Raving in Second Life™ Shengri La Hope

 

Raving in Shengri La Hope

This Saturday, August 30, 3pm SLT rave on with DJane Qee Nishi.  Theme is universal (interpret as you wish – science fiction, space odyssey, steam punk) in scenic Shengri La Hope.  Haute Dress is always welcomed but not necessary. 

Shengri La Hope 107, 140, 301, Saturday, August 30, 30 SLT.  See you there!

Men’s Avatar Makeover Kits in Second Life™ Shengri La

Ruth to Ruthless Men

The Fashion Research Institute is pleased to present a new avatar makeover kit for men in the Shengri La Welcome Area.  The kit contains shapes, skins, eyes, hair, an male avatar overrider, casual, formal and corporate clothing, shoes and boots and watches in silver and gold.

The makeover kit is provided free – buy the kit for $0L.  Contents do not transfer. Three hair styles in six shades and three skin tones are included in the kit, and some components are boxed. 

The full line of women’s makeover kits are also available in the Shengri La Welcome Area.  Visit Shengri La to move past your new resident look.   Ruth to Ruthless™, only in Shengri La.

Niftiness in Second Life tm Shengri La…Free Horseback Riding!

Saddle rezzer in the paddock of the Welcome Area

The Fashion Research Institute Shengri La complex in Second Life is the creation of many talented people working together to create a beautiful, peaceful, immersive experience.  We all add and remove bits of it, and occasionally something will happen that proves to be transcendent.  A perfect example of this is the new horse rezzer located earlier this week.

The rezzer pops up a vehicle that is saddle shaped.  Then it hands the rider a horse.  The rider wears the horse from inventory, and suddenly the rider is mounted on a fully saddled horse, ready to go riding!

This isn’t just any generic horse, either.  The creator of this particular system put a lot of painstaking work into scripting and creating the actual horse.  Through a menu system, you can change the saddle style on your horse, show or hide its Pegasus wings, change your riding pose (side saddle, anyone?), change your gait, and even change the color of the blanket under the saddle.  The horse itself will carry two people, so you can ride double.  You can change gaits by moving through its programmed gaits (Walk, Canter, Gallop, Fly) by choosing page up or page down.

What’s really fun about the horse you are given to ride is that the creator didn’t slack on the details – it blinks its eyes, switches its tail, wiggles its ears, stamps its foot when you are standing, whinnies, and sends up little puffs of dust when you are riding.  The horse itself is a mixture of primwork and sculpted prims, and of course, it moves its legs when ridden. For those equestrians who love SL horses, this won’t sound terribly impressive – until you realize that you’ve just been given this horse from the rezzer…for free.

As an estate owner, you can put the rezzer up, and allow visitors to your land to obtain the saddle vehicle and the horse (for free!!), ride around your estate until they get tired, and when they dismount, the saddle poofs, and they get to keep the horse.  The saddle won’t survive a teleport, but it does survice sim crossings quite nicely.  Riders can’t ride the horse again unless they use the saddle rezzer again. 

Needless to say, I was enamored.  The horse itself has some little quirkinesses to riding it – but for horse lovers or anyone who wants a fun, witty, immersive activity, a ride around Shengri La is enormous fun, as we found out last night.

I was tweaking the new saddle rezzer arrangement in the Welcome Area when I noticed some people in Joy.  So I flew over, and discovered Script Wizard Dale and Chestnut.   In the process of telling them about the cool new horses we now have in Shengri La, I brought out a saddle rezzer.  Another friend, Ahuva Heliosense, teleported in about then, and when she heard the word: horse, she took the plunge. 

Before I knew it, we had galloping Utopians all over the sim, and a few other friends joining us for the mayhem.  It took a little tweaking to figure out the horses, but once we got it, everyone really enjoyed themselves, as you can see in the pictures below.  We finished our evening with an impromptu art show by Callipygian Christensen, who is working up her next gallery changes for her main gallery in Shengri La and a fireworks display by Script Wizard Dale, who wowed us with some fancy and fanciful particle fireworks. 

If you haven’t visited Shengri La in SL yet, please consider yourself invited.  The horses are now there for anyone to ride.  Instructions are included in the information kiosk right behind the saddle rezzer.

Saddle Rezzer, example of the palomino horse, 'Ruby', in the paddock

Ahuva Heliosense discovers her wings!

Everyone has a horse now...

We figure out how they work...

