Baby’s Ear, July 2015 (Flickr) – blog post
Christmas is upon us, and following not far behind, the year’s end, which is often a time of reflection as we look back over the old before pausing to await the arrival of the new. It’s become something of a tradition in these pages to look back over the virtual year’s events as I’ve seen and reported them through this blog, and offer a chance to revisit the ups and downs and the good and the bad the last twelve months have brought us.
To make things easier, I’m once again breaking thing down into three parts, this section look through the months of May through August. You can find January through April here; September to December will be following soon.
The Lab
At the end of April, the Lab put out a blog post reminding people of their Second Life Affiliate Programme, something I caught at the start of May. This is the programme allowing SL users to associate a sign-up link to Second Life in their own website, blogs, social media channel, etc., and earn a commission on new SL registrations (which meet set criteria) using that link. While not new, the blog post served as reminder that the programme is still running, and that LL are casting a wide net in their attempts to gain new users. July saw the Lab also launch resident-focused promo videos on YouTube.
Following-up on comments made at the Meet the Lindens event at Sl12B in June, I put together a brief profile on Bjorn Laurin (Bjorn Linden), the Lab’s (then) new VP of Product overseeing both SL and “Project Sansar”.
With the success of the Meet the Lindens event at SL12B (see below), the Lab invited users to ask the CEO via a forum thread in July. As a part of facing the media, Ebbe Altberg and Second Life appeared on the US TV series Dr Phil dealing with computer game addiction, showing to more beneficial side of engaging in computer games and, MMOs and immersive environments.
Second Life
PaleoQuest, arrived in Second Life at the end of July 2015
May opened with a feedback meeting for the ongoing Viewer-Managed Marketplace beta. VMM suddenly moved with a jolt in July, with the start of the final run of automated listing migrations which came earlier than expected. This was completed in early August, when VMM was considered to be fully “live”.
In May, those using Facebook were informed there would likely be problems in uploading SL images to that service as a result of Facebook taking time to convert to a new API, while at the end of that month, I tried-out the Lab’s New User Experience, which had been updated to make use of Experience Keys – at least on a basic level.
Premium members saw their group limit raised to 60, then in August Concierge support was extended to all Premium members, before the surprise news came that VAT charges were dropped for Premium memberships, and the monthly subscription was modestly reduced.
In June we got the news that there were no more updates or improvements being planned for my.secondlife.com (the Profile feeds), while to help those on Windows XP and versions of OS X older than 10.7, the Lab introduced the obsolete platforms viewer, which is still available at the end of 2015. Meanwhile, Avatar complexity and the graphics presets capability finally appeared in a project viewer.
In July I took another look at the Experience Keys viewer, as it reached release status, and the Lab issued the notifications project viewer, while the Dolphin viewer bid a farewell. August saw the Lab acknowledged ongoing issues with land damage following changes they’d made, and promised to get things sorted. August also saw first word that validation checks on mesh uploads, etc., were to be more directly enforced server-side in the near future.
The Virtual Pfaffenthal ramped-up in July to offer a look into a pivotal period of Luxembourg’s history, linking the physical world and the virtual in the process, a story Drax was able to cover brilliantly in the October Drax Files World Makers.
After the loss of SL Go at the end of April, Bright Canopy reached the end of a very rapid, but well-planned and managed development cycle, and launched at the end of August.
Project Sansar
During the end of April / beginning of May, speculation was mounting that “Sansar” might be the name of the Lab’s new platform for virtual experiences. I dropped a line to the Lab on the subject as I wrote about the speculation, asking them about both “Project Sansar” and “Sansar”, and on May 5th they replied to me and confirmed via Twitter that “Project Sansar” was an interim code-name for the new platform.
Ebbe Altberg talked “Project Sansar” at the 2nd Silicon Valley Virtual Reality (SVVR) conference, providing more insight into the platform and some of the Lab’s views on the challenges they face. He also talked “Sansar” to Bloomberg in June.
“Sansar” also featured during Ebbe Altberg’s conversation at the SL12B Meet the Lindens event, for which I provided a transcript, and also summarised the comments made about “Sansar” during Troy and Danger Linden’s conversation at their Meet the Lindens event, and from recent media reports.
In an attempt to separate wheat from chaff, I presented the first in a semi-regular series, The Sansar Summary, focusing on what had been said about the new platform, rather than looking at rumours and speculation. Meanwhile, in August, Ebbe sat down with a glass of red wine for a fireside chat with Upload VR’s Nick Ochoa to discuss SL and “Sansar” in a conversation uploaded to YouTube.
And while it may have been slightly later than planned, the Lab finally announced the “Sansar” closed alpha was officially under-way in August.
In the Press
Eric Grundhauser became the latest journalist to take the time to research his subject before offering an article on Second Life, in the form of Forgotten Wonders of the Digital World, which appeared in Atlas Obscura. This didn’t sit well with at least one ideologue, prompting a number of people in the blogsphere to respond, myself included.
In August, Eric Johnson had thought-provoking article over on re/code entitled Welcome to the Metaverse, pondering the lot of avatar-based virtual spaces, past and future and prompting me to offer some thoughts. Then Alice Truong, writing for Quartz, offered the excellent Could the Oculus Rift help give Second Life a second life?
Notable Events
The Medieval Faire for RFL of SL took place in early May, while the Halfway There Weekend took place in mid-May. There was also the Sail4Life art auction and RelayStock, and Stand, a special portrait exhibition opened – then it was THE weekend itself in July.
Valsnia and Ruby Ornamental spearheaded Join Hands and Fashion for Food to raise money to assist with relief work for victims of the Nepal earthquake, while the world Goth Fair took place at the end of May / start of June.
May also bought news that the Abyss Observatory, a collaborative project formulated by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) and which had been a part of SL since 2009, looked as if it would be closing, prompting me to visit.
Of course, June saw SL12B take place, with the Lab hooking-in to the movie Jurassic World and the SL anniversary celebrations by running a dino-themed snapshot contest. LoveFest, the annual celebration of H.P. Lovecraft’s life and work occurred in August.
Art Highlights
Nino Vichan and WuWai Chun both caught my eye (again), and I got to profile Second Life author Maxwell Grantly.
Obedience a new, mixed-media installation at the Jüdisches Museum, Berlin created by Saskia Boddeke (Rose Borchovski in Second Life) and Peter Greenaway, had an interesting cross-over with our virtual world through the LEA installation Obedience by Bryn Oh and featuring Jo Ellesmere.
At the end of 2014, FreeWee Ling was awarded an Endeavour Executive Fellowship, allowing her to spend four months at the UWA in Perth, Australia. In June, the UWA sought to encourage Second Life residents to follow in FreeWee’s footsteps.
July saw the launch of Windlight Magazine, which has grown into SL’s premier arts magazine, launching the Windlight Fellowship programme in August. Also in August, the UWA launched the last in its 3D art and machinima Grand Challenges, Pursue Impossible. Thanks to Whirly Fizzle, I also got to play with ReShade, a post-processing tool which allows effects to be added to SL machinima in real-time and which can be used to overlay photographic images.
Other Worlds
High Fidelity launched a nascent marketplace, continued to work of facial recognition and gave a general update on other bits, including Professor Jeremy Bailenson of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University and Professor Ken Perlin joining High Fidelity’s growing list of high-powered advisers. In July the company launches its STEM VR challenge, with up to US $15,000 on offer, and the first two recipients were announced in August.
August saw Justin Clark-Casey step back from OpenSimulator as he became more involved in a new career. He was not the first nor the last of core developers to step back from the project, although he was perhaps once of the most involved.
Virtual and Augmented Reality
Oculus VR confirmed the Oculus Rift would not ship until early 2016, and as I noted in my coverage of the news, Palmer Lucky had a little fun with the announcement on Twitter. The company also announced they’d acquired UK-based Surreal vision.
In July, Jeremy Bailenson discussed the potential and pitfalls in VR. In August CastAR announced they’d gained some $15 million ins funding.
The Final Frontier
the Hubble Space Telescope celebrated the 25th anniversary of its launch in April 2015, and I caught up with its distinguished history at the start of May. In June I looked at the Dawn mission, and NASA’s “flying saucer”, a platform designed to test technologies which might one day deliver heavy payloads to Mars, and reported on the news the ESA’s little Philae lander might have woken up on its lonely sojourn riding a comet.
In July the space community’s eyes were focused on the furthest reaches of the solar system, and a brief encounter 15 years in the making. This took place on July 14th, when the New Horizons space probe shot through the Pluto-Charon system, marking the first visit by a craft from Earth. August saw attention shift to tiny Ceres, an asteroid being studied by the Dawn mission, and which was showing some curious phenomena of its own.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
This is a great way to recall all the things through this past year ..so much happening all the time!
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Thank you, Owl 🙂
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