To celebrate LGBTQ+ Pride, Jackalope is throwing a 50% off sale, and they are also holding a Pride Hunt. The hunt items are free and you do not need to join the Jackalope store group to get the individual hunt items, which all together make up a complete rainbow outfit!
Everything Vanity Fair is wearing in the pictures below—the fishnet crop top, skirt, badges, earrings, bracelet, the wonderful combat boots with rainbow socks, even the Bento pose and the backdrop!—is a hunt prize from the Jackalope Pride Hunt.
One of the free hunt prizes is this wonderful, colourful backdrop! The collection of balloons to the left and right are separate items and you could easily reuse them for other celebrations such as birthday parties:
Now, I should caution you that many of the hunt prizes are rather fiendishly hidden all around the store (including the ceiling!). If you get frustrated, here’s a pro hunt tip from Auntie Ryan 😉 …in the Firestorm viewer, if you press Ctrl-Shift-R, it will turn on wireframe mode (which is essentially X-ray vision). Press Ctrl-Shift-R again to toggle it back off. (If this feels like cheating to you, then don’t use this tip.)
Sahara eyes by Avi-Glam (free gift from the SL17B Shop and Hop; more information here)
This next Pridewear freebie is from a store called 28LA, and it is a doozy! Teleport to the store, and click on the rack of clothing outside, and you will receive a Pride collection of apparel, with designs for for both male and female avatars! The male clothing comes in sizes to fit Belleza Jake and Signature Gianni mesh bodies, and the female clothing is designed to fit the Belleza Freya, Slink Hourglass, and Maitreya Lara mesh bodies.
The Free Pridewear Collection from 28LA
Finally, we have the Pride Festival in Second Life, which runs from June 24th to 28th. Most of the vendor booths at this event have free gifts (you will have to join the free Pride Festival group to get them). Here’s a look at three of the many gifts:
this colourful eye makeup from ALMA (system/Bakes on Mesh, plus Catwa, LeLutka and Omega appliers);
the Proud Lips by Dotty’s Secret (system/Bakes on Mesh, plus Catwa, Genus and Omega appliers);
The coronavirus pandemic has led to the cancellation of hundreds of real-life conferences, and led to a surge in business for platforms catering to virtual conferences, such as VirBELA and AltspaceVR (Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash).
This week, I have been attending various presentations and events at the Immersive Learning Research Network’s 2020 virtual conference. Most of the sessions are taking place in a white-label* version of the virtual world VirBELA, and it would appear that this world will remain in place after the iLRN 2020 conference ends, as a meeting place for various groups of researchers.
The iLRN 2020 organizers are also using FRAME (a VirBELA project) for virtual poster sessions: smaller group gatherings around particular research topics. These poster sessions were accessible right from a browser on desktop, mobile, or even in virtual reality (more information on that can be found here).
The popular success of this conference in VirBELA (with well over 200 people in-world at any given time), plus the associated social events taking place in AltspaceVR, has got me thinking about another highly successful conference which I attended (and presented at) back in February 2020, the first-ever Educators in VR 2020 International Summit. In that case, most of the conference sessions were held in AltspaceVR, and the Educators in VR conference was really an opportunity for the platform to shine (there were also events taking place in ENGAGE, rumii, Mozilla Hubs, and Somnium Space, with livestreaming to other platforms).
What were the factors that led to such successful virtual conferences in AltspaceVR and in VirBELA?
Scalability of the Platform: In both cases, you could pack a large number of people into a shared virtual space. This was especially notable in the case of VirBELA, where the simple (but still highly customizable) avatars, coupled with many possible graphics quality settings in the client software, meant that you could have well north of a hundred avatars attending a single session without noticeable performance issues. And AltspaceVR’s cartoony avatars serve an important purpose: making the platform much easier to render on less powerful computers and devices.
Better Features: VirBELA is stuffed to the brim with useful features which make hosting a conference a breeze (e.g. the ability to quickly shift focus to one of three different presentation screens, or the podium/stage). AltspaceVR has also had a whole bunch of new features added to make holding events much easier (such as the ability to mute the audience, a raise your hand feature to ask questions, etc.).
