Tag: SL News

OnLive and LL announce new pricing structure for SL Go

Posted on by Inara Pey

SL go logoImportant note: The SL Go service is to be shut down on April 30th, 2015. For more information, please read this report.

In March 2014, Linden Lab and OnLive, the games streaming service, announced the open beta of OnLive’s new SL Go service, a means by which SL users could access Second Life via tablets and mobile devices using a full viewer streamed directly to the user’s device.

At the time of the launch, I was one of a number of people who were able to provide a review of the service, having been offered access to it ahead of the launch.

One area of upset with the service which quickly became apparent was the payment plan, which was based on a pay-as-you-go approach, with an hour of use costing $3.00, three hours $8.00 and ten hours $25.00. In response to criticism of the model, OnLive sought to make it clear through various mediums – notably Designing Worlds and Drax Files Radio Hour – that the plan was only an initial step, a means to gain data and feedback, and that options such as subscription plans had not been ruled out. The service also came in for criticism that it was only available in the USA, UK and Canada.

SL Go by OnLive: streaming Second Life to your tablet - but the initial pricing model caused upset
SL Go by OnLive: streaming Second Life to your tablet – but the initial pricing model caused upset

On Thursday April 3rd, OnLive followed-up on these comments by announcing they are both introducing a revised payment plan and extending the service to more regions.  Linden Lab also followed-up with a post of their own. The OnLive announcement reads in part:

Since launching the beta of SL Go about a month ago, OnLive reports they’ve seen a very positive response to the Second Life® Viewer for Android™ that allows users to access Second Life over wifi or 4G LTE on tablets and laptops. Today, OnLive has updated the SL Go beta with new pricing:
  • Monthly unlimited-use subscription for $9.95 (USD) / £6.95 (GBP). No contract and no commitment
  • Reduced hourly rate: $1 / £0.70 per hour.
The previously available offer of a 20-minute free trial still stands.

In addition, and with the announcement, SLGo is now available in 36 countries worldwide, including Austria, Belgium, France, Greece, Iceland, Israel, Luxembourg, Scandinavia – even the Vatican City! The full list of supported countries can be found in the OnLive blog post.

SL Go on my Nexus 7 HD + keyboard
SL Go on my Nexus 7 HD + keyboard

Commenting on the move, OnLive’s Vice President of Product and Marketing, Rick Sanchez, said:

We’re grateful for the opportunity to support the Second Life community, and pleased to be working with such a passionate and creative group.  We look forward to further developing SL Go with their feedback and suggestions.

How popular this makes the service, remains to be seen. But for those on low-end computer systems who would like to have access to Second Life in all its glory, $9.95 might not be considered too much to pay per month until such time as they upgrade their systems.

Certainly, the $9.95 price-tag for the monthly is lower than the figure I had been anticipating following post-launch activities by OnLive; I’d been expecting the price to perhaps be on a par with their CloudLift service ($14.95 a month), which launched at the same time as SL Go. Similarly, dropping the pay-as-you-go rate to flat $1.00 per hour should make the occasional access via tablet or mobile device even more attractive you those who might need it. For those who are interested, and following-up from my initial review, I also have an article about running SL Go on a Nexus 2013 HD.

Lab formally announces SL Share 2 project viewer

Posted on by Inara Pey

secondlifeOn Tuesday April 1st, I previewed the new SL Share 2 project viewer, which has options to share messages and photos with your Twitter account, and upload photos to your Flickr account. The viewer also includes updated photo capabilities for Facebook sharing (as well as a new Facebook Friends tab).

On Wednesday April 2nd, the Lab officially announced the launch of the project viewer with a blog post which reads in part:

This SLShare update will allow you to share your Second Life experiences beyond Facebook. Twitter and Flickr sharing is just as quick and easy, complete with specific options relevant to each social network.

For Flickr, you will be able to name and add a description to your image. We have tagging capabilities so you can ensure other users can find the images you want to share. Maturity settings are a requirement for Flickr, so we’ve made it easy for you to set this right from the Viewer.

