Virtual Helping Hands are having a fundraising benefit at Wheelies for continued development of Max the Virtual Guidedog.

I first blogged about the scripted guide dog last August. Since that time, the VHH team has made amazing progress! They’re playing a video at Wheelies of their recent RL presentation about Max, and it’s great to see how many technical obstacles they’ve overcome.

VHH are now trying to raise funds to purchase some needed development software so they can continue enhancing Max Voice, a cross-platform application providing text-to-speech for SL chat, as well as other assorted helpful functionality. The development software costs $550 — but the price is expected to go up drastically in mid-April, so they need to purchase it soon!

When I visited them earlier today, VHH had raised $100 of the needed $550. The benefit runs until midnight PST tonight (March 29).

You can help by donating L$ in SL at Wheelies or via Paypal at VirtualHelpingHands.org. Any amount helps.

It has been an intense two and a half months since we first announced the Imprudence project. There has been laughter, there has been joy, there has been boredom and frustration, stress and near burn-out, and a medley of other emotions thrown in there as well.

But today it’s all worth it, because today the first release candidate of the Imprudence Viewer is ready!

Read the rest for more information, plus sexy download links!

From the Imprudence Blog:

Imprudence is (or rather, will be) a major fork of the open source Second Life Viewer. Our aim is to greatly improve the usability of the Viewer through community involvement, thoughtful design, modern development methods, and a pro-change atmosphere.

Why are we doing this? Because we, the Second Life Residents, need a better Viewer, and Linden Lab isn’t getting it done — not fast enough, anyway.

I’m sure they’re trying. They have made some modest improvement. But they are faced with intractable obstacles that block them from making real progress: a lack of resources, an overloaded QA process, and a large established user base who are, on the whole, sullenly content with the way things are — and tend to resist any change.

Those are tough problems, and I don’t foresee Linden Lab being able to get past them any time soon. Rather than continue to push against these obstacles with little to show for it, I’ve decided to carve another path. A community project has its own obstacles, but they are obstacles that we can overcome. They are obstacles we can act against for ourselves, instead of sitting on our hands waiting for someone else to act for us.

Go on and read the full post and our manifesto.

I have high hopes for this project. It has been a long time coming, and there are a lot of people dissatisfied with the current viewer. If you’re one of them, get involved in the project and help us make it better!

My design proposes:

• Reworking the bottom toolbar to be collapsible and customizable, and to feature chat, IM, voice, and friends list more prominently.
• Reorganizing the main menus to be less intimidating and more logically-grouped.
• Several enhancements to the Inventory floater:
  • “Favorites” and “Worn” item tabs.
  • Quick filter selection box to easily filter items by type.
  • Various enhancements to the right click menu.

The design document is available online, with purty pictures for your enjoyment.

Feedback and critique about the design are welcome!

Thankfully, he said that further reading had improved his impression, and I explained to him that the reason many of my posts are critical of LL, is because the things that get me riled up enough to write about are often things LL has done which I strongly disagree with. So, my blog only reflects the extremes; the other stuff doesn’t get blogged.

In an interesting and related occurance, my friend Goldie Katsu tweeted a link to an article by Louis Gray, The Five Stages of Early Adopter Behavior. (You might want to go read it now, or at least skim the bold headings.)

Gray’s description doesn’t fit me well at all, I think. I never did any promotion to outsiders. I never built up a “following” (I don’t have the personality to be a cult leader). While I’ve had numerous ideas on how to improve things, I only really interacted with the Lindens after the open source client was released and the JIRA set up. All in all, I’m not an attention whore like Gray describes. I just love Second Life with a passion.

Nevertheless, I paused when reading about the fourth stage, “Sense of Entitlement, Nitpicking and Reduced Use”. Reduced use certainly rings a bell. But do I feel entitled, feeling that SL must be the way I say it should be? Is my complaining just the sign of a disgruntled early adopter who feels neglected?

