Caledon Oxbridge Q&A for 2013-07-28

15:01 Ravelli Ormstein Hello Vicereine, nice to see you!
15:01 Ravelli Ormstein two deans crashed...
15:02 Gronk Seriman I like the odds a lot better now.
15:02 Wordsmith Jarvinen It's after 3pm, so time to begin, apart from crashing deans.
15:02 Larkylouz ha!
15:02 Ravelli Ormstein both are back
15:03 Martini Discovolante shaky, but back.
15:04 Wordsmith Jarvinen Do we have a first question (or even the second question, first)?
15:05 Gronk Seriman raises a hand
15:05 Ravelli Ormstein listens
15:06 Wordsmith Jarvinen Miss Gronk?
15:06 Gronk Seriman How are the attendance counts at the gate, lately? It seems we are seeing fewer new people come through here.
15:07 Tali Rosca Statistically, very steady.
15:07 Gronk Seriman That's good to hear.
15:07 Wordsmith Jarvinen Up slightly this week. 708 first Day. 882 first week.
15:07 Martini Discovolante in fact -- up 15% last week. that was a bitmore than average
15:08 Tali Rosca Questi does weekly reports, and we're seeing very little fluctuation.
15:08 Martini Discovolante school will be starting soon, there is usually a dip then
15:08 Ravelli Ormstein i can only say about land traffic (spent time on main parcel): it is about 8000 minutes daily. and we get 23 new group members daily. both values are pretty good and stable
15:08 Larkylouz Are there numbers available on how many actually finish the orientation? Just out of curiosity?
15:08 Gronk Seriman Is there any hourly information? What times of the day are the peaks?
15:09 Tali Rosca The orientation and hourly stats, no.
15:09 Tali Rosca It is something which may come in the future; it is the sort of things I am looking into.
15:09 Wordsmith Jarvinen I think there might be hourly loading info on the sim.
15:10 Tali Rosca Personally, I'd like to do a "heat map" to track where people are spending their time, to see if we lose people along the tutorial.
15:10 Tali Rosca But it's a little further down the line; there are some other systems I want to finish first.
15:10 Larkylouz It seems that a lot come for a short time and leave; but a few stay for hours, and I assume are using the orientation.
15:11 Sli (slidingscale) Some of those are afk
15:11 Larkylouz Of course, that isn't based on anything but a subjective feeling.
15:11 Martini Discovolante thy may come back often, it is a lot to absorb all at once.
15:12 Ravelli Ormstein Greetings Mr Liam
15:12 Wordsmith Jarvinen It could easily make sense to do a college, depart ... review the one last done and do a new one.
15:12 Tali Rosca Basically, we're seeing some 800 avatars pass through each week, and that's a pretty stable number.
15:13 PoopWizardLiam fart
15:13 Wordsmith Jarvinen Welcome, Dean Questi.
15:14 Ravelli Ormstein Hello Dean Questi!
15:14 Marion Questi Greetings. I apologize for my tardiness. Lost track of time...:)
15:14 Gronk Seriman Ooo! A Five Dean Night!
15:14 Martini Discovolante afternoon, Dean Q
15:14 Tali Rosca Plus Her Lyonesse on the front row.
15:15 Marion Questi It's an honor to have you here, Your Excellency.
15:16 Martini Discovolante indeed... nice to have you here, Your Glory.
15:16 Wordsmith Jarvinen Dean Questi, is there any hourly data on loading of Oxbridge (# of avatars present)?
15:16 Tali Rosca We were just going over the statistics, claiming that the numbers are pretty much stable.
15:16 Kamilah Hauptmann I'll try to not troll you too hard. :)
15:17 Marion Questi Yes, I have hourly data going back a couple of years.
15:17 Tali Rosca I.e. when are our peak hours?
15:18 Marion Questi The busiest hour in the week is almost always this one.
15:18 Marion Questi The sim always fills up during the Q&A.
15:19 Gronk Seriman How about the weekdays?
15:19 Marion Questi But apart from that, on average the noon hour is the busiest.
