Saturday, November 14, 2009
Weekend Machinima: Torley Explores the Cyberpunk Wonderland of Sick
Here's what Second Life looks like with a high-end graphics card and all the viewer features turned up to full: Presented by Torley, a rollicking, single take trip through Sick, one of Second Life's best cyberpunk city islands, creation of a Japanese Resident named MK Curtiz. I interviewed him last year, who told me, amazingly enough, he built Sick as "a hobby". [SLurl teleport link to Sick here] Mr. Curtiz is also a superb machinima maker himself: After the break, have a look at the subtitled version of an anime-inspired short he made back in 2007:
Continue reading "Weekend Machinima: Torley Explores the Cyberpunk Wonderland of Sick"
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NWN in Japanese:Willow's Playlist:ボーカリストPhoe Nixのアコースティックピアノ
NWN限定、Willow Calderaの新しいSLライブミュージックシーン情報
どちらの世界でも、クリスタルボイスを誇り、聴衆の髪を逆立てるような体験をさせるシンガーは少ないでしょう。エレガントなカバー曲とオリジナルソング両方で、Phoe Nixは自信に満ちたピアノの旋律で伴奏された、非の打ち所がない、情緒的な音楽を演奏します。
Continue reading "NWN in Japanese:Willow's Playlist:ボーカリストPhoe Nixのアコースティックピアノ"
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Friday, November 13, 2009
I Like Banana's (Second Life Travel and Fashion Blog)
Banana Vella is the quirky name of a fashionista with a yen for SL travel -- and her blog is named the same. Amid sporadic fashion spreads, she lavishly illustrates her many travels in SL, and they're locations you'll want to visit too: say the underwater dreamland in Raimondo, the magical Bentham forest, and an island called Photon Pinks, "sim that looks like someone threw up candy all over it. I mean that in the nicest way possible!" Now won't you care for some Banana too?
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Do You Make Your Avatar More Attractive To Make More Friends?
In Second Life, it's a truism that the more gargantuan a female avatar's breasts are, the more likely the owner is actually a man in real life. In an interesting if limited study, Pixels and Policy's Gatsby Crumb conducted a survey female avatars, and found that wasn't always the case. 70% of female avatars told Gatsby that breast size was an important consideration when creating their persona. Most of those surveyed self-reported as women in real life, and while many said they resisted making their breasts stereotypically large, several said they did so... so they could make friends easier. Not for sexual reasons, necessarily, just to encourage basic social contact:
"At first I played with an avatar that I thought represented me physically... But not many people talked to me. Now [with a large-chested avatar] people go out of their way to IM me and send me friend requests."
The study inspires feminist game blogger Tami "Cuppycake" Baribeau to wonder about the social expectations of virtual attractiveness: "I’m an overweight female in real life, yet my avatar in Second Life is thin and adorable," she acknowledges. "Why is it, that we fight the typical female appearance ideals, yet when given a choice to create our avatars as overweight or as similar to ourselves as possible, we don’t?" Image: pixelsandpolicy.com.
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What RL Country Has the Most SL Spenders By Proportion?
Quaintly Tuquri, an SL Resident living in Malaysia, looked at the most recent Second Life economic statistics, and noted something interesting: Her compatriots are responsible for 4% of in-world user-to-user transactions. That would not seem like much, but then, Malaysia only has a population of 28 million. By comparison, Japanese Residents also account for 4% of in-world spending -- but Japan has a population of 128 million. (This may have something to do with the fact that SL users in Malaysia can buy their Linden Dollars with a pre-paid debit card sold at retail -- but Japanese cannot.) This makes me wonder which country has the most Second Life consumers by proportion. My quick eyeball guess is Hong Kong, whose citizens account for 3% of in-world spending -- drawn from a population of only 7 million. Or am I missing another country which proportionally counts more big virtual spenders? Image: quirkyquaintly.com
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Thursday, November 12, 2009
New World Tableau: Musique Gable's "Snowball Fight"
I love this bright and perfectly composed tribute to winter from Musique Gable.
"Not only was this cheap to shoot," she tells me, "but fun as well. I staged the area using sculpty snow (free from a friend), snow particles ($50L), Linden winter trees (free), an igloo (another freebie -- threw some pillows in there to add some warmth) and some Lost Angel poses. Grabbed a friend and started whizzing snowballs at him until he begged for mercy."