Script Wizard Dale and Elizabeth Tinsley ride through the surf

Ahuva Heliosense happily riding

Chestnut Rau canters across the Boardwalk in Shengri La

Elizabeth Tinsley pauses beside Silver Rose

Ahuva and I in the surf, talking to Calli & Script Wizard Dale

In the surf: Michele Hyacinth, Rez Tone, me, and Ahuva Heliosense

The End: On the shore - Callipygian Christensen, Script Wizard Dale; In the surf-Ahuva Heliosense, me, Rez Tone, Michele Hyacinth

 

 

 

Yay! Avatar Persistence Across Reboots and Relogs

OK, I’m not sure at what revision this happened, or who contributed the patch to do it….but last night, I logged in after working in OpenSim a bit in the morning…and discovered my prim hair still firmly attached to my head!  In a state of disbelief, I logged out and back in, to see if it was a fluke.  No, there was my hair, on my head, correctly placed.

Unconvinced, we rebuilt the region with the newest version of OpenSim code…I logged in…and there…was…my….prim…hair. Attached.  Correctly.  On my head.

Needless to say, this made me feel impossibly perky, since I can now proceed with the otherwise daunting task of attaching and adjusting all my other things like skirts, and jewelry, and shoes, and and and…

Behold: Hair.  Jewelry. Sunglasses.  Flexi Skirt.  Yay!

Fashion Runway in Shengri La Hope

Are you a new designer or a designer who enjoys designing just for the pleasure of designing? Do you want a beautiful environment with a fully functional catwalk system, in which to show off your work?

The Fashion Research Institute has deployed a completely scripted fashion catwalk in the Second Life (TM) sim Shengri La Hope.  The location features two fully functional runways with scripted poseballs loaded with popular modeling poses and a runway walk, and scripted spotlights that follow the model as she walks the runway.  Draped canopies and curtains feature a range of draperies from which to choose.

All Grid citizens are welcome to use the runway free of charge on a first come, first served basis. Individual designers may reserve the runway in advance, and full estate management is available with 2 weeks advance notice, and depends on estate manager availability.  Estate management includes security, media stream change, estate setting changes, and privacy controls.

Visit Shengri La Hope and pick up a copy of our runway show manual and rules to use the Fashion Research Institute, Inc. catwalk.

Our thanks to Chelsie Goodliffe and Ravenn Darkstone for modelling on the runways of the catwalk.

Brief Peek Inside Shengri La OpenSim 9-sim Region

 

Just a few images of the newest project…some castles, a bridge and nature scenes.  I’ve been learning to script things, thanks to Script Wizard Dale’s patience.  I even managed to make a particle garden work, and petals float on the wind from my weeping cherry trees!

Now, if I ever get the terraforming done, I can perhaps finish the landscaping.  However, real life has this way…

Rambling Through OpenSim

Last week, Black Dress Technology’s sys admin, Frank Clark, brought up the OpenSim Shengri La grid inside the Fashion Research Technology firewall.  With 9 regions, it provides us a degree of freedom for testing, content development, prototyping, and of course, our actual work in developing enterprise virtual worlds applications.  The entire operation went smoothly, from instantiating the first region, to bringing up the additional 8 regions, to adding in the RAW files and terrain files. 

I compare this to our very first OpenSim region, which we instantiated last October.  I think it’s interesting to look back and see how far this platform has come since then.  That very first, raw lump of terrain that emerged from the endless sea was largely inert.  Scripting functions were a future dream; terrain editing was difficult at best; building required lots of math and almost no finesse.  Textures might or might not load and the platform itself was highly unstable for content creators.  Things content creators take as a matter of course in Second Life (TM) were just missing, having not been implemented into the code yet – things like Ctl-Z, all the clever witty scripts, attachments, and of course, avatar persistence.

The Shengri La grid, in comparison to that first raw OpenSim region last year, is stable – so stable that multiple users were able to work in the regions while building relatively complicated, high prim, scripted builds.  We’re aleady using the regions to instantiate some of our competitive business intelligence, to create demos and to begin developing virtual world-based fashion courses.  Working on the OpenSim platform is still somewhat challenging – there are things the platform doesn’t yet support like vehicle scripts and persistent attachments - but in some respects the platform itself compares more than favourably with Second Life.  Stability, lack of lag, security for starters – our region is so stable that we’ve (well, me as a rule, since I like to push the envelope) only managed to mangle the server once, and that was after restoring content from one sim to another one, where the same asset was trying to appear on two sims concurrently.  

The lack of lag is a delight – even with multiple users in the region all actively doing things in the regions, the regions perform well.  Security – for now at least, Shengri La Grid is a walled garden, with access limited to FRI and BDT employees, and soon to our IBM development team members.

We worked extensively on the grids running r5806, and overall the experience was great.  The asset server still struggles with massive bulk uploads of textures, which resulted in a client crash for the user who was uploading textures.  The server stayed up, and continued to function well for the other users working in the regions.  

