Second Life
The biggest upgrade to Second Life since 2003 occurred yesterday… the release of the Viewer 2 beta. I would highly recommend checking it out; it can be installed alongside the main Second Life viewer, v1.23. There hasn’t been a total user interface overhaul since v1.2 (under a separate numbering system) was released in 2003, so this is pretty huge news for virtual world enthusiasts.
Of most interest to educators, I believe, will be the rich media support. You can now run Flash (and many other media formats, not just Quicktime) on any prim surface in Second Life, so slide show services like http://www.scribblar.com/ will run without any cobbling. All Youtube (and Flash) videos are now directly displayable without mucking about with third-party web sites. See the Linden Lab overview of the new interface here.
In my opinion – and in playing around with it after the PANMA event last night – the new interface is much more intuitive for the new user. As a builder / content creator, I’ll hold my opinion until I get to use it, but for the 99% of users out there who aren’t hard-core content creators, this is clearly a pretty major win with a move to a more browser-based style of interface.
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I have been in SL for more than 2 years now and I do not see that this new UI is a win, it is much too prominent for a UI for a 3D world.
What use is it if it is very intuitive if it eats up between 20 and 40 % of the visible screen area? Try it on a 15 inch laptop or even a netbook and you will find out that the 3D world is reduced to some kind of animated wallpaper in the background of all these big big sidebar and messaging windows.
I absolutely do not see the ‘much more immersive’ Experience that was promised by LL as the main aspect od Sl, teh 3D world is reduced to a side effect of a social networking browser.
The new functions like alpha masking, shared media ( how much bandwidth will this take away) and the tattoo layer are nice, but what use is it, if everything becomes more complicated just to have a new, fresh look?
Example: The camera controls, in the older versions 1.x had one small box with rotation and camera movement in it, now i have a much bigger box and need to switch between rotation and camera movement, making it much more difficult to change the cam position.
There are many many more examples of such design improvements that were made at the expense of the useability.
I work in world and i need to have many chat windows open, as well as my Friends list and the inventory.
Additionally I usually have 3 to 4 HUD attachments on my screen.
Setting Viewer 2.0 up like this leaves absolutely nothing of the world view on my 19 inch monitor, I am sure the new GUI was designed by people with next to none in world experience who work on a 30 inch display and have never heard of something like HUD attachments.
My Opinion: The technical changes that were made with Viewer 2.0 are great, the GUI changes are terrible and make the viewer unuseable for anone who is not a newbie and LL should offer to possibility to change Viewer2.0 to a Viewer 1.x like GUI, like we all know it from Windows operating Sytems, that you can still set up to look like windows XP without all this ‘new functionality’ bling.
I am an Emerald Viewer evangelist and a big fan of open source in general. This being said, I also love beta testing every new viewer that comes out. This is a huge leap forward for many of us in SL. I love the new interface, I think it’s smart and sexy. I can not wait till this style of layout gets thrown into the source code available in open source.
I hear that the longer you are in SL the less you like this viewer. I don’t buy that, the long time users I know, seem very happy with this upgrade. I hope folks will take the time to dig deep into all Viewer 2 can do, and then go nuts with the new features. It’s going to be a lot of fun seeing what creators do with shared media.
Till next time, may all your days be filled with magic
Tuna
Honestly Both Emerald and 2.0 viewers have some problem or the other and everyone has problems with both of them, I recommend checking out the viewers on inflife.net They are much more stable and have lot of features.
Cheers