"I was inspired by my real look," a Second Life user named "Rainhaindiamorena" tells me. In real life, she continues, "I'm a Brazilian singer. I live in Bahia. I tried to make the avatar with my style. black with braided hair Rainha. In Second Life I sing in different lands."
Her SL/RL photo is one of dozens now on Facebook with the tag #slvsrl, launched in Holger Gilruth's Facebook group for SLers, featuring pics of avatars alongside their real life owners.
Based on earning reports from Q4 2020 and Q1 2021, we were able to estimate that Oculus Quest 2's install base was around 3-4 million as of this April. Facebook announced its Q2 2021 earnings yesterday, so we can now update that figure based on this data:
Revenue from Facebook’s Other segment, including consumer hardware such as Oculus virtual reality headsets, totaled $497 million, up 36% and less than the $685.5 million StreetAccount consensus estimate.
If we reasonably assume that most of that $497 million was generated by sales of the $299 Quest 2, and do some simple thumbnail math, that translates into roughly 1.6 million units sold during April-June 2021. Bringing our estimate of Quest 2's install base to 5-6 million total.
And given the news earlier this week, we can be even more confident that this range is roughly accurate:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Evalyn Wunderlich’s “EverDream” is a hauntingly beautiful picture. There are fantastical elements with the brilliant sun and parhelia at the same time as stars in the sky. Sun dogs happen when the sun is refracted by ice crystals in the atmosphere. Nonetheless, the avatar is slightly dressed with a beautiful sheer scarf blowing in the wind. The scarf is what caught my eye and the most intriguing element. I love it.
In the next picture she uses a sheer scarf equally well, click here:
With Mark Zuckerberg announcing that Facebook has plans to become a Metaverse company, regular readers might ask, "Wait, weren't they already building a Metaverse?"
I'm talking of course about Facebook Horizon, released in closed beta last September, optimized to run with the Oculus Quest 2 HMD that was also released about that time. However, it has since seemingly fallen below, well, the horizon.
A Facebook veteran with deep knowledge of Horizon tells me the project might be revived, but faces some corporate barriers inherent to the company:
"I think Facebook has the money and people to throw at the problem," as they put it to me, "but making 0-1 products as a large entity hasn't been one of Facebook's strong suits... it's been to acquire other products and integrate them into the Facebook ecosystem. With the average employee tenure being 2 years or so, and the need to expand teams at rapid rates, it's very difficult to make decisions and stick to a single vision because things are always changing."
Consequently, they go on, the Horizon team has been jumping haphazardly to the latest hot feature or platform:
Back in May, a FOX producer was reaching out to members of the Second Life community (and presumably other virtual world communities) about Alter Ego, an upcoming avatars-meet-Masked Singer reality competition show. Now set to premiere on September 22nd, here's the teaser.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Maka Orion lives an adventurous Second Life. If “You Learn the Most When You’re On the Edge” is true, he’s got a Doctorate in SLiving. By putting this pic on the diagonal, he makes it so much more interesting. I like that the avatar is moving toward us rather than away. I think it increases our connection to the avatar and our hopes for his success.
Part 3 of Matthew's Metaverse Primer, Networking and the Metaverse, touches on similar territory as the paper I wrote for Samsung Next last year, but with a big difference. (More on that below.) This section explores all the networking technology needed to make highly immersive, highly multiplayer applications possible. As an example of that, Matthew touches on how Microsoft's Flight Simulator (current version) uses streaming to display a mirror world:
Microsoft Flight Simulator is the most realistic and expansive consumer simulation in history. It includes 2 trillion individually rendered trees, 1.5 billion buildings and nearly every road, mountain, city and airport globally… all of which look like the ‘real thing’, because they’re based on high-quality scans of the real thing. But to pull this off, Microsoft Flight Simulator requires over 2.5 petabytes of data — or 2,500,000 gigabytes... Microsoft Flight Simulator works by storing a core amount of data on your local device (which also runs the game, like any console game and unlike cloud-based game-streaming services like Stadia). But when users are online, Microsoft then streams immense volumes of data to the local player’s device on an as-needed basis.
