New World Notes

Today's Flickr Pick: Lush Virtual World Kawaii of All Kinds by Hunkaa

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

Hunkaa’s untitled picture could be named “Starlight with Bunnies.” I love the dreamy quality. I see the bunny on the left is sleeping, maybe it is the bunny’s dream. It is very kawaii, adorably cute. I love it. Hunkaa is a microblogger, providing credits in her picture descriptions. 

For more kawaii pics, click here:

Philip Rosedale: The Metaverse Isn't for "Everybody" & Meta Shouldn't Succeed at Making It

Here's a new interview on Axios with Philip and veteran game industry journalist Stephen Totilo, with some bombshell quotes like these:

• Of the metaverse, he says: “I think what we've learned — and somewhat with some sadness, given the work that I've done, I would have to agree — is that it's not for everybody, and maybe it's never for everybody.”
• And of Meta’s chances of succeeding with their new metaverse project: “Well, I hope they don't.”

He goes into detail on both points further in the interview, including his thoughts on why the Metaverse is never for everybody -- which I concur with, but only to a certain extent:

SL's Sleek New Search UI Receives Mixed Reader Response

Some like the new search UI... but some not so much. Here's reader David D.'s take:

It feels good, but only Linden Lab will be able to tell whether it really helps or not. In my field of higher education, there is a want to make lots of pretty videos and web pages because people equate user experience with knowledge access and will help with developing competence. There are studies that say that the look and feel have nothing to do ultimately with the learning. Usability (and universal design), information results, and presentation are all different things, and while they *can* impact one another, you can have a crap design with all the right bits of info which people are just fine consuming, and you can have really pretty things that still have terrible text output. And, even if you have both, if the engine doesn't let people get what they want, it can be as advanced and clean as it wants; it is still a crappy search engine.

The UX is good and is more attractive. Now put some substance behind the change and you'll have good universal design.

 Responding to my comment that it looks prettier, longtime third party viewer developer Henri Beauchamp demurs:

Top 3 Posts Last Week, Including a New Search UI for Second Life & a New Pro-Quality World in VRChat

• Play In VRChat: Magic Heist, Community-Made, Pro-Quality Game Ride
• Are You Thankful For Second Life's Sleek New Search User Interface?
• Classic Movie Posters Recreated With Second Life Screenshots

Budget-Conscious Fashion Ideas from Fabulously Free in SL

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

Move Over Turkeys, I got Sparkle just made me smile and feel happy. I love the exuberance. I love how she places herself against the backdrop so it looks like her hand is radiating rainbows of color. And it’s free! It’s featured at Fabulously Free in SL, which has guided the free/budget conscious SL shopper for over a decade. This post is from Creola Deledda whose post radiates excitement and joy. 

• Dress – Georg Bellic Design Leela Pink Dream Dress (Free Gift at The Black Friday Bazaar/Group is Free to Join)

Gorgeous & Hilarious Tributes to Thanksgiving by the Second Life Community

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

Adam Cayden very cleverly paid playful homage to “The Last Supper” with this Thanksgiving photo, “The Last Tab.” As in Da Vinci’s original, the host is surrounded by twelve friends. In the original, they are disputing and debating the allegation that one will betray him. In this homage, they seem to be discussing their share of the bill. This was posted in October to celebrate Canada’s Thanksgiving on the Tenth. I wanted to celebrate today’s holiday, but it’s good to remember that there are several other countries that also celebrate Thanksgiving or a similar harvest festival.

For more Thanksgiving celebrations in Second Life, click here:

Play in VRChat: Magic Heist, Community-Made, Pro-Quality Game Ride

Click here to experience Magic Heist in VRChat, a new community-made game world/ride that seems ideal for exploring over the Thanksgiving holidays. Co-developed by acclaimed VRC creators Fins, CyanLaser, and Lakuza, it is, to judge by the highly-polished trailer (watch above), pretty much indistinguishable in quality to a big budget console game for the family. Much of that has to do with the fact that Fins paid out of pocket to hire professional voice actors and license the soundtrack (the biggest part of the budget).

While it may look like a game built over a year, the team built Magic Heist in just about a month, Lakuza tells me, racing to finish it by deadline for the Raindance Film Festival contest:

Today's Flickr Pick: Wildly Varied, Always Wonderful World of Wren Alcyone

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

Wren Alcyone [branwenalcyone] takes amazing profile pics and fun Look-Of-The-Day snaps. I love “Valkyrie” though it differs from my mental image of the mythological women who escort those chosen from the battlefield dead to go to Valhalla to prepare for Ragnarok. However, what slain hero would turn down her invitation? 

For more pictures from the wild side, click here:

Are You Thankful for Second Life's Sleek New Search User Interface?

