New World Notes

VRChat Site User Demographics: 430,000 Uniques, Mostly Male and Over 25

SimilarWeb, my go-to resource for online/mobile data, just kindly shared with me some pretty interesting behind-the-paywall demographic on VRChat's site. (The company has not publicly released much concrete, industry standard user data numbers, beyond saying 30% of daily users are logged in via a head-mounted VR display.)

Here's SimilarWeb's age and gender demographics for the site:

• Gender Distribution
• Male: 81.5%
• Female: 18.5%
• Age Distribution
• 18 - 24: 42.8%
• 25 - 34: 32.1%
• 35 - 44: 12.1%
• 45 - 54: 6.6%
• 55 - 64: 3.8%
• 66+: 2.6%

The gender breakdown, alas, is not a surprise -- as embedded reporter Syrmor says, "VRChat is really disproportionately male".

The VRChat site age breakdown, however, is fairly notable: A strong majority (about 58%) are over 25, while 1 in 4 are 35 or older. That runs counter to the general assumption that VRChat users are mostly teens and early 20s.

In terms of unique users, VRChat site visits over time give us a pretty good guess at active unique users of VRChat:

Watch: How to Improve SL Land Impact By Optimizing Mesh in Blender

Poorly optimized content continues to be a bane of Second Life, so here's a useful tutorial for optimizing SL buildings by exporting them in Blender. Presented by longtime creator "Deep Elements", who tells me this process reduces overall land impact by quite a lot:

"It's an EXTREME difference," as DE tells me. "My current build (three floor Building) would have been 271 Land Impact - now it is 94, with a functional elevator, too! All rooms/floors have realistic trimming on ceiling, floor, windows, etc. There is a lot in this build, and to be under 100 is simply marvelous."  

Deep Elements explains how his method reduces Land Impact so significantly:

Cajsa’s SL Flickr Pick: Reesla Makes Great Use of Lighting & the Golden Ratio

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Reesla’s photostream is exciting to browse, full of a variety of photos united by good composition and dynamic energy. “Way Back Home” is a beautiful example of using the Golden Ratio to situate the subject. I love the use of light, the sunlight casts the subject in shadow, a silhouette while picking out bright orange flowers in the field. Cropping the picture at an angle makes it seem more dynamic.

If an Actual Pastor Simulates a Baptism in VR, Is It Spiritually Real? Here Comes the Theology

You've probably seen the virtual baptism performed by a real life pastor in VRChat, the latest video from acclaimed embedded reporter Syrmor. Left unanswered is the obvious question: If a "baptism" is only simulated in a virtual world, is it still real in any theological sense?  

From one perspective, the answer suggests another way VR and virtual worlds might one day disrupt traditional services -- in this case, the service being religion.

"VR baptisms are new to theological conversations," Bishop DJ Soto of the VR Church acknowledges to me; he is the pastor who who performed the baptism in Syrmor's video. "Our position on VR baptisms doesn’t seek to convince all denominations and religious constructs everywhere because a wide stream of varying theology already exists. Therefore, we simply state why we celebrate VR baptisms."

A trained theologian, DJ once helped launch an actual mega-church in Pennsylvania, but then decided with his wife that the next place to take his ministry was in the metaverse.

Now, his VRChurch typically holds services every Sunday in Alt Space and VRChat, with services in Rec Room soon planned. 100-150 attend, Bishop Soto tells me, with parishioners logging in from the US, UK, Holland, and Germany, "and then a sprinkling of like 10 other countries", from points as far as the Middle East, Africa, and South America.

When it comes to talking about the validity of virtual baptisms, he alludes to well-established strands of Christian theology that have existed for centuries:

Linden Lab Trying to Save Chouchou - If Its Owners Can Be Reached In Time!

Chouchou photo by Loverdag

Potential good news for Chouchou, the beloved, dream-like Second Life sim that is scheduled to be closed down within the next few days. After an impassioned protest by many SL community members, Linden Lab staffer "Patch Linden" posted an appeal in the community:

Your calls have been heard! I need the region owner to contact me directly (via email or through support) to start the process of entering the region into the Second Life Region Preservation Society. I have not seen contact from them so far.

I have also not received word from Chouchou's owners juliet Herbele and arabesque Choche, the Japanese music duo who created and own the sim, since they or their manager told me last week that they planned to take Chouchou down. I've reached out to them again, and I'm also in touch with Patch, so I can connect them directly. However, we may need more help from the community:

Cajsa's Choice of the Day: Artful Screen Captures from A Plague Tale

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Sebastian Dell-Aria’s work can be found on Instagram: His Memento Gallery, as he describes it, is his collection of “art, wallpapers & overly dramatic footage from my photomode adventures.” (He’s also active on Twitter.)

I was struck by this A Plague Tale screenshot which uses the door to frame the path leading to the garden. It is also the dark that frames the light, a suggestion of moving from the dark to the light. Of course, that’s making assumptions, isn’t it? After all, if it’s a really hot day, the dark means cool refreshment and ease from the heat of a burning sun. That poor guy raking the leaves might really like a break inside.

This shot below of Amicia (also from A Plague Tale) illustrates the extraordinary detail of the game.

Chouchou, Masterpiece Second Life Sim by Japanese Indie Musicians, Scheduled To Close Any Day Now

Click here to directly teleport to Chouchou, for now (Photo by Amunet)

Since its creation in 2008, the Second Life sim called Chouchou has been among the greatest works of metaverse art online -- a dreamy, surreal, immersive space created by Chouchou, a Japanese music duo of the same name, designed to complement and promote their ambient, equally dreamlike songs. But it's scheduled to close very soon:

"Yes, we’re going to officially announce about the closing in a week or so," the band confirmed to me on Twitter last Friday, but haven't offered more details since then.

In their heyday (as above), Chouchou would perform live in Second Life in different parts of the world -- the singer "juliet Herbele" in New York, and on keyboards, "arabesque Choche" from Tokyo. They did this without having met each other in real life, but that eventually changed -- they are now married in real life, and last year, had a child.

The duo has been moving away from SL performances in recent years, focusing on their outreach across the Internet in general. For instance, here's the trailer for their latest album on YouTube, where they have 20,000 subscribers:

Fittingly enough, it's called "Lost Utopia". Chouchou's Second Life fans have been clamoring for Linden Lab or some other benefactor to take over Chouchou, so it doesn't disappear from the virtual world, but no word if that's happened as yet. For now, here's some images and video from Chouchou taken by fans and the band in a sim that still exists in the virtual world, but not for long:

Cajsa’s SL Flickr Pick: Maerin Tamura's Whimsical Tributes to Virtual Childhood

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

“Urban Jungle” from Maerin Tamura is representative of the cheeky and light-hearted photos that dominate her stream. The pose is poised for action and delightfully teen-appropriate, youthful and non-sexualized. The Big Kids of SL are seen less than the toddlers and the adults, but they are part of the community and have adventures of their own.

Linden Lab's Trouble With Talking to Users to Get Usable User Feedback

Reader Soda Sullivan wasn't happy with this example of Linden Lab responding to Second Life user needs, and feels the company isn't doing enough:

I would like to see the Lindens become less reactive to us residents and more PROactive and maybe try to get out in front of things. Talk to people. Don't poll them, TALK to them and see what they are looking for. 

The proactive point is definitely true, and it does seem the company doesn't do enough of that. At the same time, many Linden Lab staffers do hold regular SL-based meetings for users.

However, there's a downside to direct conversations like this, and it's a problem we talked about a lot during my Linden days:

Monday Flashback: Slack Began as Work Platform for Making a Virtual World

When listening to my interview with Philip Rosedale, where he talks about creating a virtual world-meets-Slack for distributed work groups, here's a fun irony worth keeping in mind: Slack itself was originally created... in order to create a virtual world. Specifically, Stewart Butterfield's web-based world Glitch. As he told me back in 2011:

“[Glitch] is a game, and not a total open virtual world. There are some tools for creative expression now and more will be added, but anything which would count as ‘user-generated content’ will have to fit within the constraints of the game (without the constraints, there's no game left). So, much of that will be visual customizations (to avatars, houses, locations, etc.) and some of it will be ‘other’ stuff (the non-visual: collaborative music making, player-created games, etc.)”

His development team for Glitch was based around the globe, so they needed a unified communication channel where they could work together, and that's the seed of what eventually became Slack, after the small but much-loved world closed down:

Top 7 Posts Last Week: Philip Rosedale on VR’s Future, Real Dancer’s Moves for Virtual Sale, AI Stuntman, SL for Android Update & Much More

• Listen: Philip Rosedale On The Future Of VR, The Metaverse, And Building A "Virtual World Meets Slack" Workspace - The New World Notes Interview
• Nylon Pinkney Is Online: Dubious Proposals For New Snapchat Lens
• Watch: AI Agent "Learns" To Crash Into Physics-Enabled Wall Like A Stuntman
• Hollywood Producer Sells Motion-Captured Routines Of Celebrity Dancers Like Alexander Chung To Second Life Avatars
• Watch: Syrmor's First Interview With A Female VRChat Player, A Brazilian Girl Yearning For A Better Life
• Linden Lab So Responsive To SL User Feedback That The Company Won't Fix A "Bug" That The Community Has Turned Into A Feature, Says Linden Vet
• Lumiya Update: Android App For SL Unpublished From Google Play Due To Sudden Terms Of Service Changes, Dev Team Now Working To Republish

Listen: Philip Rosedale on the Future of VR, the Metaverse, and Building a "Virtual World Meets Slack" Workspace - The New World Notes Interview

Interview starts at about :09 seconds in

UPDATE, 4:40pm: Bumped up for weekend listening/discussion!

Days after Philip Rosedale announced that his social VR company was laying off 25% of its staff and focusing on building Project Lilypad, a cross-platform virtual world for workgroups, I got on a Zoom call with him to talk about that news and related topics. Highlights include news that High Fidelity is coming to Oculus Quest, his thought on the fate of VRChat and other social VR worlds in the wake of this pivot -- and the final word on open work spaces, of which Rosedale was once a prominent advocate.

Timestamps and notes/quotes below:

00:30 Philip and the founding Second Life, my stint as an embedded journalist within it — and walking the virtual world.

01:54: Philip’s mission to build a massive virtual world through High Fidelity and VR headsets — and how the slow adoption of HMDs and their shortcomings for use in work contexts have made it difficult to launch a true Metaverse-type virtual world. Leading to High Fidelity’s pivot to create a cross-platform virtual world-based workspace for teams as a way of growing the market for an eventual Metaverse.

06:20: How High Fidelity’s pivot is like virtual worlds meet Zoom, or a virtual world meets Slack. The challenge of creating an online workspace in the face of open offices — and their opportunity for telecommuting workers, and as a solution to the rises costs of living in tech hubs like San Francisco and New York.  We also delve into the productivity problems inherent in open office spaces, which Philip once advocated. (“Let me go on record and say ‘I was wrong’.”)

12:28: The fate of High Fidelity’s consumer side, in terms of the virtual world and its blockchain-based commerce system. “I’m deeply committed to building the Metaverse… so I’m not spinning down any of that”. That includes plans to release High Fidelity of Oculus Quest soon-ish — date TBD “in the next couple quarters”.

Next: High Fidelity and PSVR, going multi-platform, and how to request early access to Project Lilypad.

Nylon Pinkney is Online: Dubious Proposals for New Snapchat Lens

Four Tips for Creating a Winning Entry in Sinespace's FPS Map Design Contest!

With NWN partner Sinespace's deadline for its first-person shooter map contest judged by Erik Wolpaw just a couple weeks away (May 31st!),  there's a new blog post on their site with four tips on improving your level design. My favorite:

Watch: "Hope Everyone Likes Pancakes", Creepy Hilarious Machinima Satire of Fashion Vlog Drama

Here's a newish machinima from Splinter Smirnov and Chris Mumblewood, masters of weird, pop eye Second Life machinima, this one a creepy hilarious spoof on fashion vlogger drama. At first I thought it was about SL fashion bloggers (lord knows that sub-subculture has high drama), but Splinter tells me it's a spin on another vlogger drama I'd forgotten: 

Watch: AI Agent "Learns" to Crash Into Physics-Enabled Wall Like a Stuntman

Watch this new tech demo from DeepMotion, the AI company which taught NPCs how to argue, and learn to dribble basketballs: An AI "stuntman" agent who can run through a physics-enabled breakable wall -- and adjusts his momentum based on the wall's thickness.

"[W]hat's changing each iteration is the strength of the wall," DeepMotion's Anna Ploegh tells me, "by way of adjusting the mass of each brick. So the running movement is responding each time to a difference in the wall obstacle. Over each iteration, that mass of the bricks increases until it is too difficult for the character to jump through."

This is why each crash in the demo is different, as is the way the AI agent falls. This is in contrast to technology often used in videogames to simulate a similar effect, where an NPC is suddenly turned into a physics-enabled ragdoll (i.e ragdoll physics). Here's why:

Cajsa's SL Flickr Pick: Flubs Turns Screenshots Into Digital Paintings

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

“The Old Men and the Sea” is an extraordinary capture because it feels so organic, with a sense of place and time. In terms of composition, the sand meets the ocean at a third from the bottom and the man on the left is a third from the right while the man on the right is a fifth from the right. There is an old-fashioned feeling to the photo, not just from the men but from the desaturated colors.

Hollywood Producer Sells Motion-Captured Routines of Celebrity Dancers Like Alexander Chung to Second Life Avatars

Video courtesy Paragon Dance Animations

Alexander Chung is a renowned dancer and choreographer with a huge following on Instagram and YouTube, and now thanks to an indie producer in Hollywood, you can buy his real moves for your Second Life avatar.

While there are many Second Life brands that sell motion-captured dance moves, Paragon Dance Animations is the first I'm aware of -- at least in recent years, long after Second Life's boom days -- to create and sell dances taken directly from real world, renowned dance stars. Chung's moves are first to be offered in the SL marketplace, but Paragon has also motion-captured Liz Lira, Latin choreographer for Dancing with the Stars, and plans to sell her branded dances as well.

Paragon Owner/Producer Jon Nakagawa pitched Chung the prospect of dancing for avatars after a studio class.

Mozilla Adds 3D Creator to Hubs, Web-Based, VR-Ready Virtual Rooms

You can now create scenes for Hubs without leaving your browser!

Spoke is a 3D editor from @mozilla that lets you quickly build 3D environments and share them with your friends.

Check out the new and improved Spoke:https://t.co/5pFzFZJ7pq pic.twitter.com/a8BTQpRYfB

— Robert Long (@arobertlong) May 14, 2019

I haven't played around much with Hubs, Mozilla's web-based virtual room platform, but it's impressively responsive and user-friendly (if rudimentary). And now it comes with Spoke, Mozilla's 3D creator/room editor:

Cajsa’s Second Life Flickr Pick: Whimsy Winx, Whimsical Storyteller

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

I love Second Life Flickr’s storytellers. One of my favorites is Whimsy Winx. She happens to be among my favorite people, too, for full disclosure. She chronicled her recent move to a Linden home at Belliseria and I got such a kick out of the story. “When Life Gives You Lemons” memorializes when her mailbox deleted her house. She just pulled in a trailer to wait for its return.

Watch: Syrmor's First Interview With a Female VRChat Player, a Brazilian Girl Yearning for a Better Life

In this latest VRChat interview by Syrmor, the social VR world's best embedded reporter, Kermit the Frog and Winnie the Pooh interview an anime girl about life in Brazil -- and wrenchingly, about her home life full of violence and abuse. (At one point, you literally hear some of that, coming in from her headphones.) The frog and the bear are Syrmor and his friend Dawabvle chat, and -- for the first time in his interview series -- the anime girl is actually a girl IRL, a techie Brazilian who yearns to leave her country and abusive father.

Syrmor tells me roughly 1 in 10 players he meets in VRChat are female in real life, if that. 

"It's just that VRChat is really disproportionately male," as he puts it to me. "Part of it is sort of this circle where since VRChat is already mostly male some female players are turned off from playing since they stand out more."

Linden Lab So Responsive to SL User Feedback That The Company Won't Fix a "Bug" That the Community Has Turned Into a Feature, Says Linden Vet

Dave Kap's memoir of going from Second Life user to Linden Lab developer last week included this passage:

Getting inside the office and seeing how much people were trying to do the right thing by the residents was kind of sobering.

Reader Soda Sullivan was skeptical, writing in Comments:

That would have been such a huge statement, if he had followed it by just listing one single example. Just. One. Single. Example.

So I asked Dave for an example, and here's what he said:

“What residents did to hack in their custom animations is an example of how things in Second Life end up being designed, from my perspective. The sobering thing was simply how much time was spent trying to get things where residents wanted them. Whereas I had previously thought there was more iron-fist design and planning behind everything. Because [Linden Lab developer will] forever be trying to get it to where residents want it without breaking it for all the workarounds people have made."

As for a specific example:

Cajsa's Flickr Pick: Horizon Zero Dawn Screen Shots As Artful Portraiture

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Mandalorian Captures takes excellent screen captures from several different games. Luckily for us, she organizes them into albums such as this album of pictures from Horizon Zero Dawn. This one expresses emotion so well; Mandalorian named it “Dreamer” but I would call it “Askance.”

Readers on Slack & High Fidelity's Shift from VR; Philip Rosedale Q&A Soon!

Last Friday I had a great chat with Philip Rosedale over High Fidelity's recent layoffs and shift away from being so VR-focused in the short term, in order to build a kind of Slack-meets-Zoom-meets-virtual worlds for work app -- I'll run the full conversation in coming days. Until then, here's some reader responses to those moves (and my replies to those replies):

I'll say it before and I'll say it again. "Will it play in Peoria?" and "How does it work for/appeal to people who AREN'T the technorati/valleywags" matter... And why do you valleywags use slack? it's proprietary and duplicates functionality that exists in already-existing standards...like e-mail, jabber and IRC. Standards exist for reasons. - CronoCloud Creeggan 

In point of fact, Slack interoperates with a lot of common existing services, unifying them into a single shared virtual work space. And nowadays, it's hardly limited to Silicon Valley employees: It now counts over 10 million daily active users and is used by groups in 65 of the Fortune 100 companies.

Another update from Slack's blog, in opposition to another reader saying, "Maybe Philip opening up an office in Tokyo while seeing the world from a different perspective would help him and the project." The implication being High Fidelity's new move is coming from the Valley bubble. But as it happens:

Lumiya Update: Android App for SL Unpublished from Google Play Due to Sudden Terms of Service Changes, Dev Team Now Working to Republish

Important update for Android users and owners of Lumiya, the popular SL viewer for Android devices, which was recently removed for unknown reasons from Google Play -- as pointed out by reader/Lumiya user Mondy:

According to the notice sent through the Lumiya in-world group, the reason for the delisting on Google play was because of a change in SMS policy from Google. Lumiya has a backup feature for chat so if it uses SMS to send those then that's probably what it refers to. I know a lot of popular apps that use SMS also got hit recently for the same kind of thing and without being updated in time apps get removed automatically. According to the notice they're working on getting re-published as soon as they can.

Screengrab of that group message update above. And indeed, Google did announce some policy changes to Android apps last month related to apps and the use of SMS.

And as Lumiya's group manager says, until Lumiya is restored to Google Play, the recommended download channel for Lumiya is from the SlideMe Android market.