Springfest 2015 Press Release

Here is the press release and poster for the upcoming Springfest 2015 event in Second Life. The event will open to the public on Friday 3rd April 2015 from 8am SLT through until 5th April. This year Springfest 2015 matches the futuristic theme for the 2015 RFL of SL season “The Future is Now”.

Check out the event schedule here. See below for more details!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MARCH 31, 2015

SPRINGFEST 2015

DATES: APRIL 3 TO 5, 2015

WEBSITE:https://tcrelayers.wordpress.com/springfest-2015-schedule/

LOCATION: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Sutton%20Place/145/108/21

Springfest 2015 will take place on April 3 to 5, 2015. Springfest 2015 has a space theme to match the futuristic theme of the 2015 Relay For Life of Second Life season “The Future is Now” theme. This event will feature over 20 Relay For Life of Second Life teams, who have joined together to provide three days of cancer fundraising in 4 space themed areas! Activities include live djs, performers, a space carnival, 7seas Fishing, Bumper Boats, and paintball!

Vending areas are also set up, with many items up for sale, raffle, and auction! 100% proceeds at Springfest will go to Relay For Life of Second Life, an official charity of the American Cancer Society!

A complete schedule of teams and events can be found at the following link: https://tcrelayers.wordpress.com/springfest-2015/

About Relay For Life of Second Life:

Relay For Life is the signature event of the American Cancer Society and has been active, and continually growing in Second Life for 10 years. In 2005, the first Relay For Life of Second Life

(RFL of SL) was attended by a few hundred avatars and raised almost $5,000 US dollars for the

American Cancer Society. As of July 2014 RFL Of SL ranks number 17th out of 5000 teams worldwide in donations received. We have brought in over 2 million US dollars to help with the fight against cancer. This year our Relay weekend will be held on July 17th and 18th.

About the American Cancer Society:

The American Cancer Society is a global grassroots force of nearly three million volunteers saving lives and fighting for every birthday threatened by every cancer in every community. As the largest voluntary health organization, the Society’s efforts have contributed to a 22 percent decline in cancer death rates in the US during the past two decades, and a 50 percent drop in smoking rates. Thanks in part to our progress nearly 14.5 million Americans who have had cancer and countless more who have avoided it will celebrate more birthdays this year.  We’re determined to finish the fight against cancer. As the nation’s largest private, not-for-profit

investor in cancer research, we’re finding cures and ensuring people facing cancer have the help they need and continuing the fight for access to quality health care, lifesaving screenings, clean air, and more. For more information, to get help, or to join the fight, visit cancer.org or call us anytime, day or night, at 1-800-227-2345.

For More Information:

https://tcrelayers.wordpress.com/springfest-2015-schedule/

www.relayforlifeofsecondlife.org

www.cancer.org/involved/participate/relayforlife/second-life

Please spread the word about Springfest 2015 and lets continue to fundraise for cancer awareness and research during 2015. 🙂

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BURN2 Burnal Equinox 2015: Balance opens today in Second Life

BURN2 Burnal Equinox 2015

BURN2 Burnal Equinox 2015: Balance opens today at 10am SLT  over at the BURN2 Burning Man region in Second Life. The weekend event runs until 10am SLT on Sunday 29th March 2015. There will be live DJ events, drumming, and live entertainment during this weekend.

• Burnal Equinox 2015 Events – Full events schedule and info
• Burnal Equinox 2015 Artist Builds – Visit the incredible builds for this event

There will be friendly and helpful greeters at the gates ready to help out and ensure that everyone has a nice welcoming experience. Let’s celebrate Balance!

Balance – Equinox is the time when the day and night are of equal length, it is also the start of both Spring and Autumn. In the virtual world we can mix all things together, so we can have bats flying down to sip the nectar from the new spring flowers in the daytime, or autumn leaves transforming into butterflies at night. As always our only limitation is our imagination.

Spread the word about BURN2 Burnal Equinox 2015: Balance and come over this weekend. 🙂

IW6 Then and Now Museum

There will be a special event happening at IW6 between 1:30pm to 3:30pm PDT on Friday 27th March 2015 over at the IW6 Then and Now Museum. Featuring Bardic Storytelling, poem tellings, brief stories and much more. This event will be moderated by the illustrious Bard Aoife Lorefield of the fabled Seanchai Library, which has just established its presence InWorldz at Sendalonde.

IW6 Then and Now Museum is a trip down memory lane where you can look at many historical pictures and info boards of InWorldz past and current community. Walk from station to station to discover the history of InWorldz.

InWorldz 6th Birthday starts today from 11:45am PDT

Happy 6th Birthday, InWorldz.

