New World Notes

Twitter Usage Back Up to 2020 Levels Despite (Because of?) Trump Ban

Twitter usage last month hit 6.42 billion total visits, according to SimilarWeb, with US-based traffic up 4.18% from February. This after traffic had dipped somewhat from January's  6.3 billion visits. March 2021 traffic is about on par to Twitter's traffic in November-December 2020 and actually a touch higher than traffic in October 2020 (6.3B), right before the last US Presidential election.

Which is more or less a definitive answer to the following question that frequently came up, especially after the January 6th insurrection, when Twitter finally banned Donald Trump from the platform for inciting violence: Won't Twitter traffic collapse with Trump and all his roiling, news-grabbing tweets, not to mention all the bots amplifying those tweets, are gone?

So far, looking at the data, that doesn't seem to be the case. 

Second Life Screenshots Cleverly Converted Into Manga Comic Images

At the risk of stepping on Cajsa's Flickr toes, I'm totally in love with these images by Cadwyn Daffyd which turn SL screenshots into frames from a manga comic. Compare above with the original screenshot below:

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Vivid Stories Told Through Virtual World Screenshots

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

Bambi Foxdale’s “And In Our Hearts There Is a Boat” drew me in with its nostalgic emotional effect. I love how she shows that a picture can move someone so profoundly. 

What is an autumn hug? For the answer, click here:

Second Life Unveils Strange New Homepage Featuring Real Life Model, Other Odd Non-Second Life Marketing

Either this is a belated April Fool's joke, or this is the new official homepage for Second Life. Which is an online virtual world with 3D graphics, but for some reason, now features not an avatar, but a real life model.

Yes, really: The flying elf is from an upcoming promo that Linden Lab teased late last year (watch below), featuring many more non-avatar models pretending to be avatars. Suggesting an implicit marketing pitch on the order of, I guess, "Sign up for Second Life so you can be a flying elf... but not the one here, as she's not 3D graphics, but you'll feel like this in your mind."

The explicit messaging on the new homepage also feels as if it emanated from a marketing company with no actual first-hand knowledge of Second Life, or virtual worlds in general:

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Outdoor Images So Lovely, Even a Virtual Outhouse & a Prison Yard Look Picturesque

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

Ifollow Rivers makes fabulous pictures of Second Life homes and landscapes such as this charming cottage by a river. They all remind me of the Romantics like Thomas Cole and John Constable. Her pictures represent the pastoral and picturesque aesthetics of Romanticism that include the human element such as this cozy little home. 

To find out how even an outhouse can be picturesque, click here:

"The" Metaverse Isn't Happening (Comment of the Week #2)

Good points from reader "Kyz", reflecting on Core's mission to build a "multiverse" versus Epic's mission to build "the metaverse":

There isn't going to be a metaverse or multiverse in the sense that fiction foretold. That global environment we think of as the metaverse already happened. It's called the Internet. Within it are worlds and nearly endless content.

But one global 3D platform? Not happening. If it was going to happen it would have already. The market doesn't want it any more than it wanted VR on a global scale.

I think this thing with Core is just wordplay. They're close to Epic because they're built on Epic tech, but other than that, they're basically a dumbed down way to create games. If you want better games, you'll use the Unreal Engine itself.

Personally I find Core far too limiting compared to using the Unreal Engine directly and I don't see them overcoming the big problems like delivering the customers and buying power. The more customers, the more games and the more people trying to grab enough foot traffic to make a small bit of money before it becomes so saturated no one is making anything.

At any rate, it's still a good time to be a creator and you go wherever your skill level and determination gravitates you to. But if any entities are the metaverse tools? It's the game engines, few people are writing all this from scratch these days like SL did.

That sounds right. There's multiple popular web browsers and multiple smartphone devices running iOS or Android, so it's hard to see anything like a singular Metaverse dominating. It might not even be a matter of competing game engines (i.e. Unreal vs. Unity), so much as many metaverses for non-competing demographics:

Second Life's World Map Working After 5 Month Outage, CEO Announces

Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg announced last weekend on Twitter that Second Life's world map is, after an outage that started last November, finally working.

I'm fairly fascinated that it took so long to update this issue, and how it is (or isn't) related to Project Uplift, moving SL to the Amazon web cloud.  ("Now that Uplift has finished," the incident report read in January, "we are working to restore the map tile functionality.") I've reached out to Linden Lab for an official response and will update this post when/if I get one.

Also notable: Ebbe Altberg announcing something about Second Life on Twitter after a long absence from Twitter -- his last tweet before announcing the world map had been fixed was also from last November.

