New World Notes

The Metaverse We Want Isn't About Bridging 3D Content, But People

Really great comment from " irihapeti", responding to Jim Purbrick's thoughts on making a metaverse that operates like a system of links between different 3D platforms and experiences:

I think that we have to get away from stuff (rendered objects) as the driver of how we think about the metaverse. As while we do this then is a circular conversation about this render engine, that render engine, some other render engine, and how they can all be reconciled so that we can take our stuff with us where ever we go.

I don't think it is about this, because it is endlessly circular. New technologies come and old technologies go. Stuff gets obsoleted as new stuff is created/made.

So what remains constant in all of this ?

We do, the people.

Here's what irihapeti means:

Get a Special 20% Discount on a Versatile Couch from Dutchie Design, Legendary Virtual Housewares Brand and New Media Partner!

I'm thrilled to welcome Dutchie Design as a new media partner to New World Notes. As you probably know already, Dutchie is a venerable brand that's been creating high quality virtual furnishings for all variety of social scenes and roleplay for over 10 years. 

 

As part of this partnership, Dutchie is offering a 20% discount on this amazing and versatile couch. (Pictured above.) Here's how to redeem it:

Tutorial: How to Make SL Screenshots Look Like Hand-Drawn Art

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

“Are We There Yet?” by Xaleria Starlight made me laugh out loud with the sempiternal question of childhood travelers. I can picture Moses hearing that question for forty years. Laura and Mary Ingalls probably asked that question hundreds of times from the Big Woods to the shores of silver Lake. Intergalactic travelers will ask that in the distant future. And of course, we have the contemporary car in a very strange place, sheltered under a giant skeleton. 

The picture looks like handmade art and I was curious how Xaleria made it. She graciously uploaded her source photos and explained her method. But first, she had advice on software to use. She uses GNU Image Manipulation Program or GIMP for photo editing. “I highly recommend the G'MIC plugin for GIMP which provides tons of really fantastic predefined filters and effects. Like GIMP, it is open-source and free.”

“Another program I love to recommend is FastStone Image Viewer. It is excellent for organizing and accessing your saved images with large thumbnails. GIMP's file preview is not the greatest, but FastStone's is wonderful and you can drag and drop from it straight into GIMP. FastStone is also free.

Great tips from Xaleria to follow.

Slink Mesh Bodies Are Well-Optimized for Second Life Avatars -- Here's How

Slink, a popular virtual world brand for avatar enhancements, produces what's basically the Tesla for mesh bodies in Second Life -- not just sleek and stylish, but energy efficient and good for the environment. This is because their creator, Siddean Munro, painstakingly optimizes them to have the least number of triangles without hurting visual quality.

This is an important update to a much-discussed New World Notes post from 2018, where I included Slink among the list of mesh bodies found to be poorly optimized, a key source to virtual world pollution -- i.e., lag and non-displaying avatars. Ms. Munro disputes Slink's inclusion in that post, so I will update it accordingly. And since then, in any case, she has updated her mesh bodies to be more efficient.

"I do work hard to make sure all my meshes are as optimal as they can be, use as few textures and scripts. as possible and that they are also laid out and written efficiently," she tells me. 

As evidence, she offers this image below:

Follow Isabel for Amazing Experiments in Turning SL Screenshots Into Art

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

“Taming the Wolf” from Isabel reminds me of “The Little Prince” with its simplicity. The similarity is augmented by the wolf being a silhouette and the ladder looking like an illustration rather than an actual ladder. I love the idea of it. 

Ahead, an amazing album exploring virtual skin.

In Biden vs. Trump Survey, Staff at Top Tech Companies Less Liberal Than Often Assumed

I recently received interesting new survey results from the development team of Blind, an anonymous messaging app for company staffers. When employees at top tech companies were anonymously asked whether they supported Trump or Biden in the upcoming election, the results were often more evenly split than Silicon Valley's reputation as a liberal bastion might suggest.

Here's the results from over 6000 respondents, divided according to their company affiliation:

Philip Rosedale is Taking Input for Designing a "New World"

"In a virtual world," SL/High Fidelity founder Philip Rosedale recently asked on Twitter, "is showing tenure (age of account) bad or good?"

Which is an interesting thing to ask, and becomes even more intriguing when, after one follower wonders why Philip himself isn't answering his own question, he replies apologetically, "I don't want to dominate the conversation. Yes, designing for a new world."