Today marks the start of InWorldz 6th birthday celebrations and to mark this special occasion there will be entertainment and festivities through until 2nd April 2015. The theme for InWorldz 6th birthday is Community – Then and Now. The tag line is With Community All Things are Possible!. There are over 40 sims to explore this year full of fantastic art, build designs, exhibit experiences and much more.

IW6 Welcome Info Area

InWorldz 6th Birthday Event Schedule 

The grand opening to InWorldz 6th Birthday starts at 11:45am PDT on Friday 27th March 2015 with birthday announcements from EC and a special water show, DJd by Astoria Luminos over at the Water Show Amphitheatre.

See the full events schedule here. 🙂

IW6 Water Show Amphitheatre

InWorldz 6th Birthday Sim Layout

Here is the sim layout for InWorldz 6th Birthday Celebrations.

IW6 Sim Layout

Spread the word, signup/log into the InWorldz grid and visit the 6th IW6 birthday sims. It’s time to celebrate 6 amazing years of InWorldz. 😀

Group Selfie in Second Life with Lindens and SL community

Group Selfie Time with Lindens and the SL community

This afternoon around 65 avatars attended a very special meetup with Lindens over at the lovely Meauxle Bureaux region. Many known Lindens came along to hang out with the community including Ebbe, Torley, Xiola, Dee, Oz, Shaman, Michael and many more.

Yay Group Photo!

Meauxle Bureaux looking amazing

I just like to point out that the SL community likes having Lindens inworld either at meetups or at events in Second Life. Apparently there will be more regular meetups in the weeks ahead and I would like to say thanks so much to all the Lindens that attended today. I thought the meetup went really well along with good discussion too.

Meauxle Bureaux – gathering inside to hang out

Check out my snapshots of the meetup here and feel free to comment. 🙂

Meet Lindens at Meauxle Bureaux today from 12.30pm to 1.30pm SLT

Today (25th March) there will be a get together with Lindens and Residents at Meauxle Bureaux starting at 12.30pm to 1.30pm SLT/PDT. Meauxle Bureaux is the home of the Linden Department of Public Works (LDPW).

Xiola Linden confirmed this get together (see above) on Twitter on Tuesday 24th March offering invitation for the Second Life community to meet the Lindens. It should be interesting and hopefully there will be a good attendance.

Meauxle Bureaux is the home of the Linden Department of Public Works, a program focused on improvements related to the experience of living in and visiting the Linden Mainland. This intricate build was lovingly crafted by resident experts for all to enjoy, so come see the ultimate in shared creative spaces!

VISIT HERE

More updates later, stay tuned. 🙂

Hover Height Improvements now available in the latest Second Life viewer update

Linden Lab announced today that the hover height improvements is now available in the latest Second Life viewer update. There is a clear explanation provided in the blog post about what the Hover Height issue is. This is good news that it’s now in the default Second Life viewer update and now everyone can enjoy this latest improvement.

One of the surprisingly difficult things to do in a virtual world is to make things come to rest in a natural-looking way. Keeping feet on the ground when standing and the right body parts on furniture seems obvious, but getting an avatar to “just touch” without either floating above or penetrating into the adjacent surface can be computationally quite expensive. To avoid some of that expense, Second Life has always used approximations, which rely on some simplifying assumptions about the avatar shape and size. Those assumptions are adjusted by a number of factors including several of your shape parameter choices, values included in attachments you are wearing, and active animations.

As we’ve all seen, sometimes these things combine to leave you floating above or sinking into the surface on which intuitively you should be resting. This is because the adjustments come from many sources and sometime interact in unexpected ways. Because they have not always been applied in exactly the same order, even if you wear the same set of attachments in the same setting you could sometimes get different results.

This Viewer, and some accompanying server changes, improve things in two ways: the order in which we make adjustments to your vertical position has been made more stable — combining the same set of attachments and animations should now always produce the same vertical offset: even if it’s not perfect, it will at least be predictable. Because it can’t always be perfect, we’ve also introduced a new final adjustment that is directly under your control: a new avatar right-click selection allows you to tweak your vertical position. This final adjustment is shared with everyone around you so that they too will see you correctly, and is saved locally by your viewer so that it persists between sessions. This new feature was inspired by a proposal from the Firestorm viewer team, and they’ve been helping with testing it.

Firestorm Mobile is now Live on SL GO

Today OnLive has announced that Firestorm Mobile is now on SL Go and due to “overwhelming demand from our community of SL Go users, we are making the Firestorm Viewer available for mobile devices including Android and iOS”. Yay! 🙂

This is very exciting news for both the SL Go community and for anyone that uses the Firestorm Viewer to access Second Life. “Our studies have shown that the SL Go community prefers the Firestorm Viewer, and now they can enjoy the same rich experience on their mobile devices.”

