On this eve of the 2014 new year, it id a time to think back on the past year's events, accomplishment, and all that has been left behind.  More importantly this is a time when many of us look at a fresh new year and set some goals to hopefully accomplish with the new year.  We all know these beginning of year list of goals as New Year's Resolutions.  These resolutions are not only set by people but often also by organizations / companies.

As many of us know, Linden Lab (aka LL) set most of their own goals for SecondLife® (aka SL) in pretty much seclusion from the needs and wishes of the residents of SL that use their flagship service.  Most successful companies find it absolutely critical to use what ever means to fully understand how their customers use their products / services as well as what their customers DONT LIKE so that they can make improvements.  By doing this, these companies build a much more powerful and competitive profitable product / service to offer the market.

This seems not to be the case for LL.  I have not seen any grid wide survey or reaching out to the SL residents by LL to ask what pains us the most or what we would love LL to focus on as 2014 priorities.  If they somehow secretly found a means to collect this critical info from their customer base then they simple don't care or they believes they somehow know better as to what SL needs than their customers that actually use SL every day.  LL staff surely can't know the good and bad of SL like their customers since they rarely participate in the grid nor experience all its weaknesses.  LL has been too busy focusing on exciting major new "WOW" features while the grid suffers from long un-addressed broken or missing functions they left behind.

I am sure some might come to LL's rescue and cite examples of how LL is in touch with life on the grid and is addressing them, but all the evidence myself and many of my countless friends see is that they are completely in the dark as to what SL really needs or what is majorly borked each day on the grid.  And when Rodvik put the edict out last year to gag the public resident JIRA system, this fundamentally further blinded LL of the grid's pains.

And so, although I know that this blog posting will never be read or acted upon by a single Linden, the frustrations on the grid that myself and the community experience each day and the lack of seeing any progress by LL to address them has led me to create my own personal list of priorities for LL to focus on.  Since I wasn't asked... I thought I would blog them to the world.  So without further delay, here is ....

TOY's List of TOP 10 RESOLUTIONS LL SHOULD ADDRESS in 2014 :

Avatars with no hair.  Grey Avatars.  Missing clothing parts - mostly mesh.  No feet.  Avatars you can see right through.  I go to venues where much of the venue build does not rez.  I see particles that often never rez so I only see squares.  And these issues don't last a few minutes while the LL servers finally find the time to feed my viewer the needed content, it often lasts an entire hour. The content or avatars often never rez - while others do.  

I will point out that this lag is NOT because I have an outdated or mis-configured PC - lets just say my PC and my Laptop are top-end powerful Windows machines and not stressed out in any way.  Its not that I have poor Internet - I have 25mbps broadband proven to deliver nearly at the stated offering.  Its not just a certain brand of viewer as I have tested this issues using FS (current and beta), Singularity and LL's with similar results.

Maybe its the abuse of inefficiently made mesh clothing, bugs with the SSB, or many other factors.  What ever is going wrong, LL needs to spend time analyzing actual busy sims like live music, dance clubs, and other popular places and REALLY experience this for themselves.  SSB was not the savior to this problem and LL can't sit gloating about how it was such an improvement - it wasn't - the problem is worse than before SSB.

#2  FIX BROKEN NOTICE ATTACHMENTS
This problem has been around for over 2 years now.  It seemed to show up around the time of the V2+ viewers.  It has been reported in LL and Phoenix JIRAS countless times.  I and others have reported / complained about this issue directly to the Lindens (like Simon and Andrew) at weekly meetings.  And yet, this extremely frustrating annoying problem exists on the grid.

For those rare few that are completely clueless about this issue (which you must be a complete isolationist on the grid), its the problem where attachments (commonly an LM but it could be anything) on group notices break.  This function was a very valuable feature when it used to work by venue / club owners, stores. musicians, sim event holders to send LMs to fans / customers.  But for two years, this function does not work.  When you receive and try to click on the attachment - it goes grey and cant be used.  Its time LL stops ignoring this important and broken function.

#3  START DEVELOPMENT OF VIRTUAL LANDMARKS FOR THE GRID
Back in August 2012 I developed the concept and high level workings of an extremely valuable advancement for the entire SL grid that I called Virtual Land Marks or VLMs.  LMs in SL are one of the most commonly used asset in SL.  but they currently have a horribly inefficient limitation.  They are static as soon as they are created.  Therefore they are useless if the location actually changes - which is OFTEN for most venues / stores.  As such venues, stores, clubs etc. send out countless new ones to ensure all have the most recent cluttering up everyones inventory with duplicate and outdated LMs. 