I just gave this a quick spin (watch above):

Today we’re excited to announce that we’ve updated the look of our inworld and web-side Search feature to bring it more in line with the look and feel of our viewer and the direction that that rest of our web properties will be going... Our goal was to clean up the interface and provide a more streamlined and user friendly Search feature that maintained all the functionality that we’ve all come to expect and rely upon. Helpful tool tips will guide you in getting the most functionality out of your searches, and will update as we add more options for more sophisticated searches.

The user interface is definitely prettier! As for the user experience... well, you can watch above and make your own judgements. I ran it on a gamer laptop that plays the new AAA Deathloop game beautifully and with very little performance issues. Worth bearing in mind that Google came to dominate the search engine market back in olden times (by which I mean 2000) not because it was pretty but because it was ruthlessly streamlined to give the user relevant results as quickly as possible.

Classic Movie Posters Recreated With Second Life Screenshots

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

A few weeks ago, we asked folks to recreate a movie poster in Second Life. I thought I would share the results. Suzie Anderton chose Jaws for her #SLMovieTribute and definitely captures the menace of the original film’s poster. The waters of the Linden Ocean are dangerous! 

For more movie posters including a fun twist on a favorite Kubrick film, click here:

Second Life, The Limits of OpenGL, and the Alchemy Viewer (Comment of the Week)

"Won't be going to Fortnite if there's no custom [avatars]," writes Juliette Jones in a post on that topic, "but frankly SL's performance issues cannot be 'solved' without expending an immense amount of money on Linden Lab's part to transfer Second Life completely off of OpenGL framework."

Here's why, as she sees it:

OpenGL has a lot of difficulty using GPU resources effectively since it was originally made as a competitor to Microsoft's DirectX programming which relied on GPU. At the time, CPUs were far more powerful than most graphics cards and especially moreso than the onboard graphics of that generation's motherboards. OpenGL was built to run on those systems. No one was sure dedicated graphics cards would take off the way they did.

As a stopgap solution for Second Life users, Juliette suggests trying the Alchemy viewer over the highly popular Firestorm:

Top 5 Posts Last Week, Including: The Little-Known But Massive, Potential Metaverse & A Longtime SLer's Case for Fortnite Creative

• Free Fire: The Little-Known, Potential Metaverse Already Played By 1 In 10 People In The Entire World
• Rising Indie Musician Keith Rankin Illustrates Latest Album Cover With Images By Acclaimed Second Life Artist Whiskey Monday
• Fact Check: Neither Qualcomm Or Facebook Claim The Quest 2 Has A 10M Unit Install Base (Yet)
• Guest Post: Why A Longtime Roleplayer Left Second Life For Fortnite Creative
• Neal Stephenson Speculates New Metaverse Hype Partially Driven By Turf Protection

Yoonabae Brings South Korean Style to Second Life Fashion Blogs

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

“Yoonabae” is a style blog by Yoona Kwon [YoonaBe in-world] and features story-telling pictures created with flair and confidence. Seoul Vibes #208, her most recent post, takes the school uniform that is so much a feature of the Lolita and Kawaii styles to a more sober and realistic place. It tells a story in a classroom. This is not a sexualized school uniform, but real school with real lessons and I love it. I checked out Toksik’s school uniform which is modest enough for today though not for my school where the shortest allowable length was the width of your hand above the knee. The school decor is on point. 

• toksik elite outfit
• kopfkino school days - classroom skybox, desks, chairs, clutter, shelves, posters

For a more stylish look, click here:

Free Fire: The Little-Known, Potential Metaverse Already Played by 1 in 10 People in the Entire World

Free Fire is a cross platform online battle royale game which on the surface, is largely dismissed by the Western game industry as yet another knockoff of PUBG and Fortnite. But AR/VR investor Julie Young has been looking much closer for well over a year (months before the current Metaverse buzz reached fever pitch), when she observed that the game, from Garena -- a game studio/publisher owned by massive Singapore-based conglomerate Sea Limited -- has the early makings of a metaverse:

In Brazil, they partnered with DJ Alok for a live set in Free Fire. In Colombia, they held an event where two of the country’s biggest soccer players hosted a live tournament for charity. These are perfect examples of Sea’s incredible agility and execution. But on a more philosophical level, they demonstrate that Garena could actually become more than just a very profitable gaming platform - perhaps Free Fire, down the road, will become a new type of platform altogether.

... and based on current user numbers, Free Fire is already well positioned to be The Metaverse, if it wants to become that. As she tweeted yesterday, reporting recent user numbers: "Free Fire has 700 million quarterly active users concentrated largely in some of the highest growth regions in the world (or as @nachkari pointed out today, 10% of the world plays the game quarterly."

Yes, nearly 1 in 10 of everyone across the entire earth already play Free Fire. And for purists who scoff at the idea of the Metaverse emerging from a casual combat game, it's worth remembering that Neal Stephenson's original Metaverse also had a heavy combat game component. 