Responsive Support: It’s very clear that, in the cases of both the Educators in VR and iLRN 2020 conferences, that the platforms were heavily involved in providing support and troubleshooting to the conference organizers. Such support, often offered in real time, is critical to the success of any virtual conference.
So, what lessons can other social VR platforms and virtual worlds learn from these successes, as they seek out new customers in the pandemic-fueled boom in virtual conferences?
First: You need to find ways to work around the technical limits in the number of people who can gather in a virtual space. For example, Sansar is absolutely gorgeous, and I could see it being used for conferences—if you could get more than 30 avatars into a single world! (However, Sansar does allow for multiple broadcast instances as a way to get around that limit.)
Second Life also has significant technical limitations on the number of avatars you can pack onto one sim before it heaves in protest (again, for major events such as the Live Stage at the SL 17th Birthday celebrations, a stage is located at the intersection of four sims to allow a larger audience).
To summarize this first point: the more users you can bring together, the better.
Second: The more devices and means of access you can support, the more likely your platform will appeal to a larger number of people. As the team developing Sansar and the old High Fidelity learned to their chagrin, betting the farm on high-powered, PC VR users was a tactical error. The majority of people attending these conferences do not have a VR headset, using desktop computers with flatscreen monitors and even in some cases mobile devices like tablets and cellphones. You need to meet the users wherever they are.
Finally: You need to provide real-time, responsive customer support. This is one area where many platforms simply fail to deliver the level of concierge support required to host conferences. For example, both of the recent Blockdown virtual crypto conferences (which were held in a special, white-label version of Sinespace) were well-staffed with Sinespace employees and volunteers to ensure that things ran smoothly. It’s a cost of doing business if you want to attract business.
If you were to hold a conference in Sansar (which you wouldn’t, because of the limitations outlined in points 1, 2, and 3 above), and if something were to go wrong, you would probably have some trouble getting the real-time support you needed from the team at Wookey (although I assume it will be an all-hands-on-deck situation for the upcoming Lost Horizon festival; Sansar simply cannot afford to fumble this opportunity to showcase their platform to the world).
For example, the Lost World Global Music Festivals two-day event (which has the great misfortune to be scheduled the exact same weekend as the Lost Horizon event), is having some trouble getting the word out, and frankly, Wookey-owned Sansar should be providing assistance in both promotion and technical support of events held on their platform, instead of relying on unpaid and overworked volunteers (I would hope that at least someone at Wookey is tasked with tech support if something goes wrong that weekend, but I suspect that the company’s entire focus will be on the Lost Horison festival, instead of the competing Lost World event).
In short, bare-bones customer support sends a message: you’re on your own. Corporate users such as conference organizers expect a higher standard of service, otherwise they will take their business elsewhere.
The success of platforms such as AltspaceVR and VirBELA leads to positive word of mouth among the conference attendees, who can see the potential applications, and which naturally leads to increased business opportunities; it’s a virtuous circle.
The question is: will Sansar and other social VR platforms and virtual worlds pay attention to the lessons being taught by the highly successful and popular virtual conferences held this year by a number of platforms?
*White labeling is when a product or service removes their brand and logo from the end product and instead uses the branding requested by the purchaser. Recent examples include the iLRN 2020 conference (held in a white-label version of VirBELA) and the Blockdown series of conferences (hosted in a white-label version of Sinespace). This is a feature that is attractive to corporate and conference customers, which is not offered by many social VR platforms and virtual worlds to date.
Here is what the Onupup male body looks like, right out of the box, with no adjustments to the default shape at all (as well as a look at the alpha sections on the HUD). The black underwear is separate and included in the package.
Now, this body comes with the skin you see here, but you can turn on the ability to use Bakes on Mesh skins with this body by selecting each of the three sections (upper body, lower body, and head, and going through this four-step process for each section:
Right click on the body part in your Inventory, and select Edit from the menu.
In the edit window, click on the Texture tab, then click on the actual Texture itself.
Underneath the texture display, click on the Bake button.
Select the correct baked texture from the drop-down menu (e.g. BAKED_UPPER for the upper body).
