Second Life in 3D

Get out those old 3D glasses from your comic book collection. Here are some pcitures I made with an unofficial stereoscopic viewer for Second Life.  (You’ll need red/blue or red/cyan glasses.  Red/green won’t work.) You might wanna save these to your harddisk and watch them in full screen mode:

Walking through Second Life and seeing all the Kids5B builds in real 3D was incredibly rewarding for me yesterday.  If you like the effect in the pictures here, imagine an even better experience if you use new 3D technology. Did you see the movie “Beowolf” in 3D? Or the “U2 3D” film? Or maybe you went to an IMAX sometime, or you saw one of those 3D movies at Disneyland.Then you know what I’m talking about: Things popping out of the screen right in front of your nose. 3D technology these days is far better than the oldschool red/blue or red/green stuff. IMAX, RealD or Disneyland use prism glasses instead. And not many people know that the same technology is available for your home, too. For your TV, console and computer.

I tried this and it worked. All you need is an Nvidia graphics card (7800 or better), a special Nvidia driver, a certain interface and a pair of so called shutter glasses – and you get perfect 3D on your TV or monitor. It even works with most DLP video projectors – thats the way I do it at home. Up until now this worked with movies and many games, but NOT with Second Life. Now it does!

Yesterday I found an experimental SL viewer, developed by some guys at Michigan University and a guy called Dale Glass. His viewer supports both the oldschool red/blue 3D mode, and the new shutter glass technology which gives a result similiar to a good IMAX or RealD movie.

While the red/blue mode has the advantage of just needing your old pair of red/blue 3D glasses  (they cost about one Dollar or Euro), the shutterglasses mode is the real deal!  SL in IMAX or RealD quality, avatars popping out in front of you face, and streets far behind the monitor. Oh yeah! Linden Lab already announced that they will build in a stereoscopic 3D mode into the official viewer, too.

Here are some usefil links for building your personal holodeck at home:

You can download Dale’s experimental 3D viewer here. Read the FAQ, there is one DLL file you need to copy from the regular viewer to the experimental one.

Here is a list of 3D compatible projectors.

Some 3D Projector FAQs.

This shop has shutter glasses for consoles and PCs, and also 3D Head Mounted Displays: iGlasses (US) or iGlasses (EU) Resolution of the Head Mounted Displays is too low for SL, so thats not really cool yet. But my guess is, in a few years we’re gonna use those, too 🙂

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Kids5B

So the fun on Kids5B started 4 days ago and I’m having a blast!  After all the building, organising and drama going on in the previous weeks it was just awesome to hang out, skate, deejay, and – last but not least – show adults around Kids5B. I witnessed several grownups use the transmogrifier, thus changing into kids. (Some Lindens visited, too, one of them using a child AV – see Marianne’s post on the SLC website for that story 🙂  I won’t write much today and just add a few pictures of me hanging out in the city. More pictures ans stories will follow.

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Surprise party

After deejaying at The Vortex yesterday, Myrtil asked me to come with her.

“I want to show you something”, she said.

Myrtil teleported me to the skatepark on the Kids5B site – and whoa! Boys and girls were waiting for me! I was totally surprised and started to jump around like a maniac, only to be interrupted by hugs and presents! They had remembered it was my human’s RL birthday! 😀

Mandoo, who had conspired with Myrtil, Gabe and others on organising the party, deejayed. It was his debut as an SL DJ and he did an amazing job! ^^

There were LOLcats pictures everywhere. We had some BMX and skateboard fun, too. Adam gave away freebie boards, which was very cool! We partied all night, until the site was attacked by a giant sandworm cause it wanted some cake, too. No kids were eaten though.

I’m so lucky to have such amazing friends! *hugsyouall*

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June 23 – July 7

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SL5B: Weak clarifications

On their bug tracking website Linden Lab declared JIRA issue MISC-1231 (“Missing Cultures & Communities from SL5B”) fixed, and the company published the “clarifying” blog post it had previously announced: “Any Resident can submit an application to exhibit”. What the blog post lacks is an awareness for how insulting the SL5B mess was for a large portion of SL’s userbase. Instead of “we screwed up and we’re deeply sorry” we get: “change has raised both legitimate concerns and misinformation from some Residents.”
To date it is still unknown whether the applications of kid avatar artists will be accepted or not. One kid avatar told me his idea would be accepted according to a chat with a Linden, but he has to change the name of his build – other residents who do not have the time and patience to pester Lindens with dozens of IMs still don’t know if they will be able to contribute. I myself applied for a build several days ago and did not get any reply until now. In my opinion JIRA issue MISC-1231 should not declared “fixed” until after SL5B. For now, my SL account stays downgraded to “Basic” and I will put my time and energy into “Kids5B”.

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Drum’n’Bass heads raise L$ 37100 for Kids5B

An awesome audience of today’s “Kids Are United Show” raised L$ 37100 for Kids5B in only two hours. Thanks for partying at Vortex today. Kids5B already is an amazing effort of the child AV community. Together with Daniel Regenbogen Kids5B collected about L$ 100000 so far. All this will enable us to pay tiers, to buy stuff that’s needed and to get some classifieds promoting the event.

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