As noted in my preview, the viewer includes new photo processing capabilities, which the blog post describes thus:

This update will also introduce a set of post-processing filters that you can run your pictures through to create cool one-of-a-kind images! The new filters were inspired by the images posted to Flickr by Second Life Residents. With more than a million uploads, most of them enhanced by some post-processing, we thought it would be great to include this feature right in SLShare. These filters will work regardless of which social network you choose to share your Second Life pictures to.

But it doesn’t stop there. For those more technically savvy, we designed this feature to be modifiable by our users. If you’d like to create your own filters, check out the wiki page on this for more information.

The Twitter floater and preview pane, showing one of the preset photo filters applied - users can also customise the filters
The Twitter floater and preview pane, showing one of the preset photo filters applied – users can also create their own filters for inclusion in the floaters (Twitter, Facebook and Flickr)

As noted in my preview, the project viewer can be obtained from the release notes page, which includes download links to the Windows, Mac and Linux versions (as does the viewer’s entry in the Alternate Viewers wiki page). or by following the link in the Lab’s own blog post.

 

Linden Lab announces anaglyph 3D compatibility!

Posted on by Inara Pey

So… can’t wait for Oculus Rift? Fed-up with no 3D capability on the Linden Viewer with nVidia 3D glasses?

Well, fear not! On April 1st, the Lab announced FULL SUPPORT for anaglyph glasses! This great news was announced in a blog post which reads in part:

As we’ve previously blogged, we recently integrated the Oculus Rift with the Second Life Viewer; users with the development headset can try out the beta now and experience Second Life in a uniquely immersive way. Today, we’re happy to announce another exciting new way to experience Second Life: anaglyph 3D mode.

We think this will appeal to literally dozens of Second Life users nostalgic for the kind of 3D experiences provided by comic books, cereal boxes, and B-movies.

Hungry for nostalgia? Linden Lab's new project viewer brings you just that!
Hungry for nostalgia? Linden Lab’s new project viewer brings you just that!

The post goes on:

A key immersion feature of the Oculus Rift is the ability to look around the world by moving your head. This works with the anaglyph 3D mode as well. Simply attach the monitor to your head and coordinate your camera controls with your head movements.

Those wishing to take advantage of this latest innovation from the Lab, a company which demonstrates it can look backwards as well as forwards, can grab the project viewer today – but be quick, this is a one-day opportunity only!

SL Share: photo upload to Facebook disabled

Posted on by Inara Pey

secondlifeUpdate April 3rd: As per this LL blog post, the Facebook photo upload has been re-enabled by Facebook.

SL Share is the viewer-side capability which allows Second Life users to share pictures, thoughts, etc., with their Facebook account.

Since its launch, it has proven extremely popular among SL users who have no issue in linking their SL and RL identities, and who see it as a means of telling friends about their SL activities. However, a recent spike in usage of the capability highlighted the fact it is in violation of Facebook’s policy by posting SLurls with images sent to Facebook.

As a result, the Lab has announced that the photo upload capability within SL Share has been disabled by Facebook, and the Lab are now working with Facebook to resolve the issue.

The Lab’s blog post announcing the situation reads in full:

Facebook recently contacted us to let us know that the Photo Upload feature of SL Share is not permitted to automatically include location SLURLs in posts made from the application. We’re working with them to get a hotfix out ASAP, but in the meantime the Photo Upload feature in SL Share will not work, as Facebook has temporarily disabled that part of the application. SL Share’s Status Update and Check-In features will continue to work.

When SL Share’s full functionality is restored, SLURLs will no longer be included when you share a picture using Photo Upload, but you will still be able to let your Facebook friends know where to join you in Second Life by using the Check-In feature.

We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause you and are working to get a fix out ASAP.  We’ll use this blog to keep everyone posted with any updates and will of course let you know once the issue is resolved as well. Thank you for your patience.