Well, maybe, but I don’t think so. The stuff I criticise tends to fall in a specific category: bad (or at least controversial) policy decisions by LL.

Service outages and such I can deal with. The Grid is a friggin’ huge, complex system, and the Grid Monkeys (an affectionate term) who bang on it, and the Code Monkeys who write it, are but mere mortals. It’s gotta be a tough job, and shit happens.

I have far less forgiveness of deliberate policy moves which, in my opinion, are harmful to Second Life. I may be a bit disgruntled, but only because I perceive Second Life as being sullied by unwise decisions by the government, LL. What I feel is the same thing that one feels while watching her country decay under incompetent, corrupt, or oppressive rule.

I’m not an early adopter desperate for attention. I’m not a pessimist who claims at every turn of events that the world is ending. I’m a patriot, and Second Life is my country, my home and native land. [Update: See my comment below about what I mean by "patriot"]

I’m loyal to it because it’s the best damn idea I’ve seen in a long time, and damned if I’m going to hold my tongue while it’s strengths are cut out one by one in the name of political correctness and corporate relations.

So you see, my loyalty lies with Second Life, not with Linden Lab. Where I perceive the actions of Linden Lab to be in conflict with the best interests of Second Life, I side with Second Life.

At first, I was excited. We (bloggers, whether “strikers” or not) managed to evoke a response from Linden Lab. And a seemingly sympathetic response, at that. It was a well-spun post, I’ll admit. I was suckered in for a while. I so very much wanted to believe that everything was all good now.

But it’s not. Linden Lab has now confirmed that they are waving the banhammer threateningly at anyone who doesn’t comply. Their assurance that they will issue warnings first, reads like a sherrif from an old cowboy movie, brandishing his gun and saying, “Come along quietly, now. I don’t wanna have to shoot you, but I will if it comes to that.”

Linden Lab has also said, in plain terms, that they will use the Terms of Service as a tool to enforce compliance both inworld and offworld:

The Terms of Service are the conditions under which Linden Lab offers the Second Life services. One of those conditions is adherence to our trademark policy, meaning that any use of our trademarks�both inworld and outside of Second Life�must comply with our policy. (emphasis mine)

Clearly, this is a gun aimed squarely at the Residents, since the Terms of Service doesn’t apply to anyone except Second Life users.

And lest there be any confusion, this isn’t something that Linden Lab had to do to protect its trademark. This policy reaches beyond all logic, and beyond the requirements of U.S. trademark law. (As always, remember that IANAAL — I am not an anal-retentive lawyer. I’m just a concerned Resident with two ears and a brain between them.)

Firstly, non-commercial use of a trademark (e.g. on a fansite such as this one) is not considered infringement under United States Code, Section 15 (a.k.a. the Lanham Act) which spells out U.S. trademark law as we know it. The Lanham act also explicitly makes an exception for “All forms of news reporting and news commentary” regarding the thing the trademark refers to; that’s why newspapers don’t have to ask permission every time they print the words “Microsoft” or “Second Life”. Whether blogs qualify as a “form of news commentary” is not legally well-defined yet, but I think there’s a strong case to be made that many blogs do, depending on what’s posted. (This post, for example, is clearly news commentary: I’m commenting on the news of Linden Lab’s policy clarification.)

For the curious, I’ll excerpt the relevant text of the Lanham act:

The following shall not be actionable under this section:

(A) Fair use of a famous mark by another person in comparative commercial advertising or promotion to identify the competing goods or services of the owner of the famous mark.
(B) Noncommercial use of a mark.
(C) All forms of news reporting and news commentary.

Secondly, the risk of “genericide” from bloggers referring to Second Life by name is patent nonsense: not only does it fail to dilute their trademark, it actively strengthens their trademark by establishing and reinforcing the connection between the name “Second Life” and the services offered by Linden Lab. This non-dilution is recognized under the doctrine of “nominative fair use,” which has received significant support from judges in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the time since it was first applied in 1992.