After this, you will be able to use Bakes on Mesh skins on the Onupup body. Here I used a set of BoM male skins I picked up from a new store called DNA, which very quickly disappeared from the grid (but not before I blogged about them). Fortunately, I made sure that all my male alts picked up this set of skins for future use! I’m quite sure you can find male Bakes on Mesh skins fairly easily nowadays, anyway.
Now, I have to admit that this is a very quirky mesh body. For example, when you set him up, his mouth hangs open, and you have to find the Mouth Close Pose gesture in your package and play it, to close his mouth (?!??). Likewise, you will probably also have to type /10 menu in local chat to pull up a blue menu and click on a button to relax this avatar’s hands so that they will work with Bento hand AOs. (Like I said, quirky.)
I found I had to fiddle with the head and body sliders a lot to get a somewhat acceptable shape for the Onupup avatar; in particular the upper arm musculature looks “wrong” to me, no matter what I do to the sliders:
Another quirk is that you need to remember to add the fingernails and toenails as separate attachments! (And to remove said toenails when alphaing out the feet, as you will have to rely on unrigged shoes and boots for this avatar.)
Another problem area is the head, in particular the eye sockets, which appear to be set a little too high for classic, system eyes. You will find that many of the newer system eyes will look absolutely terrible on this head, so I used an old set of eyes from Exodi (another store that has left the grid), which did not have an eyelash “shadow” on the top part of the eyeball, a little trick that eye designers often use to make the eyes look more realistic, and which completely fails on this particular mesh head.
From some angles the mesh head looks wrong to me, even after multiple adjustments (again, the upper eyelid area is a problem). Here you can clearly see that the holes for the system eyes are set too high on this head (you might be able to get around this by using adjustable mesh eyes, but I did not test that out).
Here is the Onupup avatar, all dressed! This entire outfit is from the Freebie Megastore in London City, and it is called the Casual Male Starter pack:
I found I had to pretty much alpha out the entire body underneath these clothes and shoes to get it to work properly, however. You can do a keyword search on the SL Marketplace for “Onupup” to find a growing collection clothing designed specifically for this body over the past two years.
If I had found this free male mesh body two years ago, when it was first released, I might have been happy enough with it. But today, right now, I do think that there are better-looking options for male mesh avatars out there that are inexpensive (for example, the wonderful, fully-featured dollarbie Classic male mesh body from Meshbody, paired with the various male Bento heads offered as limited-time group gifts by Akeruka over the past couple of years). Both the Akeruka heads and Classic bodies support Bakes on Mesh, and they work well together.
In summary, I think that the Onupup body is not bad, particularly if you are flat broke, but it has a few problem areas that need to be ironed out. The creator, Onupup Resident, says in a notecard included in the package:
This comes completely free, use it, if you like it, be my crowd-founder, patreon, donator, funder so I can continue making more things, even 10L would encourage me to do more. Any thing I will make will always be free. If you don’t have money or simply you don’t want to give money, you don’t have to, you can still happily use it.
You might want to get it from the SL Marketplace and put it through its paces yourself and, if you like it, throw a few Linden dollars Onupup’s way. I’m sure he’d appreciate it!
Although I have blogged about a female Bento mesh head (Ciara by Dream) and a female mesh body (Ruthie from Tiny Things) that are available for free from The Stay at Home Club (now apparently up to 750 gifts and counting!), the Ultra Vixen II female body is the first full-body (i.e. head and body) avatar mesh body that you can pick up for free via the Club. I decided to visit the store, get this body, test it out, and write up a review.
Now, as I said before when I reviewed the Ruthie body, I am obsessed with the dumpster-fire-train-wreck of the Botched Surgeries subReddit community, where I am routinely appalled by the horrible, botched plastic surgeries that people put themselves through in real life, including breasts that land up looking like floatation devices, watermelons, or even worse. (WARNING:If you visit, you might need eye bleach afterwards. Consider yourself warned! I constantly come away from that community feeling much better about myself and my own body, though.)
Now (despite my misgivings about large-busted mesh avatars as a result of the mental scarring from regularly perusing this particular subReddit), I do honestly admire people who know how to create content in Second Life; they have a skill set that I envy. Imagine how wonderful it would be to be able to create and rig your own custom mesh avatar, for instance!
