Day: May 7, 2021

UPDATED! Second Life Steals, Deals, and Freebies: BROX Is a New Bento, Bakes on Mesh Male Body for Only L$1!

There’s a new bargain out there for you men! It’s a very handsome, Bento, Bakes on Mesh-compatible male mesh avatar called BROX, which is available for only one Linden dollar at this location. Next to it is a free group gift for L’Homme Magazine group members, a set of 8 Bakes on Mesh skins, which you can use on this or any other BoM body (the L’Homme Magazine group is free to join; just pay the vendor L$1 and your Linden dollar will automatically be refunded).

Here is the BROX body, straight out of the box, using the included eyebrow and body shapes with zero adjustments to the head and body sliders, and using skin #6 from the L’Homme Readers Gift box of eight BROX skins. Looking good!

Instead of an alpha HUD, the BROX body comes with a unpackable box of alpha sections, which you can assemble to hide any part of the body under clothing:

So men, you really have no excuse when it comes to upgrading that old system body! Everything you might need is yours for a grand total of L$1! Happy freebie shopping!

UPDATE May 9th, 2021: Well, I have been playing around with the BROX body today, and while the folder of alpha sections is useful (in fact, you might want to pick up the BROX dollarbie body just for those, even if you have a female avatar), they aren’t as convenient as a HUD with alpha sections, in my opinion. Also, I wish that there were finer subsections on the alphas, because they don’t work with many mesh items of clothing.

In the picture below, I combined mesh pants and shoes with an older, system-layer plaid shirt with a separate prim collar and cuffs:

Not bad, but I had to resort to a system-layer shirt instead of a mesh one because the alpha sections for the upper arms were too broad to allow me to wear most mesh T-shirts I tried on this body (either the arms poked through the shirt sleeves, or the alpha section extended below the shirt cuffs). So you might want to keep this mind as a possible drawback to the BROX body.

Still, this is a handsome Bento, Bakes on Mesh body, one that you can simply wear and go! You could also add a head alpha and wear any head with it (although I did not test it out myself).

Cheerio: A Social VR Platform for Finding Your Friend or Match

Cheerio is a new social virtual reality app, free to download on Oculus Go, Rift, and Quest, which calls itself the first social VR matchmaking experience. The concept is prehaps best explained with the following one-minute video:

According to their official press release:

After first launching on Oculus Rift and Go in early 2020, and tens of thousands of users joining since, Cheerio today announces that the company closed a pre-seed fundraise and has launched on Oculus Quest App Lab and Sidequest. With this launch, Cheerio introduces features brand new to Social VR to help people build one-to-one relationships, expressing themselves as personalized 3D avatars.

• Leave the app but not the conversation by recording holograms (3D video avatar recordings)

• Meet many people quickly, browsing through profiles and having one-on-one speed chats

• Control who you meet with age and gender filters

…

Users personalize 3D avatars and can communicate with others by recording and sharing public and private holograms. Online users can randomly match, one-on-one, with each other and travel together to 170 billion 360-images via Google Street View. Users upvote and downvote others’ public holograms and can
friend each other.

The idea of 3D recording your avatar (called “holograms”) reminds me of that feature in ENGAGE. There’s not much you and your match/friend can do other than explore Google Street Maps together, however. Another drawback is that Cheerio does not appear to support VR headsets using Steam instead of Oculus.

I will add Cheerio to my ever-expanding comprehensive list of social VR platforms and virtual worlds (which I promise I will reorganize and recategorize soon!).