New World Notes

Top 5 Posts Last Week Including an NFT-in-Virtual Worlds First & an AI Process to Make Virtual Worlds More Real

• Celebrate Pride Month By Sending Us Virtual World Images & Stories For Our #Virtualpride Challenge!
• New On Steam: First Class Trouble, Like A 3D Among Us, But Onboard A Cruise Ship Where You Can't Tell Fellow Players From Killer Androids
• Intel Developing Process That Uses AI To Enhance 3D Graphics By Merging It With Real Life Video
• IMVU Partners With Top Real Life Brands To Sell Virtual Fashion, Becomes First Non-Crypto Virtual World To Mint Items As NFTs
• Rec Room Has More Users, So Why Does VRChat Seem To Have Much More User Creativity? Consider The Stonecutter Test

Celebrate Pride Month By Sending Us Virtual World Images & Stories for Our #Virtualpride Challenge!

"She kissed the Captain" by Cadwyn Daffyd

To celebrate Pride Month, create virtual world images that express your LGBT pride -- then in the image description, tell us what your activity in the virtual world means to your real life as an LGBT person. Tag Cajsa on Flickr and add the hashtag #Virtualpride. Our favorite images -- and stories -- will be featured in Cajsa's regular column.

Images from any virtual world open enough to enable LGBT expression encouraged. To help spark your creative juices, here's some favorite images/stories of ours!

New on Steam: First Class Trouble, Like a 3D Among Us, But Onboard a Cruise Ship Where You Can't Tell Fellow Players from Killer Androids

First Class Trouble is a new indie game in Early Access on Steam, and it's next on my list to play. (Soon as I master Fights in Tight Spaces, but that's another story.) To judge by early footage, First Class gameplay is a fairly clever combination of Among Us (but highly immersive) meets BioShock (bloody murder on an Art Deco ocean vessel) meets Blade Runner, in the sense that you're competing against other players and killer androids... but you can't tell right off the bat which is which. (Also reminds me a bit of Spy Party, but in a multiplayer setting.) NPC AI has become sophisticated enough that it's sometimes difficult to immediately tell an NPC from another player, so I suspect we'll see this kind of gameplay mechanic being used more often. 

The developers at Invisible Walls tell me that the live action party game Werewolves was an influence, along with another, more unlikely inspiration:

Abyss Hunts Has SL Shopping Tips for This Month's Cyberpunk Fair & More!

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

Abyss Hunts is the name of Abyss Artful’s blog. She describes it this way, “I have been hunting outfits for years piece by piece in SL, mostly shiny ones. Here you will see some Cyberpunk/Role Play/Fantasy/Gothic/Fetish pictures and bold styles.” I appreciate the explanation as the title could be understood to mean freebie hunting. I was very much taken with Time Is a River, The whole woman floating in the water trope has an entirely different context when the woman is a mermaid. I was particularly taken with the hair that flows so beautifully in the water. 

• Hair: Tableau Vivant WATER LILY GACHA Flowing
• Tattoos: Nefakalum Code Silver

For some cyberpunk action, click here:

Intel Developing Process That Uses AI to Enhance 3D Graphics by Merging It With Real Life Video

This is a seriously impressive demonstration of Intel Labs' Enhancing Photorealism Enhancement project, which looks to me like a major advance in realistic 3D graphics. Very roughly summarized, it uses machine learning algorithms to merge 3D graphics with related footage taken from real life -- in this case, Grand Theft Auto Online, and video footage of a German city. (Notably not Los Angeles, even though GTA V is almost a direct mirror image of the LA cityscape.)

Or to put it more academic terms:

Today's SL Flickr Pick: A Mysterious Avatar Group Selfie & Virtual Eye Contact

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

Maasya excels at photos catching people in the act of being people. For example, who has not gone nose-to-nose with this terrifying fanged quadruped? She captures the strange relationship between humans and their feline overlords that is characterized by devotion on the one side and bemused curiosity on the other. The eye contact is everything. 

The next picture has me so curious, click here:

IMVU Partners With Top Real Life Brands to Sell Virtual Fashion, Becomes First Non-Crypto Virtual World to Mint Items as NFTs

I don't always get my metaverse news from Vogue Magazine, but when I do, I'm not surprised IMVU is involved:

“Fashion is at the epicenter of why people create avatars and connect with others on IMVU,” says Lindsay Anne Aamodt, the site’s senior director of marketing. “Part of that is because dressing up an avatar in a digital space gives people access to anything that they want to look like, and it’s hard to do that in the real world.” 