Well, HeatherD Tungsten is one of those people (in fact, I do vividly remember meeting her at an event in SL a couple of years ago (when we was wearing an earlier prototype of this mesh body) and thinking “Wow, she knows how to make her own mesh body! Cool!“.
Heather’s personal profile states:
I’ve been on and off with Second life a few times, mainly due to lack of confuser power, and ugly avatars. Then came the mesh revolution. I started playing around with Blender (3D creation) during the fall of 2016. Learning Blender is an ongoing challenge, but when you look across the sim at me, this avatar is the fruit of my work.
If you come to Heather’s store (here’s the SLURL), you might be lucky enough to find her avatar parked up on the rooftop lounge area, dancing while she is away from the keyboard, doing something else. Heather is her own best advertisement for her female mesh body! This picture also gives you an idea of how large your breasts can be with the Ultra Vixen II mesh body, which is…quite large, indeed:
When you arrive at the Ultra Vixen II store, there are four panels to your left which have three free gifts from The Stay at Home Club, and one free gift (a set of two dresses) which you can pick up if you join the Fabulously Free in SL group in Second Life (this group is free to join):
Next to this, you will find another vendor panel for what appears to be the standard version of the Ultra Vixen II body with some starter clothing, which retails for only L$15, so I picked that up as well (hey,it was a bargain!):
The remainder of Heather’s store consists of clothing which Heather has created specifically for the Ultra Vixen II body (which is where she obviously earns her money). Most items appear to be clothing fatpacks in the L$175-L$300 range.
Anyway, here is what the first of the three The Stay at Home gifts (the one labelled the Introduction Mesh Body Kit) looks like when you unpack it and put it on, without making any adjustments to the sliders (the head and hands on this body are Bento, but it does not support Bakes on Mesh; I chose the smallest, B-cup breast size of the three included shape options):
The hair is another Stay at Home Club gift, the Sugar hairstyle from Miss Canning. The red dress was in the FabFree gift package, and the shoes came from the third Stay at Home Club gift, a package of bikinis and shoes.
The second Stay at Home Club gift is a package called the Introduction Black Girl Kit, which comes in with different, darker skin and six different starter body shapes. I chose one of the starter shapes and played around with it a lot, and discovered that this mesh body responds very well to adjustments to the sliders, including making her much less busty (the breast size slider on this image is set to 25; any less and her bust collapses into her dress):
So, as you can see, this is a large-breasted avatar which you can actually adjust if you just want a somewhat less busty shape! You are never going to get a toothpick thin, starving supermodel look on this avatar, however (and if that’s what you’re looking for, you wouldn’t be in Heather’s store anyway).
Now, here are some of the limitations of this mesh body:
There is no HUD that comes with this body, so you cannot alpha out any sections of it to wear any clothing that is not specifically designed for this body. If you choose this as your mesh avatar, you are locked into Heather’s store for your clothing options (I checked on the SL Marketplace and I could not find any other creators making apparel for the Ultra Vixen II body).
The feet come in only one height (high heels), and they do not support any shoes other than the ones you buy at Heather’s store.
Your skin options are limited. As far as I could tell, there were only two skin tones (the ones in the first and second Stay at Home gifts; the skin in the L$15 package was the same as the first gift). There is no HUD to change the makeup and nails. Apparently, alternate skin tones are available, although I did not see them for sale in the Ultra Vixen II store; you can IM HeatherD Tungsten in Second Life for further information.
This body does not support Omega skin appliers or Bakes on Mesh skins.
The areolas on the breasts are huge and the nipples on the breasts are quite perky! (I’m sure this is quite intentional on the part of the designer.) Anything you wear on this body will show that (again, intentional). This is not a body you want to wear if you are a wallflower, or trying to be subtle 😉
In summary, between all four gifts, this is a nice, curvy Bento mesh body which comes with a good free starter wardrobe, and definitely an option if you want a C-cup or D-cup breast size—there’s even a G-cup shape included (helloooo, Botched Surgeries!!!). If that’s your style, then you might quite like this free mesh avatar.
