Server-side Appearance is now live, as we all know, and issues seem to be minimal / getting dealt with. The majority of maintained viewers used to access Second Life were ready for the event; but due to real life commitments, Lance Corrimal has been unable to get his Dolphin viewer ready in time.
He’s recently issued an update on things, – and the good news is that an SSA-enabled Dolphin 3 is on the way. In his note, Lance says:
I’m working on it as hard as I can, and it shouldn’t be more than a couple of weeks now. I have to do a bit of QA on it, I do want to release something usable after all.
So, if you’re a Dolphin user, don’t worry. an update is on the way. When it arrives, I’ll plunge in and have a look :).
A blog post has appeared from the Lab announcing that Project Sunshine – otherwise known as Server-side Appearance (or Baking as was), and a part of the Project Shining initiative – will go live across the grid this week.
The blog post doesn’t provide any date(s) by which this will occur, however Nyx Linden has confirmed that:
The Main channel will have Server-side Appearance (SSA) enabled following the server deployments on Tuesday August 20th
BlueSteel and LeTigre will have SSA enabled following the Release Candidate deployments on Wednesday August 21st (as Magnum is currently the only channel with SSA enabled).
So, if you haven’t already updated to an SSA-capable viewer, you have less than 24 hours in which to do so before you start seeing a lot of avatars failing to render correctly.
Currently, all maintained TPV viewers with the exception of Dolphin (V3-style) and Imprudence (V1-style) support SSA rendering of avatars.
Commenting on the upcoming enabling, Nyx Linden said:
We have stats that show that it should speed up avatar loading time for everyone, so hopefully it will go smoothly and be a great improvement across the grid.
As with previous blog-posts on the subject, the Lab have included a viewer of the new service and what it means.
So, as the video says, “Don’t be cloudy and grey, enjoy Sunshine today!”
A few weeks back, I received an e-mail from Alianna Logan asking me if I would consider having this blog being syndicated on a new blog feed – LivingSL – which is, in her words “focused on the thoughts, feelings, ideas, expressions, explorations, etc. of SL residents, even mixing in real life at times.”
Intrigued by the offer, I dropped Alianna a line, asking a little more about why she’s started feed (and to accept her invitation!).
“I was one of those who was focused solely on fashion feeds,” she said in reply, “and then started to realize there was a whole world of blogs out there I was missing out on. It’s been on the back burner because of the other three I have.”
By the “other three”, Alianna is referring to her other feeds – DesigningSL, her feed for SL creators, bloggingSL for SL fashion, and HuntingSL for events and media in SL.
LivingSL has in fact been running for a few weeks now as mentioned, and I’m frankly honoured and delighted to have been asked to help get things going. If you take a look, you’ll doubtless see a fair few names from the blogsphere you recognise, and the cross-section of articles means that the feed does indeed cover areas not often found in SL-related blog feeds.
Alianna has just opened the feed’s doors to suggestions from readers on additional blogs which might be added to it. So if you do know of a blog that fits the criteria for the feed as outlines above, why not drop her a line?
If you’re looking for a central point by which you can keep up with SL-related news, commentary, thoughts and explorations, sometimes mixed with a dash of real life, make sure you bookmark LivingSL.
The Linden Lab press page has links to a couple of short articles reporting on the use of Second Life to create virtual environments to both enhance their patient managements skills and to assess how well they apply those skills.
The research was carried out by the St. Marys Hospital Medical Faculty of Imperial College, London, and the results have just been published in the August edition of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons (the abstract is free, the full report costs $31.50, downloadable in PDF).
The Imperial College has a long history of involvement in Second Life
Previous RL studies have shown that the management of patient complications following operations is an extremely important skill set for surgeons to master. However, obtaining the required skills has generally relied upon experience gained in dealing with real patients in the hospital ward, emergency room or intensive care unit, which has tended to make learning a little haphazard.
“The way we learn in residency currently has been called ‘training by chance, because you don’t know what is coming through the door next.’ the study’s co-author, Rajesh Aggarwal, MD, PhD, MA, FRCS, a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) clinician scientist in surgery, explained in a press release accompanying the study’s publication. “What we are doing is taking the chance encounters out of the way residents learn, and forming a structured approach to training.”
For the study, the research team created three environments within Second Life to simulate a hospital ward, an intensive care unit and an emergency room. Within each of these environments. modules were created for three common surgical scenarios: gastrointestinal bleeding, acute inflammation of the pancreas, and bowel obstruction. Surgical residents (interns, junior and senior residents) together with attending surgeons were then tasked with assessing and managing the virtual patients in each of the simulations. Tasks assigned to the surgical staff included recording patient history, carrying out physical examinations, diagnosis illnesses, interpreting lab test results using X-ray and CT scans and defining an appropriate treatment / management plan.
In all, 63 surgeons participated in the simulations, with the performance of the experienced attending surgeons being used as a benchmark against which the performance of the surgical residents could be assessed.
“What we want to do—using this simulation platform—is to bring all the junior residents and senior residents up to the level of the attending surgeon, so that the time is shortened in terms of their learning curve in learning how to look after surgical patients,” Dr. Aggarwal explained.
The results of the research suggested that the environment created within Second Life was a remarkably accurate test of a resident’s abilities, with all three scenarios revealing similar levels of competency between the different groups of surgeons (intern, junior and senior), allowing the researchers to identify where skills need to be further refined and enhanced within each group.
It is now hoped that further research will see the virtual environment used to more effectively and efficiently train surgical residents from hospitals across London in post-surgical care of patients, allowing them to gain the skills they can take back to their working environments and become even more effective in handling patient management in real clinical situations, thus helping to improve patient safety.
“Going through these different steps is not going to teach residents everything they need to know for every patient with bowel obstruction, for example, but it is going to teach them about the majority of patients that he or she is going to look after and it’s going to do it in a much more education-efficient and appropriate manner,” Dr. Aggarwal said.
It is also hoped that that simulations can be used as a means of a refresher course, allowing residents to maintain the skills and understanding they gain from the initial training in a more efficient manner than might be achieved through day-to-day activities at their place of work.
Inside one of the wards at the Imperial College’s presence in SL
Long History
The study doesn’t mark the first time that Imperial College has used Second Life for their research. They have been using the platform for several years, as the following video from a 2008/9 study demonstrates.
On July 31st the Google Affiliate Network GAN) closed-down. In terms of Second Life, the significance of this is that Linden Lab offered their own affiliate advertising through GAN. However, all is not lost for those who wish to advertise SL through their websites with the potential to generate modest income as a result of doing so, a fact Ciaran Laval pointed me towards.
The Lab has entered into a relationship with Commission Junction (who have themselves been running a programme to capture advertisers and publishers who had been using GAN) to provide a new affiliate service to those wishing to advertise Second Life on their websites.
Recently the Lab has been e-mailing those already using the affiliate programme with details on how they can make the switch. For those who have not previously used the affiliate programme and wish to do so for the first time can do so in one of two ways depending on whether or not you already have a publisher account with Commission Junction.
The new affiliate programme banner
If you do not have a publisher account with Commission Junction, you can sign-up using the form linked-to from the Lab’s affiliate programme page. Do note, however that the form represents a contract between you and Commission Junction, not Linden Lab. As such, the Terms of Service displayed as a part of the sign-up process is for Commission Junction (and their associated entities) as well, and therefore should be read through. It would also likely be a good idea to check the Commission Junction website for further background information (details on how the system works for publishers, payout terms, etc.).
Once the sign-up form has been submitted, an e-mail will be sent with instructions on how to activate your new Commission Junction account.
If you do already have a Commission Junction publisher account, you can apparently add Second Life to your account via the Commission Junction member’s area.
Either way, please take the time to read the Lab’s initial FAQ on the affiliate programme page as it includes some important information on the programme – including the fact web sites based in the US states of Arkansas, Connecticut, Illinois, New York, and North Carolina are excluded, presumably for tax liability reasons.