15:19 Tali Rosca But for "normal" drift through?
15:19 Tali Rosca SL noon? It makes sense; it's generally the time you have overlap between US and Europe.
15:20 Gronk Seriman Noon SLT? I'm surprised.
15:20 Tali Rosca On weekends in particular noon is a good time; not too early for US, and not too late for Europe. (Remember that when planning events :-P )
15:21 Ravelli Ormstein the many visitors from brazil are in that time frame too
15:21 Wordsmith Jarvinen Given college student schedules, not altogether unreasonable, even for weekdays.
15:22 Wordsmith Jarvinen Does Brazil have the tradition of long noon breaks?
15:22 Elfbiter Skysmith (elfbiter) I think they may have their versio of siesta...
15:22 Tali Rosca Good question, actually. That would make sense.
15:23 Tali Rosca (And to that, I just want to add: Oiii!)
15:23 Elfbiter Skysmith (elfbiter) :-)
15:23 Ravelli Ormstein I don't know about their breaks. but could be, usually they cause a visitor peak
15:24 Tali Rosca I am currently working on a greeting system handling different languages. It will be *very* easy to add statistics to that, so we could get some numbers on when who is here.
15:25 Tali Rosca It could be fun to know, though I am not sure it's practically all that useful for anything.
15:26 Wordsmith Jarvinen Scheduling classes perhaps .... and making sure we have sufficient tutor availability..
15:27 Gronk Seriman It would help to probe that LL's birthing system is broken. People aren't ending up where they need to go.
15:27 Gronk Seriman *prove
15:27 Larkylouz C-section?
15:27 Elfbiter Skysmith (elfbiter) Sometimes newcomers have no idea where to go anyway, system or not.
15:28 Wordsmith Jarvinen BTW, it doesn't directly affect Oxbridge, but LL just announced a discount program for RL Educational Institutions and 501(c)(3) nonprofits.
15:28 Wordsmith Jarvinen This could affect who we see coming in the door.
15:28 Elfbiter Skysmith (elfbiter) Good news for EduFinland, maybe...
15:28 Tali Rosca Pragmatically speaking, though, such numbers need to be actionable before it is worth building a system to gather them.
15:29 Larkylouz OMG - that will be so welcome! Josain Zsun has worked so hard and talks often of how many educational institutions have had to leave SL because there was no discount.
15:29 Ravelli Ormstein that would really be a win!
15:29 Gronk Seriman Ooo! A chart!
15:29 Martini Discovolante esnd a telegram to Open Sim and InWOrldz.
15:30 Wordsmith Jarvinen http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Featured-News/Updated-Pricing-for-Educational-and-Nonprofit-Institutions/ba-p/2098039
15:30 Kamilah Hauptmann Fun coversation with your boss: "Remember that virtual world thing that abruptly doubled the prices? The prices went back down, feeling lucky?"
15:31 Tali Rosca I wonder, though, how many organizations dare take yet another spin. LL has a reputation of being somewhat unreliable as business partners.
15:31 Kamilah Hauptmann Meandering in random mode, comes to mind.
15:31 Tali Rosca Exactly my thoughts, Kamilah.
15:32 Wordsmith Jarvinen Prone to short term notice of changes.
15:32 Ravelli Ormstein perhaps we could publish our stats on the website one day?
15:33 Wordsmith Jarvinen BTW, on the education theme, the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) conference just occurred.
15:33 Wordsmith Jarvinen Mal Burns has been putting up videos from that. http://www.youtube.com/user/MalBurns/videos?shelf_index=3&sort=dd&view=0
15:33 Martini Discovolante nods
15:34 Tali Rosca ...primarily hosted in Cloud Party.
15:34 Larkylouz Is Cloud Party another world, or a sim here?
15:34 Wordsmith Jarvinen Dean Martini represented Oxbridge in a panel discussion on help centers.
15:34 Tali Rosca Another world.
15:34 Tali Rosca Not SL-based; not an OpenGrid.
15:35 Larkylouz HTML5 - I briefly visited the other day.
