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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[UPDATE 5PM PST: Thanks for the overwhelming response! We have met our group meetings quota and all the spots have been filled. I will continue to review the comments to this Blog post as well as publish the meeting results for further discussion soon, thanks again for your support.]

In an effort to make our Website more useful and easier to use, we will be undergoing a major redesign of www.secondlife.com in the coming months. As part of this project, we are building a set of Web-based tools to allow you to manage various aspects of your account, tentatively called my.secondlife.com.

These tools could include everything from organizing group memberships to editing your profile to browsing recommended in-world locations, all done via our site. It is our hope that these tools will provide you much greater flexibility and control over your Second Life experience. Our goal is to allow better integration of Second Life with the 2d Web and ultimately extend out to mobile devices and more.

While we are still very much in the early planning stages of this project, we would like to establish an ongoing collaboration with you, our Residents, in the design process. (more…)

When I started doing operational work, we only had 2 webservers, and that was more than plenty.  They had been fairly well configured, performance-wise; most of the time, they just sat idle, actually.

The media attention, the growth, and new web development features since then have made us throw up a third, and then quickly another two, and so on.  Meanwhile, webserver performance/reliability went from a non-issue, to occasional mention, to minor annoyance, into regular headaches.

We’ve taken several angles of attack to try to improve this.  The latest in our arsenal is the installation of a load balancer.

(Many of you will already know what it does, but for the ones who don’t, it essentially sits in front of our webservers, taking your web page requests and contracting them out to the webservers indirectly.  While this indirectness may seem like it makes things slower, this proxy actually solves many performance headaches.)

To facilitate the load balancer, we had to make one visible change- HTTPS requests that used to go to https://secondlife.com now will go to something like “https://secure-web#.secondlife.com” where # is a number.  Rest assured that this is an intentional change, and not a sign that “we got hax’d!”.

There may be a few SSL certificate issues remaining with some of our web applications. Please do let me know, and we’ll get on any that show up.

Hopefully, though, the only other change you’ll see is that during what used to be heavy load times, the website experience is still fairly fast.

I could go on about the technical aspects, but I’m sure I sound pretty boring at this point, so I will just say, thank you to the ones who have been patient with us.  Thank you for even coming to the website in the first place, so that we would even have this “problem of success.”  Thanks!

If you own a region and/or regularly use the LindeX currency exchange, please read on for information about the billing and trading limits that affect land purchases and trades on LindeX…

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We were experiencing caching problems with the LindeX “Trades in the Past 24 Hours” graph that were compounding the database issues so I’ve disabled the graph for now.

There are two big reasons why you should consider joining us at Linden Lab: The first is that you are literally able to help create a new world, which is an unbelievably rewarding experience that you simply can’t have anywhere else. The second is that Linden Lab is run in a different way compared to most companies - you have an unusual degree of personal freedom which is extraordinary and empowering. By organizing ourselves differently, we created an environment in which everyone is a strong contributor to strategy and direction. Although the experience of working at Linden isn’t a fit for everyone, check it out. If you end up joining us, you will regret every day you missed by not being here earlier!

To apply for a job with Linden Lab, visit our site at http://lindenlab.com/employment, and follow the directions from there. We need people with a variety of different skillsets and levels of experience. If you don’t see something that fits your skills or experience, apply and tell us what you would like to be doing.

As an interesting alternative, if you are part of a small, independent group of people who enjoy working together developing software, regardless of where your group is located, consider challenging us to hire you as a whole team and potentially open an office in your city. In our approach to development we’ve found that often the best team is a well-bonded group of several people with complementary skills, and additionally we have (in part through Second Life!) great tools for coordinating remote teams. So if you’re part of such a team, consider asking us to come and visit you.

The website is back up. Sorry for the inconvenience, particularly to those who were trying to update the viewer during the downtime.

The secondlife.com website will be down for maintenance Thursday morning starting at 7AM PST. During this time, residents will be unable to access any parts of the website (account information, the forums, LindeX) or do any transactions in-world that require access to their Paypal or credit cards.

We expect to have the website back online by 8:30AM PST.

The blog and the grid (with the exception of buying L$ in the viewer) will be unaffected by this downtime. Thank you for your patience.

Sometimes the most trivial part of your Second Life experience, when magnified ten thousand times, becomes not such a trivial thing after all.

Case in point: The client you download may just seem like a 5-minute nuisance to you. Magnified ten thousand times, it becomes a severe issue for our webservers on days when we release a new version- tens of thousands of people all rushing to download them at the same time. An average of 30 MB per download, multiplied by however many folks who want to login to this Second Life thing, comes out to a lot of bits.

In the not-too-distant past, we had a few thousands of residents. Our webservers did not work up a sweat serving those files on release days. Then we had a few tens of thousands, and our webservers saw some load, but it in no way caused any inconveniences for any of us. But we have been growing rapidly…

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Here’s the sample LSL script to go with the previous post and some additional information

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