Check out the full announcement below via OnLive official blog…

OnLive is thrilled to announce today that due to overwhelming demand from our community of SL Go users, we are making the Firestorm Viewer available for mobile devices including Android and iOS. Due to current technical limitations, we are only able to offer one viewer for mobile devices. Our studies have shown that the SL Go community prefers the Firestorm Viewer, and now they can enjoy the same rich experience on their mobile devices.

We will still offer our users a choice of either Linden Lab’s Second Life Viewer the Firestorm Viewer on PC and Mac to supercharge older computers and laptops.  We hope to bring this same choice to mobile devices soon, but still have some technical hurdles to overcome.

Users with existing SL Go accounts do not need to do anything!  Just pick up your iPad or Android tablet and login with your SL Go account.  Firestorm will appear.

For new users, we have 2 convenient ways to sign up for SL Go.

1. For a 7 Day Free Trial visit: https://games.onlive.com/landing/slgo and sign up.  Credit card or PayPal required.
2. To pay “in-world” visit our SL Go Island to sign up and pay in L$.  No name and no credit card are required.

 Copy and paste into your Second Life navigation bar: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Sunny%20Dream/230/147/22

We’re grateful for all the feedback from our SL Go community, helping us continually improve the SL Go experience for all.

-Dennis Harper-

Sr. Product Manager, SL Go

What do you think about this announcement ? Share your views in comments below. 🙂

Kitely removing support for Facebook Groups as access controls for worlds

Ilan Tochner who is the CEO of the Kitely grid announced on 20th March via the Kitely Forums and the Kitely blog that support for Facebook Groups as access controls for worlds will be removed as of Friday 27th March 2015.

It seems like Facebook has decided to stop allowing external programs to get the list of groups that a user belongs. Kitely will be removing this feature and support for it later this week. For more details see below.

Via the Kitely Forums thread…

We’ll be removing support for Facebook Groups as access controls for worlds on March 27. If you’re currently using this feature then make sure to change your world access controls before this date.

Via the Kitely blog post…

Currently, World Managers can choose to restrict access to their worlds so only people who belong to certain Facebook Groups can visit it. Unfortunately, Facebook has decided to stop allowing external programs to get the list of groups that a user belongs to. Therefore, we are forced to remove this feature from Kitely. This will happen on March 27, 2015.

If you are currently using Facebook Groups for access control then you should switch to a different method of restricting access to your world: e.g., using OpenSim groups. Otherwise, once we’ve updated the system your world may become accessible to more people than you had intended.

VWBPE 2015: the closing ceremony, my review and updates on VWBPE 2016

On Saturday 21st March 2015 marked the end to this year’s amazing 8th annual VWBPE conference and wow hasn’t it been great this year. If you missed the VWBPE closing ceremony then here is recorded video below. See the recorded videos here for keynote speeches and presentations here.

Congrats to Gentle Heron for winning the 2015 Thinkerer Award. Wooot! 🙂

My Review of VWBPE 2015

I would like to say a huge thank you to all the organisers of VWBPE for making it another successful event and to all the speakers for making this year the most interesting one yet. Thanks to the broadcast team for bringing the live coverage of the VWBPE 2015 conference from start to end.

For me the main highlight of VWBPE 2015 was Ebbe Linden opening keynotes speech on Wednesday 18th March because it was very helpful to know the latest updates on education, Second Life and the next generation platform. Thanks so much Ebbe for attending and hopefully Ebbe will be able to make next year’s 9th annual conference in March 2016.

This year over 75 volunteers helped to make VWBPE 2015 a huge successful and again thanks so much for helping. There was a huge attendance this year throughout and I’ll look forward to hearing more about the VWBPE 2015 stats.

I’m already looking forward to VWBPE 2016 and it’s going to be exciting to hear more updates on virtual worlds. Until then the VWBPE 2015 conference will be one my favourites so far. 🙂

VWBPE 2015 Post Conference Feedback Survey

This survey will help to improve the conference for VWBPE 2016 which will be the 9th annual VWBPE conference in Second Life. You can fill out the feedback survey here.

VWBPE 2015 Tours

Check out the VWBPE calendar for upcoming virtual tours which you don’t want to miss. It can be found under the Categories tab – Virtual Tours.

VWBPE 2016

VWBPE 2016 will be held from 9th to 12th March 2016. This will be the 9th annual VWBPE conference and the theme will be Horizons.