] The maintenance originally scheduled for tomorrow, 22 May at 7am has been postponed. We’ll post a new scheduled date as soon as possible.
Readers are advised to keep an eye on the Grid Status pages for further updates.
On Wednesday May 21st, Linden Lab publicly released the Oculus Rift project viewer. Version 3.7.8.289834 of the viewer offers initial support for Oculus Rift, and is focused on getting started with the Oculus Headset (which has yet to be commercially released, although there are currently some 75,000 SDK 1 models in the world, and shipping will commence soon on the updated SDK 2 version).
For Windows, Oculus Rift requires Windows Vista or later, and with Mac OS X, version 10.7 or later is required.
The blog post announcing the release reads in part:
The early beta testers of our integration have provided some valuable feedback, identifying bugs as well as providing suggestions for additional features and options that would improve the experience of using the Oculus Rift with Second Life. Today we’re pleased to announce that our Oculus Rift integration is now available as a Project Viewer, the first step toward becoming a part of the default Second Life Viewer.
Like our initial beta release, this Project Viewer is more about making it easy to get started using the Oculus Rift to view Second Life than it is about optimizing the UI for headset users. We’ve made some minor adjustments to the regular Second Life UI in order to present it in head-mounted display (HMD) mode, but the UI headset users will experience with this project Viewer is still essentially the same as you’d see without an Oculus Rift.
A new Toolbar button makes toggling the Oculus Rift on / off easy
Features in the viewer include:
Full Oculus Rift Hardware Support – includes automatic hardware detection and display calibration for quick and easy setup
HMD Mode – activated via Me > Display Select or via CTRL-SHIFT-D / CMD-SHIFT-D or via the HMD Mode toolbar button. This command also allows one to display the stereo rendering output intended for the Oculus Rift on their primary display
HMD configuration via Preferences > Move and View > click the HMD calibration button
Display A new Preferences pop-up provides additional display configuration options
Full UI Support – users can access the entire Second Life UI and HUDs while in Oculus Rift mode, so there are no limitations on what a user can do in-world while using the headset
Avatar Head Motion – Oculus Rift head-tracking data is mapped to the avatar, so users’ avatars look where they do
“Align to Look” [Q] – allows users to quickly start moving the direction they are looking
New First-Person View – allows users to enjoy the immersion previously available with Mouselook mode, but allows the mouse to be used to control the cursor, allowing for interaction with the UI and objects in-world
Action Key – [“X”] It is now possible to activate action items (i.e. Opening Doors) from Mouselook mode. Aim the crosshairs at the item you’d like to activate, and press the “X” key. In First-Person mode, the Action Key [“X”] will have the same functionality as clicking the mouse button in Mouselook mode (i.e. it will “trigger” guns or other held items).
To display the viewer with the best results, Linden Lab recommend that the Oculus Rift is configured as an Extended Desktop in Windows (do not Duplicate Displays), and that Mirroring Mode (Settings > Displays) is enabled on Mac OS X.
There are some known issues with the viewer, as noted in the release notes. These include, but are not limited to:
Alt+Tabbing out of the viewer confuses the Rift – RIFT-22
File Browsers cannot function in HMD mode – RIFT-20
Snapshots disabled while in HMD mode because:
HUD and UI elements always drawn in snapshots –RIFT-30
Save to my Computer adds a blank screen between refreshes when trying to take snapshots – RIFT-31
Toggling HMD mode sets the focus wrong and you have to click in world before doing anything else, on Macs – RIFT-110
There are also known limitations with the Action Key [“X”] – please refer to the release notes for a list of known issues and to JIRA raised under the RIFT project.
To go with the project viewer launch, the Lab has also created a new Oculus category in the Destination Guide, which is intended to list “places that are particularly compelling with the Oculus Rift.”
The blog post includes an introductory video, embedded below. Please note, this video refers to downloading the release version of the SL viewer – this is incorrect. The Oculus Rift capabilities are only available via the Oculus Rift project viewer, which is correctly linked-to in the blog post.
Update May 21st: This maintenance window has been postponed.
On May 15th, Linden Lab gave warning that there will be a period of scheduled maintenance on Thursday May 22nd which will see log-ins suspended for around one hour, from approximately 07:00 SLT.
[Posted 2:15 PM PDT, 15 May 2014] The Second Life Service will be closed for logins for approximately one hour on Thursday, 22 May beginning at 7am PDT.
Residents in world will not be logged out, but will experience loss of supporting services such as search and inventory. New logins will not be accepted, and Residents in world should not attempt to transfer or manipulate L$ or valuable (no-copy) assets until the ALL CLEAR is given.
As always, if the scope or the schedule of the work changes, we will update this post.
Please bear the above in mind, and keep an eye on the Grid Status Page for updates on this announcement,
Some of the new avatars as they appear in the selection screen of the new user sign-up process
Update May 16th (2): Following a tweet I made directed at Ebbe Altberg on the NO MOD nature of the base avatar shapes, he responded with the following:
My apologies for taking a while to post this. My ISP and WordPress have a periodic battle in which my access to this blog is at best limited. The battle was rejoined today, leaving me with severe access issues.
Update May 16th (1): While there are limitations with the new mesh avatars, they can also look very good as photographic models, with suitable inventory items and windlight settings. Caitlin Tobias demonstrates this with a series of very eye-catching images, which are well-worth a look at.
On Thursday May 15th, Linden Lab launched their line of new mesh avatars. In all, 24 avatars are were made available, both for new users signing-up to Second Life, and through the Avatar Selector for those already using SL.
The blog post announcing the new avatars reads in part:
Today, we’re updating Second Life’s default avatar options with 24 brand new mesh avatars. You may have spotted a sneak peek at a few of these as Lindens tried them out recently, and starting today, you can start using them yourself!
These avatars are designed to give new users a more appealing set of choices as they start their time in Second Life. Based on the most popular avatars picked at registration, these new options are much better-looking and take advantage of technology incorporated into Second Life over the past year (like fitted mesh and materials) for a more modern feel.
Currently, the avatars are largely limited to human forms, but are ethnically diverse. I use the terms “largely” and “human forms” as twelve of the new avatars are listed under the “Vampire” heading – although given one looks a tad more Lycan than vampiric, another is more demon than anything, and two have a decidedly zombie look to them, I’ve perhaps have gone for “Horror” to describe this set of avatars.
The “Vampire” avatars – although “Horror” might have been a better title (click to enlarge)
Being mesh, there are inevitably some caveats around the new avatars. Facial expressions, for example, are fixed, and old-style system clothing won’t work with them and they are NO MOD – or at least the four I tried all were. This means you cannot edit the shape using the sliders without swapping the base shape for something which is MOD.
Two of the avatars – the demon and the Lycan – come with AOs, and it’s shame a little effect wasn’t put into providing the rest with a starter AO, if only to get rid of the newbie duck walk. While the latter is a lot better than it once was, it’s still pretty ugly to see.
Two of the new mesh avatars; “Alicia” and the werewolf (which is also a pretty good approximation for how I feel before the first mug of coffee for the day…)
In terms of overall looks, the avatars are a mixed bag. That they may have been designed to “take advantage of technology incorporated into Second Life …. (like fitted mesh…)” seems to be something of non-sequitur for new users, given they are NO MOD, and thus require the base shape swapping out to allow for some degree of shape customisation, as mentioned above. While this isn’t a major issue per se, it still might lead to some confusion among newbies as to way they can’t customise the shape, height, etc., of their avatar while others can.
For my part, I confess there’s nothing within this set which would divert me away from my current avatar and her look, and I’d say that overall, the avatars may well be mesh, but they’re not particularly attractive for being so.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 