15:35 Wordsmith Jarvinen There were a number of SL-based sessions.
15:35 Sli (slidingscale) Cloud Party is HTML5? Cool.
15:35 Tali Rosca AS much as HTML5 is any one thing.
15:35 Sli (slidingscale) :)
15:36 Tali Rosca It runs in a browser without installation.
15:36 Tali Rosca Using WebGL.
15:36 Ravelli Ormstein it is still a pretty young project, not that complex or beautiful like SL. to have it in the browser is great. but not a reason for me to visit it again.
15:36 Tali Rosca Other than that, cynically speaking, it is SL annoy 2009.
15:36 Tali Rosca *anno
15:39 Ravelli Ormstein if anyone is interested:
15:39 Ravelli Ormstein since 2009 i made stats, you can see the charts here: http://www.paderdesign.de/secondlife/localstats/localstats.pdf
15:40 Gronk Seriman Wow!
15:41 Ravelli Ormstein well, i came into SL in 2009. the stats should help me to understand how SL works
15:44 Marion Questi Who has a question for us?
15:45 Tali Rosca On a random "what is going on in SL" note, I can say that server-side baking is here on the Le Tigre release channel, and from what I've seen, it rocks.
15:45 Marion Questi Can't wait to try it!
15:45 Wordsmith Jarvinen Good news, then.
15:46 Tali Rosca IIRC, Kittiwickshire is Le Tigre.
15:46 Tali Rosca So you can see it in action there.
15:47 Martini Discovolante hmm. gues i need to go home
15:47 Tali Rosca But this also means: Update your viewers, if you haven't done so already.
15:47 Sli (slidingscale) Is there a place to see "Materials" in action? A showcase sim?
15:47 Marion Questi I just rezzed in there and didn't notice anything different.
15:48 Tali Rosca As in, a build with good use of materials? I haven't seen any in particular yet.
15:48 Wordsmith Jarvinen If the baking is working you shouldn't notice anything specific, Just more reliability.
15:48 Tali Rosca The materials system is still very new, and creators need to figure out how best to use it.
15:48 Tali Rosca Serverside baking is still only on the Le Tigre channel; not grid-wide.
15:48 Wordsmith Jarvinen Likely more info on normal maps and specular reflection on the web.
15:49 Wordsmith Jarvinen LL did have some examples up.
15:49 Tali Rosca Personally, I can't wait to have some good looking leather with specular reflections.
15:50 Tali Rosca Jewelry makes seem to be fairly quick on the uptake; a really good use for the materials.
15:50 Tali Rosca *makers
15:51 Gronk Seriman I'd like to see a mesh avatar use materials.
15:51 Martini Discovolante th e borthday bear did
15:51 Martini Discovolante Birthday bear
15:51 Wordsmith Jarvinen With the normal maps, you either need a higher resolution model to generate them, or try to "fake" them of the texture information.
15:52 Wordsmith Jarvinen The advantage comes in having a lower poly model that looks like it has higher resolution.
15:52 Tali Rosca There are a lot of freely available maps for things like cobblestone and bricks, though.
15:52 Tali Rosca We should see such things soon.
15:53 Wordsmith Jarvinen Nalates has a specular map tutorial up. http://blog.nalates.net/2013/04/10/specular-maps-tutorial/
15:54 Tali Rosca I think I have mentioned this one before: http://www.manufato.com/?p=902
15:54 Ravelli Ormstein btw, we are currently experimenting with updating the oxbridge buildings, using mesh and materials. lets see, how it turns out. for sure it might take some time...
15:54 Tali Rosca That is a really good explanation of how and why specular mapping works.
15:55 Tali Rosca Heh. I see Nalates reference that one.
15:56 Wordsmith Jarvinen In short, specular maps account for the entire surface not being equally shiny.
15:58 Marion Questi We are nearly out of time...one more question, anyone?
15:59 Ravelli Ormstein heard someone typing
15:03 Martini Discovolante shaky, but back.
15:04 Wordsmith Jarvinen Do we have a first question (or even the second question, first)?
