Tag: Video

Decorating Your Mark.Space Apartment

Mark.Space is a Russian company which bills itself, according to its white paper, “an open source platform for the creation of 3D- and VR- compatible online spaces (sites) and objects, powered by Blockchain”. Like Decentraland, another blockchain-based virtual world, they are issuing a cryptocurrency in an initial coin offering (ICO) called the MRK.

You can actually go and visit a browser-based demo of Mark.Space at this address:  https://demo.mark.space/, where you can point and click your way through a simulated shopping mall, among other places. There’s not much to see or do, yet. You use your arrow keys or click the mouse to move around, left-clicking and dragging the mouse to rotate your view. You do get an annoying white screen as the scene redraws every time you click your mouse to move around. It’s all 360-degree photographs.

On their Telegram chat, which I recently joined, they announced that they were having a Best Apartment contest, where they were giving out prizes to the people who had done the best job of decorating their free apartments, and sharing the resulting pictures on social media. So I thought I would give it a try.

Here’s what “decorating your apartment” actually consists of:

  1. Choosing a 360-degree photo which represents your empty apartment (walls, windows, floor and ceiling). Not a real three-dimensional space.
  2. Dropping and dragging flat images of furniture around your apartment. Yes, that’s right, there are no actual three-dimensional objects, just pictures. The menu does let you “rotate” them, which essentially means flipping the image from left to right.

Here, I shot a one-minute video of me decorating my Mark.Space apartment, so you can see for yourself:

Rather an underwhelming experience. I think I’ll check back in six months to see if anything has progressed since then. If you’re interested, you can visit my apartment in your web browser.

Outfit Outlay: Strawberry Singh Blogs (and Vlogs) the Sansar Store Freebies

Strawberry Singh has blogged (and created the following YouTube video) about the many clothing freebies already available on the Sansar Store (this last link will take you directly to the Wearables section of the Sansar Store, and sort everything there in ascending order by price, with the freebies first).

She also mentions today’s special Scavenger Hunt edition of the weekly Atlas Hopping livestream event she co-hosts with Drax. I plan to attend; hope to see you there!

Strawberry also very kindly mentions both this blog and my store on the Sansar Store, where I do have some free avatar clothing items available. Thanks, Strawberry!

Pick of the Day: Violin Tree (Plus a Sansar Store Spotlight: Galen’s Theremin)

Mikki Miles, my favourite musical instrument maker in Second Life (in-world store, SL Marketplace), has created a new Sansar experience called Violin Tree. In his description he writes:

Inspired by an 40.000 year old boneflute, found in a cave in Southern Germany, I built this island with musical instruments that are somehow familiar, but seem to have taken a bit weird development on this offshore place. It’s a work in progress, come back again! All music and sounds are produced by Mikki Miles.

Violin Tree 1 17 Dec 2017.png

You arrive on a deserted island. To your left is what appears to be a tall tower, and to your right is a tree. As you come closer to the tower, you realize that it is, in fact. an oversize, ivy-covered flute, which plays a somewhat mournful tune as you approach and stand before it.

Violin Tree 2 17 Dec 2017

When you come nearer to the tree, you see that it is growing violins! It also plays music.

Violin Tree 3 17 Dec 2017.png

As Mikki Miles says in his description, this Sansar experience is a work in progress, so do plan to come back to see new musical creations in future!

While we are talking about musical instruments, I also wanted to showcase a particularly clever musical instrument that Galen has created and scripted, called a theremin. It’s an electronic musical instrument controlled by moving your hands around it without actually touching it.

Here is a short video I made of me playing Galen’s theremin at his Metaverse Machines Showroom (you’ll need a VR headset and hand controllers to be able to do this):

Galen’s theremin and the script used to control it are both available for free in the Sansar Store:

Galen's Theremin 17 Dec 2017

Very cool! It certainly looks like we are going to have no shortage of fun, playable musical instruments in Sansar.

Sansar Spiders!

There’s an (unofficial) Sansar Discord channel, where creators are busy comparing notes and sharing their handiworks. Here’s an invite link to the server, if you’re interested in joining the discussions. And Björn has shared two amazing videos of an animated spider he has created using 3ds Max.

I asked Björn to explain how he created such realistic spider leg movement, and he replied:

It’s just bones for now. In 3ds Max there is a CAT system, it’s like a rig preset for all kind of characters from spiders to dinosaurs to humans. They are easy to animate. So for this spider, I just used a spider rig and animated it along a spline. The program calculates the foot steps automatically.

Here’s another video, a sort of spider stress test! Not for the arachnophobic!