My university, the University of Manitoba, started its Fall term this week, and with rare exceptions, all teaching will be done remotely and online. While I am truly grateful that I can continue to work safely from home during the coronavirus pandemic, this change comes with a completely different set of challenges from the in-classroom teaching that I usually do at this time of year.
Most of my time (including evenings and weekends) is now being taken up by preparing and delivering instruction for students on how to use my university library system, all of which is being delivered remotely and online, using Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom. In some cases, I am using the technology for the first time.
Today, the librarians at the Sciences and Technology Library launched a brand new, for-credit course on information skills for undergraduate science students, which my colleagues and I will be team teaching over the Fall 2020 semester, using Cisco Webex within the University of Manitoba’s learning management system:
The first lecture of our new course
If you’re curious, here are our course objectives for the 13-week course:
In short, I will be quite busy with work at my full-time job as an academic librarian (the one that pays the bills and keeps the lights and the internet on!). So I will be working a lot of overtime, which means, unfortunately, that something has to give.
Therefore, while I may have officially returned from my self-imposed vacation from blogging, my blogposts here on the RyanSchultz.com blog will be much less frequent than usual over the next couple of months. I’m sorry, but I hope that by the end of October, things will settle down for me a little bit.
Thanks in advance for your understanding, support, and forbearance. I promise I will be back covering social VR, virtual worlds, and the metaverse at my former pace just as soon as I am able!
I reached another milestone today! According to my WordPress statistics, this is my 2,000th blogpost.
So, you might ask, what is my most popular (i.e. most visited) blogpost on the RyanSchultz.com blog? Well, I remain seriously amused that my all-time most popular blogpost of all time is one that is the top Google search result when you search on “vrchat adult” (which, apparently, quite a lot of people do):
Of the Top Ten, four are about Second Life, still far and away the most popular part of my blog. People seem to appreciate my coverage of steals, deals, and freebies in Second Life, and I will be continuing to write about what is (still) the most popular and economically successful virtual world to date, still going strong at 17 years old!
Sex seems to be a popular topic. Another three of my Top Ten blogposts (#1, #6, and #10) are about adult content in virtual worlds other than Second Life; I can only assume that they keep showing up in people’s Google search results when they are looking for virtual worlds where they can watch (or have) sex. I suspect that there has been increased interest in this topic due to the coronavirus pandemic, as people look for socially distanced alternatives to real-world encounters. (Of course, as I have written in post #10 above, most platforms still can’t hold a candle to Second Life, which has entrenched front runner status in that particular market niche.)
But no, I still don’t plan to cover adult/sex-based platforms in the same way I write about other niche and more general-purpose social VR platforms and virtual worlds. Despite my very rare past forays into that market on this blog, I will be leaving that field to somebody else to cover. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
Nevertheless, this is a significant milestone for the three-year-old RyanSchultz.com blog, and one I didn’t expect to reach quite so soon. Break out the champagne! And let’s drink a toast to the next 2,000 blogposts!
Now that The Genus Project has finally won the DMCA case filed against it, and reopened their store, the free group gift of the Strong Face head is once again available from the group notices of the GenusProject group (the group is free to join). This is a stunningly beautiful head, with all the bells and whistles of the full-price product, and if you haven’t picked one up yet to play with, now’s your time!
The head does come with a starter skin applier in three skin tones, but if you are looking for some more skin to use with that head, MILA is currently giving away two Bakes on Mesh skin tones of their Aggie skin, which is intended for Genus and LeLutka mesh heads:
So, I decided to visit their store (here’s the exact SLURL to their group gift wall; you will need to right-click on it and select Show Map, and follow the red arrow from the central spawn point). To pick up this free gift, you must first join the Mila Poses group, which is free to join.
Here is what the darker Aggie skin tone looks like on the free Strong Face head from The Genus Project:
This avatar is wearing:
Mesh Head: Strong Face gift Bento mesh head from The Genus Project (free group gift)
Hair: Aria by D!va Hair. Join the D!va store group for free and you can pick up this lovely Aria hairstyle from the panel right behind the front counter, which comes in a full fatpack of colours, plus a styling HUD.
Mesh Body, Nails, Rings, and Shoes: the Kalhene Ariadna mesh body, version 2.4. which I picked up for free at the time. Please note the Ariadna body is no longer available, but the L$1,695 Anya mesh body by Kalhene (which is frequently updated, and simply gets better and better with each new update!) is the successor to the original Ariadna freebie mesh body. Anya is available to buy at the Kalhene store, and is fully Maitreya Lara compatible; please see this blogpost for further information. I am mightily impressed with this body, and it is a great bargain!
Dress: the Lyna dress is a free group gift from Seniha (the group is free to join).
TOTAL COST FOR THIS AVATAR LOOK: FREE! (L$1,695 if you have to buy the Anya mesh body).
Yesterday, Andrew William and I paid a visit to Tivoli Cloud VR, the new, open source social VR platform based on the code from the old High Fidelity platform. Caitlyn Meeks and Maki Deprez, the friendly, geeky team who are the heart and soul of Tivoli, kindly gave us a bit of a guided tour, and showed off a few new worlds and a few new features.
We met up at the Squirrel Nut Café, where they hold a Tea Time meetup every Saturday.
Chatting with Caitlyn and Maki in the Squirrel Nut Café
Among the worlds Caitlyn took us to were Nostalgia, a wintertime Bavarian market with gently falling snow, created by Skimi, who brought over many of his models from Second Life:
Our next stop was Madder’s meeting place and art gallery, set in a futuristic cityscape environment (all of which actually runs quite well on a Raspberry Pi processor, with no less than six avatars wandering around!). Caitlyn informed me that all the art I saw on the walls was automatically framed and positioned, instead of each piece being placed by hand, using the scripting abilities of Tivoli.
We wrapped up our brief tour with a visit to a new project that Tivoli is working on with Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: a working lecture hall that boasts a fully-fledged, shareable virtual computer that can be used by the presenter to present slideshows and videos, but also to run other programs such as games!
This virtual computer runs on Linux and is called a Tivoli Shared Desktop, and Caitlyn informs me that they are working on a custom desktop environment, to make it even easier to use from VR as a more general-purpose virtual computer. The Tivoli Shared Desktop and this virtual lecture hall were created for a cognitive science course that is part of the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at SFU, that will be delivered both in-world and via Twitch, which some students will be using to view the lectures and interact with the instructor.
The lecture hall and virtual computer created for Simon Fraser University
Caitlyn and I spoke about the importance of having an open source virtual world which is not controlled by Facebook/Oculus, especially in light of the announcement last week that a Facebook account will now be required for all Oculus VR devices. We discussed the ramifications of such a move, plus the fact that Facebook Horizon avatars would be linked to people’s real-life profiles (and the impact that could have on role play communities, for example).
Caitlyn told me that she saw it as Tivoli’s mission “to protect the future of VR from Facebook”, a sentiment which I support wholeheartedly. (Then she apologized to me if her statement sounded arrogant, which it wasn’t at all! If anything, I think it’s a confident, positive, and bold vision for the future. We need all the non-Facebook VR hardware and software we can get!)
One of their goals is to provide a really high-quality virtual reality experience, and her and Maki have been hard at work revising the original HiFi codebase to that end.
She told me that the Tivoli Cloud VR platform is growing slowly but steadily through word of mouth, and they have had an recent influx of Japanese users. In fact, one day recently they came across one Japanese user in VR who had actually fallen asleep in his headset! (Shades of VRChat! Or, as Caitlyn said, “Achievement unlocked!”)
Oh, and I forgot to mention that all TIvoli automatically users get one free gigabyte of file storage space for their own projects. I plan to move the avatar that I had created using the Virtually You app for the old High Fidelity—the files for which someone kindly saved for me—into my personal storage space. I’m looking forward to replacing the standard-issue, photorealistic Matthew avatar you see in these pictures with one that looks a lot more like me in real life!
I find it extremely cheering that Tivoli Cloud is rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the old High Fidelity platform, and I very much look forward to seeing it grow and develop over time. Caitlyn and Maki and their team are already off to a great start!
All pictures in this blogpost courtesy of Andrew William—thanks, Andrew!