15:05 Gronk Seriman raises a hand
15:05 Ravelli Ormstein listens
15:06 Wordsmith Jarvinen Miss Gronk?
15:06 Gronk Seriman How are the attendance counts at the gate, lately? It seems we are seeing fewer new people come through here.
15:07 Tali Rosca Statistically, very steady.
15:07 Gronk Seriman That's good to hear.
15:07 Wordsmith Jarvinen Up slightly this week. 708 first Day. 882 first week.
15:07 Martini Discovolante in fact -- up 15% last week. that was a bitmore than average
15:08 Tali Rosca Questi does weekly reports, and we're seeing very little fluctuation.
15:08 Martini Discovolante school will be starting soon, there is usually a dip then
15:08 Ravelli Ormstein i can only say about land traffic (spent time on main parcel): it is about 8000 minutes daily. and we get 23 new group members daily. both values are pretty good and stable
15:08 Larkylouz Are there numbers available on how many actually finish the orientation? Just out of curiosity?
15:08 Gronk Seriman Is there any hourly information? What times of the day are the peaks?
15:09 Tali Rosca The orientation and hourly stats, no.
15:09 Tali Rosca It is something which may come in the future; it is the sort of things I am looking into.
15:09 Wordsmith Jarvinen I think there might be hourly loading info on the sim.
15:10 Tali Rosca Personally, I'd like to do a "heat map" to track where people are spending their time, to see if we lose people along the tutorial.
15:10 Tali Rosca But it's a little further down the line; there are some other systems I want to finish first.
15:10 Larkylouz It seems that a lot come for a short time and leave; but a few stay for hours, and I assume are using the orientation.
15:11 Sli (slidingscale) Some of those are afk
15:11 Larkylouz Of course, that isn't based on anything but a subjective feeling.
15:11 Martini Discovolante thy may come back often, it is a lot to absorb all at once.
15:12 Ravelli Ormstein Greetings Mr Liam
15:12 Wordsmith Jarvinen It could easily make sense to do a college, depart ... review the one last done and do a new one.
15:12 Tali Rosca Basically, we're seeing some 800 avatars pass through each week, and that's a pretty stable number.
15:13 PoopWizardLiam fart
15:13 Wordsmith Jarvinen Welcome, Dean Questi.
15:14 Ravelli Ormstein Hello Dean Questi!
15:14 Marion Questi Greetings. I apologize for my tardiness. Lost track of time...:)
15:14 Gronk Seriman Ooo! A Five Dean Night!
15:14 Martini Discovolante afternoon, Dean Q
15:14 Tali Rosca Plus Her Lyonesse on the front row.
15:15 Marion Questi It's an honor to have you here, Your Excellency.
15:16 Martini Discovolante indeed... nice to have you here, Your Glory.
15:16 Wordsmith Jarvinen Dean Questi, is there any hourly data on loading of Oxbridge (# of avatars present)?
15:16 Tali Rosca We were just going over the statistics, claiming that the numbers are pretty much stable.
15:16 Kamilah Hauptmann I'll try to not troll you too hard. :)
15:17 Marion Questi Yes, I have hourly data going back a couple of years.
15:17 Tali Rosca I.e. when are our peak hours?
15:18 Marion Questi The busiest hour in the week is almost always this one.
15:18 Marion Questi The sim always fills up during the Q&A.
15:19 Gronk Seriman How about the weekdays?
15:19 Marion Questi But apart from that, on average the noon hour is the busiest.
15:19 Tali Rosca But for "normal" drift through?
15:19 Tali Rosca SL noon? It makes sense; it's generally the time you have overlap between US and Europe.
15:20 Gronk Seriman Noon SLT? I'm surprised.
15:20 Tali Rosca On weekends in particular noon is a good time; not too early for US, and not too late for Europe. (Remember that when planning events :-P )
15:21 Ravelli Ormstein the many visitors from brazil are in that time frame too
15:21 Wordsmith Jarvinen Given college student schedules, not altogether unreasonable, even for weekdays.
15:22 Wordsmith Jarvinen Does Brazil have the tradition of long noon breaks?
15:22 Elfbiter Skysmith (elfbiter) I think they may have their versio of siesta...
15:22 Tali Rosca Good question, actually. That would make sense.
15:23 Tali Rosca (And to that, I just want to add: Oiii!)
15:23 Elfbiter Skysmith (elfbiter) :-)
15:23 Ravelli Ormstein I don't know about their breaks. but could be, usually they cause a visitor peak
15:24 Tali Rosca I am currently working on a greeting system handling different languages. It will be *very* easy to add statistics to that, so we could get some numbers on when who is here.
15:25 Tali Rosca It could be fun to know, though I am not sure it's practically all that useful for anything.
15:26 Wordsmith Jarvinen Scheduling classes perhaps .... and making sure we have sufficient tutor availability..
15:27 Gronk Seriman It would help to probe that LL's birthing system is broken. People aren't ending up where they need to go.
15:27 Gronk Seriman *prove
15:27 Larkylouz C-section?
15:27 Elfbiter Skysmith (elfbiter) Sometimes newcomers have no idea where to go anyway, system or not.
15:28 Wordsmith Jarvinen BTW, it doesn't directly affect Oxbridge, but LL just announced a discount program for RL Educational Institutions and 501(c)(3) nonprofits.
15:28 Wordsmith Jarvinen This could affect who we see coming in the door.
15:28 Elfbiter Skysmith (elfbiter) Good news for EduFinland, maybe...
15:28 Tali Rosca Pragmatically speaking, though, such numbers need to be actionable before it is worth building a system to gather them.
15:29 Larkylouz OMG - that will be so welcome! Josain Zsun has worked so hard and talks often of how many educational institutions have had to leave SL because there was no discount.
15:29 Ravelli Ormstein that would really be a win!
15:29 Gronk Seriman Ooo! A chart!
15:29 Martini Discovolante esnd a telegram to Open Sim and InWOrldz.
15:30 Wordsmith Jarvinen http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Featured-News/Updated-Pricing-for-Educational-and-Nonprofit-Institutions/ba-p/2098039
15:30 Kamilah Hauptmann Fun coversation with your boss: "Remember that virtual world thing that abruptly doubled the prices? The prices went back down, feeling lucky?"
15:31 Tali Rosca I wonder, though, how many organizations dare take yet another spin. LL has a reputation of being somewhat unreliable as business partners.
15:31 Kamilah Hauptmann Meandering in random mode, comes to mind.
15:31 Tali Rosca Exactly my thoughts, Kamilah.
15:32 Wordsmith Jarvinen Prone to short term notice of changes.
15:32 Ravelli Ormstein perhaps we could publish our stats on the website one day?
15:33 Wordsmith Jarvinen BTW, on the education theme, the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) conference just occurred.
15:33 Wordsmith Jarvinen Mal Burns has been putting up videos from that. http://www.youtube.com/user/MalBurns/videos?shelf_index=3&sort=dd&view=0
15:33 Martini Discovolante nods
15:34 Tali Rosca ...primarily hosted in Cloud Party.
15:34 Larkylouz Is Cloud Party another world, or a sim here?
15:34 Wordsmith Jarvinen Dean Martini represented Oxbridge in a panel discussion on help centers.
15:34 Tali Rosca Another world.
15:34 Tali Rosca Not SL-based; not an OpenGrid.
15:35 Larkylouz HTML5 - I briefly visited the other day.
15:35 Wordsmith Jarvinen There were a number of SL-based sessions.
15:35 Sli (slidingscale) Cloud Party is HTML5? Cool.
15:35 Tali Rosca AS much as HTML5 is any one thing.
15:35 Sli (slidingscale) :)
15:36 Tali Rosca It runs in a browser without installation.
15:36 Tali Rosca Using WebGL.
15:36 Ravelli Ormstein it is still a pretty young project, not that complex or beautiful like SL. to have it in the browser is great. but not a reason for me to visit it again.
15:36 Tali Rosca Other than that, cynically speaking, it is SL annoy 2009.
15:36 Tali Rosca *anno
15:39 Ravelli Ormstein if anyone is interested:
15:39 Ravelli Ormstein since 2009 i made stats, you can see the charts here: http://www.paderdesign.de/secondlife/localstats/localstats.pdf
15:40 Gronk Seriman Wow!
15:41 Ravelli Ormstein well, i came into SL in 2009. the stats should help me to understand how SL works
15:44 Marion Questi Who has a question for us?
15:45 Tali Rosca On a random "what is going on in SL" note, I can say that server-side baking is here on the Le Tigre release channel, and from what I've seen, it rocks.
15:45 Marion Questi Can't wait to try it!
15:45 Wordsmith Jarvinen Good news, then.
15:46 Tali Rosca IIRC, Kittiwickshire is Le Tigre.
15:46 Tali Rosca So you can see it in action there.
15:47 Martini Discovolante hmm. gues i need to go home
15:47 Tali Rosca But this also means: Update your viewers, if you haven't done so already.
15:47 Sli (slidingscale) Is there a place to see "Materials" in action? A showcase sim?
15:47 Marion Questi I just rezzed in there and didn't notice anything different.
15:48 Tali Rosca As in, a build with good use of materials? I haven't seen any in particular yet.
15:48 Wordsmith Jarvinen If the baking is working you shouldn't notice anything specific, Just more reliability.
15:48 Tali Rosca The materials system is still very new, and creators need to figure out how best to use it.
15:48 Tali Rosca Serverside baking is still only on the Le Tigre channel; not grid-wide.
15:48 Wordsmith Jarvinen Likely more info on normal maps and specular reflection on the web.
15:49 Wordsmith Jarvinen LL did have some examples up.
15:49 Tali Rosca Personally, I can't wait to have some good looking leather with specular reflections.
15:50 Tali Rosca Jewelry makes seem to be fairly quick on the uptake; a really good use for the materials.
15:50 Tali Rosca *makers
15:51 Gronk Seriman I'd like to see a mesh avatar use materials.
15:51 Martini Discovolante th e borthday bear did
15:51 Martini Discovolante Birthday bear
15:51 Wordsmith Jarvinen With the normal maps, you either need a higher resolution model to generate them, or try to "fake" them of the texture information.
15:52 Wordsmith Jarvinen The advantage comes in having a lower poly model that looks like it has higher resolution.
15:52 Tali Rosca There are a lot of freely available maps for things like cobblestone and bricks, though.
15:52 Tali Rosca We should see such things soon.
15:53 Wordsmith Jarvinen Nalates has a specular map tutorial up. http://blog.nalates.net/2013/04/10/specular-maps-tutorial/
15:54 Tali Rosca I think I have mentioned this one before: http://www.manufato.com/?p=902
15:54 Ravelli Ormstein btw, we are currently experimenting with updating the oxbridge buildings, using mesh and materials. lets see, how it turns out. for sure it might take some time...
15:54 Tali Rosca That is a really good explanation of how and why specular mapping works.
15:55 Tali Rosca Heh. I see Nalates reference that one.
15:56 Wordsmith Jarvinen In short, specular maps account for the entire surface not being equally shiny.
15:58 Marion Questi We are nearly out of time...one more question, anyone?
15:59 Ravelli Ormstein heard someone typing
15:59 Sli (slidingscale) was erasing. :)
16:00 Ravelli Ormstein pity
16:00 Larkylouz Thank you, Deans.
16:00 Marion Questi And so ends another edition of Q&A.
16:00 Marion Questi Thank you all for coming!
16:01 Larkylouz must hurry off.
16:01 Gronk Seriman Thank you, Deans!
16:01 Wordsmith Jarvinen Thanks for coming.
16:01 Sli (slidingscale) Thank you deans
16:01 Wordsmith Jarvinen Same time, next week.
16:02 Ariqa (ariqa) Interesting. Thanks.
16:02 Ravelli Ormstein thank you everyone, see you back next week, or earlier