Sunday, April 1, 2012

Future of SL now a blur?

Some say this will (again) be the end of Second Life, others welcome the new policy change from Linden Lab. CEO Rod Humble seems to be very excited about and his reaction/announcement on Twitter makes one wonder if the typo was freudian or intentional funny:

"@RODVIK: new "sex blur" policy is a big step forward - mainstream here we cum!"

My first reaction when reading the announcement on the official SL website was (ofcourse) shocked. How was this gonna effect my machinima, photographs... would they enforce this on the viewers and/or on the designers?

Ever since it was announced this morning no much info has been released but some Linden employee did leak some info while visiting the very popular Escort Oasis sim last nite. It seems they are gonna implement this server-side and client-side. Since they can't enforce what the viewer is showing every texture send from the server to the client is gonna be scanned and blurred if needed. Some internet search engines have already been very succesful using this approach to blur adult content, it seems Linden Lab bought this technology for Second Life as well. Apart from that they are also gonna introduce a TPV policy change which requires to put at least an option in their viewers for the user to blur explicit content.

We will have to see ofcourse how all this will affect adult content in SL. I have been told by Jennna (from the very popular SL porn blog) that the owner of slporntube already has contacted Linden Lab to discuss the consequences of this policy on the advertising income of the popular adult machinima website.

On the bright side - a change like this will force people to put more thought into their emoting, so something good may come out of this in the end.