So that's worth noting! I asked Philip for more details and will update this post if I get a reply. As for "new world" he may just be referring to the recent 3D audio-centric relaunch of High Fidelity. Or perhaps another world entirely? In any case, the thread is worth a read, here's some answers to his question:

A Stunning SL Avatar Cosplay Tribute to the Late Great RBG & Other Images

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

Jupiter Firelyte created a stunning homage to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, recreating the famed “Notorious RBG” in Second Life. She gives great detail on all the elements that went into it and I love her for it. She includes the original screenshot in the description as well. 

This is not her only political interest...

Second Life Avatars Have More Way More Triangles Than AAA Games Like Elder Scrolls Online, But Gain Little More Detail -- And Much More Lag

Pictured: In-game shot of an Elder Scrolls Online avatar from 2013 (video below)

Adeon Writer puts it succinctly:

For what it's worth, VRChat has a rating system of "Excellent, Good, Medium, Poor, Horrible"

Any avatar above 70,000 triangles is considered Horrible.

For reference, most Second Life avatars are about 200,000 to 300,000 triangles.

Many Second Life avatars use more triangles in a single shoe that most AAA games use for an entire map.

People wonder why 20 FPS in SL is sometimes considered unusually smooth.

20 FPS is laughably bad. Compare with, say, Elder Scrolls Online, which has high quality avatars (see above and below) that are also highly optimized, so the MMO seems to be in the 40-60 FPS range. More from Adeon:

Top 6 Posts from Last Week Including a Top Gaming YouTuber Embraces SL, and a Visual Metaphor for the Metaverse

• Watch: Celebrity YouTuber Bored With The Sims Quickly Becomes Queen Of Second Life, Basically
• Shopping Tips From An SL Fashion Blog -- And Blogging Tips From Me
• Founder Hubris Led To Magic Leap's Fall -- But Valley Hubris Enabled Its Rise
• Is The Ideal Metaverse A Network Of Linked Places, Or A Seamless World?
• Epic Invests In Core To Expand Unreal's Metaverse Potential -- And Increase Its Competitive Advantage Against Apple
• Linden Lab Needs To Punish Poorly Optimized Mesh -- Or Reward Well-Made Mesh

Watch: Celebrity YouTuber Bored With The Sims Quickly Becomes Queen of Second Life, Basically

Ms. Carmen King is a gaming YouTube celebrity with nearly 1 million subscribers, and earlier this month, an amazing thing happened.

"If you've watching my channel lately," she announces, "I've been talking about how bland the Sims 4 has been getting -- that Star Wars pack did not make it any better, bitch."

But rather than switch to a recent game, she reaches all the way back 17 years to launch Second Life:

"I'm not here to troll or make enemies or anything I like that," she begins, in a nod to YouTube's many a-hole SL trolls, "I genuinely want to do stuff in SL like create myself in Second Life, go shopping, find me a man, go to a strip club, get pregnant -- and I'm not even kidding, you can literally get pregnant in Second Life and literally deliver a baby, like straight out your cootchie deliver, I'm not even joking,"

... which should give you a taste of her girl gamer-meets-Cardi B charm and NSFW Rabelaisian patois. What follows is more or less the "WAP" of game streaming, adventures in avatar enhancement, apartment hunting, and later on, road rage in a diamond pink car. Yes:

Shopping Tips from an SL Fashion Blog -- And Blogging Tips from Me

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

Live, Love, Laugh is MetteKenzo Nagy’s blog. She focuses on fashion and I was drawn to her work by her colorful, bright pictures. “Ooh Na-Na” really appealed because it was a successful example of turning a picture on its side. She didn’t do a full horizontal. Even though the diagonal is very acute, it still allows us to make sense of the picture without turning our laptop on the side. I have been baffled by these pictures for quite some time, but Gogo explained the rationale and now it makes sense. Many of today’s blogs have such big pictures they fill more than the screen, by going diagonal, they can get the whole picture in your window without scrolling. Now it seems obvious. I like the dress, though it’s only for the body made by the same creator. 

