New World Notes

Why WeChat is Wonderful: The Cross-Platform Mobile Chat/Audio/Video/Social Network That'll Change the World

"WeChat is going to change the world!", says my colleague Lisa Hanson, renowned expert on China's virtual goods market, and I tend to think she's right. It's a cross-platform mobile chat service first launched in China now rolling out to the rest of the world, but just saying that doesn't quite convey how big it already. Now with about 200 million active users, it's rapidly gaining on its closest rival, Whatsapp -- but like I said, it's not just a chat service. I started using it in China because most of its users are here, and it's already kind of a social necessity. When you meet people socially in Beijing and Shanghai, likely as not you'll pull your mobile phone out, launch WeChat, and show your WeChat QR code, so they can automatically add you to their communication network. (Speaking of which, I'm "wjamesau" on WeChat, if you want to connect.)

Besides text chat, it also has asynchronous audio chat -- meaning, you can send audio and messages to people in your contact network. This is better than texting in many cases, and opens up more use cases beyond chat -- for instance, I've used WeChat as a English/Chinese translation tool.

Wechat also has a social network so you can share updates and photos with your friends, and most NWN readers will love the fact that you can create an account without having to share your real world details. (Far as I can tell, you don't have to display your real name, or even show a real photo in your profile.)

And oh, did I mention WeChat has a booty call? I'll let my friends Andrew Leonard and Henry Fong explain:

An Open Source Artificial Life Project Called OpenWorm

OpenWorm is a very cool project that also scares me a little bit: a collaborative, open source attempt to construct an artificial life form -- a simple worm, computationally created from the cellular level to a point where it's sophisticated enough to solve, as the site explains, "basic problems such as feeding, mate-finding and predator avoidance". This would be the first digital life form of its kind, but if the project is successful, more sophisticated species are sure to follow.

I first heard about this open source project because OpenSim pioneer John Hurliman recently joined OpenWorm's development team, helping with improving the code's deployment processes. "In the future I'd like to help with the physical and neural simulation aspects," he tells me. "It strongly overlaps with the simulation research I did at Intel, even though we were virtual world/avatar focused, for the implementation the theory is equally applicable to a project like this."

How's progress on the worm itself going?

Google's Eric Schmidt & Jared Cohen Think Virtual Reality Will Become More Commonplace, Online Identity Less Anonymous - They're Half Right

This is a thought-provoking trailer to The New Digital Age, an upcoming book by Google execs Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, and it's very interesting that they describe the future of the Internet as a "virtual world":

One point seems off to me:

Five billion people are expected to come online during the next decade as information technology becomes even cheaper and more widely available. At the same time, virtual reality will become more commonplace and online identities will become less anonymous and more valuable.

Emphasis mine. They're probably right that VR will be more common, though my money is on technology like the Oculus Rift versus the augmented reality of Google Glass, which still has the a-hole problem to contend with. In any case, the idea that online identities are moving toward more anonymity seems wacky on its face. Here's why:

Oculus Rift on a Treadmill Just Proves Oculus Rift is Not Ideal for First-Person Shooters

There's a startup called Virtuix that's integrated the Oculus Rift with an omni-directional treadmill, and shot a demo video (below) of their technology in action with Team Fortress 2. I love the idea of hardcore gamers having to run around for hours at a time, but I'm betting most of them do not. Which is yet another reason why I agree with Keystone that the Oculus Rift is better suited to leisurely virtual world experiences, versus twitch shooters.

Anyway, more huffing and puffing violent VR below!

Double Confirmed: Philip Rosedale's High Fidelity Building "A New Kind of Virtual Reality Platform" - As Are Many Others

"Our mission is to create a new kind of virtual reality platform," announces Philip Rosedale on the blog of his new company, High Fidelity, officially confirming what some of us up to now have just inferred: Philip is basically building Third Life. It will probably incorporate a voxel-based 3D graphics engine, and gesture-based controls. (He also wants to hire a full-time graphics engineer, so update your resume, kids.) I'm planning to talk with Philip about his vision very soon, but it's interesting that he's doing this at the same time others are pushing to create new virtual reality platforms of their own. Overall, this feels like a real trend, made possible by continued leaps in computer power, especially related to 3D graphics, and their continued drop in price. It reminds me of something someone told me a few years ago, when Second Life's hype wave was on the wane. Don't worry, he said, this is just the first generation of something much bigger, which will come into its own as the technology to drive it evolves.

