Month: December 2019

Bryn Oh Opens a New Artistic World in Sansar: “I See Our Movement As the Immersivists”

Canadian artist Bryn Oh (whose work in Second Life I have written about before) is opening a new art installation in Sansar on Friday, December 6th, 2019, on which she has been working over the past year, thanks to some financial assistance from the Ontario Arts Council.

Titled simply Hand, Bryn Oh describes the artwork as follows in a recent post to her blog:

Hand is the story of a girl named Flutter who carries something precious in a suitcase.  You follow her story in the same world that my others characters inhabit, and some of these you will recognize furthering their story and place within the world I have been working on for over a decade. 

Bryn created Hand to be best experienced in a VR headset, and she has some insightful observations on the use of virtual reality as an art form:

I believe that the virtual reality medium is a new art form which, in my case, focuses on immersion.  Throughout art history many artists have striven to immerse the viewer in their sculpture, painting or even cinema. They want you become lost in their artwork whether it be compositional methods such as the eyepath leading the viewer around a painting, to cinema where they turn off the lights, turn the sound up high with a screen large enough to reduce the peripheral vision distractions to a degree where the immersion is strongest. They overwhelm or control your senses, then tell you a story which, if well written, will take the viewer away from the world for a while.  We had the Cubists, Impressionists, Surrealists, Modernists and I see our movement as the Immersivists. 

Having been very impressed by Bryn’s art to date in both Second Life and Sansar, I look forward to experiencing her latest creation!

If you want to visit Hand, here is the Sansar Atlas entry for the world.

How You Can Win Up to US$5,000 in Sinespace’s Contests for Content Creators

This blogpost is sponsored by Sinespace, and was written in my new role as an embedded reporter for this virtual world (more details here).

Did you know that Sinespace has weekly contests for content creators? Each week’s winner receives US$500, and contests will run weekly through to February, and perhaps longer.

Last week’s contest winner, Punkerella and Booradley, came up with something I’ve never seen before, in any virtual world: colourful, interactive sea slugs!

In addition to the weekly contests, there are two major contests taking place over the next few months, with some seriously sweet prizes:

  • Out of This World: Create a unique, interactive and outlandish environment using the Sinespace SDK. The theme is “out of this world”, so create something unique, quirky and alien-like. The winner receives US$3,000 plus 1 year of Exclusive Creator membership. The runner up gets US$2,000 plus 1 year of Exclusive Creator membership. The contest deadline is Dec. 20th, 2019. (More details here.)
  • Carnival Games: Create a unique and engaging mini game using the Sinespace SDK and Lua (Sinespace’s scripting language). The game can be any carnival-themed game, from maze run, shoot the aliens, to anything you can imagine. The gameplay needs to have a way for players to score normal and bonus points, along with a leader board. The game can be single-player, PVP or PvE. The contest winner receives US$5,000 plus 1 year of Exclusive Creator membership. The runner-up gets $US2,000 plus 1 year of Exclusive Creator membership. The contest deadline is Feb. 10th, 2020. (More details here.)

You can get details on upcoming contests, plus see all the entries for past contests, on this page. To find out more about becoming a content creator in Sinespace, here is some information to help you get started.

Second Life Steals, Deals, and Freebies: Apple Fall

I don’t usually blog about deals on items for your home and garden, but Apple Fall is having such an amazing sale that I am going to break that rule, just this once!

In a message sent out to the Apple Fall Facebook group, the store announced:

Apple Fall is having a Black Friday Sale! And guess what? Everything is L$50, or less! We are not kidding you.

The Sale has begun, and we hope you are ready to grab everything Apple Fall related, and stuff those inventories to the max.

The sim will only have 12 residents at a time due to technical difficulties, we won’t close the sale anytime soon as we don’t want any of you to miss out.

Apple Fall offers the highest-quality home and garden furnishings, buildings, and skyboxes. And yes, EVERYTHING in the store, from tiny teapots to huge houses, is L$50 (or less) each! This is such a great deal that it was worth fighting to get into the sim (as you can expect, it’s jam-packed). It looks as though the sale will continue for a while, but I would still advise you to get down to Apple Fall as soon as you can, since I don’t know when this sale will end.

So even though I have no land to place it on, I decided to buy the Harwick Manor house for only L$50 (hey, it was on sale!):

Apple Fall Hardwick Manor

I also picked up some lovely furniture from the new Fulwood Collection for my Linden Home in Bellisseria:

Apple Fall Fulwood Collection

There’s also a corner in the store with numerous freebies, including a wingback chair in three colours. Also, there are a few nice freebies on the chest table in the Fulwood Collection display in-store. So hurry down!

vTime XR Has Been Downloaded One Million Times Since Its Launch in 2015

There’s an interesting article about the Liverpool-based social VR company vTime XR, which appeared last October on the British website BusinessLive (I guess I must have missed it!).

Titled Inside Liverpool firm vTime – the tech business behind world’s first cross-reality social network, the article provides some statistics on how popular vTime XR has proven to be since its launch in 2015:

…earlier this year, an update to the app meant a name change from vTime to vTime XR. That saw it become the world’s first cross-reality social experience – meaning users can meet, chat and share with others in AR, VR or 2D mode.

With VR, the app’s users stay fully-immersed inside the locations using a headset, while AR mode allows them to place a live, 360-degree model of the destination on any real-world, flat surface.

That creates a shared virtual space by using VR headsets or a smartphone, with the app allowing any users to meet – regardless of which mode they are using.

The product has been downloaded around 1 million times, with users in 190 countries across the world, and [the software] available in eight formats.

vTime XR is an example of a simple but well-done single-purpose VR platform. Its sole purpose is to allow you to connect and converse with your friends, coworkers—even complete strangers!—in groups of up to four people at a time. It has deliberately focused on that core use (conversation), adding support for new platforms over time. Because it is so easily rendered, it can be used by just about anybody: people on mobile devices, cellphone-based VR, all the way up to the Oculus Rift VR headset. (Surprisingly, it’s not available for the Oculus Quest yet.)

Congratulations to vTime XR for reaching the significant milestone of one million downloads!