Second Life's Emerald client facing obsolescence originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

As we previously predicted, the Second Life 2.0 viewer is going live today, meeting the originally slated release target of Q1 2010, if only by a few hours. The 2.0 viewer has been in public beta since 23 February.

In addition to the new viewer, its rearranged user-interface, slate color scheme and slick Shared Media implementation, today sees the launch of two new Orientation experiences and a selection of new starter avatars to select from (we wonder if any of them are blue).

Continue reading Second Life 2.0 goes live today

Second Life 2.0 goes live today originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 31 Mar 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Over about the last 60-90 minutes, Tom Hale's been delivering a keynote at the SL Pro! conference held in Second Life. There are multiple hefty announcements from Linden Lab involved, and some of that should be reaching the official Second Life blogs as you read this.

Golly, what do we have among all of this? We've got the Second Life 2.0 viewer public beta, which should be available right now. We've got the new third-party viewer registry and third-party policies being announced today; We've got changes in the names of content-ratings. We've got the official release of open source viewer Snowglobe and the announcement of Snowglobe 2; and all capped off with a slew of supporting FAQs, guides, video tutorials, wiki pages and what-have-you!

Continue reading A red-letter day for Second Life, Second Life 2.0 viewer and more

A red-letter day for Second Life, Second Life 2.0 viewer and more originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Over the last few weeks, Linden Lab staff have been talking about a few upcoming Second Life projects during their in-world office-hours sessions. Now the Lab has always been quick to stress that the accuracy and reliability of information obtained through those venues is questionable, and that we shouldn't assume that anything said at them is actually accurate.

With that in mind, we went back to the Lab about several identifiable (or at least apparent) projects to get the skinny on them and find out what's actually happening with them, and where they're at.

Continue reading Linden Lab investigates new/updated technologies for Second Life

Linden Lab investigates new/updated technologies for Second Life originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 18 Feb 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

This week, in The Virtual Whirl, we're going to take a selection of reader questions that we've received in comments and in the virtual mailbag and do our best to offer up some useful answers. Join us as we whirl through the mail.

Continue reading The Virtual Whirl: Questions from the virtual mailbag

The Virtual Whirl: Questions from the virtual mailbag originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Welcome to The Virtual Whirl, a new weekly Massively column covering virtual environments generally. The term 'virtual world' is slowly seeing less use, being supplanted by the more general 'virtual environment', but the world term still has a fair bit of life left in it.

Virtual environments covers a whole lot of ground. From William Crowther's original efforts in 1976 that based a game in a virtual version of the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, virtual environments have been a part of gaming, artificial intelligence and behavioral research, modeling, telemetry and process control and more.

Nowadays we're seeing Second Life, Blue Mars, There.com, IMVU and others trying to find places in non-game contexts, like content-development and prototyping, publishing and performance, entertainment and social, education and business; efforts that are met with varying amounts of success.

Continue reading The Virtual Whirl: Community guide to Virtual Worlds

The Virtual Whirl: Community guide to Virtual Worlds originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab says it hopes to have a public beta of the Second Life 2.0 viewer in February, presumably targeting an official release in March. Given that the Lab wants to move forward with quarterly planned viewer releases, this means that the current Second Life 1.23 viewer will lose official support at approximately the end of June.

Linden Lab says it has already finalized features and the user-interface at this stage, and is not planning on making any substantive changes between now and release. Any work beyond bug-fixes and stabilization for the viewer is to be deferred to the mid-year 2.1 release.

Continue reading Second Life 2.0 viewer for February/March

Second Life 2.0 viewer for February/March originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

While it has been called Viewer 2009 once or twice, almost every Linden Lab staffer who mentions it calls it Second Life 2. Once on the drawing-board as a major overhaul of Second Life both at the server and at the viewer (client), the idea of a huge developmental jump was abandoned some years ago, and all of the features slated for Second Life 2 were added to Second Life 1, incrementally.

Well, except for the last item on the list, the user-interface. Essentially Second Life seems to now everything SL2 was originally planned to be, sans the new interface.

Continue reading Looking forward to Second Life 2.0

Looking forward to Second Life 2.0 originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

This week we managed to get a look at an early build of what calls itself Second Life 2.0 - though the final version numbering is up for grabs and it could wind up being called 1.24 or 1.25 yet but Linden Lab has been amending their Second Life trademarks to allow "2" to be added. The only really major changes in 2.0 revolve around the user-interface that interactive design agency Big Spaceship has been working on for the last 6-8 months.

And quite a change it is. We're under no illusions that the new user-interface is entirely set in stone. A few parts are confusing, and it has a ton of rough edges and little quirks. It's fascinating to see the direction that it's going in, however.

Continue reading Second Life 2.0: A sneak peek at the new user-interface [updated]

Second Life 2.0: A sneak peek at the new user-interface [updated] originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 12 Jun 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.