... Now, she’s spearheading a first-of-its-kind virtual fashion show on IMVU that unites the real-world labels Collina Strada, Gypsy Sport, Mowalola, Freak City, Bruce Glen, My Mum Made It, and Mimi Wade with expert creators who know their way around the 3D meshing and texturing process that brings IMVU’s clothes and accessories to life. The show will stream on May 27, after which IMVU users will be able buy and dress their avatars in the designer looks they saw on the virtual runway.

Subscribe to IMVU's YouTube channel to watch the show. Reached by phone after a whirlwind of preparing for this event over the last 6 months, Lindsay tells me that it was Vogue's global director who first reached out to IMVU about covering the show, after hearing about it from one of the brands. 

While there have been similar crossover events in other virtual worlds (for instance, Armani once had an official store in Second Life, with decidedly mixed results),  this is the most prominent real-to-virtual fashion launch in some time.

Another newsworthy feature:

Moodily Beautiful Screenshots of a Beautifully Unconventional Avatar

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

Nora’s untitled picture is a fabulous naturalistic self-portrait. I love how comfortable and at-ease her avatar seems. She is kind enough to include the pose in the description. The pose is very appealing. Add to that, her use of black and white makes it all about light and dark, about shadows and contrasts, and she uses them brilliantly. 

Nora really explores the different between pretty and beautiful, click here:

Rec Room Has More Users, So Why Does VRChat Seem to Have Much More User Creativity? Consider the Stonecutter Test

Rec Room recently reported over 1 million monthly users and a higher peak concurrency than VRChat. But when it comes to the two leading social VR worlds, VRChat seems to have a crucial edge: A far more active and ambitious creative community. 

That statement is my personal estimation, to be sure. And to be fair, Rec Room does have some interesting user-made projects. But I follow both worlds pretty closely, and VRChat’s user-driven worlds and innovations consistently seem to hit on a completely different, higher level. Just in the last few months, for example, I’ve written about*:

• A user-made program that converts C# to Udon (VRChat’s internal scripting system).
• A user-created process to juggle virtual balls from real life motion tracking.
• A group-created VRChat world that’s so popular, it’s becoming a stand-alone VR game.

There’s even an entire VRChat-based rave subculture (see below). 

Why has VRChat succeeded so far on this front? A casual survey of user creators points to a core factor:

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Kimberlyann Creates Wildly Different Images, All Good

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

Kimberlyann’s photostream is full of striking images. “Lone Wolf'' seems just terrifying to me and I love it. It makes me think of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, ostensibly the most haunted forest in the world. You don’t have to go out west to find ghost towns. There’s also this “Blair Witch Project” vibe, the blurred and ever-expanded trees. 

For more something far less spooky, click here:

Any Open Metaverse Will Require an Opt-In Click (Comments of the Weeks)

Good conversation by readers around last week's post about a universal metaverse protocol, and whether we really need it. One reader was skeptical when I described Steam as basically "[A] metaverse portal, taking you from VRChat to Rec Room and beyond with a few clicks and several minutes of wait time", asking:

Are you serious when you're suggesting to readers of this post that we should be content with "a few clicks and several minutes of wait time" for hopping between destinations in the "worlds-wide meta-metaverse"... rather than striving for the simplicity (and instant transportation) of links between websites? 

As broadband improves, I suspect we'll get to several seconds of wait time by this decade. But it's hard to see the clicks going away. Metaverse or not, we'll probably always need to go through some opt-in steps when going from one experience/IP realm to the next. Or as reader Adeon Writer puts it:

VRChat requires you opt-in to visiting any world it has not greenlit - so the idea of going from one experiences to [another] without clicks is a pipe dream. Even websites warn you when you are about to leave.

This points to a fundamental challenge to the Metaverse ideal, which typically describes a seamless immersive experience that is also open like the web:

In Case You Missed It, Here's Elon Musk on SNL Playing a Cryptocurrency Enthusiast Admitting the Whole Thing is Hustle

This Saturday Night Live segment pretty much reminds me of every conversation I've had with a crypto-evangelist except the question I keep asking him (and it's always a him) is, "OK if it's so important how come hardly anyone is using it to buy goods and services?" over and over again until the crypto-evangelist casually mentions that they personally have made a lot of money from crypto. (You know -- actual money, the kind Michael Che holds up.)

I suppose we should credit Elon for being self-effacing, but on the other hand -- or maybe not: 

Top 6 Posts from Last Week Including More About NFT-ing Second Life Screenshots & the Latest Viral Project from VRChat

• Play Scavengers, Ambitious Sandbox Game With A Senior Designer Who Got His Start Creating Shooters In Second Life
• Second Life's Terms Of Service Allow Users To Sell Screenshots Of Others' SL Creations (I.E., In Theory, As An NFT) - But Would It Hold Up In Court?
• Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2021年4月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan
• Watch: Doggface Video Recreated In VRChat To Promote Upcoming Inline Skating World
• Here's A Metaverse Protocol Proposal Linking Virtual Worlds - If We Need One?
• Why Bill Maher's Snarky Takedown Of Cryptocurrency Isn't Snarky Enough

Play Scavengers, Ambitious Sandbox Game With a Senior Designer Who Got His Start Creating Shooters in Second Life

Scavengers is a new free-to-play multiplayer hardcore game with some serious face-punching action and hybrid gameplay (sandbox, PVE, PVP, etc). And while it might not seem so on the surface, it's something of a second cousin to Second Life. For one thing, it runs on Spatial OS, Improbable's platform for deploying massive single shard MMOs, and I'm told at least one of Improbable's top execs was a dedicated SLer back in the day.

Even more pertinent, a senior designer of Scavengers is Ben Batstone, a longtime Linden Lab veteran who got his start as a Second Life user known as Buhbuhcuh Fairchild. And he credits his work in SL for his design approach to Scavengers:

"I made my first shooter games in SL - those watermelon guns that griefers would use were using my scripts. Being able to iterate quickly and get instant community feedback was amazing as a novice designer.

"As far as what I am doing with [Scavenger developer] Midwinter, a lot of my efforts are around long term player engagement. I think I could view that very narrowly with a 'game designer' role: just game features, content and mechanics, but my time as a Linden made my belief that the stickiest content is other people, and the more we can get players interacting in positive ways, the more those players will return. So I'm pushing hard for driving social features and strong community programs, and trying to integrate that with gameplay. We're less than a week into Early Access so a lot of that is still in the foundational steps, but we've got some cool stuff on the way."

Their vision seems to be a game that makes a conceptual leap up hits like Fortnite and League of Legends, while incorporating virtual world-ish, persistent action:

Watch Me Chat, Dance, and Flirt With Mr. Bones, an Animesh Skeleton Using Really Useful’s Chatbot Script for Highly Customizable NPCs in Second Life

Verbose, sassy, and surprisingly spry, Mr. Bones is an animesh skeleton on the Marketplace here from The Really Useful Scripts Corner (a proud sponsoring partner to this blog) powered by the Corner’s unique chatbot system.  (Click here to chat with Mr. Bones in SL -- touch the pumpkin to rezz him.)

As you can see from the video above and my dialog below, Mr. Bones himself makes for a friendly virtual companion in SL (he can even follow you on command!), but he’s also meant to show off Really Useful Script Corner’s feature set for customizable NPCs (Non-Player Characters). 

“My basic chatbot has two functions - Chat and Responses,” lead developer Grace7 Ling explains, “Chat includes the bot being able to greet visitors and greet its owner. The bot can also remember who it has met before as well.” Her chatbot can also spout random things as a way of encouraging nearby SLers to reply.

As for responses, Grace means more than simple text-based replies. Responses include “doing something in response to a keyword or key phrase it hears, like giving a landmark or SLurl, or playing a sound or animation.” 

Ms. Ling’s more advanced chatbot comes with a third feature: Chatter, which enables owners to specify multiple possible answers to a statement, with different probabilities for each. You can even expand your bot’s phrase recognition range by adding “brain-files” (i.e. notecards) to its database.

While Mr. Bones comes with the new Animesh Pro Edition chatbot script, Grace’s chatbot series includes a mesh human, a French bulldog, a parrot, and a mirror. 

Her customers, she tells me, are already using them for a wide variety of NPCs in their own projects:

Shopping for SL Male Fashion? Look Inside Taylor Belmont's Dirty Mind

The Dirty Mind blog is by Taker Belmont. I got a kick out of post #41 with the banana swing. The banana outfit is such a clever choice. It has a sort of mod meets camp feeling. The gold pillars are too much which makes them perfectly campy. 