After taking several snapshots, the post-processing magic began: "Threw it into Photoshop -- making everything black and white, except for me and my reluctant snowball victim (to draw your attention to the snowball fight) and the pillows in the igloo (to give it a splash of color), along with a little brushwork to add depth and shadows."
See more of Musique's great SL-driven art on her Koinup profile, see the whole New World Tableau series here. To best submit entries of your own, join my New World Tableau group on Koinup, and start uploading them there; be sure to tell us a bit how you created your image.
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Chestnut's Choices 11/12 - 11/18: Concert Series Blends Live Jazz & Immersive Art, Science Author Dorion Sagan Speaks, All-Day Fall Music Festival and Much More
Chestnut Rau’s weekly round-up of upcoming SL events…
If you like live Jazz and 3D immersive art, there is a series of mixed reality events that should tickle your fancy. JazzLive at The Crypt presents a short season of jazz concerts celebrating the wealth of talent in the UK jazz scene. The shows will be broadcast live from the RL venue into a Second Life space filled with art by some of the virtual world’s most respected artists -- DanCoyote Antonelli, Oberon Onmura and Juria Yoshikawa.
The art covers the entire sim and creates a wild, pulsing, colorshifting environment which serves as the background for the music. As you can see from the photo above the art is large-scale. What you can't see is the work reacts to avatars which creates an engaging immersive experience. During performances the RL audience will be able to view the art on a large screen and the SL audience will be able to see the action at The Crypt. Jazz is experimental by nature and the same can be said about virtual art so the two seem like ideal partners.
On Friday, 11/13 at 8pm in London and Noon in SL, The Dave O'Higgins Quartet will perform, featuring Dave O'Higgins on tenor & soprano saxes, Tom Cawley on piano, Arnie Somogyi on bass and Matt Home on drums. For more information about this show and for a schedule of weekly performances please go here. As a special bonus this week, there will be a set by SL jazz musician Seba Sideways who will be playing starting at noon. In JazzLive. [SLurl teleport at this link]
Also after the break:NMC Covers 2 Sims with Work from 30 Artists, Political Humor in the Age of Obama, Old-time Thanksgiving Stories, AIDS Benefit and much much more
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Wednesday, November 11, 2009
How to Make Second Life Truly Mass Market, Part 2: Point-and-Click Avatar Movement!
World of Warcraft, the largest 3D online world with 12 million subscribers, has it.
Sims 2, which is often compared to SL, and is the biggest single-player 3D game for the PC, selling 13 million copies, also has it.
But Second Life, the largest 3D virtual world with only 750K active users, and a growth plateau, does not have it:
Point-and-click avatar movement.
With a point-and-click interface, the user clicks the mouse somewhere within the display, avatar goes there. Display camera automatically follows the avatar. The basic interaction is common to anyone who's ever used a modern computer.
With Second Life, by contrast, the default movement interface is still based on first-person shooter keybindings -- A strafes left, D strafes rights, and so on. The reason for this is simple:
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Willow's Playlist: Indie Rock From [Engrama]: SL's answer to the White Stripes, with added Spanish flair
Exclusive to NWN, Willow Caldera covers SL's burgeoning live music scene
For Pupito Abrahams and Lakua Arriaga, performing in Second Life has become a real-life career. Taking their influences from bands such as Joy Division and The Cure and sprinkling over them a dash of Spanish guitar, [Engrama]'s live presence has a whimsical quality that perfectly complements its indie cool.
The duo live together in Buenos Aires, though Pupito hails originally from Argentina and Lakua from Spain. [Engrama] was born from a shared interest in musical experimentation and blends Pupito's interest in the local independent music scene and Lakua's goal to 'musicalize' images, which comes from her background as a photographer.
This video was shot by Sound'r at Idylls Club.
"We use to watch a movie and put down the sound and try to do the soundtrack of the movie, and one day we start playing without that mechanism and started making music," says Pupito.
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Philip Rosedale Unveils New Company: "LoveMachine Inc" Offers AI, Destruction of the Ego, Lots of Money-Making
The mystery around Philip Linden's new company keeps getting, well, mysteriouser. Just announced on his Facebook feed (where he also created an invite-only group for it), the LoveMachine Inc site is pretty sparse so far, except to say, "We believe that the right band of people can work together, have a huge amount of fun, make a bunch of money, and try to save the world."
Adding a bit more meat to that mission statement is Philip's help wanted ad for an executive assistant posted to Craiglist, which mentions that "what we are doing is about Artificial Intelligence," then somewhat curiously, says the company will value "freedom, fun, greatness, and the destruction of the ego". (My theology is a bit rusty, but aren't elimination of the ego and massive money making usually considered mutually exclusive?) In any event, it does seem to involve creating, as I first suggested, a mass market version of the original Love Machine, apparently with some AI functionality. Part of me thinks this is all or largely a lark, especially since the job application requirements demand that you start by finding the "word written in sharpie on the lower edge of the sign outside the [Linden Lab] door." Then again, in today's economy, I wouldn't be surprised if several applicants have already made their way there. Image credit: www.lovemachineinc.com. More fun from Dusan Writer here.
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Tuesday, November 10, 2009
In Survey, 90% Call For Critical Second Life Fashion Blog -- Here's Some Advice on Writing One
Noting the dearth of SL blogs that are critical of Second Life fashion, I recently surveyed the demand for same. Here's the results: nearly 90% are potentially interested in reading an SL blog with negative product reviews. Iris Ophelia wrote a classic guide for spotting poorly made Second Life fashion, so here's three suggestions for blogging about them with a minimum of drama:
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Open Forum: If Second Life Notecards Are So Frustrating, Why Do Residents Keep Using Them?
Every time I go into Second Life, I'm inundated by all the text notecards that have been piling into my holding queue since I last logged in -- press releases, event announcements, long messages, and so on. Often they take forever to open, and in any case, there's no way to immediately reply to them (you need to discern who sent which notecard, then contact them, a process of several steps), and if you accidentally close or discard one you need, good luck trying to find it in your Inventory. There's no way to automatically export them out of Second Life, so if you want to blog about them, you have to arduously copy/paste the notecard text from multiple windows. For all these reasons and more, I have a profile message begging people to contact me via email, and a post announcing the same. Despite this, the notecards keep coming. I'm hardly the only one frustrated by them, so the mystery is why they're still such a mainstay of Second Life miscommunication. What's your take?
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New World Newsfeed: Top University's Online Advisers Now Required To Maintain Office Hours on Second Life Campus
Penn State is ranked among the United State's very best public universities, and now the Chronicle of Higher Education reports it has another distinction: The school's online advisors are required to maintain office hours as avatars in Penn State's Second Life presence. Judging by the website calendar, that means 12 Penn State representatives being available in SL throughout the week. I wonder if the University's Second Life island gets enough foot traffic of students and would-be students to justify such an active schedule -- but then again, all it really requires is running a SL window in the background, and popping it open when you hear the clicky-clacky typing of a visitor. Direct SLurl to Penn State's Island at this link. Image: worldcampus.psu.edu.
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Virtual King Tut Photo Contest - $100 Each For 3 Winners
NWN partner Rezzable is sponsoring a photo contest of King Tut Virtual, their Tutankhamen exhibit running on an OpenSimulator grid. (Direct link here on Rezzable's Heritage Key site.) Three winners will get $100 (USD, not Linden Dollars) for taking high-res pics around these themes: "Avatars exploring", "What in King Tut Virtual would you show to your friends?", and "What's real in a virtual world?" Go here for all the details. Pic by Prad Prathivi.
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Monday, November 09, 2009
The Art of M. Linden -- Abstract Peek Into Mind of Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon
In a very interesting interview with Mark Kingdon on Massively, the Linden Lab CEO casually told Tateru Nino about his art student background, and pointed to his Flickr stream of drawings, a striking series of abstract and intricate meshes. I was curious to know more, and how they might relate to his current work in Second Life.
"I've been doing these drawings for 15 years," M. told me, "although the ones you see on Flickr are from a very condensed period of time... Drawing helps focus my mind, like meditation.
"The less colorful/intricate drawings on Flickr were done at the office while on long conference calls -- black ink pen, basic printer paper. (Yes, I can concentrate on the conversation while drawing.) I remember exactly where I was when I did the last one in the set (it's shaped like a lopsided Africa). I had to crop it because it had telephone numbers on it. A true doodle. The more colorful/intricate drawings -- the ones where I used colored pencils -- were done at home. They take a long time (and they're messy) because I am forever sharpening the pencils. I haven't doodled much at all since joining the Lab. When I am in in-world meetings I am always camming around."
So how does his artwork relate to Second Life and his management of Linden Lab?
Continue reading "The Art of M. Linden -- Abstract Peek Into Mind of Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon"
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Second Life's Oldest Resident is 97
Los Angeles architect David Denton uses Second Life as a tool for his work (more on that soon), and when colleagues complain that SL is too complicated, he has a novel reply: "If my 97 year old mother can do it, you can do it."
Because that happens to be the case: meet LS Back, who is almost certainly Second Life's oldest Resident. (When I told David about the 88 year old blues singer and the 87 year old Holocaust survivor who also use SL, he snorted: "Whippersnappers.")
Ms. Back, David tells me, enjoys flying around and exploring, and visiting the exhibit hall which David built for her, to display her watercolor paintings in-world. (He made it as a surprise for her 95th birthday.) We are fortunate to have a real life photo of her, because Ms. Back was initially reluctant to be profiled. For as she first told David, "Southern ladies do not reveal their age."
Photo and screenshot courtesy of D. Denton.
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Second Life Machinima Shot With an iPhone
Want an economical way to shoot Second Life machinima? There's an app for that. As demonstrated by Botgirl Questi, who captures SL video with her iPhone:
I actually like how the iPhone gives the footage a glassy, abstracted appearance. (This is roughly the way Douglas Gayeton shot his Molotov Alva SL documentary, with a high definition camera pointed directly at his monitor.) Botgirl also edited this video with an iPhone app called ReelDirector, so it's entirely an iPhone package.
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My Favorite New World Notes Posts From Last Week
If you missed them last week here's a last chance to check them out before they slide off the front page:
- How to make Second Life truly mass market, Part 1: Deep Integration With Facebook (Very interesting conversation in Comments)
- Iris Ophelia's guide to spotting badly-made virtual fashion (a must read for fashionistas)
- Korean company developing multitouch metaverse screen interface for OpenSim/Second Life
- US Army funds Second Life-based therapy for amputees
- Virtual law expert Ben Duranske's advice on SL Content Theft. Biggest one: Register the copyright of your SL content!
- In reply to Stroker lawsuit, Linden lawyers cite "Unclean Hands" defense -- an expert analyzes why
- How big is the market for SL's enterprise solution, anyway?
- Willow profiles vocalist Phoe Nix, a bit like Tori Amos meets Kate Bush
- The social fallout of SL content theft
- Goodbye Bettina from Second Life blogging (but not gone besides that)
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Sunday, November 08, 2009
Today Meet Virtual Goods Expert Susan Wu in Second Life!
Today (November 8) at 4 PM SLT/Pacific, virtual goods expert Susan Wu will be the guest on SmarterTechnology's Second Life show, where she'll speak on "The Internet Economics of Vampire Fun". Fast Company named her one of 2009's 100 most creative people in business, and for good reason: Susan's the founder and CEO of Ohai, a new MMO game developer, and before that, was CMO for the Apache Foundation, VP of Strategy for Opus360, and most recently a partner at Charles River Ventures. (She's even been involved in some SL-related projects.) Even more important, she's a good friend of mine, and one of the smartest people working in virtual worlds and games. Please come if you can, you'll learn a lot about both -- including City of Eternals, her upcoming vampire-themed MMO, which I'll be talking more about here soon.
This is the SLurl teleport link to SmartTechnology's auditorium. If you can't reach the in-world venue, here's how to watch the video stream on the web:
Continue reading "Today Meet Virtual Goods Expert Susan Wu in Second Life!"
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Saturday, November 07, 2009
NWN in Japanese: IBMとNokiaが、より進歩したリアリティー会議システムをセカンドライフで開発している
IBMとNokiaが、より進歩したリアリティー会議システムをセカンドライフで開発している。この開発によって、参加者はリアルとバーチャルの会議スペースを共有することが出来る。ここにあるシステム作動中の映像では、目とアバターの位置を追跡するヘッドマウントカメラが取り入れられ、現実世界とセカンドライフのビデオをまとめている。これにより、デモではミーティング参加者がセカンドライフの中にしか存在しない3Dの建物をチェックしているところを見ることができる:
Continue reading "NWN in Japanese: IBMとNokiaが、より進歩したリアリティー会議システムをセカンドライフで開発している"
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Friday, November 06, 2009
Virtual Law Expert Ben Duranske on SL Content Theft
Chestnut Rau has a good summary of a recent in-world presentation on legal issues and SL content theft by virtual world law expert Benjamin Duranske (Benjamin Noble in SL), author of Virtual Law: Navigating the Legal Landscape of Virtual Worlds. Among the highlights Chestnut reports: "He remarked that the class action suit recently brought against Linden Lab regarding content theft was very well done", and "suggests content creators make sure they register their copyright with the government because in the US doing so increases the ability to sue for damages and recover legal costs". Emphasis mine, because I strongly second his second point. Shockingly, in a recent survey, 85% of SL content creators polled say they have not registered their works. So I'll put it even more bluntly than Benjamin:
If a Second Life content creator wants to show they're actually serious about protecting their SL content, they should register it with the US government.
Anyway, read the rest of the summary here, with more from Phaylen Fairchild.
Image credit: A slide from Benjamin's SL talk, from Dusty Artaud's Flickr stream.
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The Heartbreak of Second Life Content Theft
SL fashion designer Sasy Scarborough has a long and tormented post on the heartbreak of content theft, sent to me by my style columnist Iris Ophelia. Here is Sasy talking about one of her regular routines, tracking down stolen content, so she can report it:
Let's start with the malls, the places that are so seedy that I used to feel dirty just being there, and even worse would constantly panic that someone might think I was actually in a stolen content store to actually shop, because I couldn’t say anything, wasn’t able to explain, just had to get in get info and get the hell out.
Then there are the full blown stores selling every single item you have in your inventory from the original creator, up there so blatant in its copybotted glory, that I used to have to stand there for twenty or more hive inducing minutes to rez it all, and then to find out it was even worse because it was all being sold full perms, so the travesty would continue.
Last week, I noted that it's difficult to see evidence of substantial content theft's impact in the Second Life economic reports, which show continued growth of revenue transactions. (My basic sense is that most content theft is too low margin and fly-by-night to show up on a macro level.) However, I also suggested then that the moral and social impact is grave. Ms. Scarborough's story is but one illustration of that.
Iris put it best, when I asked for her take on content theft's economic impact: "It's hard to say," she told me, "because money is still being spent and we can't see where it's being spent. Designers who get copybotted incessantly like Maitreya still do well, but we have no idea how much they could be doing better if content theft wasn't so rampant."
However, she continued, "In truth the only thing that we really can measure is the stress that it puts on designers and people in the community who do care like Sasy, and the added strain it puts on the system of Lindens in charge of dealing with governance and copyright enforcement issues who already have a hell of a lot on their plate to begin with."
Image credit: sasypants.com
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Thursday, November 05, 2009
In Defense Against Stroker Serpentine Content Theft Lawsuit, Linden Lawyers Cite "Unclean Hands" Defense Against Plaintiffs -- an Expert Analyzes Why
The Lindens' lawyers have filed a response to the content theft-related lawsuit filed by Stroker Serpentine and Munchflower Zaius -- the Alphaville Herald has a full copy here. Among the defenses is the legal doctrine of "unclean hands", in which a defendant argues that the plaintiff (Serpentine and/or Zaius in this case) are acting unethically or have acted in bad faith. To me this seemed a surprising defense to make, but since I'm not a lawyer, I contacted an actual one, for his opinion: Sean Kane of Kane & Associates, who's an expert in law related to virtual worlds and online games. Here's his take:
"Linden Lab's inclusion of Unclean Hands as an Affirmative Defense in their Answer to the Complaint may not mean much of anything. There are several Affirmative Defenses that are almost always included in an Answer because if they are not raised they may be deemed waived. Unclean Hands is one of them." (More after the break.)
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New World Tableau: "Surfer" by Arminius Heron
Ideal viewing for a cold Fall day, Arminius Heron shot "Surfer" in a beach region with a kneeling model pose and a surfboard, turning a static shot into a perfect freeze frame of action. (You definitely want to click to see the full effect.)
"It was quite difficult to obtain the right camera angle," Arminius tells me, "because what you would never suspect is that Vanessa is actually hovering about one meter above the board. Plus, this was before WindLight and environmental controls were introduced to SL, so the lighting was rather dull, too. The water and splashing effects are all Photoshopped in using only default-brushes, A LOT of layers and emboss effects."
See many more of Mr. Heron's great SL-based images here, and see the whole New World Tableau series here. To best submit entries of your own, join my New World Tableau group on Koinup, and start uploading them there; be sure to tell us a bit how you created your image.
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Survey: How Big Is the Market for Second Life Enterprise?
This week, the Lindens officially launched its behind-the-firewall product, Second Life Enterprise™, formerly code-named "Nebraska", with a starting price of $55,000. It comes out the gate with 14 clients, including a number of high profile firms like IBM and Northrop Grumman; how many more potential clients are out there? Please make your best educated guess below:







