New Sculptures

"Fat Man" and "Senor Cohones", the latter actually an intermediate stage of the other, which I decided to conserve as a sculpture of it's own, you will notice the identical leg positioning.

Both can be admired and purchased at Mechatiki Skyloft, which has seen a little re-decorating lately, a new wall here, a shiny new lamp there - come to see it today! While you're there grab one of the delicious free drinks, grab a glass of wine from the table or use ye goode olde Kybernetic Martini Assembling Contraption ... and at the bar you'll find some useful paraphernalia if you seek to equip your own home bar - a shaker, lime, olives ... or the bar itself.

Purely Senseless Technology

Product Anouncement:

Two new useless items from the Mechatiki workbenches (one you can at least sit on) - the Bulbus Apparatus and the Operator Armchair were launched onto the Second Life market place.

Regard the videos below or have a look at both contraptions at Mechatiki Skyloft!

Bulbus Apparatus on XStreetSL.

Operator Armchair on XStreetSL.

RL invades SL

... In a positive way.

Per accident (err, youtube's related video suggestions) I stumbled upon videos from the fine folks of UC Berkeley - they're doing some pretty cool stuff actually. On their grid of 40 Opensim servers and in SL.

Like Ortho-Mapping for example. In other words: mapping orthoimagery (aerial views, in this case of the earth) onto terrain.

Watch the videos below to get a bird's view of the Berkeley area:

From the text going with the second video:

Real-life geographic information is modeled at three levels, or scales of detail. The (1:42) Level 1 build mimics Google Earth with globe-type data at 1/42 scale. The (1:16) Level 2 build adds LiDAR first-return data to include the tops of every building and trees at 1/16 scale. The (1:3) Level 3 build is the best we can do, solid geometry 3D graphic primitives and real-world textures hand-tuned for optimal streaming at 1/3 scale.

"Mimicking" being a bit of an understatement in this case, ha! I can see Earth Grid fed with real time real life data before me already.

Teh Sikrit Lab

... is how I affectionately call my offline Opensim region, which despite it's limitations and quirks I have installed to do some prim tinkering for import to Second Life.

After all it has it's merits when it comes to building - no lag! No expenses for texture uploads. And of course the sheer unlimited amount of prims available (45000 per region). Which means after a week I have still some left for more achievements such as the Office Chair Xccutive or this Tower PC.

Click here to view Flickr Set.

Standalone SL for Corporations coming soonish

LL have announced "Second Life Behind a Firewall", SL server software for solvent corporate customers to run on their own hardware:

"Today, we’re pleased to share that the stand-alone version of Second Life solution is currently in the alpha phase. We have nine alpha installations in the field at organizations such as IBM, Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC), New Media Consortium (NMC), Intel, and Northrop Grumman. And, we’re planning to go into a limited closed beta phase this summer with general availability later this year."

Certainly a step towards a broader acceptance of the platform in RL business environments - I can see corporations starting to use SL worlds for internal collaboration etc. more readily when their own sysops are to blame for downtimes.

Next SL Viewer Release to bring major progress

Besides facilitating the new adult content policy LL announced recently (which is also the reason this release will be out later than anticipated) the next release of the official client will incorporate features like shadows, flexi prims and bulk permission editing!

Boy Lane, developer of the alternative Cool Viewer, divulged on the forums along with posting a link to his pre-alpha Shadow Viewer 1.23 release:

"... It is purely meant as an early preview, perhaps to take some nice snapshots, and play around, but it is not meant for any serious work. It is something pre-alpha, it will crash. ...

Included features are:
Bulk permission editing (part of official 1.23 to come)
Enhanced building tools (part of official 1.23 to come)
Flexible Sculpties
Double click to wear attachments
Large Prims (only for Opensim grids)
Maximized Network Bandwidth
MUPose Style
Worn Inventory Tab
Teleport History
...and a number of more goodies and (hopefully) stability fixes. Too many to mention here ..."

Yummy.