Virtual celebrities — are they real?

Linden Lab introduces the “First Look” series of viewers as an “unstable branch” of the Second Life viewer. This allows developers to fully exploit new technological advances without fear of “breaking” the “normal” viewer. The result? In a month, we got a completely new rendering pipeline, giving us back the performance lost since the olden days of the 1.4 viewer, by moving the rendering into OpenGL calls done on the graphic card’s hardware. A nice side-effect is that the “shiny” feature now does mirroring, a feat that was deemed impossible a few years ago!