SL Sare: the inclusion of SLurls with uploaded images is against Facebook policy
SL Share: the inclusion of SLurls with uploaded images (2nd image from left) is against Facebook policy

The situation likely means that any TPVs what have also included the SL Share capability into their offering will need to adopt any hotfix forthcoming from the Lab once it has been made available.

Lab issues call for Oculus Rift beta testers

Posted on by Inara Pey

secondlifeOn Wednesday March 12th, Linden Lab issued a call for people willing to help beta test the upcoming Oculus Rift enabled SL viewer.

The call, made via a blog post, reads in full:

The Oculus Rift offers exciting possibilities for Second Life – the stereoscopic virtual reality headset brings a new level of immersion to our 3D world, making Second Life a more compelling experience than ever before.

Though a consumer version of the headset isn’t available yet, we’ve been working with the development kit to integrate the Oculus Rift with the Second Life Viewer. We now have a Viewer ready for beta testers, and if you have an Oculus Rift headset, we’d love to get your feedback.

If you have the Oculus Rift development hardware and would like to help us with feedback on the Viewer integration, please write to sl_oculus_beta@lindenlab.com to apply for the limited beta.

Oculus Rift: the headset-enabled viewer is now ready for beta testing
Oculus Rift: the headset-enabled viewer is now ready for beta testing

As noted in the post, the headset isn’t commercially available as yet, but the pre-release version with the Oculus Software Development Kit is currently available for $300.00 directly from Oculus VR themselves. If you have a kit already, now is the time to sign-up!

As I reported in December, VoidPointer Linden had indicated that the work on making the viewer operate with the Oculus Rift headset was “feature complete”. This fuelled an expectation that a project viewer might make an appearance either before, or soon after Christmas, 2013.

However, Oz Linden shortly afterwards indicated the “soon” might be something of a relative term. Since both of those announcements, the Rift viewer has been working its way through the Lab’s QA process, and while it didn’t appear as quickly as perhaps VoidPointer had hoped. Even so, when commenting on the status of the viewer back in December, he was able to confirm a few things about it:

  • The same viewer can be used in both a “normal mode” and a “Rift mode”
  • There will be no apparent changes to the viewer / UI when in “normal mode”
  • Frame rates when in “Rift look” will be very much down to the user’s own hardware  (unsurprisingly).

Elsewhere, it had been indicated that when in “Rift Look”, UI menus may float over the user’s head, keeping them out of the field of view until such time as needed. This was certainly the case when Simon Linden tried the viewer earlier in “013, but it is unclear if this approach has been carried forward – so that’s one for the beta testers to discover.

There is no timescale for how long the beta testing will last, but this announcement brings official support for Occulus Rift (users can also use David Rowe’s CtrlAltStudio viewer, which provides preliminary support for the headset) a step closer to reality.

@SLOfficialtweet branded “not official” by Linden Lab

Posted on by Inara Pey

A new Twitter account appeared on Friday March 7th. “SecondLife Official” (@SLOfficialtweet) billed itself as the “new Second Life official twitter page”. This took a number of people by surprise, given there is a legitimate Second Life Official Twitter account (@SecondLife).

The appearance of the account prompted a question on its legitimacy from Strawberry Singh (among others), which in turn prompted an immediate and unequivocal response from Linden Lab:

false accountPeter Grey, the Lab’s Director of Global Communications further underlined the unofficial nature of the account in an e-mail to me, stating:

That account is NOT official, nor from Linden Lab. It was first brought to our attention this morning, and we’ve been replying to queries on Twitter about it to confirm it’s not legit.

The account doesn’t appear to be a phishing attempt – the link included in the account header seems to refer to the official secondlife.com website. However, as it stands, it is likely that this account could be blocked / removed by Twitter as it would appear to be a pretty clear attempt at brand impersonation and trademark misuse.

Parody accounts, unaffiliated accounts, etc., are not new on Twitter. However, many of these do carry an indication that they are not in any way official. Twitter also have an account verification process for those accounts that might be subject to impersonation in order to further help prevent issues of misrepresentation. Given the extent to which the Lab uses Twitter, having their own official account verified might help discourage this particular prank from being repeated in future.