WindLight and the wedding of Destroy Television and Walker Spaight.

So the new lighting system has arrived and it looks great. Look at this photo or click on the next one to start a little video of mine which I did at the wedding of Walker and Destroy, what a nice couple 🙂

Click here to play the video
(this is from my german blog over at http://mrtopf.de, btw)

More information about the new viewer and lighting system is on the official Linden Lab blog and you can download it here.

Streaming the Cisco press conference live from Second Life at 10:30am SLT

If you want to watch the Cisco press conference from Interop 2007 live then you have 2 options:

1. Go to Cisco Island 4 in Second Life and attend the stream in-world
2. Go to this URL on ustream.tv and watch my rebroadcast from within Second Life

1 hour later there will also be an SL-only press conference, probably also streamed by me.

A tool for creating Sculpted Prims easily

If regarding Sculpted Prims all you need is to create objects with some sort of Lathe tool (like in 3DS Max), then Rokuro might be for you. It was created by Yuzuru Jewell and takes some profile of an object in order to create the full object by rotating that profile by 360 degrees. You can even define if you want a smooth objects or 3, 4, 5 or 6 edges.

Here’s an example screenshot of the editor:

And here is the resulting texture it creates when doing a 5 edge object:

And the resulting prims (one was done as smooth object, one as 5-edge):

Get this cool tool here.

[via Eggy Lippmann]

Technorati Tags: secondlife, virtualworlds, tool, tools, lathe, modeling, sculpted prims, sculpties, rokuro, taotakashi

Our sim got delivered and you are invited to party!

COM.lounge now has it’s first sim after doing business mostly on separate sims for clients. So come and join us tomorrow, Saturday at 11am SLT at the sim Stadt.

The sim right now is more or less temporary and after that it will become our home for COM.lounge and some of our clients.

Hope to see you tomorrow!

Technorati Tags: comlounge, stadt, sim, party, taotakashi

Streaming live from the Text 100 Island where people from the Social Media Club Boston are hanging out

Unfortunately no stream from Boston but at least a live video stream from Second Life, so click here! So tune in if you want, more streaming comes soon!

some details about the age verification

So yesterday there was the office hour meeting with Robin and Daniel Linden where the topic of course was age verification.
The pointed out again that this verification process is nothing they need to do for Linden Lab but the purpose is only for the residents who maybe need to be sure about the people they interact with (esp. of course in the adult content genre).

Some points from that discussion I simply want to list:

• Aristotle and Integrity are different divisions of a single company, but they are seperate. Aristotle has no access to data managed by Integrity. No one has access to the data Linden Lab send to Integrity
• The data is never saved (as I understand it also not by Integrity). It’s matched only. Nothing can be sold, shared, or even viewed. This is “enshrined” in their contract, as Daniel put it.
• Linden Lab is interested in seeing graphic and explicit content flagged…not ‘nude’ skins and the like. Ultimately, the community will decided what should and should not be flagged
• Linden Lab examined many vendors and would like to provide more over time but Integrity offers the most flexible, fast, and reliable system and the only real global solution
• Integrity has been doing this kind of work for major comanies for a long time, and everyone who has worked with them has raved
• Examples of clients are most major movie studios, the largest online sex toy retailer and Budweiser
• For verification it is in the international area probably generally National ID, driver’s license, or passport in place of the last four SSN digits. US-wise it’s the last 4 digits of the social security number.
• 157 countries are supported
• flagging will be per parcel, not per sim
• Gender verification might also be possible but of course only voluntarily where people really want to state it. This is possible but not planned yet.
• all verification is opt-in and voluntary.
• it will be a one-time fee to do verification, for premium accounts it will be less or equal L$10,-, for basic accounts there is no price point yet defined.
• about how content is flagged: “The community will express what it feels to be adult content both by using the abuse reporter and by simply speaking with their neighbors” (Daniel Linden)

So that basically have been the points discussed. For me one question remains though: What is the legal impact if I’d flag a parcel as adult and some minor gamed the system (which of course still is possible) and buys some adult content from me. Then her mother sues me. How safe am I?

Another question which just comes to mind is this: If a parcel is flagged as adult people of course still can cam in. They might even be able to use some vendor from the outside. I wonder if this is made impossible then (camming would be difficult of course).

Technorati Tags: secondlife, virtualworld, age verification, aristotle, integrity, lindenlab, minor, protection, taotakashi

Sculpted Prims for Blender

The new beta is just out of the door, featuring both voice and sculpted prims, the first cool thing is around.

The problem with sculpted prims right now was of course that no conversion script for the open source 3d program Blender was given from the start. But Second Life resident Amanda Levitsky just did it and created a tutorial on how to make sculpted prims with Blender. You can find it here.

I certainly looks like something for which you need a bit of understanding of Blender and UV textures and the like but from what I see there I guess the first steps are merely setup and then you can go from there and form your object. Of course one needs to learn about Blender which is surely more complex than the Second Life Building tools, but a lot of tutorials are around.

Great news and I love it when I see things like this happen where a resident just jumps in and creates the missing pieces. Another reason to opening up whatever platform is out there.

Technorati Tags: secondlife, sculpted prims, lindenlab, blender, 3d, virtualworlds

Finally: flickr is getting rid of NIPSA!

Ok, I am a little late to this party as this happened actually exactly on my birthday already but nevertheless I want to report on it as I was one of the opponents of the whole NIPSA thing (see here and for the rest here, Wired article with a statement from myself and Spin/Eric here).

What was promised after the Wired article on it (thanks Kathleen 🙂 has now happened. flickr not actually removed the NIPSA mechanism from accounts but instead introduced a filtering system where you can mark your photos as screenshots yourself (for me SL photos are still photos but ok..) and then you can request that the NIPSA tag is removed.

What is NIPSA?

For those late to the party here a little explanation: Formerly only real RL photos (very blurry definition actually regarding Photoshop etc.) were supposed to be on flickr. Screenshots and other things (like of course nudity) were not allowed or at least blocked from public searches. And this is what NIPSA stands for: Not in Public Search Area. As Second Life photos were seen as screenshots your whole account would be then marked as being NIPSA and thus won’t show up in e.g. public RSS feeds such as the Second Life Group photo pool (that’s why on the Second Life blog where there is a flickr plugin showing the contents of that pool never showed all photos).

With this mechanism of course also tagging your photos made not that much sense as they were not searchable anyway.

What should you do?

But with the new system this is no problem anymore. Everybody now can decide what sort of results they want to get back from a flickr search. They just need to define it here. On the account page they also show the status now. So if it says NIPSA there you might want to make sure that all your photos are flagged accordingly (you can set the safety level and the content type either on each photo or in the Organizr for a batch) and request a review of your account here.

Now this is great news, so thank you flickr and it might finally be time for me to get a pro account for Tao Takashi, too.

BTW, you can find the flickr blog post here for the full scoop.

Technorati Tags: flickr, NIPSA, secondlife, screenshots, fliters, taotakashi

Tao Takashi now podcasts in german

So if you are german speaking and interested in New/Social Media, Web2.0, Second Life and maybe Plone/Python as well as some music, then you maybe want to check out my new german podcast.

If you are more into reading, I again would recommend my german blog at http://mrtopf.de. Maybe I will even add a german video blog at some point (should maybe quite my job to have time for all of that 😉

Technorati Tags: podcast, german, web2.0, newmedia, mrtopf, taotakashi, topfshow, topfcast