• KALHENE // Kate Dress Fatpack [Group Gift] For Kalhene Anya Mesh Body Only! Available at Mainstore

A bit of rockabilly in the next post -- along with my personal advice for fashion bloggers:

University Of Western Australia's Second Life Art Sims Closing This Year -- But Artists Can Feature Their Work There in a Grand Finale Festival

The University Of Western Australia's virtual campus in Second Life has been among the most active and longest lasting educational presences, hosting regular art festivals like this one featuring cinema great Peter Greenaway But after years of hanging on, I'm told the UWA regions are finally being closed at the end of this year.

That's disappointing news. The good news is UWA is going out with a digital bang, hosting a huge final art festival on a massive platform above the campus. Curated by longtime virtual art advocate Chuck Clip (above) and Mariposa Upshaw, with the blessing of UWA's Jay Jay Zifanwe, this is meant to be, as Clip calls it, "one last thank you to the men and women of the institution that touched all of our lives." 

If you're a 2D or 3D artist who wants to feature your work in this space, the submission details from Mr. Clip are below. And I do mean "massive", take a lot at its scale:

Founder Hubris Led to Magic Leap's Fall -- But Valley Hubris Enabled Its Rise

Bloomberg News has a great long feature on the rise and fall of Magic Leap, which raised $3.5 billion on the prospect of transformative AR technology, only to lose nearly all of that money in the fires of hubris. The company is still operating, but mainly now as an also-ran competitor to Microsoft's HoloLens/AR for enterprise use business. The hubris of Magic Leap's founders is not surprising -- it's pretty much par for the course for any startup that attracts that much funding so fast -- but the story doesn't cover another variation of hubris. 

Specifically: Why did so many major tech companies and VCs invest so much money on a product -- i.e., a head-mounted display -- with no successful track record whatsoever? Especially when one of the Internet's largest companies (Google) recently demonstrated the social disasters inherent in AR glasses -- i.e. "Glassholes"?

But invest they did, and took great pains to do so:

Fabulous Photos Shot in the Virtual World Rain

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

It’s raining today here in Oregon and it is such a relief after all the smoke from the wildfires. I know we had a big storm on the 18th, but it was at 3 A.M. and most people missed it. I thought I might feature great photos of virtual rain since that glorious torrent stopped between the beginning and the end of this paragraph. 

“True love isn’t Romeo and Juliet; it’s Grandma and Grandpa who grow old together” is a lovely (Up-inspired?) picture by Angel Roxley whose June and Jonathan pictures were featured a while back. 

Next: Is it real or is it Second Life? 

Is the Ideal Metaverse a Network of Linked Places, or a Seamless World?

Continuing his blog series on what he's learned as a lead developer/consultant at Oculus, Eve Online, and of course Linden Lab, Jim "Babbage" Purbrick has a new post arguing that the architecture of the metaverse should be a network of linked, small spaces:

As the Second Life continued to expand and change at an ever faster rate it became increasingly important to have ways to find the good stuff. Bookmarks, searches and external blogs indexed the expanding world helping people find things. Rather than walk, fly or sail around the world people would teleport from place to place or event to event. Even if you wanted to walk it became increasingly hard to do so: more and more parcels of land became private, restricting entry to both people and any scripted fish unlucky enough to try to swim across the boundary... Technologically, Second Life also began to split at the seams. The addition of Second Life URLs (SLurls) allowed blogs to link to locations in Second Life and people increasingly wrote scripts which published out to the web and Twitter or pulled data in from the web to visualize in 3D....

[I]t was incredibly encouraging to see some of the earliest experiments in social VR at Oculus try something similar by linking Oculus Rooms to other experiences via coordinated app launch (CAL). While the first CAL implementations linked Oculus Rooms to a fixed set of published experiences it’s easy to imagine people using similar technology to build environments which link to their favorite locations around the Metaverse just as early web sites curated links to favourite content around the web.

I understand Jim's reasons for wanting the Metaverse to act more like the web -- but then that means the Metaverse acts less like a world. Or as I put it to him:

"Don't linked small spaces create a sense of discontinuity and hurt immersion and a feeling of being in a 'world'? In your post, you mention some virtual worlds that link with small rooms (Metaplace, Whirled and Sansar), but they're all small in terms of user bases. The biggest virtual worlds, Minecraft and Fortnite, are huge contiguous spaces."

