Second Life screenies

Aug 15, 2007 13:45

Was playing with Second Life a couple weeks ago, and got a new Luskwood avatar from one of the vending machines.

screens taken at the sony ericsson sim )

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3d graphics / anticholergenics nanakikun August 17 2007, 15:53:56 UTC
Thank you for your compliment^^ :D

Compared to 10 years ago, the on-the-fly 3d is amazing today.. ^^`
What I usually do is think about what things were like twenty years ago for giant factories, then go to what's realtime for today.

Twenty years ago, they bankrupted two entire corporations animating TRON and The Last Starfighter, and Super Nintendo approached the graphics of the latter in Star Fox, with their SuperFX chip, before the end of the millenium.

Then, seven years ago, they were using Pentium IIIs to render Final Fatnasy: The Spirits Within, and today you can run Oblivion, which gets pretty close, at DVD-ish resolutions at a solid 60 frames per second on a box that costs less than $900 (assuming a $300 CPU, a $300 graphics card, and cheap everything else).

Unfortunately for me, I need anticholergenics* in order to operate 3d virtual reality simulations for more than twenty or thirty minutes without getting mildly sick. (They're not very expensive, and the asthetic of needing drugs to succeed is an amusing one.) So, alas, I can't hold a strong interest in 3d games and places because of the continuous negative feedback I get from getting ill.

*i.e. Dramamine. Unfortunately, besides helping with motion sickness, anticholergenics have also been demonstrated to cause both high levels of drowsiness, and an inability to distinguish fantasy from reality in a moderate subset of those exposed, both of which could easily interfere with efficient coding in networked situations.

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Re: 3d graphics / anticholergenics jenkat August 20 2007, 20:43:47 UTC
I agree; compared to ten years ago, these graphics are truly amazing, which is what excites me about what's still ten years down the pike.

Now, this is a very interesting issue you bring up, about the physical disorientation that submersion in (or intense focus on) 3D environments can produce. It's also clear that some people are more and some less susceptible to it. I don't find it strange at all to hear of it happening, but I've seemed to be on the less susceptible side, myself.

However, that's still in a 3D framework with "relatively normal" physics, like in FFXI. The orientation is largely the "same" as real life.

In a framework like Second Life, where one's spatial orientation - and the physics that apply to 3d objects - can be quite unconventional, I can much more easily imagine these effects. And yes, even see myself getting vertigo/dizzy as a result.

I think it's a very interesting problem that will have to be faced as a common aspect of virtual interaction (and work) as it becomes more widespread.

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