Shenlei Winkler's Page

Shengri La Spirit: A Designer's Perspective of the Making of OpenSim is now available on Amazon! It has now been about two years since Fashion Research Institute first began exploring the OpenSim platform to assess its suitability for our patent-pending design and development application, Black Dress Technology. In those two years, we have seen a great deal of development on the OpenSim code base. http://tinyurl.com/nnytrw


Fashion Research Institute Joins IBM's V-Business Consortium: http://tinyurl.com/nxe98l

Fashion Research Institute Announces Autumn 2009 Student Internships
Virtual apparel is a burgeoning market. In 2008, more than $2.6 billion dollars of virtual goods were sold in virtual worlds, games, and immersive spaces. This figure is expected to double in 2009. Avatar apparel – clothing, accessories, and footwear worn by avatars – is a huge part of these sales. Until now, there have been no programs specifically intended to help new designers become established in this area....For more information about our Autumn 2009 Intership program, please visit: http://shenlei.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/fashion-research-institute-announces-autumn-2009-student-internships/

Collaborating With Intel Labs for OpenSim Performance & Content Delivery: http://tinyurl.com/nf29gs

Finalizing the details of Shengri La Spirit: A User's Perspective of the Making of OpenSim. Foreword by David LEvine (Zha Ewry), with contributions from OpenSim Core developers, this lushly illustrated book is a tale of the journey of the creation of Shengri La Spirit, the 41,000 prim region created in OpenSim during the 4400-4600 versions of the OpenSim code base. Shengri La Spirit will be available on Amazon.com in August 2009, and the region itself will be made open for public visitation, with hosting and hardware provided courtesy of the Intel Corporation.

Announcing the publication of Designing Dreams: Best Practices for the Art & Business of Avatar Apparel Design & Development. Designing Dreams is the first comprehensive textbook focused on helping fashion design students and emerging designers learn to quickly create professionally developed avatar apparel for Second Life and OpenSim. Emphasis is placed on using a framework developed by Shenlei Winkler, CEO of the Fashion Research Institute to achieve reliable results. Designing Dreams guides the new practitioner through critical design and business decisions to help them achieve their goals with an avatar apparel design practice. Designing Dreams is the textbook suggested for use with the Fashion Research Institute's avatar apparel design courses, taught in both Second Life and OpenSim. Designing Dreams is now available for purchase on Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Dreams-Practices-Business-Development/dp/0984117105/

The Fashion Research Institute made a critical hire of Justin Clark-Casey, one of the core developers of the OpenSim platform. We are very pleased that Mr. Clark-Casey is joining us as the Lead Developer for our Black Dress Technology subsidiary. Full news release here.

The Fashion Research Institite and IBM cross another boundary into the great unknown of hardening OpenSim. This week we not only crossed the artificial prim limit of 15,000 prims set by Linden Labs (TM) on Second Life (TM), but we also enabled attachments and more to the point, showed a full fashion look in our collaboratory, IBM-hosted OpenSim Shengri La Spirit. We're currently at 18,604 prims in Spirit and hammering at the code and installation to toughen up OpenSim code. I have such an amazing and responsive team working with me; Kurt Taylor is our OpenSim development lead, Zha Ewry is our IBM Team Leader for this effort, and last but certainly not least, the amazing Script Wizard Dale Innis, who has been o-so-great at giving me exactly what we need, almost before I ask for it. Guys, you rock.


Yay! IBM OpenSim Shengri La Spirit is back and sassy!

Those IBM Blade servers are something else again. Yes, that really is a sim with 45,000 prims. I got the testing started again and feeding bug reports to Team Leader Zha Ewry.

The Fashion Research Institute's islands in Second Life (TM):

Shengri La comprises five islands in Second Life(tm). We maintain the islands open to the public at sea level. The islands are largely open natural space, with many small vignettes to discover. We host artists in our galleries, with two resident artists - Callipygian Christensen, a photographer, and Pumpkin Tripsa, sculptor. We also feature the work of fashion designer Yuriko Muromachi, whose flagship store is located on Shengri La. We host the community gateway for apparel industry personnel on Shengri La. The Gateway is not open to the public, but it represents a new paradigm in user orientation. The FRI-IBM collaboration team maintains space on the islands, as well, including Team Leader Zha Ewry, Principle Investigator Dr. Rez Tone, and script wizard Dale Innis.
Shengri La was renovated from February 1-8 2008. Terraforming was provided by IBM researcher Dr. Rez Tone. I built and landscaped the rest of the sims.

In the IBM booth at the National Retail Federation Show, January 2008.
By the time this was taken ( near the end of Day Two) I was reminded once again why Trade Shows R Not Me. My feet hurt! IBM does an amazing job of caring for their people, complete with nice thick rubbery sheets under a plush carpeting, but let's face it, 9 hours on your feet facing the public isn't for everyone. Still, it was an amazing experience to work with Distinguished Engineer Wendy Neuberger and Client Executive Bernadette Duponchel. I learned so much from them! We were in the IBM booth (front and center) to present our new virtual worlds-based product design solution. We've been working with IBM Research to develop this innovative, game-changing technology, and this was our first public appearance. Quite an experience for an upstart start-up.

The Community Gateway for apparel industry personnel on Second Life(TM)

We're developing a new paradigm in user orientation o n Shengri La. Given that our target audience is comprised of largely visual learners, who already have a good grasp on graphics programs that have a common look and feel to many of the build tools available in OpenSim and Second Life (tm), it made sense to use to create a visually lush experience for these new users to enter into. The Gateway itself is comparatively small with regards to its footprint, but it packs a lot into it. Several top SL TM designers have graciously provided content so that our new users can step out in style. Style being, of course, critical to any good fashionista, whether they're a design intern, product manager, or executive. We have included a variety of interactive engagements created expressly for this audience, which are designed to encourage exploration.


The "Flight over the Edge" past artificial prim limits on OpenSim

OpenSim is our next big initiative. We looked at all the other virtual worlds out there last summer, and we focused on OpenSim for several reasons, including the fact that it uses the regular SL TM viewer. This means we can train people to use virtual worlds in Second Life TM where the rich content allows for an immersive experience, which is particularly important for our audience of visual learners. Then, when our OpenSim world is ready for enterprise, our trained, skilled user base can just 'step over' without having to learn how to use a whole new world with different controls.

This is the picture where we forced our IBM OpenSim Shengri La Spirit over the artificial prim limit - we built to about 16,000 prims before the decision was made to stop. I'm waiting for our new build to come live on the second IBM Blade server hosted on the IBM Yellow Zone before I resume building in OpenSim.