The deciding factors for determining whether something is nominative fair use are as follows (excerpted from this PDF by Chad J. Doellinger; and also spelled out on Wikipedia for your satisfaction):

(1) the product or service in question must be one not readily identifiable without use of the trademark;
(2) only so much of the mark or marks may be used as is reasonably necessary to identify the product or service; and
(3) the defendant must do nothing that would, in conjunction with the mark, suggest sponsorship or endorsement by the trademark holder

(And mind you, this is for commercial use of someone else’s trademark. Noncommercial use is already in the clear under the Lanham act, and doubly in the clear if it passes these tests.)

You’ll notice that I’ve said “Second Life” quite a few times in this blog post. Am I liable for infringing and/or diluting Linden Lab’s trademark? Let’s check.

1. Since I cannot readily identify the Second Life service or world without using the trademark “Second Life”, the first test is passed.
2. Since I’m not going beyond the bare mininum, e.g. using the eye-in-hand logo or the font used in the Second Life trademark, the second test is passed.
3. And since I’m not implying sponsorship or endorsement by Linden Lab (and in fact, I’m going to extra measures to expressly disavow it), the third test is passed.

I can therefore be quite confident that a judge would find this to be nominative fair use, and thus neither infringing nor diluting the trademark. Add to that the fact that this blog is noncommercial, and that it also might qualify as a form of news commentary, and I’m in the clear under the Lanham Act, too. In other words, Linden Lab has no legal basis to object to my use of the words “Second Life” throughout this post.

But as I mentioned above, Linden Lab’s legal department has decided to reach beyond the law, and add further constraints under the terms of service; they have decided to be bastards above and beyond the call of duty. Noncommercial use, nominative fair use, news commentary use… they don’t care about the law, they just want you to obey their nonsensical, self-destructive whims.

Well, I’m going to continue to talk about Second Life and Linden Lab. And I’m going to call them by their names. And I’m going to continue to do all the things that I and other Residents did to give life to Second Life and get Linden Lab where they are today.

Linden Lab can go ahead and smack me with the banhammer and send me as many baseless Cease & Desist letters as they want. The moment they do, I’ll willingly stop talking about Second Life, contributing to Second Life, or logging in to Second Life, because at that moment I would know that Linden Lab had fully deluded itself into believing Second Life can exist without a community.

Wowzers, Squidograms are selling like hotcakes! I guess people must like the slimy personal touch that comes with expressing your love via cephalopod courier! And really, who can blame them for that?

Anyway, in response to the fantastic demand for squiddy action (see, I knew I wasn’t the only one!), and to save you guys from Repetitive Stress Injury in your mouse-clicking finger, I’ve set out Squidogram Multipacks! Now you can buy 5 or 10 Squidograms in one shot!

But remember, these loverly Kissing Squidograms are only available through today! (Actually until whenever I wake up tomorrow morning/afternoon.)

So tell that special someone how much they excite your neural fibers and make your chromatophores quiver and dilate with glee!

I’m not totally convinced. Photographs, after all, are created by exposed light hitting a film or data strip. That doesn’t happen in Second Life. And while I think it’s fair to say that an image which is captured “raw” from SL is very similar to a real world photograph (I discuss that here), it’s also possible to subjectively manipulate the world’s appearance in a way that’s totally different. (When an RL photographer needs more light, he can’t just move the sun where he wants it.)

What’s more, many SL images are drastically altered in programs like Photoshop. A lot of real world artists use photographs as their medium, staging them in fictional narrative scenes, say, or even painting on top the actual photo, and because of that very process, they’re not called photographers– they’re called artists.

I consider Hamlet’s view here to be somewhat narrow.