This becomes even more complicated when other users, not to mention new content they create, are part of your virtual world. But while broadband penetration and bandwidth speeds continue to increase, any multi-user Metaverse worth the name will run up against the simple fact that our broadband can't ever run faster than the speed of light:
[W]hile the Metaverse isn’t a fast-twitch AAA game, its social nature and desired importance means it will require low latency. Slight facial movements are incredibly important to human conversation — and we’re incredibly sensitive to slight mistakes and synchronization issues (hence the uncanny valley problem in CGI)...
Unfortunately, latency is the hardest and slowest to fix of all network attributes. Part of the issue stems from, as mentioned above, how few services and applications need ultra-low latency delivery. This constrains the business case for any network operator or latency-focused content-delivery network (CDN) — and the business case here is already challenged and in contention with the fundamental laws of physics.
At 11,000–12,500km, it takes light 40–45ms to travel from NYC to Tokyo or Mumbai. This meets all low-latency thresholds. Yet while most of the internet backbone is fiber optics, fiber-optic cable falls ~30% short of the speed of light as it’s rarely in a vacuum (+ loss is typically 3.5 dB/km)... Furthermore, network congestion can result in traffic being routed even less directly in order to ensure reliable and continuous delivery, rather than minimizing latency. This is why average latency from NYC to Tokyo is over 3× the time it takes light to travel between the two cities, and 4–5× from NYC to Mumbai.
Emphasis mine. Or to put it another way: The metaverse of our dreams will always be hobbled by the speed of light.
In fact, the way Matthew lays out all the bandwidth and latency hurdles facing metaverse applications leaves me significantly less confident than I was while writing the Samsung Next article. Which takes me to my own thoughts on Part 3:
Update, 7:18pm PT: While a Facebook spokesperson says this recall impacts Quest 2 owners "globally", it's unclear if "about 4 million" refers to the total install base worldwide, or just US-based owners. In a discussion on this post among VR developers (ironically on Facebook), Adam Frisby estimates the total Quest 2 install base worldwide to be around 5 million.
Facebook says it is “participating in a voluntary recall of the Quest 2 removable facial interface in coordination with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).” The CPSC said about “4 million” facial interfaces are affected by the recall, plus 172,600 in Canada, sold between October 2020 and July 2021 — the interfaces come with each headset sold as well as sold separately for $20 or for $40 as part of a Fit Pack...
[A Facebook spokesperson said:] "That is why we started our voluntary facial interface replacement program in December, and are now rolling out the silicone cover for all Quest 2 and Quest 2 Fit Kit owners globally.”
Well, not so hilarious if you're one of the Quest 2 owners now with dealing with a face rash. (Pro-tip: Target has a good deal on hydrocortisone cream.)
4 million is relatively good install base for a VR product only on the market since late last year -- but is still far from Zuckerberg's 10 million install base goal. (Which is still many tens of millions less than the install base for current video game consoles, but leave that go for now.)
Now that we know this, perhaps Facebook will be more open about their Quest sales in future shareholder reports.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Zanya’s photostream is full of extraordinary landscapes and seascapes such as this gorgeous image, “Fly On.” She has a fascination with birds and they often sneak into her pictures. Or, as in this picture, they become the focus of the picture, as shown by its placement at the intersection of two diagonal lines that are drawn 45 degrees from each right corner. (See thumbnail pic I've annotated here.) As a result, her picture is beautiful and the composition is exquisite.
Our limitations are graphics cards and computing power, size of screens and types of display screens. I'm excited about Unreal Engine 5 with Nanite, which helps us down the road of being able to render more rich environments without the cost of so many draw calls, as well as world partitioning for larger worlds, etc.
Watch above to share Kyz's excitement! However, Kyz also adds, in a possible demur to Matthew, VR should not be the metaverse's focus:
Click here at 1pm SLT tomorrow (Saturday July 24) for a special event in the G.B.T.H. gallery featuring acclaimed SL-based artist Whiskey Monday. Whiskey herself will be there to help unveil a new series of her works with a cool mixed reality twist -- alongside a classic series with a cross-platform hook.
