Linden Lab Announces An Indefinate "Pause" On AI Characters Starting Sept 1

 

Those who worry about AI bots in Second Life can relax soon, at least for the time being. 

 

A few days ago, Linden Lab announced they would soon "pause" both the creation and activity of AI characters. 

 

... we are announcing a pause in the Character Designer experiment. Starting Sept. 1, the Character Designer feature will be turned off and no longer available.  

 

 This pause gives us time to carefully evaluate everything we’ve learned and determine how best to evolve this technology in a way that aligns with the broader future of Second Life.

 

What this means is those who have created AI characters will no longer be able to access them, nor can any more created. The Lab would also say characters and their memories would not be saved.  

 

Linden Lab would state this was not the end of AI in Second Life, but "a thoughtful pause as we refine our strategy and continue exploring new opportunities for innovation."

 

 For more information, check out the Linden blog entry (here). There's also a thread in the Linden forums (here). 

 

Bixyl Shuftan

 

Microsoft Pulls Plug on Experiment In Artificial Inteligence Quickly Gone Bad

It's a theme from science fiction that happens again and again, engineers either set out to create a fully functional artificial intelligence, or they accidentally do. And it isn't long before it spirals out of control, concluding humans are a threat and begins acting against them. But could this really happen in real life? After an experimental AI was made accessible to the public, it attracted the attention of Internet trolls. Their actions turned the chatbot from a teenage personality to one spewing hateful remarks in less than a day.

Read more in Extra.

Eye On The Blog: Linden Lab Launches Fitted Mesh Project Viewer

It has been quite some time since Linden Lab introduced mesh graphics to Second Life. While they have been used to good effect in making realistic-looking and detailed items, unfortunately the clothes made with mesh sometimes fit avatars poorly. If someone wanted to wear such an outfit, they would have to "diet" by making the avatar conform to it's limited specifications. And to quite a number, this was a compromise to their virtual experience they felt they shouldn't have to make, "I came here to look how I want, not how something else wants me to look."

So a solution was sought. Qarl Fizz, the former Qarl Linden, soon developed a "Mesh deformer" which made outfits made with the graphics to conform to an avatar's shape. While others expressed interest, Linden Lab never did. When Qarl announced his departure from being involved with Second Life, he also mentioned no one with the Lab had bothered to comment or answer one of his emails about it.

About a month later, Linden Lab announced it's own solution to the mesh clothing problem in the official blog, "Making Mesh Garments Fit Better," saying they had found a different solution. Their Fitted Mesh Project Viewer added "collision bones" to avatars, which garments would be rigged to.

The Linden Lab development team has studied both approaches, and compared their effectiveness, maintainability, and performance. Neither approach completely eliminates the occasional need for an alpha clothing layer to prevent small parts of the avatar skin from appearing through garments, but both work quite well at resizing garments so that they fit the avatar and move naturally with it. While the collision bones method requires the creator to do some additional rigging, we have decided that because it leverages more of the existing avatar shape system it is likely to be the more maintainable solution and to perform better for a wider range of users.

At this moment, the viewer is still in it's experimental stage and "At this time, the new skeleton should be considered provisional and subject to change; we do not yet recommend selling or buying garments rigged to it. ... any change to the collision bones will likely break garments rigged before the change."

For the complete blog post, Click Here. Also, Inara Pey has written about the Mesh viewer, which you can read Here.

Bixyl Shuftan

Eye on the Blog: "Reaching into Second Life With Leap Motion"

Just after announcing it's purchase of Blocksworld and its release of dio, Linden Lab offered some news for those preferring to stick with Second Life. They had been working on a code for "Leap Motion," a controller that allows one to interact with one's computer using just hand gestures, for use in Second Life.

When our developers first saw the Leap Motion controller they couldn’t wait to get their hands on one. Thankfully, we were able to get a pre-production development kit and built demos to explore its capabilities in Second Life. The demos included tests of flight controls, object manipulation, and avatar gestures. 




 This work was strictly experimental, but it showed the power of Second Life as a platform for exploring gesture-based interactions with controllers like the Leap Motion, and we’re happy to be able to share the code with you as a starting point for your own explorations.

If you have a Leap Motion controller and would like to experiment with the Second Life Viewer, you can find the source code for these experiments at http://bitbucket.org/simon_linden/viewer-rabbit. The indra/newview/llleapmotioncontroller.cpp file contains most new functionality. The Viewer is built to work in several different modes. These modes can be used to control the avatar while flying, send data into Second Life for scripts to intercept, detect hand motions that trigger avatar gestures, or control the camera and avatar movement. To switch between these modes use the "LeapMotionTestMode" value in the Debug Settings, accessible from the Advanced menu.

To give our experiments a shot you will need get the source mentioned above and contact www.leapmotion.com to join their developer program and obtain the SDK. Currently only Windows Viewers are supported, but other platforms could be added by linking in the appropriate Leap Motion SDK.


There was a small thread on the official forums, where several residents expressed mixed opinions. A few liked it, others seemed to feel it was spending $70 for a buggy device. On the Second Life Universe forums, the posters seemed a little more interested about it. Inara Pey noted how due to a bug, one fired a gun sideways like an urban gangster. Hamlet Au thought it was too laggy to be of much use for building, but imagined some creative uses for it in adult areas with the device used for virtual spankings with just a flick of the wrist.

*Addition* Valkyrie Ice has a review of "Leap Motion"  on Aceler8or Magazine.

A Science Experiment in Second Life

Those joining the Science Center and Linden Research groups will occasionally get an invitation to join a science experiment. Funded by a university's department, the experiment is one way Second Life is having some real-life applications, as well as providing a few lindens to the volunteers for their time.

More on the experiment in People.