I chatted with Julie a bit about Free Fire last night, and from that, my sense is that the platform is very much moving in the Fortnite Creative direction that Epic is taking, adding monetization mechanics for user creators. And the thing is, Free Fire has some considerable advantages against Epic -- namely eyeballs:

Risking Indie Musician Keith Rankin Illustrates Latest Album Cover With Images by Acclaimed Second Life Artist Whiskey Monday

Faith in Persona is a pretty banging experimental pop album with a top-rated track from rising indie artist Keith Rankin aka Giant Claw, and if the album cover seems familiar, there's a very good reason for that: It's drawn directly from works by beloved Second Life-based artist Whiskey Monday (with her full permission of course).

"He just saw my stuff on Flickr and asked if he could use it," Whiskey tells me. "He had no idea this kind of art existed in SL."

He certainly found the right artist. Here's how Rankin announced it on his Instagram, plus a compare/contrast with Whiskey's original images:

Second Life Artists Create Image Book Inspired by Poems of Pablo Neruda

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

“Me gusta cuando callas” is a picture by Pedro for a multi-artist exhibition in Second Life [teleport here] and an online picture book celebrating the poetry of Pablo Neruda. It is called “A Thousand Words” and challenges the artists to give a picture worthy of the words of Neruda. 

Twenty artists came together selecting poems from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair which is one of Neruda’s best-known collections. 

The image above illustrates Neruda’s poem which begins, “I like for you to be still / It is as though you are absent / And you hear me from far away / And my voice does not touch you” -- and I think his picture is an excellent representation of that melancholy Neruda is writing about, when the loved one is silent and absorbed, but still within reach of a smile. 

For more examples from the exhibition, click here:

This Artist Makes Second Life Screenshots Look Like Dramatic Movie Stills

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

Rule Binder’s “The Last Dragon” is amazing. So amazing, I teleported over to Willow Falls [teleport here]  to check it out. I went during daylight so it was not quite so spooky but there was fog in the cemetery where the Dragon King skeleton can be found. It’s an exciting picture, made more so by the dramatic lighting. 

And now for something completely different, click here:

Fact Check: Neither Qualcomm or Facebook Claim the Quest 2 Has a 10M Unit Install Base (Yet)

If you're following VR news across various social media platforms, you probably saw this article on The Verge yesterday:

Meta has sold 10 million Oculus Quest 2 headsets, according to Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon at the company’s 2021 investor day, giving the best benchmark yet for sales of Meta’s standalone VR platform since it launched last October... The news doesn’t come directly from Meta itself, but given that the Quest 2 relies on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 chipset to power its standalone VR hardware, Qualcomm does seem like it would have an accurate number for how many headsets have been sold.

This is hard to believe, because at the end of July, the install base for the Quest 2 was 5-6 million, based on Facebook's latest earning report. (Not to mention July's infamous face rash incident which placed the US install base at 4 million.) Given that hardware sales mainly surge during the holiday shopping season, it's seriously unlikely 4-5 million more Quest 2 units were bought in the last 3 months alone. 

So I wasn't surprised, scrolling down further, to find this jaw-dropping update casually added to the bottom of the Verge article (but with no subsequent change to the clickbaitey headline):

Guest Post: Why a Longtime Roleplayer Left Second Life For Fortnite Creative

Longtime urban fantasy author Victor Ziblis is -- or rather, was -- a longtime member of the Second Life roleplay community, who first joined the world to promote his novels. 

"[I]t was actually a marketing stunt suggested by my publicist," he tells me, "The advertising stunt went off pretty well, but I found Second Life to be so enjoyable that I stayed for over three years.  I remember Club Caribe/Habitat on Quantum Link, and this gave me the same feel except it was 3D." And so he stayed in Second Life, even becoming entrenched enough in the community that he was promoted director of medical services on a major collection of roleplay sims.

But he recently left Second Life, "because it occurred to me that I was spending a lot of money on a thing that wasn't really returning me with anything but an hour or three of roleplay a week, and mostly was just my character lounging around in front of his home.  I'm not trying to get laid, and clubbing is played out to me so what was the point of sticking around?"

Before completely leaving, however, he posted a long and passionate rant on /SecondLife cheerfully entitled "Fortnite is eating our lunch." And while I don't necessarily agree with it all, it's worth considering by other members of the SL roleplay community -- and for members of Linden Lab itself, as they consider how to better serve that community.

Reprinted with permission (with some editing by the author), here's Victor's rant in full below: 

Today's Second Life Flickr Artist Pick: Lally Starsparkle

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

Lally Starsparkle named this “Sweet Dreams” after the Eurhythmics tune. This does portray what seems like a sweet dream of a woman standing in a boat while fish leap into the boat. IS she enchanting them or is that little gizmo suspended, in defiance of gravity, from her hand some sort of magical fishing tool? I love the soft colors and the magical feeling it evokes. 

