Day: August 26, 2019

UPDATED! Review: Lindsey Stirling Concert in Wave

I took the afternoon off work to catch the electronic violinist, Lindsey Stirling, perform a live show in Wave at 2:00 p.m. Central Time.

Lindsey wore a full-body 3D motion capture suit and special VR gloves, which allowed her to completely animate her avatar in Wave, from her head down to her feet (including each individual finger on her hands), as she played and danced!

The concert was wonderful! She played several of the songs from her soon-to-be-released album, Artemis, for the first time before a live audience. As she played, the stage around her would transform itself into different designs, and sometimes, particle effects (like red leaves) would swirl around her. It was a mesmerizing performance!

Here is the entire performance captured on YouTube. The special effects were wonderful, and they really added to the overall fantasy atmosphere! (They updated this video, so I reposted the link below so that it should start at the very beginning of the video. If it doesn’t work for you, just scroll back to the very start of this video to catch the start of Lindsey’s performance, thanks!)

I especially liked how people’s comments were displayed as bright lights at the intervals between songs, while Lindsey talked to the crowd in attendance (you can see all their avatars in parts of this performance). I’m assuming these were the comments posted by the YouTube viewers, but I’m not sure. It was a wonderful experience!

Here’s a link that should connect you to all the different places you can watch the concert! I understand that this concert will only be available for 24 hours and after that, it’s gone. So please don’t wait to go see it!

UPDATE Sept. 13th, 2021: Here’s a two-minute recap video I just discovered!

UPDATED! Editorial: The Sansar Female Avatar Proportions for Avatar 2.0 Are Wrong (and What Linden Lab Has to Say About It)

Sigh…

Here are the well-known, standard female human proportions, as covered in any beginner art class:

As you can see (and you can check this by doing a simple Google search on “human female proportions”) the average female is 7-1/2 heads tall.

So why in God’s green earth is the female avatar for Sansar’s Avatar 2.0 project 8-1/2 heads tall?

Not only that, the arms on the female avatar are too short, and the hands are too small! Your avatar’s arms have to be long enough to be able to wipe his/her ass properly 😉

Why is Linden Lab not using the many standard human female proportion diagrams in designing their default female avatar for the Avatar 2.0 project? Here’s a few more images:

C’mon guys! Get it together, please. We don’t want to have to go through all this all over again for Avatar 3.0. Please get the avatar proportions right before you release this! Otherwise you’ll have to go back to the drawing board when users complain (and they are complaining already, from what I can see on the Sansar Discord).

UPDATE Aug. 27th: Well, there has been the usual lively discussion over on the Sansar Discord about this! Cara Linden responded:

Thanks for the feedback everyone! We are looking at our skeleton and the hand looks proportioned well against the body.

Image shared by Cara

She added:

In addition, we are going for more of a stylized avatar look vs a realistic one, hence why we are not focused on conforming to ideal proportions. The new avatar 2.0 skeleton was designed to give you all a broad range of capabilities using full face AND body deformation capabilities. Once we released the full system, you will be able to create all kinds of avatars from realistic looking ones to more stylized ones like caricature avatars with huge heads and even small bodies.