For the "In Other Wor(L)ds" show, Whiskey tells me, "I decided to show a series of images along with their direct inspiration: scanned pages from my RL journals. The visitor can see the SL image (In Other Worlds) in the traditional art-on-the-wall gallery showing, but if you click and hold on the image, an overlay of my RL journal (In Other Words) appears.
"These are small notebooks I've carried around with me for years, where I jot down ideas, thoughts, quotes, words and phrases - just text that I want to refer back to later. It feels both empowering and very vulnerable to show them. But I feel like showing the journal pages with the SL images they inspired helps to give more context. It gives the images just a bit more fullness. I'm really excited by the final form of the show. I'm proud of it."
Looks marvelous. G.B.T.H. is also showing all 40 images from her classic "My Tweets as Pictures" series, which as the title suggests, are Second Life images she created based on tweets she made. Here's one, a smashingly retro image matched to her Dorothy Parker-esque wit:
After a long wait, it's here! And exclusive to New World Notes: Presenting Episode 1, Season 3 of LANG, a noir comedy machinima series made entirely in Second Life, which I'm thrilled to premiere. (Watch above.)
If you haven't seen Season 1 and Season 2, however, binge-watch them here first, as the story is pretty complicated. Here's a very brief elevator pitch of Season 3 from lead LANG creator Zatch Ixchel:
"Without spoiling previous seasons - LANG is about two private investigators in a city that doesn’t want them. This season, in particular, is one about parenthood -- fatherhood, specifically. Betrayal, lost love, and revenge are other themes we explore this time around."
There's a seriously cool shot around 9:20 that was more challenging to create then it might seem -- here's how they did it (spoilers ahead):
“A friend introduced me [to Second Life] a few months ago," Billie Echo (above) tells me, "It’s quite interesting.” The inspiration for her avatar's appearance (also above) is also interesting:
"Actually, I was going for a tall vitiligo queen but a lot of wonderful mistakes were made. But I don't regret it." (Her father is from Benin, where many people have vitiligo.) Now, she wants "to use this platform to spread awareness about vitiligo and albinism."
Billie Echo's SL/RL photo is one of dozens now on Facebook with the tag #slvsrl, launched in Holger Gilruth's Facebook group for SLers, featuring pics of avatars alongside their real life owners. Displayed with their permission, here are ten of my favorites, featuring the owners' explanation for their avatar's appearance:
I think over the next five years or so, in this next chapter of our company, I think we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company. And obviously, all of the work that we’re doing across the apps that people use today contribute directly to this vision in terms of building community and creators. So there’s a lot to jump into here. I’m curious what direction you want to take this in. But this is something that I’m spending a lot of time on, thinking a lot about, we’re working on a ton. And I think it’s just a big part of the next chapter for the work that we’re going to do in the whole industry.
My cynical take (and it's hard not to be cynical, when it comes to Facebook) is this move is made in great part to stave off anti-trust regulation that is now looming over his company. ("Hey we're not really a social media monopoly, look at us trying to compete with Epic/Apple/ROBLOX etc!") But in fairness, Zuckerberg has long been passionate about VR, buying Oculus (with founding Linden Cory Ondrejka's guidance) many years before the Facebook backlash reached fever pitch.
Related to that, the Metaverse may be the one technology platform that Zuckerberg cannot conquer:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Azaria is a photographer in both her first and Second Life. She is skilled in taking pics in both worlds so sometimes it’s hard to know what world a picture came from. For example, “Hunted” is realistic enough, I had to check to confirm it was from Second Life. In her About section, she wrote, “Shadows, light, emotions, depth, and movement are the things that make any image good!” You can see that in play in this great picture. (I also confirmed that she placed it in a few SL groups on Flickr to be certain.)
I remember chatting with a metaverse developer early last year on a potential project in Avakin Life, a mobile-based virtual world in the IMVU category, and it seemed like another niche also-ran. Avakin Life has a limited social media footprint, to judge by the relative dearth of user-made YouTube videos. (This build tutorial/speedrun above is one of the few out there that quickly pops up.) But as with Rec Room, this seems mainly to do with Avakin Life being targeted at young teens who aren't yet on social media in a major way.