There is no significant difference in the amount of scene-manipulation in RL photographs versus SL photographs. RL photographers may not be able to move the sun on a whim, but they can and do carefully schedule the time of day of their shoots, and use bounce cards and/or studio lights to manipulate the lighting of the scene. You can bet that they’d move the sun if they could. (And I bet some SL photographers would die for the ability to have light bounce off cards in SL — both realities have their challenges.)

Nor is the amount of post-processing (Photoshopping) significantly different between RL and SL photographs. We’ve seen the Dove Evolution film that demonstrates how much manipulation goes on before, during, and after a RL photo shoot.

Both RL photographs and SL photographs run the gamut from casual snapshots (“This is us having a good time at Jack’s bachelor party”), to careful attempts at capturing reality (“Behold the natural beauty of a majestic waterfall”), to highly manipulated digital imagery (“I cloned in the crowd of a thousand cheering fans later”), to strange and beautiful photo-collage and mixed-media imagery (“I think you’ve been sniffing too much rubber cement, Marcel”), and so much more.

The compositional skills — framing, balance, depth, contrast, and so on — apply equally to RL and SL photography.

So we’re left with one distinction. RL photographs are created by photons bouncing off physical objects, passing through the lens and aperture of a physical camera, and stimulating photosensitive materials. SL photographs are created by careful mathematical projection of virtual objects, rendered as polygons onto a framebuffer in a computer. In both cases, the result is a 3D scene being projected onto a 2D image plane.

It’s just that one of the scenes exists inside the computer.

I’ll leave off with one last thought: Photography has long been about capturing the vision of the artist. That’s not always the same as an accurate representation of the physical world.

I will pay L$ or USD$ for a mesh capture of my avatar. I have the following modest requirements:

1. The final result must be in Wavefront OBJ format.
2. Will pay extra if it has UV texture coordinates intact.
3. Attachments and skin textures not needed.

If you can do this for me, please leave a comment, IM in-world (Jacek Antonelli), or email (jacek.antonelli ~ gmail.com).

[Update: The ever-cutetastic Patchouli Woollahra very kindly OGLE'd my avatar. Thanks, Patchi!]

Back in May of this year, I posted about my work on a script to export animations from Blender to SL-compatible BVH files. Well, as you can see from the comparison screenshot below (click to enlarge), I’ve made a lot of progress since then.

(Mind you there’s some difference between the camera angle in the two shots, and possibly some slight mis-rotation of the hands from SL’s rather zealous animation ‘optimizing’ algorithm.)

Some difficulties I’ve encountered:

• As mentioned in my earlier post, the axes of rotation for the bones in the SL skeleton differ from the Blender skeleton. That is, in the Blender skeleton, the Y axis always points along the length of the bone. In the SL skeleton, it varies between bones.
• Furthermore, the order of rotation for the Euler angles varies from bone to bone in the SL skeleton. I have had to employ code to convert from one order to another to correct for this. It seems to have done the trick.
• SL has a bug which duplicates the first frame of an animation. (VWR-3783)
• Using IK on the Blender skeleton, especially in the legs, tends to cause jittering in the SL skeleton — that is, wobbly knees and ankles. My best guess at the moment as to the cause of this is SL’s insistence on converting all joint angles to integer degrees. Subtlety, be banished!
• Certain rotations result in a significant difference in the appearance of the animation. I’m pinning the blame for this one on Gimbal Lock. That’s right, I’m looking at you, Mr. Lock.

Nevertheless, my animation exporter script is a very significant step up from Qavimator: smooth blending between keyframes (controlled by my most-beloved Bézier curves); custom rigs for different types of animations; inverse kinematics to provide that extra stick in the feet; layering and blending single actions to create longer animations; and all the rest.

And as it happens, I’m currently in a trial period as animator for one ChronoForge 4D, a manufacturer and purveyor of sharp, pointy things with which to poke and jab at other similarly-minded avatars. So next time you stab someone through the heart and then kick their body to the ground (in SL), you might say a little thanks to the kindly, peace-loving artist who made it all possible.