Hat tip: Gogo, whose tweets get results!

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Thought-Proving Images By Sheldon Bergman

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

I discovered Sheldon Bergman by checking out Roseleiya’s favorites. When I paged down and saw “Losing Their Heads for Love”, I laughed out loud. I love how he made the metaphorical literal. His photostream is not very big. There are 31 photos, but all of them are thought-provoking and thoughtful

More thoughtful pictures are up next, click here:

SL At the End of Major Innovations After Uplift? (Comment of the Week)

My post on Jim "Babbage" Purbrick's long-ignored C#-in-Second Life integration provoked many "Oh what could have been" responses, both here and across social media. (Especially poignant to read posts by other former Lindens, remembering this project fondly, if bittersweetly.) For example, this comment from reader Pulsar, who not only bemoans the loss of this C# feature, but who also sees it as a sign of Linden Lab's waning interest in innovation:

I can imagine what SL could have been with C# and many other things.

Second Life instead has been a story of poor decisions, missed opportunities, half-baked new features, that also introduce new serious, user-experience hampering, bugs... that get fixed after ages if never.

Now Linden Lab can't even fix the world map, broken since several months ago. Preview grid (Aditi) inventory can no longer be synchronized since November 2020. Screenshots still tend to fail to upload to my.secondlife, teleport failures, objects not showing up in the viewer until you right click and so on. All stuff that shouldn't have passed any serious QA check in first place.

"It kind of works and it doesn't explode entirely" seems the way to go for Linden Lab.

It would be great having C# in SL, but, yeah, VRChat allows that indirectly. I don't expect anything competitive coming out from Linden Lab anymore. Other virtual worlds are implementing anything that Linden Lab should have done, never did and probably will never do. People used to SL would be amazed to try out any other virtual world and see that it just works without falling apart. None of those can fully replace SL for now (in general, while subjectively it depends on what you do), but the strong points are getting fewer and fewer, while SL is being surpassed in so many other areas.

My strong sense is Second Life is now basically in maintenance mode, and that the user base shouldn't expect any major innovations that might drastically impact the existing ecosystem or hurt the world's steady profit, now that it's going directly into the hands of a massive holding company.

Anyway, the ironic thing about all these recent technical shortfalls is that they're happening after the completion of moving SL to the Amazon web cloud, dubbed "Uplift" -- perhaps the last major innovation to the platform.  As reader Sally Crofton notes:

Top 7 Posts Last Week Including Epic's Metaverse & Multiverse, VRChat Breakthroughs & Updates & the Second Life Scripting That Could Have Been

• Watch Life 2.0, The Best Documentary On Second Life Now Available On Netflix -- And My Interview With The Director Below
• Mass Effect Fan Community Creating Massive Roleplay Experience In Second Life Inspired By The Game
• Core Games Joins Epic's Store -- But Not Necessarily Epic's Metaverse
• VRChat Announces User Monetization, Enhanced Avatar-To-Avatar Dynamics, Webcam/Mobile Face Tracking, And Many More Upgrades Coming Soon-Ish
• Watch: Juggling VRChat-Based Objects From Real Life Via Motion Tracking!
• The Metaverse Wars Are Here: Epic Gets $1 Billion From Sony & Other Major Players To Build Unreal-Based Metaverse
• Watch: Scripting In Second Life With C#, A Feature Once On Linden Lab's Roadmap But Apparently Forgotten

Watch Life 2.0, the Best Documentary on Second Life Now Available on Netflix -- And My Interview With the Director Below

Click here to watch before Netflix pulls it from the streaming library (as the company often does): Life 2.0, the acclaimed 2010 documentary on virtual world life, love, business, and identity -- and how they all bleed over into the real world. And I do mean acclaimed: After premiering at Sundance, the film had a good run in the arthouse circuit, garnered 89% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes*, a great review in the New Yorker, and then Oprah Winfrey picked it up for her new cable network,

I interviewed the director, Jason Spingarn-Koff, when the movie played at South by Southwest -- watch below:

How to Add & Customize an Audio Reactive Display to Your Sinespace Scene

Click here to get a free copy of a Sinespace furniture item that shows off a cool feature to the virtual world, a proud sponsoring partner to New World Notes: 

An audio reactive display that dynamically responds to music being streamed into a scene. (Watch above for a club scene demo.)

Sinespace staffer Xu (Xulain #4636 on Discord) has some tips for installing the Display in your region:

"Sometimes when you place objects in room edit [mode] the object cannot find a collider to line up against but just place at any rotation and edit after with the "e" key to rotate.

