I have to say, I love this new feature of SL! I know, LL could have spent that time improving a gazillion things, but sometimes we also need useless but fun featurettes to play with…
I have taken a look at some very complex plugins/toolkits that can string together several such images and have a point-and-click interface that allows users to explore a ‘virtual experience’ that way — exactly like Google Maps/Earth do with their Street View! So, if you ever wanted to show your non-SL friends what SL looks like from the inside, now you can: it just takes some time and patience to come up with a path to follow around a region and do several 360º snapshots along the way — and then stitch it all together!
No, I haven’t done that yet. I simply cannot afford the time!
And if this is the result of the return of Philip Rosedale to the helm, let’s see some more cool features!
Hint: With the proper plugin/JavaScript, you can even view such images using VR goggles, with full stereoscopic support. I can imagine there is a good reason for that. Some friends of mine seriously suspect that the so-called ‘Metaverses’ out there will be not much more than 360º panorama scenes that can be explored and interacted with (and where other users’ avatars will be able to freely move around). Doing that is considerably easier than developing a fully-streamed, on-demand-assembled-scene virtual environment such as Second Life — and will naturally enough load much, much faster. The image above is around 1.6 MBytes in size — not much, for current standards; on broadband Internet, it should load in a handful of seconds, which is just a tiny fraction of what it took for the real scene to render in Second Life…