• 055 SumBoss  - [ GUILTY ] Man Cave (exclusive)
• Banana Swing & Tree Light Set - CROWDED ROOM Marketplace

And now for something completely different, click here:

Second Life's Terms of Service Allow Users to Sell Screenshots of Others' SL Creations (I.E., In Theory, As An NFT) - But Would It Hold Up in Court?

Important comment/update to last week's post, when I cautioned against creating NFT from Second Life images. When the EFF lawyer I quoted referred to the "dark interesting mysteries" around IP ownership of user-created content in SL, Linden Lab had not addressed derivative works in its Terms of Service. Since then (in 2017, it looks like), the company has:

2.5 You also grant Linden Lab and other users of the Service a license to use your Content in snapshots and machinima that is displayed in publicly accessible areas of the Service.

You agree that by uploading, publishing, or submitting any Content to or through the Servers for display in any publicly accessible area of the Service, you hereby grant other users a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to photograph, capture an image of, film, and record a video of the Content, and to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the resulting photograph, image, film, or video in any current or future media as provided in and subject to the restrictions and requirements of an applicable Product Policy or other policy.  

Reader irihapeti noted this clause, which effectively requires content creators to opt out from people using their content in an SL screenshot for commercial or other purposes:

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Sharp Male Fashion Imagery from Alfred Wessex

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

I love “To the Moon” from Alfred Wessex. I love how he shows the avatars’ love for each other in such a simple way, how she leans into him, how he rests his arm on her leg. It shows a couple attuned to each other in an ordinary moment enjoying the night sky. I also like the subtle light that illuminates some of the grass but fades quickly outside their magic circle.

Wessex does great fashion shoots; for more, click here:

Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2021年4月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan

Sanny Yoshikawa が、New World Notesのなかから、毎月おすすめのバーチャルワールドニュースを日本語で紹介します。

Sanny Yoshikawa covers the monthly virtual world highlights from New World Notes for virtual Japan.

 

 

 

Watch: Doggface Video Recreated in VRChat to Promote Upcoming Inline Skating World

Just vibing and grinding in Shibuya Terminal ☺️

Having a little too much fun making the #jsrf world in #vrchat 😆

(tribute to Doggface208's amazing vid last year 😁 ) pic.twitter.com/a31pSnLvat

— Lakuza (@LakuzaVR) April 27, 2021

This is a fun VRChat-based tribute to the beloved Doggface Fleetwood Mac skating video. Which would be great in itself, but VRChat being VRChat, it’s also a video promoting an upcoming VRChat world with physics-enabled skating:

“The world itself is based on Jet Set Radio Future, a game released back in 2002,” explains Lakuza, who created and stars in the video, and is a developer of this world:.

”It’s inline skating with a heavy emphasis on grinding across objects… it'll be the first VRChat world to allow for grinding in this manner.” He’s being modest: It’s probably the first VR-enabled skating game in any virtual world that’s not specifically engineered for skating. Anyway, follow him on Twitter for launch updates.

The skating was developed by @squiddingme, the skating system was created via the Udon Sharp compiler:

“I’m not clever enough to understand how it works,” says Lakuza, “but he's basically created a system of movement options that allows double-jumping, wall-running, grinding as well as being able to control acceleration speed over time.” 

As for bringing the Doggface vibe into VRChat, he’s actually using the platform VR mouth tracking technology:

Here's a Metaverse Protocol Proposal Linking Virtual Worlds - If We Need One?

Metaverse technologist Kim Nevelsteen, who created that quite cool project which seamlessly connects different Minecraft servers to each other, has promoted an epic manifesto from the M3 group proposing Metaverse connectivity between a wide variety of virtual worlds, including WebVR,  VRChat, Minecraft and beyond:

• Part 1 is here.
• Part 2 is here.

"People are searching for a standardized Metaverse protocol," Kim says, summarizing his purpose. "Even if that's achieved, the overhead of updating the integrated systems will impair a Metaverse. An architecture with dynamic evolution is required and currently IPSME is the only one that satisfies all criteria, as far as I know." (That stands for Idempotent Publish/Subscribe Messaging Environment, on which he co-authored this academic paper .)

