We are very pleased to announce that the "Rezzable Visions" art series will get rolling again, this time on the Rezzable Private Grid (alpha2). The first artist that will present a brand new creation is Bryn Oh.  Bryn Oh's work is a fantastic example of the kind of art installations we want to put out on our opensim grid. Bryn uses the new medium that is the metaverse to tell stories and engage the visitors into the action and drama. We had an incredible piece from Bryn on Black Swan when it was up in SL. We know that this new work will again push the limits of prims and find a magically way to pull us into the mix. Stay tuned on when "Crosshatch" will be open to the public.

Intrigue-Immersion-interaction--mystery-melancholic at times.... her installations produce awe , deep thought and amazement!

Bryn Oh is a sort of second life "Ghost artist" for a Toronto Oil painter.  She is a Metaverse artist who is meant to exist only online.  She is a concept, a pixel character who inhabits the virtual world of Second Life.  To one day exhibit amongst first life artists in a formal gallery environment as a digital character is the eventual goal.

We have been hammering away quite hard on OpenSim in the last while. I posted some notes about Top 10 Issues we see as of today over on the Rezzable.net blog. I probably missed something really obvious, irritating, but hey, 10 is a random number. Short summary: "In general OpenSim has come quite a long way in the last year. There is still quite some road in front to get it to be a sort of 3D Web Server like Apache. It is very complex--maybe too much so, but nonetheless it works. And it works a lot better than it did a year ago."

Also check my older post from last time we updated on OpenSim.

We have been working away to get perms implemented in the release version of BuilderBot. It seems to work ok, but there are some session issues that are a bit tweaky. In fact we sent a copy of the pre-release application over to Jack at LL last night. We would like to be among the first to have registered status for SL. There have been a lot of tech issues getting this to run smoothly -- makes us wonder if LL isn't messing around with something somewhere to block 3rd party applications completely. 

LL's latest threat to kill accounts that use "unapproved" viewers has also stopped our testing on the SL grid for BuilderBot. No one, rightly so, wants to give LL a reason to delete their account (especially if they can copy their own stuff off the grid)

Help us spread the love of our OpenSim-based grid! We are looking for a highly energized and dynamic person to help us get more activity going on our Rezzable Grid. It is an incredible chance for someone to dig deep into this new technology and engage with artists, builders and virtual world enthusiasts from all over the planet in order to get busy and get into the next phase of the 3D Web/Metaverse.

What exactly do we need help with?:

RightAsRain Rimbaud, aka Jon Himoff, CEO of Rezzable, will give a talk in voice, with Q&A by educators, for the weekly Second Life Education Roundtable.  Topics will include the role of virtual worlds for education, Rezzable's decision to move more content to OpenSim, the Builderbot controversy, and Rezzable's vision for content creation.

The event run 2:30-3:30  SL Time next Tuesday, October 6, at the Montclair State University campus in SL:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Montclair%20State%20CHSSSouth/130/180/2

Have a question to put to Jon in-world? You can submit advance Qs here and as time permits, moderator Ignatius Onomatopoeia will ask them at the event.

The dream of the prim that captivated the grid. Black Swan is now closing.

Nice tip from Chris at ReactionGrid about some 3D collaboration tools that seem to be heading in a good direction. IL Immersive Collaboration by Jeff Lowe is a small set of tools (now) that help people make the most of being in a virtual space to do project stuff. 

Chris poses the same question I always wonder: "When people come to me talking about work in 3D, I can almost guarantee I'll hear the word "PowerPoint" in the first paragraph. What is it about this particular tool and why do they want it in 3D?" Powerpoint is so 1990's -- at least use photoshop! But clearly people struggle to express their ideas (err.. when they actually have some worth sharing). Getting to good ideas is much more exciting, albeit harder work.

Scottish students and their teachers now have a new canvas for their projects: CANVAS (Children’s Art at the National Virtual Arena of Scotland). This Open Sim virtual world will provide learners a space to display art projects while avoiding the administrative difficulties associated with other  worlds blocked by school-system firewalls.

One of the major inconveniences that are precluding the adoption of Opensim (and Second Life) based virtual world technology has been the impossibility to visit these virtual worlds using the browser. People are used to seeing everything inside a browser, and are even willing, in some cases, to download a plugin, but in general get discouraged when they have to download a whole new client, learn a new and complicated interface, etc.

That's why I got very excited when I found a reference, in Jeanricard Broek's blog, to a new release of 3Di's viewer-in-the-browser plugin, called  3Di OpenViewer. I googled for "3Di OpenViewer", and I found a fantastic tutorial by Zaki; in some minutes, I was running the viewer inside Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, and I was logging in to my own grid, Condensation Land!