Tag: Forbes

Daz 3D Avatars and Clothing in Sinespace: A Look at Three of the New, More Realistic-Looking Human Avatars from Daz Originals Now Available in the Sinespace Shop!

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

Daz Productions, better known as Daz 3D, is a software company specializing in providing rigged three-dimensional human models and associated accessory content, for countless markets. You might have seen Daz 3D models used in games, advertisements, and movies, perhaps without even knowing it. I know an author who uses Daz 3D models to create images to illustrate the science fiction novel he is writing.

Forbes recently reported that Daz 3D has become a featured developer for Sinespace, providing whole avatars, clothing, and accessories to purchase from the Sinespace Shop (their store brand is called Daz Originals):

You can see some of the new Daz Originals avatars in this two-minute YouTube video which was recently published by Sinespace, showing the almost endless options of their powerful avatar customization system:

So, I decided to take some of these Daz Originals avatars out for a test drive. And I have written up step-by-step instructions on how you can get started, for free! (If you act quickly.)

I started with a freebie I picked up using the promotion code in the Forbes article, the Shyla skin and shape bundle; the promo code is only good for the first 50 people who use it, but I just tested it with an alt and it still works as of the day I wrote this blogpost, Jan. 4th, so be sure to snap it up before she’s gone! If you missed your chance to get a promo code for the free Shyla offer via Forbes, you can purchase the complete Shyla avatar bundle for 1,355 Gold in the Sinespace Shop.

You’ll have to have a Sinespace account already set up to use the promo code (if you haven’t done that yet, here are step-by-step instructions). Then sign into the Sinespace website with your username and password, click on My Account in the top menu, then click on Redeem Code:

Once you have redeemed the promo code, open your Sinespace client and click on the Inventory button. Up top you should see an icon for the Shyla bundle, which you must unpack before you can use. Click on the Shyla icon in your inventory, and select Use:

Then you will get a listing of the contents of the bundle. Click the Get button to receive the items into the various skin and outfits folders.

Then, click on Outfit, and click to create a new female avatar:

You’ll be asked to give her a name. Then, starting from the default female avatar, click on the Wearing button (the wardrobe), and remove everything—we’re starting from scratch here!

Now, click on the Body button on the right hand side, and select all three of the following items under Morphs (this is important):

  • Base Shape Body F
  • Base Shape Head F
  • Shyla Female Face Shape

Then, click the Skin button, and add the Shyla eyes and skin:

Then, dress her as you like using clothing under your Accessory, Body, Top, and Bottom buttons!

Be sure to click the Save & Close button in the bottom right-hand corner of the Outfit window to save your new creation!

I did a little bit of fiddling with the default dimensions of the Shyla avatar (I gave her a bit more muscle tone, and for some reason, the default hands were rather large). I also shopped for some new hair, and a new pair of brown eyes I liked much better than the default Shyla ones. Here’s a few pictures I took. The detail on the skin texture is insane!

Then, to outfit her properly, I purchased the Solaris outfit in black from Daz Originals, which is a complete, mix-and-match set including a miniskirt, leggings, boots, corset, belt, bra, gloves, a shrug and a necklace. The Solaris outfit comes in turquoise, copper, pink-and-white, or black-and-silver, for 605 Gold each.

After Shyla, I bought two different male avatars from Daz Originals.

Here is the incredibly realistic-looking Mr. Woo avatar (2,505 Gold in the Sinespace Shop), wearing the red-and-black Wise Master outfit (639 Gold):

Then I purchased the Luke avatar (1,075 Gold), the Soledad hair in red (99 Gold) and the Beast Master outfit in gold and white (665 Gold). A very impressive warrior indeed! The skin quality is, once again, excellent.

The detail on the clothing and armour is incredible!

The Beast Master outfit also comes in iron, navy, red, and black, for 605 Gold each (you can also buy each piece separately if you wish):

It is clear that we are going to have some really good, realistic-looking avatars in Sinespace! I’m looking forward to seeing what other Daz 3D assets become available in Sinespace. This looks to be the start of a very fruitful partnership. Adam Frisby, the Chief Product Officer for Sinespace, says:

We’re really excited to see Daz’s work come into Sinespace, they’ve got an amazing character library with so much original content that’s never been in a virtual world legitimately before. Furthermore, their content is all designed to work nicely with all our other fantastic creators’ avatar content – so you can mix and match your favourite Daz content with your favourite content by our other creators.

The coolest thing is they’re pioneering a lot of our new morph technology, we’ve been really keen to see that take off, and to have such an esteemed developers content using it, is really something we love.

UPDATED! Forbes Writer Takes a Hatchet to Facebook Horizon in a Hilariously Badly-Written Article: “Facebook, the drug we snort off the buttocks of a willing and paid for social media pit of despair…”

As could be predicted, there have been oceans of fawning press coverage of Facebook Horizon, since it was announced two days ago at OC6. So I was surprised to find a hilariously bad, savage swipe at the yet-to-be-launched social VR platform, and coming from Forbes business magazine, no less.

In an article titled Facebook’s Horizon VR Promises A New Kind Of Drug For Our Exhausted Reality, consumer tech writer Curtis Silver swandives right into the deep end of the hyperbole pool:

Facebook, the drug we snort off the buttocks of a willing and paid for social media pit of despair, has opened us up to the psychological horror of the world around us. If that’s not enough, now Facebook wants to drag us into VR with its Horizon VR project.

Quick, somebody call the Mixed Metaphor Police! I’ve heard Facebook called a lot of nasty things in my time, but comparing it to hooker off whose butt you snort cocaine is a new one! Except it’s not a hooker’s ass, it’s a pit of despair, get it? (But wouldn’t the cocaine just fall into the pit?)

But wait, there’s more!

If you’ve forgotten, amid all the political wrangling and constant stream of lukewarm fake news into your eyes, Facebook owns Oculus VR, a VR system generally focusing on immersive games and experiences. Well, now Facebook wants to really get involved, introducing Horizon VR during its Facebook’s Oculus Connect 6 developer conference, which took place at the same time we were all watching Amazon introduce a new world of surveillance smart home tech.

Horizon VR, upon first glance, appears to be some sort of leg-less Nintendo Mii meets Second Life apparatus, focusing on creating environments and interactions that appear happy and contained, but will most likely be terrible and insane. It’s intended for use on the Oculus Quest headset, which doesn’t have the computing power of PC-connected headsets. Therefore, Horizon VR is something more akin to the graphical output of a Nickelodeon cartoon rather than a reality-based world.

“Lukewarm fake news into your eyes”?!?? Oh, honey, no. Lukewarm is associated with touch, not sight. Somebody needs to get this writer a proper thesaurus. (And maybe some English lessons.)

Curtis also gets quite a few technical details wrong in this write-up. First, the social VR platform is called Facebook Horizon, not “Horizon VR”, as he keeps calling it (even in the title!). And Horizon is not just for the wireless Oculus Quest headset; it is also intended for the PC-connected Oculus Rift headset. And one of the many OC6 announcements was that soon you will be able to run Oculus Rift games on your Quest using a cable connected to your computer. In other words, there’s really nothing stopping Facebook (or anybody else, for that matter) from making more realistic-looking experiences and avatars. The limit is truly your own imagination.

Anyway, let’s proceed…the writer was comparing Facebook Horizon to a Nickelodeon cartoon…

To Facebook’s credit, that’s a smart move. Reality is certainly something we need less of. Horizon VR offers an escape from the twisted dysfunction of reality, on the surface at least. In screenshots and talking points. [sic] We all know what is going to go down in a virtual world captained by Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. Horizon VR might appear to be a cartoonish world of fun interactions and avatars without legs, but users will surely find a way to quickly create a nightmare world that moderators will be unable to manage.

Meanwhile in the real world, the Department of Justice has joined the FTC in an antitrust investigation of Facebook. A new study from the University of Oxford has revealed that (duh) Facebook is the most common platform for spreading disinformation at a government and political level. And in response to anti-bullying and mental health groups, Facebook will begin testing hiding likes to make users feel better. Facebook is an actual hellscape.

You really want to experience that in VR? As fellow Forbes contributer [sic] Paul Armstrong puts it, “As more and more scandals hit Facebook thanks to lax privacy policies of yesteryear (they promise), this bold vision [of Horizon VR] is all well and good but it’s built on the back of something ugly and hence, it’s destined to be tainted from conception.”

Facebook is a drug. Quit Facebook. Seriously. Before it ruins you. The solution to the problems Facebook has deftly unloaded upon the populace and your personal mental health isn’t to begin ingesting your social media drug in the virtual realm, the solution here is to delete Facebook from your phone, wake up and soberly face the real world once again. Only then can you find a viable, real-world escape from the real world. Like bowling, or mini-golf.

Sweet minty Jesus. I am most certainly not a fan of the Facebook social network, in fact I think it has caused some real and serious problems in society. But what story editor okayed this snarky, badly-argued, poorly-composed, half-assed hatchet job?? I mean, it’s one thing to write a well-written, well-reasoned, technically accurate critique of a product. But this mess is none of those things.

To cite just one example, what does hiding likes on a social network have to do with anything?

The writer can’t even get the name of the product straight, let alone the technical details. And there’s a sentence fragment just kind of hanging there in mid-article: “In screenshots and talking points.” And it’s spelled contributor, dear. There’s this wonderful new invention called spellcheck, you should really look into it sometime.

But the biggest problem that I have with this story is it just rather lazily assumes that Facebook Horizon is simply going to be some hellish VR version of the Facebook social network. A social network and a social VR platform are two very different things, used by different types of people for completely different purposes. We won’t know what Facebook Horizon is like until the closed beta test early next year, but we can assume that the company has learned at least a few things about what does and doesn’t work with Facebook Spaces, Oculus Home, and Oculus Rooms. (At least, let’s hope so!)

Is there a chance Facebook Horizon will be a terrible product? Absolutely. But I think it’s just a wee bit early to deem the new social network akin to Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell. And Facebook has already announced that they will be deploying a team of human greeters and guides in an effort to model good behaviour on the platform and counteract griefers.

My God, I can’t believe I’m actually standing up for Facebook! (I must have a fever or something.)

But this article is so God-awful I just couldn’t let it go without comment. Forbes, you can do better than this sloppy, slipshod journalism.

UPDATE 6:39 p.m.: One of my Twitter followers, named Bird, shared this video with me:

And another Twitter follower, James Baicoianu, explains:

In other words, the Forbes website does many of the same evil things of which they accuse Facebook! A perfect case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Forbes Covers HoverDerby in Sansar

 

Forbes article 4 Apr 2018.png
Screen capture of the Forbes article by Charlie Fink

 

Charlie Fink has written a very detailed and complimentary Forbes article in their Tech section about Sansar.

Titled VR Action Sport Hoverderby Opens In Sansar, Charlie gives a good overview of all that Sansar currently has to offer, touching on many of the experiences I have already covered in this blog, such as C3rb3rus’ Eternity and 2077, and the Hollywood Art Museum exhibits of the Lost Art of Star Wars and the Art of Drew Struzan.

But the main focus of the article is the HoverDerby experience that Galen, Jasmine and Drax have been building and promoting over the past several weeks. Charlie writes:

When [Linden Lab CEO Ebbe] Altberg showed me the new user-generated multiplayer game, Hoverderby, I realized immediately this is what I had been looking for in Sansar all along: a place where people would gather and collaborate or simply watch in a group. As I have said repeatedly in this column: People are the killer app.

One of the reasons AltSpaceVR struggles and Rec Room is succeeding is because in VR you need to know who you are, where you are, and what you are supposed to be doing. HoverDerby addresses that. It might or might not work for all sorts of reasons, scale being one, but it’s the right idea.

The article also addresses the continuing need for interactivity in Sansar, which needs more than just beautiful experiences to visit:

Draxtor sums up the challenge Linden Lab faces. “The passive consumption of beautiful worlds will always be secondary to social engagement.” Altberg agrees, “Sansar, like Second Life, is at its best when it’s social.” Drax says there is more social action cooking. “We have some more social games coming.  Circling around 114 Harvest starting in late May we are giving away houses to rent and will do daily community hangouts with board games and scavenger hunts and book clubs.” Personally, I’d love to see more action sports like Hoverderby.

I want to rent one of the houses on Harvest Street! Please get me on that list, Drax!

And I was surprised to find I was also mentioned in Charlie Fink’s article, taking a direct quote from this blogpost in which I briefly describe the rules of HoverDerby. Thanks, Charlie! It will be interesting to see if I get any resulting uptick in traffic to the blog. (I also recently received a complimentary shout-out from Strawberry Singh, thank you so much Strawberry!)

All in all, this is quite the positive public relations coup for Linden Lab. Congratulations to Ebbe and his team!