For a romantic homage to one of the great operas, click here:

Neal Stephenson Speculates New Metaverse Hype Partially Driven by Turf Protection

Image credit: Christopher Michel

Interesting comment from Neal while talking with CNBC about his new environmental sci-fi novel Termination Shock:

[CNBC reporter] I have to ask about the metaverse, a term that you coined in the book “Snow Crash” in 1992. Now it’s everywhere in tech. It was on Disney’s earnings call! Everybody in the tech world is suddenly using the term, probably not the way you intended it or originally envisioned it. What are your thoughts on that?

Along with expressing similar bogglement at his Metaverse concept's longevity and influence that he expressed to me in 2014, Stephenson's reply is curiously unexpected:

Linden Lab Should Market Second Life Like Minecraft (Comment of the Week)

"What if Linden Lab marketed Second Life as an ante-litteram Minecraft instead?", asks reader Pulsar, in a post about the wrong Metaverse lessons being learned from SL. By "ante-litteram", Pulsar means "ahead of one’s time", but that's a cooler way of saying that. Pulsar proceeds to explore a re-marketing of SL as a creative platform:

Sure, SL "prims" are more complex than Minecraft cubes, but also more powerful. However [Second Life's technical/UI problems] they were fun. Linden Lab, instead of improving it and making it more accessible, dropped the creative fun to Blender, making it even less accessible to many.

A prim-centric promotional campaign for Second Life could be linked to some kind of prim collection game mechanic, Pulsar goes on, but that's not necessary:

Top 5 Posts Last Week Including: The IP Bloodbath Inherent in Disney's "Own" Metaverse, Security Issues Inherent in Facebook's Metaverse, and Media Learning the Wrong Metaverse Lessons from Second Life (Again)

• Facebook's Biggest Metaverse Safety Problem Is Baked Into Facebook's Brand
• With Disney Announcing "Our Own Metaverse", Prepare For An IP Bloodbath Across Competing Platforms
• Dear Media: Maybe Don't Draw Wrong Metaverse Lessons From Second Life?
• VRChat Hits New All-Time Peak User Concurrency Record: Over 55,000!
• Nissan's Marketing Program In VRChat Could Learn Some Hard Earned Lessons From Second Life

Facebook's Biggest Metaverse Safety Problem is Baked Into Facebook's Brand

The man driving Facebook/Meta's Metaverse development is seriously worried about safety on their now-in-development platform, according to a leaked memo reported by the Financial Times:

Andrew Bosworth, who has been steering a $10 billion-a-year budget to build “the metaverse”, warned that virtual reality can often be a “toxic environment” especially for women and minorities, in an internal memo from March seen by the Financial Times. He added that this would be an “existential threat” to Facebook’s ambitious plans if it turned off “mainstream customers from the medium entirely”. The memo sets out the enormous challenge facing Facebook, which has a history of failing to stop harmful content from reaching its users, as it tries to create an immersive digital realm where people will log on as 3D avatars to socialize, game, shop and work. Bosworth, who will take over as Facebook’s chief technology officer next year, sketched out ways in which the company can try to tackle the issue, but experts warned that monitoring billions of interactions in real time will require significant effort and may not even be possible. Reality Labs, the division headed by Bosworth, currently has no head of safety role.

These are all valid concerns but nothing in the Times report says anything about a core safety vulnerability on virtual platforms:

User identities, and how they're linked to one's real life name and identifying details. But this is the key means by which people -- mostly women, but also vulnerable minorities -- are targeted for stalking and abuse across platforms. Especially in immersive Metaverse-type spaces, where many mistakenly assume their identity is safe behind their quirky avatar name.

To cite just one example, Linden Lab had to walk back a plan to require real names only in Sansar, its erstwhile Metaverse platform, after strenuous protest from women and members of the LGBT community. Their concerns are quite correct, when it's not uncommon for women to be stalked in real life after their stalker does a reverse image search of their avatar.

But the thing is, Facebook's brand and DNA is utterly linked with real names. It is even stated explicitly in its stock filing with the US government:

Fantastic SL Fashion Photos & Finds from Jakarta-Based Blogger Koffi

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

K❤FFI is a blog by Ryan Ricci Blazkowicz [koffitear resident]. Her recent post “Need of Hour” caught my eye with its urgency. She’s moving with purpose. And she is dressed for it. 

• Mini a Chuu - Skullia Glasses @mainstore [ChuuAkamine}
• Toksik - Outsider Parka @marketplace  (crxsxs}
•  Spoiled - Lazy Socks @marketplace (spoiledstore) 
• Nitropanic - V2K Shoes @marketplace {Vressers}

For a more gothic look, click here: