4:49 PM PST Our support portal is available once again.

One of our web servers is currently having technical problems. If you need to view knowledge base articles, please log in as a guest. If you need to submit a ticket, please try reloading the page or retry access when the problem is fixed. Our web engineers are banging on it now.

I know that many of you have been anxiously awaiting the return of the Friends Online functionality.  I am happy to announce that the issues with this service have now been resolved and it is now back online.  Thanks for your patience while we hammered this service back into shape.

[Update 4:40PM PST 10/19/07]
We apologize for not providing updates on this the last few days.  This issue is still ongoing and we are still working to resolve it.  Again, if you are having difficulties with your password in the meantime, please visit the support portal at http://secondlife.com/support.

[Update 5:45 PM PST 10/16/07]
Most of the web team was focused on Friends Online today and did not have a chance to address this issue. However, they will be picking it back up tomorrow and we hope to have a solution for you soon. Thanks for your patience and have a great night.

The password reset tool (http://secondlife.com/password) has been having intermittent failures the last two days. In some cases, the tool will send you the confirmation email and allow you to answer your security question, but then it re-directs you back to the Second Life homepage.

Our web team is aware of this issue and we are working to resolve it as quickly as possible. In the meantime, if you are having difficulties with your password, please visit our support portal at http://secondlife.com/support. We apologize for the inconvenience.

As many of you are aware our CAPTCHA system was less than ideal. It was often hard to read and you never knew if the space was required, etc…

Thanks to help from the folks at Carnegie Mellon University we have been able to replace our old system with reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA not only helps to prevent spam and other abuses but also helps improves the process of digitizing books.

Most of the time you shouldn’t even see reCAPTCHA. Only if you enter a bad password on the login and support pages will you see reCAPTCHA.

Thanks!

-Durl

Early this year, Linden Lab released the source for the Second Life
viewer. Programmers can download the source, make changes, and even add features and improvements by submitting changes that we incorporate in the main viewer. By the time we release our next viewer, we’ll have enjoyed hundreds of submissions from over fifty contributors, and we couldn’t be more thankful. (Thank you!)

This success has been encouraging, and we’re now opening the source of two key components in our web services infrastructure: Eventlet, and Mulib.

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I’m currently recovering from a very intense, but enjoyable weekend at Hack Day London which Christopher Linden and I attended to help hackers mashup Second Life.

Paul Johnston and Nigel Crawley had brought a webcam, markers and reactivision software they were looking to put to use, so, as we were playing IceTowers with IBM at the time, we thought it might be fun to build a mixed reality version of the IceHouse game Torpedo.

It turns out that Torpedo is particularly well suited to a reactivision implementation as it relies on the position and orientation of pieces placed freely on a playing field, but judging torpedo hits in real life is difficult. It’s also a very simple game, so there was a slim chance that we could build it in 24 hours.

Our plan was to play the game in real life then publish the position and orientation data from reactivision to the web, then use LSL to pull the data in to SL where we could rez the pieces, launch the torpedoes and calculate the results. At the same time a second web cam would stream video of the board in to SL, so that we could watch the game play out in RL then see the results calculated in SL.

Working on the hack was loads of fun and team Supernova did a great job with help from Timeless Prototype in world. The software came together amazingly well but it wasn’t until we started running around scavenging tripods, glue guns, gaffer tape and white boards to nail together the hardware side that we started getting lots of interest from the other hackers.

In the end the lightning strikes, storms, leaks and lack of wifi meant that we didn’t complete all of the gameplay, but we managed to demo all of the technical aspects of the hack live in our 90 second presentation.

Everything we used was open source, so anyone will be able to finish off our work or build some other interesting computer vision application in SL. Nigel thought mixed reality spin the bottle would be good fun. Andy Piper has another SLorpedo write up here and a selection of pictures here. Chris took a video of the presentation, so hopefully we’ll be able to make that available soon too.

I’m already back working on the SL infrastructure, but it’s great to be able to hack on interesting SL applications once in a while and hopefully we’ll see some of the hackers at Linden Lab Brighton in the near future.

UPDATE: Team Supernova finished the game last week and ran it at SL.UK on Saturday, some SL footage of the finished game here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd-MoN9d_Nw

We have a new job opening available for a Web Content Editor to help us keep our websites fresh and up to date. Ideally, we’d like to fill this job from within the Second Life community. We’re looking for someone who understands Second Life, has a strong interest in virtual worlds, and is ready to dive in and make an impact at Linden Lab. (more…)

The land store upgrade is complete. Here are the changes:

• I expanded the reservable area by 300 units west, 100 units north.
• The land store now displays the X, Y coordinate more for many “unavailable” messages.
• In order for you to reserve a space, all EIGHT spaces around it must be open; that is, they must not be reserved or built-upon already. Previously, this was just the four cardinal directions.

Again, please note that we are in the process of redesigning the entire “Land Store” concept. I understand that the current incarnation is somewhat difficult to use, and the Lindens involved with the Land Store have been very vocal about resident feedback with various frustrations.

Comments are welcome, but please try to keep it useful or constructive! Thanks a lot for your patience today.

A couple of months ago Zero talked about the new capabilities infrastructure that has been added to Second Life. The viewer requests capabilities from the simulator and receives a URI which it can use to invoke the capability. When the capability is invoked a proxy maps the URI to a private URI and passes the request on to a web service which processes it.

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At a very interesting session at Euro FOO last year on using Second Life in real life, Claus Dahl commented that Second Life is potentially a great platform for prototyping networked augmented reality applications. Everything in Second Life has an Id, everyone has a HUD and scripts in Second Life can use llSensor to scan the local area to read the Ids and llHTTPRequest to retrieve information from the web associated with those Ids. Second Life is a world in which everything has an embedded RFID tag and everyone can have an RFID reader, internet connection and augmented reality display for free. We can start prototyping very large scale augmented reality applications in Second Life today.

I’ve been meaning to experiment with these ideas ever since Euro FOOCamp, so it seemed appropriate to finally start hacking some LSL about when I needed a presentation for BarCampLondon2 last weekend.

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