Babbage's reply to that:

Epic Invests in Core to Expand Unreal's Metaverse Potential -- And Increase Its Competitive Advantage Against Apple

I've previously called Core, the new Unreal-based, user-generated game development platform from startup Manticore,  as a kind of Fortnite-meets-ROBLOX concoction. So I wasn't surprised at yesterday's news that Epic, publisher of Fortnite and developer Unreal, directly invested in the company:

[Core] is getting an injection of $15 million, thanks to a funding round led by Fortnite creator Epic Games, in order to expand even more. “At Epic we believe the industry is ultimately headed to games becoming more like open platforms where creators can build their own worlds,” Epic president Adam Sussman said in a statement. “Built in Unreal, Core exemplifies this future and goes one step further by providing the environment for anybody to create great multiplayer games, and a metaverse playground where players discover endless entertainment.”

This investment adds some financial heft to Epic CEO Tim Sweeney's ongoing battle with Apple, which he's described as a war for the future of the metaverse. If Core is successful, it'll become an alternate marketplace for Unreal-based games beyond Apple's control -- and a potential candidate for an Unreal-based metaverse.

Virtual World Fire Photographed in Memorial to Real World Wildfires That Devastated the West Coast

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

Eoleon Elcano posted “World on Fire” when wildfires were spreading throughout the West. My own state lost a million acres to fire and some 40,000 people have been evacuated. The house I rented when I first moved here was burned to the ground. The smoke that permeated the air in Portland was so intense, I could taste it if I licked my lips despite having the doors and windows closed. This picture brilliantly captures that wild intensity and is so timely. In her “About” page she says she uses Black Dragon, PhotoShop CS6 and a graphic tablet for editing. I am always intrigued and impressed by Second Life artists responding to first life crises. I think she captured the intensity of our wildfires. 

More extraordinary pictures ahead:

Content Creator Goldmine: Studio Ghibli Releases Hundreds of Movie Images for Free Use, Including Stills from Miyazaki's Masterpiece Spirited Away

If you're reading this blog you're probably both a virtual world content creator on some level and a fan of Studio Ghibli films, so this news should come as an incredible gift:

Now the studio is making another unprecedented move, by announcing they’ll be releasing hundreds of images from their movies for the public to use free-of-charge, with one caveat: they’re to be used “within the scope of common sense.”

That includes stills from Hayao Miyazaki's masterpiece Spirited Away (like this one above). Click here for all the free images.

There's already quite a lot of Studio Ghibli tributes in virtual worlds, of course, like this Second Life recreation inspired by Laputa: Castle In The Sky. So I'm excited to see what's created with this trove of legit content.

As for using it "within the scope of common sense”... I'm pretty sure that's a polite way of saying, "No hentai, you freaks." 

Anyway, here's another from Tales from Earthsea:

This Artist Uses Second Life Screenshots to Tell Whimsical Stories of Robots

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

“Nannybot Portrait” is a striking picture of Nannybot with a bird. Created using overlays to simulate painting, I like how anachronistic this is, the futuristic robot with the bird in the style of a Renaissance painter. It made me smile. It is part of a series conceived and executed by Samanta Yates in some epic role-play storytelling. Samantha is a naughty angel whose mother needs some help to manage her and the house. Enter Nannybot, “The latest innovation in domestic assistance and childcare for the busy homemaker from Sirius Cybernetics Corporation! Equipped with extensive GPP (Genuine Person Personality) the Nannybot 4000 is mostly unlikely to be the result of fatal injury.”

Mary Poppins has nothing on Nannybot...

Linden Lab Needs to Punish Poorly Optimized Mesh -- Or Reward Well-Made Mesh (Comments of the Week)

Good reader thread responding to my somewhat tossed off remark that, "While you should definitely encourage users to customize their avatars, you also want to impose optimization restrictions so avatars don't become a bloated lag-inducing disaster like they have in SL."

The problem, as Alicia observes, is the company behind Second Life has enabled (encouraged?) poor optimization:

Linden Lab has set the maximum for textures at 1024x1024, and most creators end up making their textures too damn big (any texture size over 1024x1024 max), which then will be forced to the max of 1024x1024; but, remember that LL never set limits on how many verts/faces a mesh item should have. The textures issues, on the other hand, can easily be fixed if people simply went with the allotted sizes (64x64, 128x128, 256x256, 512x512 and the 1024x1024 max) SL can manage.

