A short video of the Mechatiki Public Lab at the Second Life 6th Birthday Exhibit.
We are currently preparing the the proper fencing to keep the chance of escaping creatures at a reasonable minimum.
At the exact opening of the events we will release various live kinetic creatures on our parcel and watch what they are up to for the next week! (Inviting you - the public - to interact with them.)
Here's the SLUrl already, though I don't think the public can access the sim before June 23rd ..
... There will also be free drinks.
Recurring readers may remember I mentioned that I had exposed a family of kinetic Marsdog sculptures to the visitors in SL as well as RL of Brooklyn is Watching - an interworld art project interfacing a Second Life sim with a gallery in Brooklyn.
Last weekend it was kindly discussed in the weekly podcast - click here to listen to it.
This was a really, really interesting listen for me , for more than one reason. Firstly my art was being discussed by people I had never met in either world - interesting, but a situation that can easily occur in real life too. So taking into account that the few lines of info I had provided on the brooklyiniswatching website were disregarded I thought my work scored pretty good - the four debaters at first didn't know what to think of or do with the objects, and yet they were discussing one of the larger ones (I suppose from listening to the podcast) in it's seeming stasis, lying on the back, gradually finding out about the tounge-sticking and feet moving, ending up learning about the physical character of the sculpture through collision. I regard the discussion a win for my art in that it seemed be able to make four guys talk about it quite intelligently about it for several minutes without saying it sucked big time - on the contrary it seems to have invited interaction.
To me the discussion had a special twist and was particularily interesting because one of the panelists apparently wasn't familiar too much with SL itself, so his reaction to Second Life art was not filtered through the lenses of limitations seasoned users are aware of and generally was to be expected to approach the works with a more intuitive attitude than someone who has internalized the workings of the UI.
While I have never met any of the illustrious round I have already had time to google the two non-regulars ... and the one I suspect must be the SL noob, Jason Robert Bell, is not only author of a caveman-robot comic, but he is also selling what I have just ordered as a first gift for little Emma Danger over the pond: a little plush Caveman Robot!
All in all the podcast has made me curious for more, Brooklyn is Watching is definitely a project to watch for some serious world connecting art discourse. Follow this SLUrl to visit the inworld location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Popcha/72/140/27.
Today Linden Labs announced a new product in limited beta: phone calls from the real world into the Metaverse. Historic indeed:
"This marks the first time a Resident will be able to communicate with a non-Second Life user within Second Life. The service goes into a limited Beta trial today and will launch as a full offering in Q3."At least for now, if you are not in the US or GB long distance rates will apply, since the number to call is composed of any one of a list of now 8 US and one London phone number followed by an individual "access code".
So to call our avatar Magggnnus Woodget dial any of these numbers:
Boston +1 617-861-0749
Chicago +1 312-348-3694
Dallas +1 972-813-0067
Los Angeles +1 213-271-2575
New York +1 212-660-9951
Philadelphia +1 215-475-5291
San Francisco +1 415-490-9443
Washington D.C. +1 202-629-9859
London, UK +44 20-7100-5624
followed by the "access code" 128033. If you are in San Francisco for example you would dial 490-9443 128033 ...
Of course I would have to have voice turned on to take the call I suppose, but I actually have started to experiment with it (the feedback noises were terrible).
Here is the announcement on the SL blog and this link leads to the access code dispensary.
Brooklyn is watching is a mixed reality exhibit taking place in a gallery in Brooklyn and simultaneously in SL, where the visitors in Brooklyn can see into SL, not vice versa.
Since the exhibit invites anyone to contribute some art and document it, I obliged and gave Brooklyn a family of Marsdogs to watch:
They should be there for a few days before they get returned, unless of course they propel themselves through the air over the parcel's borders at some point, which sounds not unlikely since they are physical and animated at the same time.
This one has a pre-quel. A while ago on the XStreet marketplace webpage, the login cookie suddenly expired in a very short time-span. Something in the background had changed and this little detail was not considered. Which caused an uproar amongst users that were - like me - used to keeping open one or more tabs in their browser with the XStreet page on it, frequently checking it, be it for new forum posts, traffic or products. Logging in every time you want to refresh a page can be a major pain in the ass and actually get me to not use a page so often anymore. Happened so in this case, I changed my behaviour to only checking the page once or twice daily for the period of time XStreets new owners - Linden Labs - took to decide to fix this.
Now back to present time: this monday May 11th another change to the login occured. Now everyone with an SL account can login to XStreet with their SL login. Everybody has to use their SL login now to get into the XStreet page.
And now it comes. The cookie again expires in a very short period of time. Five days counting, two Jiras and several threads on the XStreet Forums and no fix in sight - so now it's a feature. Nice Job.
Vote:
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-1095
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-1099
And just for giggles here is the traffic for my items on XStreet for the last month:
(With all SL residents suddenly having XStreet accounts and this being advertised you would expect and influx of new eyes in the last few days, no?)
Thanks to Robin Wood's free T-Shirt template (and the CDC's generous image service) Mechatiki Research is now able to offer the Dollarbie H1N1 T-Shirt with the popular 2009 swineflu virus on it. Get it on XStreet or pick it up inworld at Mechakitty Design.SL resident Times Sands has published a 6 page article titled "A Technical Update on Second Life's Readiness for E-Learning", which is an informative look at where the technology stands today and what is still needed from an e-ducator's perspective.