Avakin Life has more than 200 million registered users [note, see below - ed.] on iOS and Android and more than a million who come back at least once a day. Previous investors Novator Partners, David Helgason, and Hilmar Pétursson also participated in the funding round. All told, it took about a year to close the deal, said Lockwood Publishing CEO Halli Bjornsson in an interview with GamesBeat.
Registered users aren't the same as monthly active users, but with 1 million daily actives, I'd estimate the MAU as being about 10 million give or take. (I.E. a bit larger than IMVU's 7 million monthly users.)
Reminds me that longtime reader "Pulsar" mentioned it as a way of thinking about virtual worlds apart from the Second Life model -- and a mobile alternative to it:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Blip Mumfuzz has a thing for lines. You can see it in the leading lines that draw us into “Path.” She illustrates a couple of facts about leading lines, they don’t have to be straight so long as they take us somewhere and although they usually go off into the horizon, they are allowed to veer left if they do so as subtly as this path does. The turn is so close to the edge of the frame, it is only perceptible with your second look. On one level this picture is very simple but there is real thought in how it was framed. There are six pictures in this series and they should be considered as a single body of work. They are all so good I thought about featuring just this series, but then you would be missing out on so much more.
For the side of a house and a window like you’ve not seen before, click here:
Matthew Ball’s epic, nine part metaverse primer is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the technological components to make the Metaverse possible. Former global Head of Strategy at Amazon Studios, the widely-sought analyst and VC is most recently the founder of the Metaverse investment fund, the first of its kind.
I’m planning to interview Matthew later this Fall; so over this Summer, I’ll be blogging each part, highlighting the key themes that stand out most to me, then following up with commentary of my own.
Advances in image capture technology are making mirror world concepts feasible:
Long sought by Metaverse advocates and investors -- over a decade ago, founding Linden Lab investor Mitch Kapor mentioned it to me as a major necessity to drive adoption -- the rise of smartphones and their component technology has made it possible to convert our real world into the virtual one. Most crucial of all, perhaps: Our very selves, into our avatars.
You can see how far we’ve come in this demo (watch above) of Epic’s Live Link Face app, which uses the latest smartphone-based facial capture to map a user’s expression onto high fidelity avatars.
Similar capture technology is also being used to convert the entire real world into high fidelity 3D models that can be shared in the Metaverse. (See this iPhone-driven mirror world demo I wrote about back in 2019.) The technology has vastly evolved since then, as Matthew writes:
Apple’s Object Capture, meanwhile, enables users to create high-fidelity virtual objects using photos from their standard-issue iPhone in a matter of minutes. That all of this is possible through standard consumer-grade hardware is astonishing.
Underlying technology like this, he goes on, can power some unexpected use cases far beyond enabling your Fortnite character to share your expressions:
In the future, this sort of tracking system will be used to reproduce these users, in real-time, in a virtual mirrorworld. Technologies such as Google’s Starline will then allow remote workers to be ‘present’ in the store (or a museum, or a DMV, or a casino) from a sort of offshore ‘Metaverse call center’ — or perhaps at home in front of their iPhones.
Hardware advances may help drive consumer adoption:
Motion sickness is often fingered as a barrier to mainstream adoption of VR, a key access point for the Metaverse. Matthew notes that recent improvements may soon address those:
The Oculus Rift also peaked at a 72hz refresh rate, while the most recent edition achieves 90hz, and up to 120hz when connected to a gaming PC via Oculus Link. Many believe 120hz is the minimum threshold for avoiding disorientation and nausea in some users. And ideally this would be achieved without needing a gaming-level PC and tether.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Lola Ghost posted this picture on Facebook with the title, “Sometimes there is beauty in something broken.” It really spoke to me because I, too, see beauty in what others see as broken. The flowers reclaiming the broken road and overpass, adding color to the gray of the concrete are beautiful, but so is the rust that adds traces of color to the metal. There is also something admirable in the will to survive that keeps the houseless getting up to face each new day. I wish their lives were easier, but they do not succumb to despair and carry stones into the water.
