Some new developments

There’ve been some new developments in SL lately which are worth mentioning:

  • IBM tested a transport of an avatar from the Second Life grid to their own grid, meaning it is now technically possible to teleport to an Opensim. Sounds quite good, but at the moment it’s just moving an ruthed Avatar, since assets are not shared at all between those and are unlikely to be ever shared at all. Otherwise expect a revolt of content builders in Second Life, but we’re getting closer to the Intergrid.
  • Second Life is growing bigger and bigger. This is of course good for the company and stabilizes their economic model. There’s been a shift from premium users to land sales. If you don’t really want to own land on the mainland (and who does that really…) has no need to get a premium account at all! Seems also that in world economy is now recovering slowly of the gambling ban. Well, the prices for many stuff are quite high now, higher than they used to be in about one year for example, looking good in Second Life becomes more and more expensive…

And also something funny I’ve found in another blog: "Entering chat range: Prokofy Neva." Quite a funny chat transcript about how to call things in Second Life and more…

A somewhat older article about IBM’s „Second Life“ business group

While stilll doing business with IBM (haha!) I’ve stumbled upon this somewhat older article about the formation of IBM’s Second Life business group. What the goals of IBM are, what they’re planning to do and have already done. Quite interesting read!

OpenJPEG got faster!

Now that’s something out of the IBM article, but worth an own entry: the open available JPEG-2000 library OpenJPEG got faster! This means you don’t need the proprietary libraries from Kakadu anymore to get a good open source client, if you’re living on the bleeding edge and this is making its way in the main tree of OpenJPEG after some time, I guess. Yeah!

IBM series on the Second Life client

The nice folks over at IBM Developerworks have started a series about Second Life. The first article of it is about how to compile your own client, the pitfalls and how to achieve the goal, since it’s not so trivial to do.

Quite worth a read, better than the wiki page over at Lindenlabs and I am looking forward to the next articles of this series!