Watch This Video to See Why Linden Lab Should Spend Millions Getting Second Life to Run Well on the Oculus Rift

Chances are you've already seen this now-viral video of a 90 year old woman fully freaking out from the joy of experiencing a virtual recreation of Tuscany through the Oculus Rift headset, and I really hope everyone at Linden Lab has seen it too, because... well, just watch:

We were just talking about whether Second Life can become the killer app for the Oculus Rift, but this video makes it far more clear what the opportunity is: A means of bringing the virtual world experience to everyone, easily, without them necessarily having to learn how to use a complex user interface to get the basic experience. Not to mention an experience that seems to be far more profound and immersive than just seeing the world on a flat, single screen. With the Rift, all that's required is the ability to move your head. But like I said, here's the key challenge:

Second Life Runs Pretty Well on a Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2

I don't own a Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2, but Mr. Angelocracy Xue does, and demonstrates that he can run Second Life on it pretty well -- watch:

The impressive thing is that SL seems to work with the ThinkPad's touchscreen controls, which I thought Mr. Xue had customized himself. He says not so:

Sell Your Linden Dollars for Bitcoins in Second Life (If You Don't Mind the Long Wait & Losing Value from the Trade)

Turns out you can sell your Linden Dollars for Bitcoin, the virtual currency lots of people talk about (even though few of them use it as an actual currency), from within Second Life, where about 400,000 people regularly use the virtual world's official money. Software engineer Sam Williams documents his experience of doing just that, via the Virtual World Exchange. It's pretty time-consuming:

In order to initiate the transfer, I had to visit one of VirWoX’s terminals inside Second Life, where I deposited L$5,195. That’s me in the image above, with what appears to be some sort of cat behind me... The final step was simply to get the money out of my VirWoX account and into a bitcoin “wallet,” a secure address that acts as my public identity on the bitcoin network. This turned out to be, by far, the most time-consuming step. After downloading the recommended bitcoin client, I needed to wait about five hours for it sync with the network.

And if I'm looking at the current exchange rates right, he lost a few dollars of value in the process:

Can Second Life Become the Killer App for Oculus Rift? Only If Linden Lab Goes All In

Following up on his first impressions with the Oculus Rift dev kit, virtual world innovator Jon "Keystone" Brouchoud argues that Second Life is the killer app for the technology, but OpenSim will develop for it first. He offers ten reasons he thinks this will be so, though most of them are actually reasons why Second Life should be the killer app. While I agree with that hope, I respectfully think there's several reasons why it won't:

• Oculus Rift is expensive: The consumer model isn't set for release until 2014, doesn't even have its features locked in, and is slated to be sold for between $200-300. It'll be very difficult to build a killer app from that high a price point.
• Oculus Rift developers are overwhelmingly FPS game-centric: While Jon notes that the Rift will probably induce motion sickness in FPS games, the fact remains that most of the games currently in development for the Rift are FPS. (Read the list here.) With its heavist and most prominent backing from FPS innovators like John Carmack, Gabe Newell, and Cliff Bleszinski, the Rift's has already been framed as a killer app not for virtual worlds like Second Life, but for first-person shooters.

That said, Jon offers a very good reason for pushing Second Life as an alternative model for Rift content:

Watch Philip Rosedale Connect a Smartphone's Accelerometer to Movement in a Virtual World

This is Philip Rosedale demonstrating new technology from his new startup High Fidelity -- it connects a mobile phone's accelerometer to a virtual world, and in this way, matches the movement of person holding the phone directly to movement in the virtual world. Watch:

"At a high level," Philip tells me, "we are looking in a very broad way experimentally at how sensors can be used to better animate the avatar." In this particular demo, here's how they do that: