Accident Designs

posted by Sophie Zhu
on The Raft 1 day, 11 hours, 34 minutes, 11 seconds ago

I spend some time searching for difrent information networks because i have been thinking about creating a personal one to sort out my inventory. As i did that icame across updates to 411 and SLQ. SLQ is now connected to SLexchange which is a very neat function. In all apects SLQ looks like it has developed a lot since last time i took a look at it. Perhaps they will be the Google of SL. As regards to 411 im not sure if its good for anything. What is your experience with difrent info systems in SL?

There seemed to be some problems with Bloghud crossposting feature. But here it is manually.

Atmospheric Rendering is coming to Second Life and will along with the water, the trees, the day/night thing, the land, the human like avatars and the gravity inspired up and down way of navigating create an even more Realistic World.

Your World Your Imagination or ad least that is what they say about Second Life. Perhaps it should be “Your World - and this is a not so detailed copy”.

As i have been developing Accident Designs in Second Life i have moved away from the boundaries of the world as we know it. Often there is absolutely no reason realistic should be used as a positive description of virtual content, mostly the term realistic simply means lag of imagination. However there can be good reasons to create realistic content and in those cases i truly appreciate technology to make wind, weather graphics, trees, gravity, physics, ad so on.

But ad default id like unlimited freedom to express my imagination. I can imagine more than clouds and i can imagine more than plain terrain. Generally there is a vast amount of discovered and undiscovered possibilities that has no need for realism and might actually need the lag of it. Realism as it is implemented now in Second Life is not a possibility it is not freedom of imagination. It is a limitation. It is a limitation to your imagination and a limitation to your ability to create what you imagine if you should come as far as to imagine more than a brick house or a beautifull sunset.

I would like my ideal virtual world to support developers imagination and not confine it to a predefined themed space. It should offer the technology to create realism if needed but the default space should be confined to nothing and should be themed only by the term 3D. New and should not be known as islands. Water heights and land texture should not be a concern unless the user chooses it to be. One of the greatest limitations as now is the default appearance as a humanoid avatar, and especially the way you seem to fly around SL as if gravity really existed. Why do our avatars have to orientate the same way all over the grid.

To give room for imagination and creativity in order to evolve beyond the boundaries of First Live. We must first make sure we do not confine ourselves to a First Life environment.

A lot of people ask if they can import there previusly created 3D models from another program to Second Life - i generally tell people that the primitive systems are too far apart. However i came across this plugin allowing you to create sl content in Maya and a similary tool for google sketch up. I have heard of applications for other programs aswell. This won’t allow you too import your original 3D models to SL, however you can set up an external workspace with an interface known to you. Please comment if you have any experience combining Second Life with other 3D programs.

http://www.purplestatic.com/MEL_SL/
http://eightbar.co.uk/2006/09/29/google-sketchup-second-life-export/

Business Week created this collection on some of the richest people in Second Life. Im sorry i am not on it myself hehe. Check it out it might give you an idea of the proportions of Second Life and the actual possibilities of Second Life as a new business area or as an extension of your current.

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/04/0416_richlist/index_01.htm

Linden Lab is planning to integrate voice communication inside SL. Today meetings in second life leaves no space to concentrate about anything else than your chat log. But with the ability to use our voice the experience and usability of SL would be considerably enhanced. Perhaps we might even sometime be able to automatically display our facial expression, and body language.

There is no doubt that chat communication has it’s disadvantages. We need to express ourselves very clear and might even then not be understood. Furthermore important linguistic terms such as humor and sarcasm are hard to interpret. In general we need to keep to the facts or thoroughly explain our thoughts and feelings behind our message.

A lot of this would be considerably easier if we had the ability to express ourselves in sound. Of course we would still not be able to smell or touch each other. However we would experience a greatly enhanced communication. We would be able to look past our chat log and discover the 3D environment while communicating. This would enable presentations, conferences, classes and meetings to be much more useful in Second Life.

Ad last voice communication would allow us to lead fluid conversations where we can explain ourselves quicker and more thoroughly.

In the future i expect to combine voice communication and Second Life myself. This is also going to be of huge benefit to businesses as IBM planning to use Second Life as a virtual meeting place. Further of i could imagine that face expressions and body language in Second Life will be directly connected to your real life identity. But i believe that chat messages will still have its own advantages.

Know more:
Embracing the Inevitable - Official Linden Blog

Open source is the answer if web 2.0 is going to contain a 3. dimension.

If Second Life needs to evolve even further there is no way around Open Source. Therefore Linden Lab decided to release the Client Code and they are working on a release of the server code. Of course Accident Designs are looking forward to the release and we expect it will enable us to set up our own exclusive servers available for our customers.

Open source virtual worlds already exist but the release of the Second Life source code will definitely bring us closer to a 3d network accessible to the whole world as we know it with WWW.

Know more:Open Source Busybody Reporting for Duty - Official Linden Blog
Embracing the Inevitable - Official Linden Blog
http://www.uni-verse.org/
http://www.opencroquet.org/ - 2 existing open source virtual worlds