Enmeshed

So, I’ve been working on a couple of other projects, and haven’t had much time for virtual world stuff recently, but I was looking for an excuse to slack off the other night, so I decided to go on to the grid to collect this month’s free premium gift. Here I am, sitting on my fine new sofa, trying to look intellectual:

Moving the furniture around was fun for about five minutes, but to be honest I’ve never found the dolls-house aspect of Second Life particularly interesting, so my attention soon wandered.

I had downloaded the 3.0 viewer, so I thought I would check out some of the new mesh objects that are now available, to see if they really would be the revolutionary force that I had predicted a couple of years ago.

Here’s a ukulele I found at the Mikki Miles Mesh Department, along with various other musical instruments:

and they have some interesting-looking creations at MeshAvatars:

It certainly looks much nicer than the usual prim-based stuff, though I’m far from a connoisseur in these matters. It seemed quite expensive by SL standards, which made me wonder how much trouble it actually was to upload these things, since prefabricated examples can be found pretty easily on the web, and the mesh creation tools aren’t that hard to master (I’m told).

The answer to that turned out to be “more trouble than I can be bothered with”, what with having to register with the Lab as a mesh uploader, take a test in intellectual property rights, and wade through the technical details of the actual process, not to mention paying the upload fees. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there with more patience for this than me though, so I still think that there will eventually be an influx of cheap mesh items that will put the old prim merchants out of business. I suspect the relative obscurity of SL might be their best hope of a reprieve.