Month: December 2017

Pick of the Day: Violin Tree (Plus a Sansar Store Spotlight: Galen’s Theremin)

Mikki Miles, my favourite musical instrument maker in Second Life (in-world store, SL Marketplace), has created a new Sansar experience called Violin Tree. In his description he writes:

Inspired by an 40.000 year old boneflute, found in a cave in Southern Germany, I built this island with musical instruments that are somehow familiar, but seem to have taken a bit weird development on this offshore place. It’s a work in progress, come back again! All music and sounds are produced by Mikki Miles.

Violin Tree 1 17 Dec 2017.png

You arrive on a deserted island. To your left is what appears to be a tall tower, and to your right is a tree. As you come closer to the tower, you realize that it is, in fact. an oversize, ivy-covered flute, which plays a somewhat mournful tune as you approach and stand before it.

Violin Tree 2 17 Dec 2017

When you come nearer to the tree, you see that it is growing violins! It also plays music.

Violin Tree 3 17 Dec 2017.png

As Mikki Miles says in his description, this Sansar experience is a work in progress, so do plan to come back to see new musical creations in future!

While we are talking about musical instruments, I also wanted to showcase a particularly clever musical instrument that Galen has created and scripted, called a theremin. It’s an electronic musical instrument controlled by moving your hands around it without actually touching it.

Here is a short video I made of me playing Galen’s theremin at his Metaverse Machines Showroom (you’ll need a VR headset and hand controllers to be able to do this):

Galen’s theremin and the script used to control it are both available for free in the Sansar Store:

Galen's Theremin 17 Dec 2017

Very cool! It certainly looks like we are going to have no shortage of fun, playable musical instruments in Sansar.

Pictures from Tonight’s Sci-Fi Party

Here are a couple of shots of the sci-fi party held this evening with Greg Aronowitz, the curator of the Star Wars production art collection, at his virtual museum experience.

Sci Fi Party at Star Wars Exhibition 15 Dec 2017

Unbeknownst to us as we were standing around talking about movies and special effects and art, SIN was busy re-arranging items from the collection!

SIN's collection 15 Dec 2017

Sci-Fi Party Tonight at the Hollywood Arts Museum Star Wars Exhibition

lost art of SW

Join us tonight at 6:00 p.m. Pacific Time/Sansar Time for a special sci-fi party at the Star Wars production art exhibition, called the Lost Art of Star Wars, at the Hollywood Art Museum experience! You are encouraged to dress in sci-fi theme!

Here’s the text of the invitation in full, from the official Sansar blog:

As fans the world over prepare for their first (or tenth) viewing of the brand new Star Wars: The Last Jedi movie – we’re celebrating in Sansar with a Sci-Fi party hosted at the virtual exhibit Lost Art of Star Wars – in Sansar. Where else can you engage and interact with such a unique collection of Hollywood history like this? Get up close to sketches and early production designs, pick up and throw an X-wing starfighter as though it were a mere paper plane?

See what you can find in the Sansar Store to deck out your avatar in theme – then join us from 6 – 8 pm (PT) for an epic good time.

Hollywood Art Museum curator Greg Aronowitz will be joining us. Greg is a prop and set designer, director, writer, producer, and practical effects professional who has worked on hundreds of film and television projects, and also has a passion for preserving film history to collecting unique production pieces from many of Hollywood’s classics. He shares compelling stories about the history of each piece in his collection.

The Hollywood Art Museum: Lost Art of Star Wars is a virtual tour of many of these never-before-seen pieces that can be enjoyed in both desktop and VR modes.

See you there!

Scene of the Day: Winter Wonderland

I haven’t done a Scene of the Day for a long time, so here is one! This post doubles as a brief report of the Product Meetup. As usual, I will leave it to Inara Pey to do her usual professional job of reporting in detail on these meetings, and just link to it. (Thank you for the valuable service you are providing to the Sansar community, Inara!)

This morning’s Sansar Product Meetup was held in Beverly Zauberflote’s Winter Wonderland experience. We did have some problems with instancing, where some people ended up in a duplicate version of the experience, wondering where everybody else was. It took a few minutes to sort it all out.

Along with Jenn, Brett, Carolyn and Nyx from Linden Lab were present to answer our questions.

Winter Wonderland 15 Dec 2017

The first version of access controls for experiences will be part of the next release of the Sansar software, where you can restrict access to your experience to people on your friends list. People will also be able to create and sell clothing on the Sansar Store, as has been reported before, but runtime cloth simulation (cloth physics) will not be part of the upcoming fashion release next week. There will also be updates to scripting abilities, which the C# programmers among us will no doubt welcome.

It does sound that Linden Lab is still going ahead with their controversial decision to allow consumers to retexture items taken out of inventory and placed in their experiences. Some creators who disagree strongly with this decision have said that they will not place items up for sale in the Sansar Store until Linden Lab implements a comprehensive permissions system. There was quite a bit of discussion about this today.

Jenn stressed again that consumers who retexture items will not be able to take them back into inventory or resell them, and that people will not be allowed to retexture clothing and attachments. Both Jenn and Carolyn stressed that Linden Lab is taking people’s concerns about this matter very seriously.