As I’m on WordPress.com, this programme is not for me – but if you self-host, and want to add SL advertising to your site, it might be for you. Commission Junction has a large number of advertisers, so there is no reason why you cannot include other suitable ads as well in order to try to increase your opportunities for revenue generation. Apparently, the minimum payout amount is considered high, so as with everything of this nature, mileage is liable to vary as to the return gained through the programme when all factors (traffic, ad selection, etc.) are taken into account.
On July 28th, I received an e-mail from the Lab announcing that they are once again running their “limited-time” Premium membership offer. As with the previous promotions (run in 2011 and 2012), this offer comes with strings attached:
The discount only applies to Quarterly membership billing plans
Only the first quarter will be discounted; the rest of the year will be charged at the full Quarterly membership rate.
The offer will be running until 20:00 SLT (PST) on Sunday 11th August, 2013, and those wishing to take advantage of it can do so via the sign-up page.
The latest premium membership offer from Linden Lab
It’s likely the offer will draw upset from some quarters, with people pointing to the Lab “failing” to address issues of high tier. Whether such complaints are valid is actually debatable; when it comes to tier, the Lab is very much between a rock and a hard place insofar as tier cuts are concerned, as any significant reduction in tier could actually hurt their revenue stream far more rapidly than attempting to weather the storm of declining in private region numbers (and perhaps trying to deal with matters through other means).
That said, there is a finger to be pointed at the Lab where Premium membership and land use is concerned, and that’s in regard to Linden Homes. These were originally intended as providing a means to “get people started” on the road of having a house and land in Second Life. However, this has never been the case. There are no time-limits on Linden Home occupation, no incentives to encourage people to move on elsewhere, etc. So people tend to stay, and the Linden Home regions grow, quite possible to the detriment of the land market as a whole – and I actually speak as a guilty party; I have a Linden Home and reduced all other land holdings to zero last year.
The problem here is what to do. The fact is that Linden Homes are one of the “better” perks of Premium membership, their age and (in some estate cases) their so-called “slum” looks notwithstanding. If they are taken away, or if people’s use of them is limited, it could lessen the value in having people go Premium. Plus, even if the time people can have a Linden Home is limited, it doesn’t automatically mean that once that time is up, they will simply move elsewhere and rent land; they might simply opt to go without.
Incentives are needed, and this again introduces problems: what should the incentives be, how should they be directed, and who should be involved? Some kind of co-operative venture between the Lab and rental estates might be possible; but again, which estates? And how would it be managed without the Lab being accused of “playing favourites” or damaging the market for the smaller rental operations or without the whole thing becoming too complicated to be easily managed by estates and / or the Lab?
Linden Homes: hurting more than helping the land market?
My own thoughts remain that the entire Premium membership package needs a complete re-think; although I admit identifying how this could easily be achieved to the satisfaction of all isn’t as easy as it sounds. Back in 2011, Will Burns suggested one possible direction this might take:
Might I suggest that if the Premium Accounts were instead treated as Professional Accounts, changing the focus from casual consumer to producer, then the Gaming Toolbox options for experience creation would be an excellent (and genuinely new) Added Value to the Professional Account holder.
Since Premium/Professional Accounts require some sort of identification, this makes the Professional Account holder directly accountable for their actions using the professional toolbox systems.
The problem here is that not all current Premium members are content creators. So what happens to them if the focus is to “rebrand” Premium accounts as “Professional” rather than to introduce a new “Professional” membership category? That said, the introduction of such a “Professional” membership package, with access to a unique set of tools and capabilities, in addition to a re-vamp of the Premium membership package would appear to have merit on a number of fronts (even if it would be liable to generate its own controversy).
There are doubtless dozens of ideas which could be put forward on the subject of Premium accounts (and the future of Linden Homes). Whether the Lab would consider any of them, no matter how workable, is another matter. For now, however, the promotional offer is open. If you’re interested, I offered some thoughts on the matter a year ago, and which probably still holds true today and might be worth reading before making the jump.
Server-side Appearance is now live, as we all know, and issues seem to be minimal / getting dealt with. The majority of maintained viewers used to access Second Life were ready for the event; but due to real life commitments, Lance Corrimal has been unable to get his Dolphin viewer ready in time.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 