It is with great pleasure, then, that I offer these views into our newest OpenSim project, the Shengri La Grid: Shengri La Bliss, Shengri La Dream, Shengri La Muse, Shengri La Belle, Shengri La Star, Shengri La Diva, Shengri La Passion, Shengri La Liberty and of course, Shengri La Spirit.

Shengri La arises from the Depths

Another view of the first grid region, Shengri La Spirit

3 regions up, a 4th coming in

Two more regions instantiating...Playing with Terrain Textures and adding another region

 

Retexturing the terrain...

Almost done with RAW files and terrain textures

A Particle Butterfly Farm

Looking south over Shengri La Bliss

Sunrise over Bliss, Spirit, Dream, Muse, & Liberty

A wild rose patch on Shengri La Bliss with the ubiquitous butterflies...

Sunset over Bliss & Muse

“Beauty Lain Bare” SL Art Exhibit Opens in Shengri La Peace August 14

Beauty Lain Bare
Photography by Michelle Babii
Words by Edna St. Vincent Millay

On exhibit at The Small Gallery, Shengri La from August 14 – September 28

Artist Opening 7 PM SLT, Thursday August 14

Artist’s Statement: Of all the visual wonders in both Real Life and Second Life, I have always found great beauty in stark and simple images; scenes that are not complicated yet have just enough detail to evoke a strong feeling.  While I am looking at different scenes, I tend to gravitate to images that create feelings of loneliness and sadness, a certain quiet and pensive mood, and even to those that invite a bit of uneasiness.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, a famous American poet well known for her sonnets, had created quite a reputation as an outspoken, unconventional, austere, and even grim writer. In my mind, her stark emotional words seemed a match for the simple beauty I found in Silent. Pairing phrases by ESVM with each photograph seemed to be unfair to direct the viewer toward a particular story or mood rather than letting them come to their own conclusion. But then again, as we don’t respond the same way to visual cues, we may not interject the same emotion into the written word.

I understand the images will be a departure from the vividness, details, and color of Windlight but that is exactly my intention. A laying bare of beauty, if you will, devoid of the accoutrement offered to us by Photoshop and Windlight.  The only tweaking was to cause the sky to be a shade of white in order to enhance the black and white quality in some of the photos.  All photos were taken in the black and white sim called Silent. Any colored textures seen in the photos are what occur in the sim and are not post production additions.

Michelle Babii is a well-known and accomplished SL photographer, who has specialized in unretouched SL images.  She is also co-owner of the Manzanillo Artists’ Enclave.

Black Dress Technology Hires Justin Clark-Casey as Lead Developer

NYC, NY, August 5, 2008 — Fashion Research Institute, Inc. (FRI), announces the hiring of Justin Clark-Casey as lead developer for its Black Dress Technology subsidiary. Beginning September 9, he will be responsible for managing all aspects of technology and development for Black Dress Technology.

 

Clark-Casey was most recently a Software Engineer in Information Management at IBM UK. In that position, he was part of the team responsible for the development of the IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management Server 8.0 and WebSphere Product Center 5.3. He is a core developer for OpenSim, a virtual world platform which can be used for creating and deploying 3D virtual environments compatible with the Second LifeTM protocol. Black Dress Technology’s apparel industry PLM solution is distinct because the apparel designer performs her work in a fully integrated enterprise virtual world based on the OpenSim platform.

Clark-Casey is pursuing a Masters of Science degree in Software Engineering from Oxford University, and has a Bachelors of Arts in Economics and Econometrics from the University of Kent. He writes about OpenSim development and related issues at justincc.wordpress.com. He is based in Hampshire, England.

“As one of the top contributors to OpenSim, Justin brings a deep understanding of the OpenSim platform and its capabilities, and the skills to adapt it to the specific needs of Black Dress Technology and our customers,” said Shenlei Winkler, FRI’s CEO. “The fact that we ourselves operate in a virtual environment means we can have the best talents working on our projects – whether they’re on the East Coast of the U.S., the South Coast of England, or anywhere else.”

Black Dress Technology is developing an end-to-end enterprise solution for virtual-worlds-based product design for the apparel industry in conjunction with IBM, its parent company’s technology partner. Users will ultimately be able to enter a virtual world specifically developed for apparel and accessory designers, receive training on the systems, and take a design from concept to prototype – with every step short of actual manufacturing being done virtually.

Fashion Research Institute conducts research into technology-based initiatives and develops emerging technologies to sweepingly overhaul traditional fashion industry practices and methodologies. FRI’s mission is to reduce the carbon footprint and change the environmental impact of the industry in ways that are sustainable, replicable, respectful of the practitioners, and meaningful for all stakeholders. FRI maintains Shengri-La, a five-island complex in Second LifeTM, and a nine-island OpenSim complex. FRI is an IBM business partner, and has been working closely with top IBM architects and researchers over the last year to develop its virtual-worlds-based product design solution.

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