Its time that LL make VLM development and integration into the SL grid a priority for 2014.  Enough of the new WOW features that residents need to be educated to see why its valuable.  Develop a game changing function that ALL RESIDENTS would instantly understand and see value in having.

#4  INCREASE THE MAX GROUP LIMIT  
What more can be said about this??  Just Do it.  Not sure why this is such a painful torturous decision for LL to make.  Currently maxed at 42.  Groups are used for countless membership management, communications, and advertising.  Lets make it an even 100.  It can't be too hard for LL to adjust and would make countless LL residents very happy!  

#5  INCREASE THE CHAT DISTANCE  
LL might not see there is any real value in increasing the current 19 meter chat limit to spend any time on it but increasing the chat limit to even something like 50 meters (or 96m like in Inworldz) would be a big benefit for so many larger venues and clubs where there are DJs, hosts, musicians, etc. that need to talk to efficiently to a large wide spread crowd - as well as the crowd itself that talks among themselves.  Right now many hosts have to manually SHOUT to ensure all can hear.  Everyone has to check the distance to the intended receiver to make sure he she is within 20 meters.  LL.... how painful can it be to just make a small adjustment that lets everyone local chat to 50 meters

#6  FIX DISAPPEARING AVATAR WHEN JUMPING ON ANIMATIONS (i.e. dance balls)
A problem that has shown up on dancing ball animations - like the couples balls - since Server Side Baking is that your avatar completely disappears when you sit on the ball.  Your dance partner then asks you in IM "Where did you go? You just disappeared.".  The one that gets on the ball doesn't see this - just everyone else.  Not only has your avatar de-rezzed but your title goes with it.  Its like your Avi left the sim.  As soon as you get off the ball you show up again.  If you get back on again then all is good.

#7  MAKE SIMS MORE POWERFUL WITH MORE CAPACITY
In the glory days of SL when there was actual sim growth, I could understand that this would not have been worth asking.  But, with LL seeing 1000's of sims being abandoned each year and with competing grids offering sims with far greater capacities at much lower prices, its time for LL to re-allocate more of that freed up capacity to giving sims more horsepower.  And LL could start by making all the Mainland sims have far greater capacity than they are now.  Right now I can and have crashed our mainland sim if 40 avatars show up to my art gallery.  Its time that LL use all that freed up server capacity to mainland sims.

#8  FIX THE TOS THAT HIGHJACKED ALL SL CONTENT CREATOR RIGHTS
Considering this was one of the most talked about stories in the SL blogging and creator / artist community, banned SL by external content sites, caused so much anger and backlash to LL, created a new SL Content Creators Association, and forced LL Execs to actually pop their head out of the ground for once, this is not a topic that needs much explaining.  But, it is now the end of 2013 and LL's draconian content high-jacking TOS rules are still in place.  Sadly LL seems to be playing games with its content creating community.  Lets hope one of LL's first resolutions to address (i.e. IMMEDIATELY) will be a new fair TOS.  It will be very sad on LL's part that its life-giving content creator community will be forced to take more drastic and direct motivation efforts to force LL to correct its TOS.  We will see.

#9  START TAKING A.R.'s SERIOUS & BAN ABUSIVE USERS / GRIEFERS
Too many times I have heard A.R. report on abusive, dangerous SL users (i.e. Stalker or personal harassment) and Griefers go unpunished.  I am not sure why LL does not seem to take so many A.R.'s serious.  Is it because of a lack of staffing?  Is it because they don't want to "take sides"?  Is it because they don't want to further reduce the SL user count by deleting these individuals?  Most of us are not sure of the real reasons, but I have seen to many times that dangerous, stalking, personally harassing users (sadly mostly sick-minded men) are reported yet they remain on the grid.  LL's record is so poor that most users already know that filing an A.R. is just a waste of time.  As for Griefers, well we all know how well LL has them under control.

#10  RESTORE THE RESIDENT PUBLIC JIRA SYSTEM
This is actually an invaluable function that was not part of the SL grid but provided so much value in helping quickly identify, quantify, diagnose, and resolve SL problems.  It was also a system that many LL staff quietly were as frustrated as the community that it was gagged.  It was mistake for Rodvik to gag the JIRA and he needs to admit he made a mistake and ungag the JIRA so we can return to identifying and resolving serious problems on the grid that currently LL is no longer aware of.