It also contains a point to which I can attest to from first hand experience:
"... A reverse question is whether Second Life might be a useful venue for creating training content to be delivered in the real world? And the answer is a resounding Yes. Virtual films (called Machinima) are being made in Second Life faster and less expensively than would be possible in the real world (if they were even filmable in the real world at all)."... Mechatiki Production's eager staff are ready to take your orders.
"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.
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!
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:
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
Tinkering with settings and controls is always a good idea! *laughs* Well, often enough it actually IS.
I'm not quite sure when the wireframe rendering option (in the Advanced menu, activated by Ctrl+Alt+D) will be useful ... but now I know it is there:
Makes for a nice retro 80s look, doesn't it?
A new name popped up on my new-worlds-radar: Sirikata.
"Sirikata is an BSD licensed open source platform for virtual worlds. We aim to provide a set of libraries and protocols which can be used to deploy a virtual world, as well as fully featured sample implementations of services for hosting and deploying these worlds."
When I looked around on their site and subcribed to one of their lists, I recognized a name among the subscribers - Kyle Machulis of teledildonic fame and ex-LL-employee, who I had met 2007 at a dorkbotSF at San Francisco's Porn Palace where he presented some of his dildonic equipment, while I was there helping present the Mind Reading Martini Maker.
Says Kyle about Sirikata: "Turns out the sortof-project manager of sirikata was an ex-coworker from Linden, and contacted me about it. I've pretty much just been lurking on the list, haven't had much time to interact, but I've got high hopes for the platform, as there were lots of things I wanted to do at Linden/SL that never happened."
All I want to add is that listening to artist Chris Platz in that video above makes me feel like I spend my days playing in the sandbox. .. Wait, that can be a good thing actually!
I am happy to announce Mechatiki Research are participating in this year's St. Patrick's Shamrock Hunt at Jabberwocky (March 14-17)!
We wrapped the non-animated version of our new mechanic left hand prosthesis in one of Ona Ra's beautiful sculpty shamrocks and set them for 1L. And then I carefully hid it near our local outlet (for spoiler click image above to visit flickr).
Make sure to continue the search after picking up our hand - additionally to the many high quality items that will be provided, there will be a cash prize in one of the shamrocks that are hidden around the market place.
Two new videos of Todd Borst's animation tool Puppeteer in action:
Mechanic Hand, a mechanic left hand with subtle animated finger movement.
I tried the Imprudence viewer mentioned in this post and turned the Mechatiki glassware department to jelly:
On some sculpts the rendering quality decreases wildly after flexi is turned on, but I have confirmed I'm strongly looking forward to having this as a standard feature.
"Essentially, Second Life is a 3D version of Photoshop which the users live inside."
Best one-sentence characterisation of Second Life ever. By Hamlet Au in NewWorldNotes, where he discusses Second Life After The Hype, and the Future of SL Media Coverage.
Here's my pic of the day:
(me standing on version 0.2 of Creature)
Flexi Sculpts, here they come ... a patch that was recently publicised on the Jira enabled early adopters with the appropriate skills to compile their own viewer to experience flexible sculpted prims - Now Imprudence came out with a ready-to-run client for us ordinary builder folks to be able to play with flexi sculpts too!
"Note that this viewer is NOT OFFICIALLY SUPPORTED. It’s just for testing/fun, so if you crash, well, you crash. Don’t expect this feature in Imprudence until the performance issues can be sorted out."
I can see a multi-functional creature growing there ...
After a ladder, a table and a computer monitor this organic structure was a nice conclusion of a tinkering sunday!
... For your 2nd office or living room? Then be quick and reply to this Plurk (within the next 24h or so)!
I'm giving away this ~33prim rolling flatscreen plus test pattern texture to use as media texture in land settings to anyone who says they'd like one in a reply on Plurk. (If you tell me three reasons why you don't want to open a Plurk account in a reply on this blog, I'll send you one too.)
... The monthly tiered fees to Linden Labs, that is, I am not going to go into any land market discussion ...
Considering that SL is a unique service (all the open source clones don't offer anything near the quality of SL in any respect and in that light land-prices have to be considered even more expensive in alternative grids) the answer is clearly no, otherwise the demand would not hold up in the way it does.
But what about the creator's perspective? Once you got used to detailed building - maybe fell addicted when playing around in a standalone Opensim, where prim count doesn't play ANY role at all ... it's hard to keep up with land purchases if one wants to make and use prim intensive creations in THE main grid.
Since my new installation of standalone OS isn't running as desired anyway, I was going through a bit of a prim turkey, so the fresh construction site mentioned in my last post comes as a welcome opportunity to tinker with some stuffs I hope Pinkpink is going to find useful and/or inspiring in her efforts. ... I am not so sure about that 300 prim truss I built today though ... But it turns out to be easy to prove to her that 1/8th of a sim is NOT actually really BIG for a project like a gallery ... some truss here, some fish there, and half the prims are a gone. LOL? or WTF?
While not surprising me in itself, it still reminds me of my own chronic shortage on prim allowance and also brings to mind Ann Otoole's blog-post in which she compares SL to RL costs.
So, do I wish monthly land fees would be lowered? YES? But do I also want LL to invest in modern servers and other infrastructure that will keep the grid running and improve on it? Um, yes too! That means I cannot answer my question "Is Land too expensive in Second Life?" myself ... I politely pass it on to Linden Labs then ...
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