Also, knowing how to keep the MB down on the textures also helps if the person knows what their doing in GIMP, PhotoShop, or any other photo manipulation program. When it comes to mesh, you still have mesh hair that shoots an avi's complexity near or past 100k, and the same thing can happen with jewelry, clothing, etc. Verts/faces counts also increase/decrease when you resize any mesh object (trees, shrubs, etc.) All of these individual issues ultimately becomes a huge problem that never gets handled as LL only wants to continue working as is...

Everyone knows that LL will never impose restrictions on how maximum number of verts a mesh item can have.

Pulsar argues that Linden Lab should set out rewards and/or restrictions around mesh:

Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass Becomes Biggest Cloud Streaming Service by Far, Acquires Bethesda to Become Even Bigger

I'm pretty convinced cloud streaming is going to be the future of online games, especially virtual worlds, so today's acquisition by Microsoft of Skyrim developer Bethesda is worth keeping an eye on:

As the gaming industry transforms from a device-centric era to a player-centric era powered by new technology that provides the freedom to play with friends anywhere on any device, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) on Monday announced plans to acquire ZeniMax Media, the parent company of Bethesda Softworks, one of the largest, privately held game developers and publishers in the world. Creators of critically acclaimed and best-selling gaming franchises including The Elder Scrolls and Fallout among many others, Bethesda brings an impressive portfolio of games, technology, talent, as well as a track record of blockbuster commercial success, to Xbox. Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft will acquire ZeniMax Media for $7.5 billion in cash.

The very announcement hints at streaming as the future: The end of buying expensive gaming PCs and consoles, and rather, using cloud streaming and edge competing to jump into virtual worlds from any device, even an old laptop or mobile phone. And with this purchase, Microsoft has a huge content advantage to add to its fast-growing subscriber base:

Top 6 Posts from Last Week, Including Avatar Creation Advice from a Virtual World Veteran & A Slapping Rap Song Inspired by SL

• Zuckerberg Wants Oculus Quest 2 To Sell 10 Million Units. The First Quest Hardly Sold 1 Million.
• There's A Playable, Physics-Enabled Tribute To Fall Guys In Second Life
• Someone Made The Bates Motel & Mansion Of Hitchcock's Psycho In Second Life
• How To Create Avatars For Virtual Worlds -- An Oculus/Linden Lab Vet's Advice
• Watch: Someone Made A Rap Song About Second Life And It Fricking SLAPS
• Poignant Images Of Sadness Created From Virtual World Screenshots

Weekend Shopping Tips from a New SL Blog called Kirinyth

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

Kirinyth has a self-named blog that combines visiting beautiful sims, fashion, and decor. “Riding a Sky Whale” is an outstanding blog post that thoughtfully asks us to look at the world anew. I love it when bloggers write more than credits, sharing more of themselves than an outfit. 

• Top: DEAD DOLL by Kiddoh Oh Knotted Shirt (free gift at Uber)
• Jeans: Maitreya by Onyx LeShelle Zipper-Skinny Jeans
• Shoes: REIGN  by KenadeeCole Arianna Sneakers

Click through to see why her blog is very different from the usual.

Zuckerberg Wants Oculus Quest 2 to Sell 10 Million Units. The First Quest Hardly Sold 1 Million.

Admittedly I haven't been following the unveiling of Oculus Quest 2 and all of Facebook's other VR/AR-related announcements this week as closely as I once did. (Owing to, you know, their sheer and total Facebook-itude.) But I should note this interesting point CEO Mark Zuckerberg made in an interview with The Verge's Casey Newton:

Casey Newton: So where are you on this long road to making VR mainstream?

Mark Zuckerberg: VR, I think is well on its way. We had this milestone in our mind that first we needed to get the technology to the place where you could have a standalone headset, it could be portable, it could be high quality — do the tracking and all that. And Quest was the big milestone on that. Then, from an ecosystem perspective, we believed that if we get to 10 million units active, then that’s kind of a critical magic number.

At that point, you have a self-sustaining ecosystem. That’s the next big push: how do we get the technology to be more accessible to more people? A big part of that was driving it to be more affordable, and making it more portable. ... And we’re not at 10 million yet, but I’m optimistic that over the next few years, we’ll get there. And that will really be a new stage of VR.

Emphasis mine, because, wow. 10 million active users isn't even large compared to a single video game console. (Total sales of Nintendo Switch, after 3.5 years on the market: 61 million.) Even more key, the first Oculus Quest barely reached 1/10th those numbers: