Fact or Fiction - From a fictional point of view it would be interesting to see if life in SL would take on such a dominant role in ones life that residents behavior in the real world would be altered to mimic the persona from SL or vice versa. As it moves to the next level would society pay greater attention to the life in SL in terms of social status, economic affairs etc and their status in real life would have little or no significance... These are some rambling thoughts at 1.45 AM.
Expanding my understanding - with the increased use of emails, IM, blogs etc understanding the sender's message, state of mind etc was somewhat predictable. Now with the advent of SL use of actions would add yet another dimenstion to this. However, do the avatars in SL have the ability to deploy non-verbal gestures to make communication more effective as in real life? Would this eventually substitute the use of the several available Internet communication tools? Not sure...
Seeking help - If there are some Mac users I would like to get with you all to see what issues you are running into with SL and Mac. I have a Macbook and I am running Leopard and I cannot get the graphic cards supported by SL and I am looking for alternatives.
Fun activities - cooking sounds good we can open a sub-topic and get the interested parties in to hatch a plan. Count me in
4 comments:
Narasi, you bring up very interesting issues. I encourage you to keep burning the midnight oil:-) and elaborate and start researching so that you can present some concrete ideas to your group.
As I said in another post, Avatars in SL can indeed express any number of behaviours, body language etc. But these need to be created in RL and imported. We plan to create a large library of behaviours and BL in the near future, once we get our own motion capture system in-house, which we are expecting shortly. We'll talk about that.
About your Mac woes, I am sorry. Seems like the problem was the Graphics card, right? have you investigated in SL forums and on the internet at large using the right keywords? I am certain you will find an answer (might not be what you want to hear, but hopefully someone has a solution.
If not we will try to have a couple of PC's available for those with that problem. Let me know if someone else has the same issue.
In my inventory, I have a gestures folder. I haven't tried them out but I think they came with the deal when my avatar was created. Or, maybe I picked them up at a free store. What can I say, my student budget mentality in RL might be causing me to resort to thriftiness in SL. Free is a very good price.
As for Mac, it seems that the Macbook graphics card is integrated meaning it cannot be swapped out. I don't know if this will help but it's a post I found online at http://osx.iusethis.com/app/secondlife
“Hiya, I'm Brent Linden (I work for Linden Lab). Just wanted to point out a few things. First, it's "Linden Lab", not "Linden Labs" ;-) That's just a pet peeve. Second, SL can be optimized for better performance on a Mac. I use a MacBook with 2 GB of RAM and it's not that bad. At the office I have a screamin' PeeC which has a 512 MB video card. Anyway, here's some suggestions to make your Second Life experience a little more bearable on a Mac:
- Go to Edit > Preferences and set the draw distance to 64 (for a low-end video card/Intel integrated graphics) or 128 (for anything else). You can go higher but remember the higher you go the more you can see -- and the more you can see the more you're downloading. Second Life is a streamed world, where the content is on the servers and not your hard drive, so it's very bandwidth hungry.
- Turn down options in Graphics Detail. We have a problem with Ripple Water on the Mac due to some weirdness with the Apple drivers and OpenGL. If you're using a MacBook or Mac mini try setting Terrain Detail to Low, and using only the sun and moon lighting options. Turn on Shiny no matter what video card you have -- its worth it for the 2 or 3 frames per second it costs!
- Right-click is the Command/Apple key in Second Life. The Mac client was created after the PeeC client and the keyboard commands were already firmly burned into our Residents' minds so we couldn't hijack the Control key for right-clicking. Tip: On a MacBook or MacBook Pro you can put two fingers on the trackpad and click to simulate a right-click.
- Modify your network settings for broadband optimization: get Mac Pilot http://www.koingosw.com/products/macpilot.php and go to the Network tab. Click the 'Optimize for Broadband' button. Second Life sends some massive UDP packets out and these can over saturate the buffers on a standard Mac (a problem we're working on).”
Hello Brent,
Thank you for your detailed info. I will implement the suggestions later this afternoon. I was able to enter the orientation island using my eMac. It worked fine. Just trying to figure out what one would do to get the right click working on Mac's...
Thanks again for the tips. I will update you on the progress.
I am glad you were able to enter SL with your eMac. About the "right click", even though I am a "macperson:-) and I appreciate simplicity (e.g. one click mouse), sometimes it defeats the purpose, specially as content becomes richer and more interactive.
I opted to use a small and very comfortable wireless Logitech mouse (about $30 at BestBuy) which not only gives me left-right clicks but the middle wheel as well, and this feature is invaluable when navigating VR in general.
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