*** END OF TOYS TOP 10 LIST ***

I had many others I could have added but this was my selected Top 10 List of Resolutions I would hope LL would make a priority in 2014.

So now I open the floor to all of you.  Is there a really major item you have in your mind that is not on my list?  If so, post it as a comment.  Lets here what you would like LL to focus on.

In the spring of 2013, I had been hearing from some of my SecondLife® friends of this amazing burlesque dance troupe stage show that was a very popular weekly late night event.  I went to to check out their show.... and well... I never missed any of the remaining 22 weekly shows for 2013 and also became an unofficial photographer for this troupe - capturing their dances live action during each show.  

Last night was their last show of 2013 and I can now release my little Christmas present to this amazingly talented dance troupe - Guerilla Burlesque (SL).  Here is my 12 minute video...

Toy's 2013 Photo Journey at Guerilla Burlesque....

Some information this amazing dance troupe in SecondLife®

The dance troupe is called "Guerilla Burlesque (SL)".  This troupe does their weekly shows at a beautiful large almost Gothic styled theatre on the IDLE ROGUE sim in Secondlife®.  These weekly shows are late Friday night (11:59pm SLT which is equal to N.A. Pacific time).  Although for North Americans the show is held during the wee hours of the night (i.e. 3am Eastern), the shows are almost always filled to max capacity!  If you want to be assured a seat you must show up at least 15 minutes early as quite often any last minute audience members are turned away because the theatre is full.

During each show the G.B. troupe does about 6 amazingly themed, staged, and professionally choreographed dances.  What is amazing is that each troupe member is not just a Dancer... she/he is responsible for creating the entire dance.  This means the troupe member must come up with a theme, select a song, build / assemble a stage to exacting stage dimensions, find and set up dance animations, choreograph with other dancers if its a team dance, rehearse it, and ultimately setup / dance / teardown during the show.  They must do this set up and tear down in a sim that is already stressed and do it with only a 1 song interlude between the other dances!  

Each week, a completely new set of about 6 dances are presented to the amazed audience!  EVERY WEEK... NEW DANCES!

I said I became addicted.  Well to the extent that since May of 2013, I attended all remaining 22 weekly shows that were run in 2013.  More so, I started to take live action photos of each dance at each show.  As soon as each show ended at 3am local time for me, I would sift through all my shots, select the best ones for each dance, post-process these, and publish theses best of the night photos onto my Facebook page.  It started as a fun Photography challenge for me and has turned into something of an expected tradition after each show.

Well, after 22 shows and over 130 dances, I built up an inventory of over 275 dance show highlight photos in 2013.  With all these photos in my inventory, I decided to create this 2013 Photo Journey at Guerilla Burlesque as a tribute to this amazing dance troupe that is arguably the most creative and most professionally run dance team in Secondlife®

It has been a joy to be part of each of their shows, watch the amazing creative talents each week, and participate in the fun audience banter and after-show parties.  If you are a resident in SL and you have not yet heard of or attended a G.B. show.  Make sure in 2014 that you do.  You wont regret it - I didn't.

For more information about Guerilla Burlesque (SL)...
Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/GuerillaBurlesque
Inworld Theatre Location:  http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Idle%20Rogue/109/184/36

See you there !!

Last month I was Mentoring / Coaching at an All-Weekend Entrepreneurial Challenge.  This challenge brings together participants of software/hardware geeks, designers, inventors, and entrepreneurs who take a selected few of the initially pitched ideas on Friday and develop them a MVP (minimal viable product) and a 5 minute business pitch on Sunday night to judges for prizes.  Its one of many events our local community holds to support and grow entrepreneur-ism and a new generation of start-up businesses.

During this event one team was working on product or service that planned to provide a new level of relaxation de-stressing experience via a full visual / audio immersion within a virtual world.  A key component to their idea was the use of the latest up-coming technology craze to hit the virtual world industry - the OCULUS RIFT.

So, before I go any further you might be asking yourself : WHAT THE HECK IS THIS OCULUS RIFT ?  Well I will tell you all that I am no expert on the "Rift" as I just started hearing about this product and Buzz Term over the past few months.  But basically the Rift is a new product from a company called Oculus VR® (VR=Virtual Reality) that provides a stereoscopic video experience to the wearer of the headset.  