Apart from that you just needs some music a radio or anything that uses an audio source." For instance, this free oldtimey radio, also by Xu.

 

At the last Sinespace office hours, Xu recently gave an in-depth tutorial for creating and customizing your own audio reactive displays, -- watch below:

SL Fashion Friday: Style Tips from a Glamorously Grumpy Fashionista

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

Kouralee’s post asks “Where’s the Beach?” and I am here for her grumpy question and very grumpy face. In a world of RBF and FaceApp smiles, it’s wonderful to see someone with a serious grump on. I love her avatar! 

• Shiny Stuffs|Underneath it all [bom] LeL|Ebento
• Duckie|Cruel Gacha [bom]|The Epiphany
• Kiru|Baby Shark Gacha|The Epiphany
• Kitcat|Somdae Gacha|The Epiphany
• Sakura|Pastel Dreamer Gacha|The Epiphany
• Marti|Tessa Gacha|The Epiphany

For more frowns and a very cute outfit, click here:

Mass Effect Fan Community Creating Massive Roleplay Experience in Second Life Inspired by the Game

Click here to visit something fairly amazing in Second Life: A massive roleplay game world inspired by Mass Effect. It’s the creation of BluShock, a fan community that’s been creating entire worlds and experiences in Second Life based on the videogame franchise for over a decade. I recently made a small visit to the asteroid base, just a small part of the larger experience, and was duly impressed.

“It's our largest and most ambitious/compact base of operations yet,” BluShock leader Fazzy Constantine (above) tells me. “We have over 25 rooms and multiple elevators with 8 levels each, a huge arboretum dome, which is inspired to look like the Presidium Commons, on the Citadel, from the Mass Effect games, which our roleplay group has been inspired by, since 2010.”

But the base is only the beginning:

“The asteroid will be our base of operations in our fictional star system. Vanaheim, which is set in the Milky Way galaxy, in what would be known as the Beta Quadrant, if you were into Star Trek. We have three more main worlds we'll be creating, over the course of 6 to 9 months.” Here's further details on the group's in-game news site.

Anyone can visit their worlds, but the group is serious about maintaining their roleplay narrative, even in their Discord server: People can join, he tells me, "Through application, and then we hold an induction. If they have roleplay experience, great. If not then it's pretty easy to pick up. If they want to just observe and become explorers of the asteroid and worlds then they can choose to do that and still get invited to the Discord server."

More from Fuzzy below, and some pics from BlueShock’s Flickr group:

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Perfectly Photographed Virtual Coffee & Other Images of Minimalist Masterpieces

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

My best friend’s husband is a coffee perfectionist. He has a thermometer to measure the temp of the coffee to ensure it’s 180° when poured into the Aeropress. He measures meticulously. I recently found an Aeropress attachment that requires 210° water and more fussiness and sent my friend the link, suggesting it is the perfect birthday gift for him. It really is. So when I saw this picture from catNap, I had to laugh. Now this is the set up he needs. 

I love the delightful minimalism of the catNap photos, for more, click here:

Core Games Joins Epic's Store -- But Not Necessarily Epic's Metaverse

Core, the ROBLOX-meets-Unreal "multiverse" funded in part by Epic is now, to no one's surprise, now available in Epic's store. Trailer above, announcement snip below:

By combining the power of Epic’s Unreal Engine with accessible tools that require no coding experience in a single platform, Core makes game creation, publishing and play available to everyone for free. Core also offers the most creator-friendly economy of any gaming UGC-platform with a 50% revenue share, allowing creators to make money and build businesses on Core. 

I got early word that this would happen right about when I was writing about Epic's new $100 million funding deal with Sony and other partners to build a metaverse, and assumed Core Games would be an integral part of that project. 

But not necessarily: When I asked Core CEO Frederic Descamps how does Core Games fit in with Epic's just-announced metaverse plans, he answered with this Delphic statement:

VRChat Announces User Monetization, Enhanced Avatar-to-Avatar Dynamics, Webcam/Mobile Face Tracking, and Many More Upgrades Coming Soon-ish

VRChat devs just dropped a ridonkulously huge grab bag of announcements on Twitch, both upcoming and experimental; I pulled some highlights onto my YouTube, and my VRC correspondent Adeon Writer watched live and took copious notes. Most exciting to the user community was probably what's featured above: Avatar-to-avtar dynamics, which enable users to "physically" interact and even manipulate each others' bodies -- that's on the company's roadmap for this Summer.

