At SLCC today, Stefan Buscaylet gave an informative presentation about portrait photography in Second Life. The photographic tools available in Viewer 2 are far more versatile than I realized, and should appeal to serious RL photographers. I’ll write more about this in the future, after I’ve had a chance to work on it myself.
Category: report
You can have your own virtual world
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have your own virtual world? It might be for your business or university, or maybe just for you and your friends to hang out in without having to deal with griefers. Or maybe you’ve wished you could experience other virtual worlds without having to create a new account in each one.
Both are becoming possible. Two emerging software packages, OpenSim and HyperGrid, will soon make them realities and in some cases even easy. Best of all, Second Life® members won’t need to learn much that’s new. The skills you’ve learned In Second Life will mostly carry over to the OpenSim worlds and you can use unofficial Second Life viewers such as Imprudence and Phoenix to visit any OpenSim world. The Hypergrid will do something even more wonderful: it will connect OpenSim virtual worlds in much the way that the Web connects websites. The day is coming when you can have a website that will contain a portal to your own virtual world, and when you’ll be able to teleport from your world to other virtual worlds.
I’ve tried three ways you can have your own virtual world today. All are new and still under development. None are really products yet. They are for pioneers, but they are real and available for you to try. The ones I’ve tried are:
- Kitely. This is an amazing concept. It’s what will interest most people. You can have your own single sim virtual world created in just two minutes or less! I have three Kitely worlds. It’s the only one of the four that requires no technical ability to se it up. The limitations are present are that you can’t get on the HyperGrid yet and you can have only one sim.
- Diva distro. This is the easiest way to get you to get a world with more than one sim and that’s on the Hypergrid, but you should try it only if you have some technical skills, such as being able to configure port forwarding on your router. Nonetheless, for someone accustomed to configuring computers and software it’s fairly easy to set up. I had mine up fairly quickly and friends were logging into it and enjoying it. The Diva distro will meet the needs of most people.
- OpenSim. If you anticipate needing more than one server for your world or if you want full flexibility in building your world, then the regular OpenSim distro is what you need. It’s not for the faint of heart, however, and requires a fair amount of technical skills. If you have the skills and the strong pioneering spirit required for plunging into software that’s still being developed, the big problems you’re likely to face are the lack of documentation and the fact that because it’s still evolving as a product, answers you find to your questions are likely to apply to older versions of OpenSIm and not to yours. I have just gotten my own 8 sim virtual world going, but it still needs work to get it to run right. I’ll be writing about my progress in future posts.
Here are some links where you can learn more:
Kitely: http://www.kitely.com/
Download links for Diva and Opensim: http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Download
Diva Canto’s blog (Diva Canto created the Diva distro and in RL is University of California at Irvine professor Cristina Lopes): http://metaverseink.com/blog/
Lost Gardens of Apollo
The Lost Gardens of Apollo is one of Second Life’s treasures. It’s also one of its oldest attractions, dating all the way back to 2005. There isn’t much in Second Life that’s been around this long.
It’s a place of seductive beauty, a place for lovers and for lovers of beauty. The sheer complexity of the build is stunning. Covering an entire sim, it contains lush forests, hidden places to relax with a lover, an imposing temple-like structure on the harbor, and a “Bridge to Nowhere” floating high above. Former members of the now-defunct virtual world There.com will feel at home in the floating islands that conjure a feeling of the magical place Saja in that extinct world.
Second Life members can visit by using either of these slurls:
- slurl.com/secondlife/Apollo/76/212/24 (central landing point)
- slurl.com/secondlife/Apollo/76/212/24 (Bridge to Nowhere)
The Lost Gardens of Apollo has a Facebook page at /www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=20573244932
Here are four photos I took on my visit there yesterday. I’ll have more in the future.
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The darkly post-cyberpunk city of Hangars Liquides
The Hangars Liquides sim, home of the French music label Hangars Liquides, also known as HL, isn’t yet complete, but it’s already amazing. Djehan Kidd, creator of the sim, describes it as "Post Cyberpunk deconstructions… a huge and tangled cyberpunk city, home of RL avant garde music label Hangars Liquides."
When you first teleport there, you will be in a pitch black room. Before doing anything, look for the floating text "HL readme + free flight assistant". It will give you a notecard with some information about the sim, and most importantly, it will give you a flight assistant. The sim is around 1600 meters above sea level, far above the elevation at which avatars can fly. Immediately look in your inventory and select "Flight Feather" and attach it to some part of your body. It serves two purposes: keeping you from falling when you step over an edge in the darkness, and it illuminates your avatar, a huge help in the darkness that permeates this sim.
One other thing you should do is set your Draw Distance to 512 meters. You’ll find this in Edit/Preferences/Graphics with a checkmark in Custom. Don’t leave it there after you leave the sim, however. It will probably substantially slow down your computer.
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If you wander along the dark hallway, you will eventually find yourself in HL’s mysterious city, a place teeming with electric energy yet no life, a haunting place where you can never quite get your bearings. Make sure you have your audio on. HL describes its music as "flashcore"; Wikipedia describes it as hardcore techno experimental music. Their music is an essential component of the experience. |
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