Earlier this week, Linden Lab announced that they were following up their testing of Project Bento, an upgrade in avatar design that would allow for much more detailed avatars with features such as moveable fingers, from being limited to the Aditi testing grid to the main Grid. But this will not be a full release. Residents with regular viewers may see avatars designed with Bento as odd-looking, glitched, or possibly crashing at the sight of them.
This release will be available on
Agni, making it available to a much wider audience. However, this is
still a limited release, until we’re confident enough that this could be
a release candidate and ultimately be part of the release Viewer.
Creators, recipients, and anyone wishing to view the new content must be
running the latest Bento Project Viewer. If you encounter Bento avatars and are not using the Bento Project Viewer, you may see some strangely behaving avatar animations and meshes. If you're using a very old (i.e. no longer supported) viewer, encountering Bento content may even cause a crash; updating to the latest Bento Project Viewer will prevent this problem.
(Click here if the video fails to play)
In this Linden Lab video narrated by Torley Linden, some more examples of what Project Bento can do are shown. But as the scene in 1:27 shows, there are likely some residents whom will only be thinking of using Bento to extend their middle fingers to the virtual world.
The Linden blog entry can be read in full here.