This is all admirably ambitious, but with self-described metaverses like ROBLOX and VRChat already quite massive, I'm starting to wonder if we need a single Metaverse protocol connecting them:

This Artist Uses Second Life Wireframe & Layering to Create Amazing Images

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

“The Magician” seems so perfect for a 1970’s roch concept album. I love the psychedelic exuberance of the picture with the mirror-like shards exploding outward from the epicenter where the Magician has materialized from some hole in the stage before some dramatic opening riff during which the rest of the band arrives. This is one of the many creative and exciting pictures by Hermes Kondor. 

Hermes is an experimenter, for more, click here:

Reddit's /SecondLife Gains 10,000 Subscribers; Great Community & Resource

/SecondLife, the largest SL-related subreddit, recently grew past 10,000 subscribers. Over the years (it had only 2,000 subscribers back in 2015), it's evolved into a solid go-to hug for interesting and informative SL/virtual world-related content and conversation. Since it's on Reddit, the participants tend to skews towards SL veterans, especially developers and scripters, and unlike most (all?) social media hangouts for SLers, isn't an unceasing cascade of fashion pics and shopping announcements. (Though there's still a lot of that!)

Some recent stand-out threads:

• Robin (Sojourner) Wood has passed away, after an extended struggle with cancer (phyllodes tumors)
• Through fire, Iron becomes Legend
• Has Second Life improved? 2008/2009 - 2020/2021
• Metaverse - Our Existence, Our Reality, a Second Life Existential Machinima
• Explore 10 tranquil and artistic Second Life destinations!

Much more here. And thanks to u/TrinityDejavu, u/zebragrrl, and u/0xc0ffea for their moderating skills!

This Artist Elevates Virtual World Screenshots With Unexpected Angles

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

I like pictures that confound me. “Snapshot 45” is confounding. She’s standing on a wall for a house that looks like it’s built on a dock and there are fish swimming by. It makes no sense which is perfect because I can imagine the fish are actually taxis swimming from fare to fare or the house is underwater and people have gills. On the side of being underwater, there is the seagrass and the sandy bottom. On the side of being aboveground, there is the electric pole with the isolators. Is it both? In Second Life it can be anything. 

I love her way with angles, for more, click here:

Why Bill Maher's Snarky Takedown of Cryptocurrency Isn't Snarky Enough

Setting aside Bill Maher's usual "Old Man Yells at Woke Millenial Cloud" tone, this is a pretty good and funny takedown of cryptocurrency hype, mostly hitting the right targets, such as its Ponzi scheme nature, for instance, and the absurdity of Tesla CEO Elon Musk promoting Bitcoin despite the fact that its environmental costs utterly undermines any green advantages achieved by Tesla the company.

Maher's rant, however, fails when he notes that major companies like Microsoft, Etsy, and Starbucks accept Bitcoin as a currency... without noting that hardly anyone uses Bitcoin to buy goods and services. As I wrote in 2015:

According to Linden Lab stats, Second Life has about 1 million monthly users, and about 125K+ hardcore users (i.e. in SL over an hour a day). Insiders tell me about 400,000 users regularly spend Linden Dollars. So with all that activity in mind, it's safe to estimate 100K Linden Dollar individual users a day. (Conducting a lot more total transactions.) Contrast with Bitcoin: The much-hyped currency -- lauded weekly in the tech and mainstream press for the last 4-5 years, with over $400 million invested in Bitcoin-related startups since 2012 -- is still used only about 100K times a day. (Which means unique users are significantly less than 100,000.)

The wild thing is, Bitcoin's daily transaction rates have not grown that much since then, fluctuating between 200,000 and 400,000. In another words, a daily transaction rate of a small city, and still less than Linden Dollar transactions in Second Life.

As usual, fellow HBO comedian John Oliver had a better take on the topic, back in 2018:

According to Linden Lab stats, Second Life has about 1 million monthly users, and about 125K+ hardcore users (i.e. in SL over an hour a day). Insiders tell me about 400,000 users regularly spend Linden Dollars. So with all that activity in mind, it's safe to estimate 100K Linden Dollar individual users a day. (Conducting a lot more total transactions.) Contrast with Bitcoin: The much-hyped currency -- lauded weekly in the tech and mainstream press for the last 4-5 years, with over $400 million invested in Bitcoin-related startups since 2012 -- is still used only about 100K times a day. (Which means unique users are significantly less than 100,000.)