This also spoke to me of my city. Portland, Oregon is beautiful and lately it has been characterized as broken due to an ever-growing number of houseless people and months of sustained violent confrontations between police and protesters. But when you look out the window of the bus and see a tarp stretched among trees in a greenway, with a painting hung on a hanger from the rope, the struggle from those who are in extremis to still hold beauty in their lives gives me hope, more hope than a home in “Architectural Digest.” Clearly, we need better answers for people without housing, but there is an indomitable spirit among the houseless that is admirable and beautiful.
If you have ever seen something in a picture and you can’t unsee it, click here:
Over in last week's post on how Second Life might find a new audience on mobile, New World Notes' super savvy readers are picking up clues and speculating that Linden Lab is going to -- or at least should -- create what I'd describe as a lightweight, IMVU-like experience for mobile.
Take it away, Pulsar:
They are making dedicated mobile-regions now (just instant messages, but they plan to add a 3D view later). Here is the opportunity to start a sort of new SL from ground up: mobile-avatars on mobile-regions; meanwhile you keep your account, friend list, chat, L$ etc, that keeps you on the SL grid. And you would still be able to use the old style stuff in the old regions as before.
Mobile regions may have a clear grand total upper limit in texture and polygon count, instead of an obscure and exploitable "land impact". And they could be on demand, cutting the costs.
A mobile avatar could be a single item or it could be customizable by replacing the body parts with dressed parts, as other games do. Not that pile of attachments on top of each other that you see in SL. You could still colorize the parts, change head textures etc.
This approach would also make sense from a technical perspective, as "0xc0ffea" explains:
I'm thrilled to announce that Season 3 of LANG, a full-fledged streaming series shot entirely in Second Life, will premiere here on New World Notes next Friday. Fresh from lead creator Zatch Ixchel, here's the exclusive trailer above.
"This season takes place a few months after the events of Season 2," Zatch tells me, "but we also get a few glimpses into the past, and where some of these people came from. Characters from Season 1 reappear, some as their younger selves. There is one character briefly mentioned by Teddy in Season 2, 'Jack', who is featured prominently throughout this story. I think this season will be a real treat for anyone who has been watching since the beginning."
So now is a good time to binge watch the first seasons -- they're embedded below. Easily among the most ambitious Second Life machinima projects ever made, LANG has great noir visuals and voice acting, and dialog with a wry Tarantino-esque wit. As you might have guessed, theses seasons take quite awhile to create, and involve a dozen-plus SLers along with Zatch:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Parthenoid 2. 0 is a blog by Sian who focuses on cyber-fashion for trans avatars. Sian’s most recent post “xx:xy tryouts” is a fascinating and insightful exploration of how Second Life offers freedom of exploration to individuals. They write, “one of the unexpected, unintended niches of Second Life has been its use as a testing ground for trans identity, for the sexuality of unaccustomed bodies, a relief from a dysphoria we might not even have known we had. We wanted to investigate another possibility of who we were, tried on gender in the cheaper off-the-rack way, the better to know what worked and what didn't.”
The fashion is interesting in its exploration of cyberkink, but secondary to the intriguing and deeply introspective writing as Sian explores trans identity in their first and Second Life. I particularly loved Sian’s plea for acceptance of making mistakes:
“Whoever we are, however we are, we have to be allowed to trial who we are without harming anyone, with full consent, as messy and transgressive as that might be, because for many of us, in the worlds we live in, in the closets we inhabit, so often padlocked on the outside, a trial is the best we might get.”
Nanite for Unreal 5 May Be Key to Making the Metaverse -- VR, Not So Much
Great comment from reader "Kyz", reflecting on my analysis of Matthew Ball's metaverse primer thus far:
Watch above to share Kyz's excitement! However, Kyz also adds, in a possible demur to Matthew, VR should not be the metaverse's focus:
Continue reading "Nanite for Unreal 5 May Be Key to Making the Metaverse -- VR, Not So Much" »
Posted on Monday, July 26, 2021 at 04:05 PM in Comment of the Week, Making the Metaverse | Permalink | Comments (0)
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