Well, according to the new Sansar community manager, Eliot:
So if you haven’t seen it already, Twitch streamer UmiNoKaiju is doing a partnership with us! She made a video of her customising her avatar, and I bet you will recognise a few of her items 😉
It’s clear from this video that UmiNoKaiju is excited about all the avatar outfit options, and being able to dress up your avatar! UmiNoKaiju has a YouTube channel (with 3,586 subscribers) and a Twitch channel (with 60,080 followers).
Today, Philip Rosedale, the visionary founder of Linden Lab and creator of Second Life, conducted a tour of his new VR-capable virtual world, High Fidelity, for Strawberry Singh and Draxtor Despres.
This is another of Strawberry’s continuing series of visits to virtual worlds other than Second Life. She had visited High Fidelity for the first time a month ago. Back in February, she had also paid a visit to Sinespace, on a tour led by Sine Wave Entertainment’s Adam Frisby.
Philip said that currently, the High Fidelity company consists of 55 people, and about 20,000 people have created user accounts so far in High Fidelity. He said, in response to a comment from Drax that most High Fidelity users are probably American, that British/European users actually make up the largest block of HiFi users.
Philip talked about a piece of code you can add to your HiFi client, called Mirror Mode, which allows you to see a copy of your avatar in-world, to see what you are wearing, etc.
The group started at the Zaru domain, and from there they went on to visit the following domains:
Each HiFi domain runs on its own server; High Fidelity is a distributed open-source virtual world. Philip said that they built the architecture so that anybody who wants to can put up their own server, which means that it can scale upwards much more easily than a centralized system. He also hinted that you might be able to access High Fidelity on your phone someday soon!
Here’s Strawberry’s livestream of the tour (she was experiencing some technical issues with lag, and she did crash at one point):
Drax also did a livestream of Philip’s tour (one of the cool HiFi features he demonstrated was the ability to befriend another avatar simply by shaking their hand in-world):
Business Insider recently published an article about Siren, a hyper-realistic human avatar created by a computer-vision company called Cubic Motion. This is NOT a video of a real human being; it is a computer-generated digital avatar, driven by an actor!
Here’s another video showing you some of the behind-the-scenes work required to make Siren seem like a real person:
This is another short video showing an actor driving the Siren avatar, taken at the recent Game Developer’s Conference held in San Francisco:
Mind-blowing technology! According to the Business Insider article:
Wood estimates that “sooner than two years” from now, each person could have access to the technology required to create and puppet their own digital body double in virtual reality, from their own home.
“It could be done today,” Wood said in an interview with Business Insider. The hold up, he explained, is with the VR headset manufacturers that have yet to incorporate wearer-facing cameras into their products, a feature which real-time image capture relies on.
Can you imagine being able to drive your own avatar in one of the newer virtual worlds, using this technology? Astounding.
I am again a spectator at today’s third week of the regular HoverDerby tournament, hosted again by Jasmine, Galen, and Drax! I am watching the games from the separate HoverDerby Lounge experience, which has a screen with a livestream feed by Drax:
One of the new features I really like, is that Galen can now highlight individual players in the overhead camera view of the playing field, which makes it easier to see who the commentators are talking about. Very nice feature!
(Zafia Vesta has also released some cool sci-fi outfits for HoverDerby players. These wonderful bio-armour outfits are not official HoverDerby items, but Zafia does have the necessary permissions to use the HoverDerby logo and brand. Check them out too.)
Today’s winners of HoverDerby are SaintOfMirren and WILD. Congratulations!
