My post last week on Artbreeder, which uses Generative Adversarial Networks to create "children" of an original image, generated a mini-burst of excitement among many in the SL community, who started experimenting with the process to turn pictures of their avatars into "real" people. And the results are pretty mesmerizing! Above is one by Devin Vaughn, whose avatar looks in real life, I guess, like the clone of Ronan Farrow blended with Anderson Cooper?
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
This picture from Mimi Bunny makes me think of a movie poster for an adventure film. You know the kind, the hero and allies all rushing forward to save the world and the day. I love the colors and the wild frenetic energy.
Skittish is "a playful virtual space for online events" now in closed beta, the brainchild of beloved tech veteran Andy Baio, a longtime advocate of Internet-driven creativity. As the video teaser above suggests, it combines the whimsical charm of online games like Animal Crossing, with video sharing and other features associated with platforms like Zoom, along with virtual world-type user creation tools and spatial audio chat.
As Andy explains on his blog, it's his bid to create a new kind of virtual event platform for the pandemic age and beyond, synthesizing the online experiences many of us found joy and relief in during the quarantine:
As depressing as most virtual events were, there were three bright spots of creative experimentation happening over the last year:
Experimental Events. The brilliant MUD-like environment created for Roguelike Celebration and the ongoing series of LIKELIKE events showed how event spaces could draw inspiration from games to great effect.
Proximity Chat. Second Life has supported spatial voice chat for nearly 15 years, but a crop of experimental new platforms started using spatial/positional audio and video to make virtual parties feel more real.
Social Games. Approachable games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Among Us, and Fall Guys were breakout stars of the pandemic, giving us new ways to connect to with friends when we couldn’t be together in person.
There are some amazing projects out there, but I started outlining a hybrid of these ideas: an online event venue for large-scale gatherings that used spatial audio, didn’t assume people were comfortable being on camera, with real-time customization of the space, and built in a 3D engine for a more immersive game-like feel.
Via Nodoka Hanamura, this week's virtual world location gracing New World Notes' banner is Hiraya Village in Second Life, a community based around a highly-detailed recreation of modern urban cityscapes of Japan.
"It's run by Rydia Lacombe and a few others as a federated community (much like East River), it spans multiple regions and recently started expanding to cover all of Bedstraw and parts of Datana, as well as existing as a larger community that extends to Cisthene, Amella, Tersa and Gibbosa."
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
“2326” is a picture of the cyberpunk sim Drune and comes with Difficult Conundrum’s suggestion that you listen to OX1 from DJ Tommy Four Seven. Yes, the music suits the environment. I love how she presents this as a polaroid, something she does with many of her pictures. I love how the blurred picture suggests the frenzy of a city like Drune, all zip and zoom.
The next pic is the first one I saw and knew immediately I would feature her:
UPDATE, 2/23: The AMA is live now here with Philip's first answer beginning, "I'll be working on virtual worlds in one form or another until I die..."
Get your questions ready: Philip Rosedale, whose hair I'm relieved to see has remained excellent through the quarantine, is going on Reddit tomorrow to answer anything asked of him in the /IAMA subreddit.
Seriously: "Ask me about #SpatialAudio, #VR, virtual worlds and virtual economies, avatars, and … anything."
I'll post the direct link when it's live and probably feature some good questions/answers, and hopefully many will be from New World Notes readers like you. To start prepping your queries now, here's some recent-ish Rosedale/High Fidelity/Second Life news featured here, from 2019 to last week:
Listening to The Office podcast about the 2007 episode where Dwight and Jim play Second Life reminded me of another appearance by the virtual world a few years later -- in Hot Tub Time Machine (2010), starring John Cusack along with Craig Robinson and Clark Duke. (Both of whom, funny enough, also starred in The Office.) In Hot Tub, Duke is Cusack's geeky nephew, who apparently is obsessed with playing in one of SL's many dark urban roleplay communities, like the infamous Crack Den (think Grand Theft Auto Online but with hardcore sex), but is stuck in the game's prison, doing hard time.
When the movie came out, I got to talk with Steve Nelson, the SL creator who worked with the filmmakers on the machinima for the SL scenes:
The dapper AF avatar on your left belongs to TheVirtualGent on Reddit; the "photo" on your right is what he might look like in real life -- a process made possible via Artbreeder, which uses Generative Adversarial Networks to create "children" of an original image along user-selected parameters.
This particular "photo" was created by a Redditor called Ugleh, who gave me the basic how-to of how they made it:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
I just discovered Jacques Valentine’s self-named blog and really love the fresh and avant-garde style that he creates. His pictures are great, too. Jacques approaches androgynous fashion in the best possible way, insisting that people can wear anything and still be a “boys to the bone.” Lookbook #473. For example, the dress and the collar are not even by the same creator, but doesn’t look like it was made that way.
Office Ladies is a podcast from Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey recounting their behind-the-scenes memories as ensemble stars in the beloved TV series, and their latest episode (stream above) delves into the "Local Ad" episode from 2007 -- or as New World Notes readers might refer to it, "the one with Second Life". (Starting at around 9:24, but of course listen to the whole thing.)
From my own behind-the-scenes memory, I recall that the show's writers called Linden Lab for fact-checking purposes -- which is probably why they wrote Dwight basically reciting the company's official messaging at the time: "Second Life is not a game. It's a multi-user virtual environment, it doesn't have points or scores, it doesn't have winners or losers."
Fischer reached out to producer Kent Zbornak (aka Kent-a-pedia) for the details. "Kent reached out to the developers of Second Life, Clear Inc., and Linden Labs, and we entered into a license agreement with them," Fischer explained. "They ended up creating all of the avatars and animation for us. Kent had to send pictures of John and Rainn over to those guys, and they drew out little avatars of them based on Jason and Greg's direction. And that's how they made it."
Fans of Second Life were likely pumped to see the virtual world appear on the show, but Second Life employees were thrilled as well.
"We got a letter, Angela, from Cyn Skyberg," Fischer said. "And listen to this: 'I worked at Second Life when this episode came out and we were so excited. I was the head of customer service at the time and I got all our team together virtually to watch the episode. Second Life was and is a crazy place and so much really nutzo stuff happened in there. This was a big highlight for all of us.'"
I don't know if The Office team knows this, but the episode went on to help crystallize a major conflict within Linden Lab itself, which at the time was pushing for an IPO -- and as part of that effort, was trying to re-frame Second Life as not being a game, but as a development platform. Even though roughly 95% of the userbase play it as an Adult-rated Sims/Minecraft-type sandbox construction game. (Something I wish Jenna Fischer had been told, seeing as she's a fan of The Sims.)
So as Linden Lab suggested how Dwight should describe Second Life, the company itself was spending millions and millions to try and make Second Life actually resemble Dwight's vision -- which led, a few years later, to a massive layoff in the company. It was, as I wrote back then in 2010, a result of "The Dwight Schrute Echo Chamber":
"[We] have created one big community on Discord [via @IcosaGallery] with most people who are working on the open source TiltBrush part of it, and a main fork at the moment of Open Brush," VR artist Rosie Summer tells me. "We are all talking and collabing. Did a lot of play testing for the MultiBrush fork via the Discord. It’s a real exciting hub, and some funding doors have also opened to us too."
Rosie, as you will remember, is a master of solo TiltBrush art, and loves the experience in this new multi-user spinoff:
What you're watching above is a video from social media influencer Taryn Southern, except not quite: It's a "clone" of Ms. Southern, created via an AI platform called HourOne.
"We take a small sample of video footage (ideally captured in a studio, as we did with Taryn), and use our proprietary AI algorithms and generative adversarial networks, to generate an exact digital replica of that person," explains Natalie Monbiot, Head of Business at HourOne. "We can then program the digital twin by way of text or voice inputs, to generate new content delivered in an entirely lifelike way. Uniquely, we don’t do any stitching with our characters – they are fully generated, in the cloud, to deliver with flexible and natural facial expressions -- and since the videos don’t need to be ‘handled’ the potential to scale is enormous."
Monbiot estimates it's possible to save 95% of production costs on future videos, using clones this -- since after all, once Taryn's clone is created, a real life studio, camera crew, make-up, lighting, etc. are no longer required. To be sure, there's a certain dead-eye loss of humanity in the transition from biological Taryn to digital Taryn, as you may notice from the video. But Monbiot says HourOne's AI clones will become more lifelike and expressive in future iterations:
"Today we specialize in face-to-camera video with nuanced and natural facial expression and head motion," as she puts it. "You will certainly see bigger ranges of movement and emotion in the coming months."
From the point of view of well-known online personalities like Taryn Southern, not to mention major pop stars, film celebrities, and beyond, this opens up the possibility of their AI clones continuing to perform, endorse products, make press appearances, and beyond, even while their organic selves are sleeping, or on vacation.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
ByteDreams Slade is a blogger at Style Is a Choice who shoots such dramatic photos they are worthy to stand on their own as art. In Style #172, she shows how beautifully a true artist can display the beauty of darker skin with light and shadow. This picture made me think of the Vogue Challenge last year after Anna Wintour apologized for lack of Black representation. In 127 years, only one Black photographer had shot a cover - and only because Beyoncé insisted on it. Their record of featuring Black women on the cover is equally dismal. I was reminded of their failings again last month after they chose a poor picture for Kamala Harris.
This new simulation basically models the injection of universal basic income -- a solution to the rich/poor divide recently popularized by Presidential candidate Andrew Yang. But as Philip writes, while UBI helps in the short term, his new simulation suggests that the wealth gap quickly starts growing, even with UBI:
Courtesy Caitlin Tobias, this week's virtual world location gracing New World Notes' banner is Golgothica in Second Life, a roleplay storytelling region inspired by Game of Thrones and other fantasy classics. As Caitlin writes on her blog:
Golgothica is for role-play and upon arrival you are supposed to dress to theme. A broad theme, as described above, and since I am an Elf I didn’t find it to hard to find an appropriate outfit for exploring... [Lead creator] Golgothica is a cool place, you should go and have a look! And I suggest you don’t wait too long, Hera’s regions usually do not have a long lifespan.
Quick favor, excellent readers: Let me know if you're interested in a New World Notes newsletter, where subscribers will get special articles and other content. While I plan to always post to New World Notes the blog you're reading now, a subscription-based newsletter (if there's enough interest!) would give me a chance to devote more time to writing richer, more in-depth, news-you-can-use stories -- something I've wanting to do for years.
Hope enough of you agree. But even if you don't, I'd love your opinion. Much mahalo!
There's a new update to Black Dragon, the SL viewer with a cult following for making Second Life look like a AAA game and for giving users great features for virtual photography and machinima.
Speaking of which, here's a new Black Dragon photography tutorial from SL YouTuber and apparent Fleabag cast member Boston Blaisdale. It comes to me via NiranV, the tireless sole creator of Black Dragon who has a Patreon for developing the viewer that could seriously use more patronage for all the work he does on it. Niran recently added a $10/month Patreon level for store owners who want a link to their shop -- an extremely good deal, seeing as Black Dragon has roughly 5000 active users.
Niran gives this tutorial a thumbs-up, especially the part around 4:00 minutes in, when Blaisdale gets into using Black Dragon's highly valuable in-game poser:
Starting at 12:30pm PT today, you can watch this Twitch channel to see yet another clever solution to teaching a large group of students in quarantine times: UC Irvine computer scientist Crista Lopes, being "sick and tired of teaching in Zoom", moved her class of 150 students to OpenSimulator, an open source virtual world. And not just to stream a video lecture to an assembly of avatars, but using OpenSim's scripting functionality so students could actually learn programming by using the virtual world's language, and building applications within it:
"The course is ICS10, a General Education course in the spirit of CS Principles," she recently reported. "There's 150 students enrolled. So far, the students have programmed in assembly on a simulated computer, used various tile walls with assorted encodings, and are now deploying and configuring a simulated Internet inside the simulated world.
"So far, everyone seems to be turning in their projects on time, and engaging. And a curious side effect has emerged of a student creating YouTube video tutorials showing how to do the projects." (See below.)
As regular readers know, Professor Lopes isn't just an OpenSim user, but one of its early pioneering lead developers. So I was curious how she customized OpenSim for her class, and how challenging it was for students to use. OpenSimulator is basically a reverse engineered version of Second Life, with a notoriously difficult UI and old graphics; Fortnite or ROBLOX it is not. (In fact, her class uses Firestorm, a viewer for accessing both Second Life and OpenSim.)
"I was expecting it to be problematic," she tells me, "and I was ready to spend many hours doing tech support, but it was surprisingly easy. There was no major hurdle, shockingly!" However, having no hurdles required a fair amount of preparation on her part, which you can read about below.
Challenges aside, she recommends OpenSim as a teaching platform to other teachers, if their course work is enhanced by a 3D immersive space and simulations -- my conversation with her below:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
“Darkest Hours” is a clever visual metaphor of how our thoughts can consume us, particularly if those thoughts are motivated by anger or resentment. It reveals how circular and repetitive those thoughts can be while they completely overwhelm our minds. I think it works well to convey that concept. It is one of just many excellent self-portraits by Creep Wolff.
"Increasing the visual fidelity of avatars raises the expectations for realistic motion to make those realistic features look alive," Jim notes about MetaHuman. "The more realistic the avatars look the better you have to be at tracking facial movement in VR to avoid the avatars looking dead. If you can't capture sufficient movement you have to instead be good at synthesizing it based on the social context, but if you get that wrong the avatars look creepy not because they look dead, but because they don't respond in a natural way given the social context."
Realism in social VR introduces a new challenge:
"Most of the current attention is on improving motion capture by the headset," as Purbrick puts it, "but the better that gets the harder it becomes to escape your real identity: all of your habits and movements are transferred faithfully to your avatar whether you like it or not... Short version: people don't want creepy avatars more than they want realistic avatars and it's a lot more work to make realistic avatars not feel creepy in VR."
These points are a good place to introduce a recent talk Jim Purbrick featured on his blog, largely drawing on his experiences developing avatars for Second Life:
