Day: August 17, 2017

Product Meetups August 18th at the Accuracy Training Module

Accuracy Training Module 17 August 2017

Every Friday, Jenn, the Lead Community Manager for Sansar, hosts an in-world meetup to discuss software development (bugs, upcoming features, etc.). She quite often gets several staff members from Linden Lab to attend as well. Tomorrow’s product meetups (formerly known as Office Hours) will be held at the Accuracy Training Module experience by Nebulae. There are two product meetups:

  • 9:30 – 10:30 a.m. Pacific Time/Sansar Time
  • 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time/Sansar Time

Everybody is welcome to come to one or both meetings. There will also be another social gathering (happy hour!) at the Strange Lights experience at 3:00 p.m. Pacific Time/Sansar Time (if Strange Lights is misbehaving again, we will move to Astro Port).

Pictures from the History of Sansar

Here are some pictures I took during the closed beta test of Sansar. (I checked with Linden Lab and I do have permission to post these, despite the NDA that was in effect at the time.) The first one is an in-world Office Hours meeting held at the Conference Stage experience way back in February:

screenshot_2017-02-10_11.47.50

As I mentioned in an earlier blogpost, the kaiju monster avatars were popular, expecially amongst the Linden Lab staff attending these meetings, because back then they were the only avatars whose hands could be moved using the VR headset hand controllers. (Inverse kinematics for human avatars was not introduced until just before the launch of the open creator beta on July 31st.) Here’s another February 2017 Office Hours meeting, this one held at the Highlands experience:

evening_office_hours_sansar_highlands_february_10_2017_1024

my_first_virtual_snowman_february_27_2017_360On February 27th, 2017 I created my first mesh object using the Oculus Medium software: a snowman. I uploaded him into my Sansar experience to admire him in-world. (I later coloured in my grey snowman using Blender. You can see him at the spawn point in Ryan’s Garden.

sansar_stress_test_pile_on_march_8_2017_360On March 8th, 2017 Linden Lab asked all the closed beta testers to participate in a stress test of the system. We were asked to pile into one experience after another in sequence, to test how many avatars each experience could hold at one time without problems. So many of us came into the Highlands that we had avatars stacked on top of one another like a human pyramid!

After the Highlands, we all piled into the Seven Wonders Park experience (bottom photo)! As you can see, it got pretty crowded!

sansar_stress_test_seven_wonders_park_march_8_2017_1024

leonas_clock_in_sansar_25_april_2017_360On April 25th I visited an experience that demonstrated an actual working clock, created by Leona. (I checked and I can’t find her experience in the Atlas anymore. I don’t know what happened to it or the clock, but it was very cool!)

Well, that’s all the picture I want to share for today. I’ll post more pictures from the early days of Sansar later!

Pick of the Day: Secrets of the WorldWhale

Secrets of the WorldWhale 17 August 2017

I’m not going to tell you a lot about this Sansar experience, because I want you to explore it for yourself. When you arrive, head for the old mouse in the cloak sitting under the tree. He’ll tell you what to do 🙂

You will need to know how to teleport, either using your VR headset’s hand controllers in VR mode, or the Control key and the mouse in desktop mode.

Secrets of the WorldWhale justly deserves the US$2,500 prize it won for Best Sound Design in an Experience in the recent Sansar Creator Challenge.

Scene of the Day: Strange Lights

Strange Lights Sansar 17 August 2017

Today’s Scene of the Day is from the wonderfully atmospheric Sansar experience Strange Lights, by Loki Eliot. This picture was taken by Second Life and Sansar user Lenni Foxtrot and posted to the Sansar group on Facebook today. Strange Lights has also been the site for our 3:00 p.m. Pacific Time/Sansar Time daily in-world meetups this week, hosted by Jenn, the Lead Community Manager for Sansar. (Unfortunately, this experience has also been crashing quite regularly, so the meetups have often been moved over to the Astro Port experience. If you can’t find us in Strange Lights, look for us today in Astro Port.)

One of the interesting differences between VR and desktop (non-VR) users of Sansar is the different way that “god rays” (like the ones in this photo) appear. When I visit Strange Lights while wearing my Oculus Rift VR headset, I do not see the “god rays” the same way that a desktop user of Sansar sees them.