Also coming out starting this Summer: User monetization options and, finally, a full creator economy: 

"User-to-user subscriptions is the first thing they are adding," Adeon reports, "basically Patreon except in-game directly, and Udon and scripting can react to it." (I.E., monetization options can be embedded directly into interactive experiences.) And while the ability to sell content in-world is on VRChat's roadmap, virtual currency is notably not: "[VRChat devs] specifically said they won't be doing a fake currency; real money only for anything they make."

Maybe most interesting from a cross-platform point of view are upcoming/experimental features that track body and facial movement via webcams and mobile devices:

Today's Flickr Pick: Ms. Nakamori Makes Even a Nuclear Power Plant Pretty

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

I know I featured Nekonuko Nakamori just a little over a year ago in this post but there are just so many great pictures. When I saw Wandering World 1220, though, I just had to share it. Perhaps it is because Fukushima is in the news again with the announcement that they will begin releasing the water in the cooling tanks into the ocean. Nekonuko’s picture with the orange and yellow sky and the twin nuclear power plant chimneys has that foreboding feeling that captured my own emotion reading the news about the Fukushima water. Her avatar is there in the picture, so small and fragile. This also captures that feeling of there being no good solutions, no safety. 

For a more personal picture, click here:

Watch: Juggling VRChat-Based Objects from Real Life Via Motion Tracking!

If I'm describing this video accurately, it's mind-boggling: VRChat YouTuber Mitama Sakumaru (known as "390_JUGGLER" in VRC) is juggling in real life -- but the objects he's juggling only exist in VRChat. 

Yes: The juggled objects in VRChat are physics-enabled and respond to his real life juggling movement via the motion tracking of his VR rig, he tells me.

In a tweet, he reports that juggling virtual objects with no mass is harder than it might seem: "The weight and lack of finger sensation are quite severe, and it is about three times more difficult to do with normal gravity! " 

It's part of his effort, Mitama tells me, to create a new kind of virtual performance, where "the border between props and bodies are more ambiguous":

The Metaverse Wars Are Here: Epic Gets $1 Billion from Sony & Other Major Players to Build Unreal-Based Metaverse

Remember the browser wars back in olden times (by which I mean 2017)? Massive companies competing to own the dominant platform for streaming content to the 2D web? Welcome to the metaverse wars:

This round includes an additional $200M strategic investment from Sony Group Corporation, which builds on the already close relationship between the two companies and reinforces their shared mission to advance the state of the art in technology, entertainment, and socially-connected online services. Other investment partners include Appaloosa, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, GIC, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Park West, KKR, AllianceBernstein, Altimeter, Franklin Templeton and Luxor Capital.  Epic continues to have only a single class of common stock outstanding and CEO Tim Sweeney remains the controlling shareholder of the company.

“We are grateful to our new and existing investors who support our vision for Epic and the Metaverse. Their investment will help accelerate our work around building connected social experiences in Fortnite, Rocket League and Fall Guys, while empowering game developers and creators with Unreal Engine, Epic Online Services and the Epic Games Store,” said Tim Sweeney, CEO and Founder, Epic Games. 

Epic's vision for the metaverse, of course, is based on its proprietary 3D engine, Unreal. And this comes only a month after ROBLOX, built on the Unity engine, had a massive successful IPO. We are certain to see many more announcements like this in coming months, each a salvo in the battle to win market dominance for the metaverse -- even if the concept is still relatively pretty niche, and hasn't yet been clearly defined for a mass consumer audience. You can see that in Dean Takahashi's recent interview with Sweeney:

Today's Flickr Pick: Avatars in Shock & Ecstasy from a Red Glowing Box

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

I love it when people come up with some photo project that focuses on a novel idea that no one else is doing, and that is what I discovered when I got a FlickMail from Lacie Babenco, asking me to participate in her Shockstasy Project. 

When I arrived, Lacie was looking quite demonic. She explained that she had summoned the red glowing box from “somewhere deep and dark.” 

She continued her explanation: “I honestly don't know what it does but it compels me to bring humans to touch it.” And so I did.

“It radiates an energy but it is so absolutely silent. It draws in mortals to touch it,” she went on. “They each experience something unique to them, I have no idea what they feel, only they know. It's called a mix of Shock and Ecstasy - 'Shockstasy.' So I observe and send you back to your mortal world and someday, hopefully it's revealed what the box is doing....I like to think it's taking into account your soul and who you are.” 

I am in trouble....