Additionally, the Rift also has motion sensing technology that allows it to report any head movement in any direction back to an application that has integrated with a Rift device.  Applications use this head movement data to change the scene on the Rift's screen so that it looks like when you turn your head in a direction, the scene act accordingly.  This would be very similar to you using the mouse or the arrow keys in camera mode within SecondLife® to look around you on a sim - but the Rift knows where you are looking so you don't have use a mouse or arrow keys.

This product is still only released as a developer's kit at $300US to encourage companies/people to integrate the Rift into a new generation of immersion experience products and services.  The full consumer version of this product is not expected to be released until some time in 2014 (some say June but maybe later).  I was told when the Consumer version releases it will come with a major improvement in screen resolution over the current development version which is quite low resolution.

I will explain a bit further about my NOOB LEVEL of perspective, experience, and knowledge of Rift but if you want to know all the details about the Rift, here is the link to their website:

Since the Rift is quite new as well as its Development Kit, the software that supports it is still small but growing quite fast.  The most popular application that works with the Rift and that is actually promoted directly by Oculus is UNITY3D - a game development platform that can create scenes pretty much identical to the scenes you see inside the SecondLife® grid.  During my experience, that is exactly the software that was used by the owner of the Rift device.  For the team's weekend product, they built a peaceful midnight scene on a rocky outcrop on the edge of a lake under a star filled sky with a burning fire in front.

Well it was.  I turned my head 180 degrees in both left and right direction and the scene was all there.  In fact, when I looked behind me and down, I noticed I was placed on the edge of a cliff behind me - so I looked down.  The scenery was created in Unity but anyone that has been in SecondLife® would swear they were on the grid.  Same kind of objects.  

As I mentioned before, the resolution of the current developer kit Rift is low resolution and I could see the individual pixels if I looked carefully but since this is a developer kit and the Consumer version plans to be released with much higher resolution, this was not a big deal for me.  Also, even though the audio was not part of the Rift product, I must say that adding the team's earphones and custom developed audio for the scene just finished it up when it came to immersion.  As you can see in the photos, I was in a bright, loud, and busy collage campus atrium but with the Rift and these headphones, I was at a dark starey skied lake by a fire.  SOOO COOL!

Of course, while I was there I asked the owner of the Rift if he knew if Linden Lab was going to have a Rift integration.  He said that he heard they would and it would be shocking if they didn't as the Rift will be a perfect new immersion tool to take grid users to the next level of realism in SecondLife®,

Fast Forward a couple weeks to December 5th - Guess what "VoidPointer Linden" from Linden Lab openly announced on December 5th during their weekly Beta Server Office Hours meeting?  

LL will soon be releasing a beta version viewer that will support the Oculus Rift !!

Here's first mention (note the time stamp) of the discussion in the December 5th transcripts from this Office Hours meeting:

[2013/12/05 15:32] VoidPointer Linden: Adding suport for Oculus Rift is feature-complete and should be released "soon"

And here is the link to the entire transcript so you can read all VoidPointer and the other Lindens had to say about it as well as the questions they answered:

SECONDLIFE Beta Server Office Hours Minutes for 2013-12-05

So basically, Linden Lab is very close to completing a Rift capable SecondLife® viewer - maybe even before the end of the year.  Now remember this would be a beta viewer and more importantly you would have to have one of these Development Kit versions of the Rift since the final consumer version of the Rift is still not expected to be released until maybe mid 2014.  I wouldn't go out buying a developer kit version with the consumer version coming soon with much better resolution.  As initially cool as it would be to see the SL grid via the Rift ASAP, the low resolution would quickly annoy you.

So SL Residents, stay tuned for a lot of excitement related to the SecondLife® inworld experience and the Rift.

My previous blog posting provides all the details about this exhibit, but in case you don't want to read the last blog.  I was given the amazing opportunity by a very large international corporation with head quarters in the city I live to exhibit up to 40 of my artworks on their huge art wall.  The exhibit would exclusively display my works for a period of 6 weeks.  The exhibit started on October 26th and ended yesterday - six weeks later - December 6th at 3pm.

Aso mentioned in the previous post, the corporate art committee mentioned that I would be their first "Digital Artist" to ever exhibit.  They have shown photography and several styles of traditional / mixed media artists but never a Digital Artist (photo manipulation, virtual world photography, 3D model sculptured wall art etc).  So there was no hint of how the corporate audience would respond.

Well I can tell you now with the conclusion of the exhibit, the response was simply amazing.  More importantly, for this being my first ever real world art exhibit, the value I received from the experience was beyond my expectations in many ways and I want to share this with you all.

First, to address what most would look for as the first factor of a successful art exhibit.  Let me answer the quantifiable question all ask:  HOW MANY DID YOU SELL?  Going into this event, the committee told me that some artists make no sales at all, most will make a few (like the last artist was happy she sold 2), and a few have sold a lot.  Therefore, going into this exhibit I set my expectations with the norm and would be happy if I sold a few (maybe up to 5ish).  Well, when all was added up, I sold 16 as a direct result of the art exhibit !!

• 2 artworks were sold just before I put the exhibit up
• 7 artworks were sold directly off the wall (and I didn't have to take them home)
• 5 artworks were order as Re-Prints of what was on the wall or from my online art gallery
• 2 artworks were sold as R.L. prints by friends in my SecondLife community from my Deviant Art site
• 2 instances of a special commissioned artwork (which I won't even count as a sale but you never know)

Here is a "glimpse" gallery of all the artworks that were bought during my exhibit:

For me, selling 16 artworks directly as a result of this art exhibit is far beyond what I could have hoped for.  Since I expanded my journey as an Artist beyond the borders / realm of SecondLife® in 2012, I only sold about 12.  Six of them were actually indirectly related to the exhibit when I inform the hair stylist showing my art on their walls that I needed my art back and they said - "NOO We don't want to see them go" so they bought their own versions of the art.  Even the corporate art committee mentioned that this would be considered a very successful exhibit in their eyes as well.  

I will say that even though the sales were great - with the margins being quite small and my huge investment to print 40 artworks to canvas, I am still over $1,000 in the hole but I consider this printed art now as an investment to use for other exhibits and hopefully to sell off.  So I don't consider that fact as a failure.  Its not even a factor.

In addition to the sales was the education and insight of what the general public liked about my art versus didn't like.  By that I mean, what styles of my art portfolio would rise up as unique enough to become marketable (i.e. people would actually put money out to have it) versus the art that would not sell.  The exhibit demonstrated this clearly.  

With the exception of one real life floral photo that was bought for personal reasons (they were her flowers), none of my many pretty real life florals sold.  I am sure I know why.  Even though they are very pretty photos, they are not unique in the art print market.  ANYONE CAN BUY FLOWER ART - even from Walmart - for a fraction of the price I charge for my art..  In  other words, the art that I had almost no artistic manipulation applied - did not sell.

Yet I sold many of my heavily manipulated Real & Virtual world art as well as my 3D sculptured wall art.  This means, that most of my portfolio of art has a potentially unique offering / styling that the general Real Life public has not experienced.  For all of us in SecondLife® its commonplace and we have seen amazing virtual world art.  But its fascinatingly new for those that do not know of these virtual worlds.

Another valuable outcome for me was the validation I received about how much of what I learned, developed, and evolved as an Artist in SecondLife® was a huge value-add as a foundation when I transitioned / expanded my Artist role into the Real World.  All the important tips and tricks I learned from all the SL art galleries I have exhibited at.  The development of my "Artist's Comment" notecards for each artwork.  Learning how to present / display my art at a gallery.  Promoting and advertising art events.  All of these were huge value inputs to prepare me for my first real world exhibit.

Finally, the one experience I gained the most from this exhibit was the feedback from all those that bought and even those that did not.  During the exhibit I received many verbal compliments and emails from so many about how unique, refreshing, new, vibrant, intriguing, interesting, and even inspiring / comforting my art was to them.  A few that will stay with me are as follows:

• One lady, a VP of the company who bought an artwork said that as soon as she saw the artwork she ended up buying she knew she had to have it.  She also said that over the years she has rarely ever stopped to even take any interest of the art exhibits, but her co-workers joked to her that with my art she stopped and looked and read about the art.  She even went to my art site.
• Another lady bought one of my artworks.  She mentioned her child recently passed and my artwork gave her  a feeling of comfort that he was safe and playing happily in the hands of God.
• On a couple occasions I was told my art was being sold to low.  But, because of my price, a couple people bought my art because it was the first time they loved an artwork that they could afford.
• So many people commented how vibrant the colors were and wondered if I painted the scenes - most of those were the virtual world artworks they just don't register to those that have not seen that environment.

In conclusion, I cannot be more happy how my first ever real world art exhibit went.  The experience for me was invaluable and will be one of those highlights in my life.  I am so grateful for this corporate art committee giving me this opportunity.  I can now say that I have been an Artist that has publicly exhibited my art.   NEXT !  :)