For more experiments in shockstasy, click here:

Watch: Scripting in Second Life with C#, a Feature Once on Linden Lab's Roadmap But Apparently Forgotten

My post on UdonSharp, the user-made C# compiler for VRChat, inspired me to reach out to Jim "Babbage" Purbrick. Because when he worked for Linden Lab, he was aiming to make it possible to script in Second Life with C#. Sad to say that didn't come to pass, and he left the Lindens in 2010. As he wrote on his blog then:

Alas, tomorrow is my last day at Linden Lab and Babbage Linden will never get to see C# scripts running in the wild in Second Life, but I very much hope that I do. I hope that C# support is eventually added to Second Life and that I don’t have to wait 170 years to turn the handle. As another Babbage said when he failed to build the Difference Engine: “Another age must be the judge”.

Watch Jim's demo above to see how cool that could have been, with more background on his blog.

"Supporting C# and other modern languages was always the end goal with the work on Mono and we implemented the Mono scripting engine to be language-independent," he tells me now. "Although in production we only ran LSL scripts compiled to CIL we had development builds which would run C# compiled to CIL with normal C# compilers and then processed to inject microthreading support with the same tools that processed the assemblies produced by the Linden Script Language compiler in production."

Bringing C# to Second Life, as he explains, would be an enormous modernizing leap for the platform:

If Virtual Worlds Like Decentraland and Second Life Were Cities, Which Would They Be? (Comment of the Week)

Fun comment from Joey1058, reflecting on the NFT art gold rush, which has led to some NFT art galleries in blockchain-based worlds like Cryptovoxels and Decentraland:

In terms of broader community, I'm starting to see virtual worlds aligning into classifications. Cryptovoxels and Decentraland are similar to the richer cosmopolises, like New York. Here is where you'll find arts and culture. Museums, theaters, gardens, zoos and other venues. All based on an NFT foundation. Places like IMVU, Sinespace, and Second Life are the equivalent of "working man's" towns. Still cultured, but with an everyday foundation in "getting your hands dirty and doing it yourself". AltspaceVR is a corporate lifeline. And VRChat is pure relaxed social freestyle.

I get where Joey's going with the New York analogy, though as I noted in the post, both Cryptovoxels and Decentraland have very small resident user populations and seem to be focused more on financial speculation, than the arts. Maybe a better comparison is Dubai? (Then again, New York is also heavy with speculators.)

Any suggestions for "working man's towns" to compare IMVU, Sinespace, and Second Life?

Top 5 Posts Last Week Including the Post-Gold Rush Future of NFT Art & the Rising Power of the VRChat Creator Community

• Multiplayer Beat Saber Becomes Gesture-Based Social VR Community
• Where Can NFT Art Go Now That The Gold Rush Is Gone?
• VRChat Now So Popular With Devs, Thousands Are Using A Compiler That Converts C# To The World's Internal Scripting Language
• Second Life Wesbite Traffic Down Nearly 50% Since 2018, According To SimilarWeb, Likely Reflecting Strong Decline In New User Sign-Ups
• Core Has Half A Million User-Created Projects & Over 1 Million User Accounts... But How Many Active Users?

SL Fashion Friday: Style Ideas for Home Décor & Dinosaur Hunting

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

Clau Dagger SL is Clau Dagger’s fashion blog, though since she often decorates the scene that provide the backdrop for her fashions, it’s a decor blog, too. I like this picture for 2020 0407 a lot. I especially like the fire hazard decor. I am always conflicted by decor full of piles of books and candles. It looks so romantic and cozy, but having once lost everything but the clothes I had on in a fire, I can’t help but I also think fire hazard. I am obsessive about fire hazards. In real life, this would give me anxiety, but in Second Life, I like it! 

Scene Item Sources:

• DISORDERLY. / Delicate Blooms / Frames / Pink (Collabor88)
• DISORDERLY. / Delicate Blooms / Books / Pink (Collabor88)
• DISORDERLY. / Delicate Blooms / Birdcage / Pink (Collabor88)
• DISORDERLY. / Sugar Berries / Cranberry Cake Slice
• DISORDERLY. / Flower Bunnies
• DISORDERLY. / Cozy Piles / Tea & Cookies
• DISORDERLY. / Cozy Piles / Donuts & Pictures
• DISORDERLY. / Marie's Treats / Scones
• DISORDERLY. / Marie's Treats / Tarts
• DISORDERLY. / Green Hedges / Loose Papers
• DISORDERLY. / Book Magic / Magical Potions
• DISORDERLY. / Book Magic / Magical Birdcage
• DISORDERLY. / Book Magic / Magical Suitcase
• DISORDERLY. / Enchanted Extras / Beast's Library Papers
• E.V.E Sunny Spells M02 - w/o Glitter
• E.V.E Flowers of the Mist

For an exciting role play scene, click here: