New World Notes

Is Aufwie Set to Be Second Life's Next Break-Out Pop Star?

Auwfie is a twentysomething singer who performs his own music in Second Life three times a week and, for my money, is destined to become SL's next break-out crossover pop star. With a distinctive, richly textured voice backed by a soundscape of vibey hooks (listen above and below), his style sits somewhere between, say, Radiohead and Ariel Pink.

Known as Aufwie Mysterious in SL, he's performing next tomorrow in-world at 5pm PT, at a venue called Industry -- click here to teleport, and join his Discord here for show news.  

Auwfie has actually been visiting SL on and off for over 10 years. "I started performing for people in hangouts just for the laughs, never really took it with proper seriousness," he tells me.

But the coming of COVID changed all that:

Second Life Community Launch Huge Event to Help LGBTQI People Persecuted in Real Life

Click here tomorrow at 12:30pm PT for SeraPride, a fundraising event with all Linden Dollar proceeds converted into US$ to benefit Rainbow Railroad, a non-profit which helps LGBTQI people escape persecution in real life.  Help on the SL sim of Seraphim, Second Life's most popular fashion blog, top brands like Blueberry are donating items/matching funds, while major performers including Skye Galaxy are performing. I just took a sneak peek and the place looks super spectacular.

All the details here, including a spreadsheet which transparently tracks all donations in real time. 

Video below to get you psyched for the party!

Fantastic SL Fashion Tips from Flickr Photographer Kaelyn Alecto

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

Kaelyn Alecto is an SL fashion microblogger providing the details in her Flickr description. I love this picture, particularly that she has the naturalistic sand on her skin and her carefree windblown hair. 

• Doux - Summertime hair day

• TETRA - Spicy Bikini @ Kustom9

• Izzie's - Sand covered body layer (bom)

For more casual fashion, click here:

FBI Just Proved Bitcoin's Much-Touted Anonymity is Illusory, Says Financial Expert -- And No, El Salvador Didn't Actually Make Bitcoin Any More Useful

When I read that the FBI had seized $2.3 million in Bitcoin paid to Colonial Pipeline hackers earlier this week, my first thought was:  This proves that Bitcoin can't be free from the powers that be, because it rides on rails that they control.

Because as it happens, that's the title of a post I wrote back in 2011, citing the observations of Bill Maurer, who's now Director at the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at UC Irvine, and one of the world's foremost experts on alternative/experimental forms of money and finance.

"Indeed," Bill tells me now, "the Colonial Pipeline case demonstrates that the much-touted anonymity of the Bitcoin blockchain is illusory: given the right analytics and determination, an algorithm can deduce the addresses associated with specific transactions--especially big, highly publicized ones where the amounts transacted, and in what chunks, are known (since presumably Colonial Pipeline told the federal authorities in what pieces they transferred the ransom)."

That's due to the nature of transactions like these, he went on:

"Bitcoin transactions are not like, 'Here's $4M of my total stash of fungible $100M,' but, 'Here's THESE pieces of Bitcoin adding up to $4M' which makes it easier to spot transactional patterns than, say, actual physical cash. In this case it seems the FBI also got the private key(s) associated with some or all of the transactions, which means that they somehow got access, and I'd guess it's either through an informant or just plain sloppiness on the part of the attackers, by, say, having their private key on an accessible device or server somewhere."

Or to put it another way: This shows that Bitcoin transactions are not any more anonymous than real world currency transactions -- especially when the authorities have a very good reason to trace them.

But surely there still are legitimate uses for Bitcoin that don't require anonymity, right? After all -- as every single Bitcoin evangelist in your life has probably told you -- El Salvador just made Bitcoin an official currency in the country.

So does that show Bitcoin can become a means for purchasing goods and services? Maurer believes there's much more (and much less) to that move:

Viewfinder, Mind-Bending, Reality-Creating Unity Demo, Now Seeking Publishers With a Graphically Enhanced, Playable Version

Remember Viewfinder? Created by student Matt Stark, that's the synapse-thrashing Unity demo which depicted an interactive world where the user can manipulate their surroundings by taking a picture of them which, once taken, becomes its own little interactive, manipulable, physics-enabled world.

Since showing it off last year, Matt has greatly enhanced the graphics options, added some gameplay features, and has turned it into a short playable version -- watch above! He is now seeking publishers interested in bringing it to the world.  Get in touch with him on Twitter or with his development partner Callum Underwood.

As for how he does this, here is Matt's way of explaining it:

LGBT Second Life Users Celebrate Pride With Tributes to the Freedom of Virtual World Expression & Identity

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

Pitch Wyld’s “Hey Sailor” captures the exuberance of Pride. It is an homage to the “V-J Day in Times Square” shot when World War Two was finally over. A less-famous shot of those four pictures taken that day shows the woman punching the guy in the face for just grabbing her, but that is the past. Today this image celebrates Pride, a kind of V-B Day (Victory over Bigotry) and it is consensual. He also chose perfect mood music “I Am What I Am” with Gloria Gaynor.

Describing what Pride means to him, Pitch writes: 

“I have found that being involved in Second Life has allowed me to safely explore different sides of my sexuality in such a way that I can then implement these ideas, concepts, feelings in a more meaningful way into my real life. I am given an arena that is largely non-judgmental, where I can play out different scenarios and think more deeply on who I am and how my sexuality expresses itself. Second life hits my scientific side where I can gather research in the ways that other folks engage in their sexuality. This allows me to be more knowledgeable and hopefully receptive as a loving and engaging partner.” 

For more Virtual Pride, click here:

Second Life-Based Works by Internationally Acclaimed Artist Cao Fei Now Featured By NYC's Museum of Modern Art

Cao Fei, one of the world's most acclaimed artists, is easily the most well-known artist to use Second Life as an artistic medium. And now, some of her SL-based works are being featured by the world's most acclaimed modern art museum, the MOMA in NYC.  If you're visiting New York this Summer/Fall, another installation of hers, "Whose Utopia", is on display in the museum itself.

She's still engaged with her SL-related works, by the way, even making an impromptu in-world appearance earlier today via her avatar, China Tracy:

Second Life Photographer Makes Amazing Use of EEP Environment Controls

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

This fabulous picture of Portocorvo in SL (directory listing here) is so fantastic, I knew I wanted to feature it, but the name of the person who shot the picture sounded familiar, Dandy Warhol, as though maybe I had written about him before. Trying to keep finding new people, I checked and nope, I had not. Must have been thinking about the band of the same name. Anyway, the picture is astonishing. I love the color, I love how sharp and clear it is, the complete opposite of my memory. 

The word “pellucid” was invented for this next picture, click here:

Play Palia, a "Community Simulation" MMO Set in a Fantasy World at Peace

Palia is an intriguing new MMO now in limited pre-Alpha access with a somewhat odd* name from Singularity 6, a startup I last wrote about in 2019, led by many AAA developers who ambitiously promised to create worlds that built "community, friendships and a real sense of belonging.” I was somewhat skeptical at the time, but Palia announces itself as aiming to be just that: 

Palia is a massively-multiplayer community simulation game set in a brand new high fantasy world with elements of open world adventure games. It’s a cozy and welcoming world that we hope fans of the community sim genre will love for years to come.

As all that suggests, there's little or no typical "kill 10 rats" type of gameplay, almost as if it's set in a fantasy world that takes place in between the great battles that get way more press:

How to Import a Minecraft World Into NeosVR With Mineways; UPDATE: Added GitHub Resource

Update, 6/9: This is the Substrate fork on Github that Frooxius created for this Minecraft import.

Here's more info on how Frooxius, lead developer of the crowd-funded social VR project NeosVR, seemingly reverse engineered a version of Minecraft and imported it into his world:  He didn't actually reverse engineer a version of Minecraft.

"It's using a Substrate C# library called Substrate (with some updates from me) to read the data [link above - WJA] and figure out which chunks are in the file and then uses another community tool called Mineways to export the chunks as geometry," he explains. "That geometry is then imported into Neos and post-processed with materials, positioning, adding some extra things like light sources where torches are and a culling system to handle large worlds."

And here's how other Neos users can try this out:

Powerful Virtual World Photos Inspired by Malcom X & Victims of Myanmar's Violent Coup

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

Whiskey Monday introduced me to Illy S’s photostream with this painfully evocative raw photo, part of a six-photo series featuring unedited photos of the same woman with the scars of a whip on her back. Musical inspirations for the series include Nina Simone’s “Isn’t it a Pity”, Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” and Outkast’s “Liberation.” The series’ theme is power, this picture in particular, titled after Malcolm X’s powerful quote, “The most unprotected person in America Is the Black Woman.” 

I love how Illy S. shot her pics at sunset when a little moonlight brightens the gloaming just enough. In some ways, the way the dusk hides her scars, making us try harder to make them out to recognize what they are, involve us more deeply, invests us in the picture. 

As in the Great Migration, her photos move to Brooklyn -- click here:

Monday Memory: My 2014 Interview With the Late Ebbe Altberg After He Became CEO of Linden Lab

With the Second Life community and the wider industry still processing the passing of Ebbe Altberg, I went back to read my first interview with him in 2014, shortly after he became Linden Lab's CEO. It's particularly moving how he discovered the virtual world through his son:

Though he is Linden Lab’s new CEO now, one of Ebbe Altberg’s first experiences with Second Life occurred over 10 years ago, and as it happens, actually involved a violation of Second Life policy. It was around that time, you see, that Altberg’s son fell in love with Second Life, and became an avid builder there. Which is usually a fine thing, but here’s the problem: Altberg’s son was a young teen at the time, and back then they were strictly not allowed:

“So yeah, he was underage,” Altberg admits now, “so SL booted him correctly.”

Altberg convinced then CEO Philip Rosedale to be lenient, but by that time, Altberg’s young son had become a well-known content creator in Second Life... Despite all that, Ebbe's son stayed engaged in Second Life for a couple years, and even co-founded an in-world design company. And being among the first explorers of Teen Second Life, one of that world’s original islands was even named after the avatar of Ebbe Altberg’s son. And Ebbe Altberg watched all this amazed: “For a kid to have this experience so early was fantastic,” as he puts it now.

Another interesting point is how he saw VR/XR devices as a potential savior to Second Life's waning  user/revenue growth:

Top Posts Last Week, Including a Eulogy to Late Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg

• Ebbe Altberg, Ambitious & Inspiring CEO Of Linden Lab, Dies After Long Bout With Illness
• Real Life Artist Sells GIFs Of His Second Life-Based Sculptures As NFTs
• Long-Dormant Second Life Users Brought Back By The Pandemic Contemplate A Post-COVID Return To Reality
• Watch: ScavLab Test Displays Groundbreaking 4,144 Concurrent Players In Same Space, Appearances By Lead Devs & Improbable CEO As Giant Avatars

Ebbe Altberg, Ambitious & Inspiring CEO of Linden Lab, Dies After Long Bout With Illness -- MULTIPLE UPDATES: Added Personal Tributes from Philip Rosedale, Blueberry & Strawberry Linden, His Moral Leadership & How He Discovered Second Life Through His Son

Here's an announcement from Linden Lab that I've been dreading to write about for over two years:

Ebbe Altberg started with Linden Lab as our CEO on February 5th, 2014.  He took the helm of the company and immediately went to work on reinvigorating our spirit and culture.  Ebbe brought a profound openness, and transparency in his operation which was key and that had many effects on all of us internally, and externally.  Lindens were encouraged to be part of the vibrant community in Second Life, to participate in and to cherish it as part of our daily duties... As I am here before you today, it is with profound sadness that I share with you Ebbe passed away yesterday evening restfully and surrounded by the love of his family. 

What this means for the future of Second Life, recently purchased by a massive holding company, is a conversation for next week. What I'd rather do now is talk about Ebbe, who in my opinion was the most ambitious and inspiring CEOs of Linden Lab since Philip Rosedale himself. He galvanized the community and the company around a new vision to energize virtual worlds, and boosted company morale beaten badly by lack of revenue growth, layoffs, and the entrance and quick exit of two CEOs before him. (It's why the company made T-shirts for employees emblazoned with Ebbe's immortal words, "We are still the shit when it comes to virtual worlds.")

Also worth noting that Ebbe guided the company through rough waters while dealing with his illness since at least 2019:

SL Fashion Blogger Friday: Style & Houseware Shopping Tips from Dama

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

Dama is a lovely blog from Damatjo Magic. I love her Sunny Afternoon post. The picture is lovely. She used the Rule of Thirds in placing her avatar and it gives the picture such great balance. I love her blouse with the lace on the yoke and sleeves. And who doesn’t love a truck full of flowers. She points out that the braid can be worn on the left or right. I only wish that she told us where to get the blouse.  

• Hair: Holly – Mina Hair @ Uber

For a lovely set piece she blogged, click here:

Real Life Artist Sells GIFs of His Second Life-Based Sculptures as NFTs

This looks like a first for the world of NFTs and for Second Life: French artist Patrick Moya, who's been creating virtual installations in SL for many years while also showing his works at many real world exhibits, is now offering works created in Second Life as NFTs here on OpenSea and also on Rarible.

To be specific, Patrick clarifies to me, he's not directly selling the 3D files/scripts based in Second Life as NFTs:

He's selling animated gifs made in his Second Life Life studio, he clarifies, while "The buyer owns the token that was created to certify the gif." However, if the NFT owner wants the Second Life-based original, Patrick tells me he'll transfer that to the owner, so they can display it an SL gallery space.  ("But there's not many NFT buyers in Second Life," he notes.) Seen from that perspective, his NFTs are more valuable, because the owner not only gets the .gif, but the real (virtual) item to display in a social space. 

While hasn't sold any of these NFTs yet, he's already seen some success selling RL art pieces that originated in the virtual world:

NeosVR Can Now Import Minecraft Worlds (Though I'm Not Sure How)

Hopefully I'll hear back soon from Frooxius, lead developer of the crowd-funded social VR project NeosVR, but apparently, he's figured out how to reverse engineer a version of Minecraft and import it into his world. (And apparently did so as a three day project.) My go-to VR expert Adeon speculates that Frooxius may be parsing a Minecraft save file and making a voxel renderer to interpret it internally, separate from Minecraft. (Or something like that!)

While it only has a few hundred daily users (at least on Steam), this is yet another example of how NeosVR seems to be on the vanguard of innovation in social VR. More example below:

Long-Dormant Second Life Users Brought Back By the Pandemic Contemplate a Post-COVID Return to Reality

Where do virtual worlds go when the pandemic’s gone? It's a topic I'll be thinking a lot about in the coming months. The tragedy of the global pandemic accelerated the need for online work and virtual social spaces as never before -- hence the explosion of Zoom-meets-virtual worlds startups such as this one.

But as the COVID outbreak thankfully ebbs in much of the globe, many organizations are already calling for their personnel to come back into the office. Can virtual world spaces and platforms adjust to this new era, while maintaining its cultural gains? Or are they destined to fall back to simply being entertainment platforms mostly targeting teens?

I thought about this while recently reading this thought-provoking Reddit thread by veteran Second Life users who drifted away years ago, then returned to the virtual world during the pandemic (as a fair amount did)... and are now contemplating a return back to base reality:

Take a Tour of Topia, Web-Based Virtual World for Real Meetings That Just Added a Marketplace for Creators

Topia is another web-based virtual world-meets-Zoom platform to put on your radar, very much in a similar space as Andy Baio's Skittish. The startup just got $5 million in funding from the VC firm of Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, and just unveiled a marketplace for world creators:

World owners can now earn commissions whenever visitors to their worlds spend money in Topia, including subscriptions and marketplace purchases. Topia’s new creator marketplace allows artists and experienced designers to create scenes or entire customizable worlds and offer them for sale, making it easy for anyone to develop tailored experiences. The marketplace is launching with a collection of scenes designed by notable artists, including former Riot Games and Magic Leap Art Director Daren Bader, Void Bastards Creator Ben Lee, and Ubisoft Senior Environment Designer Karen Stanley.

Click here to try it out yourself by jumping into Topia's general welcome area. I just did, randomly bumped into an active group chat where another guy showed up on camera eating cereal, and promptly fled. However I did have time to appreciate the whimsically hand-drawn default graphics, a nice way to draw in non-gamers. You can also import graphically richer 3D worlds: 

Watch: ScavLab Test Displays Groundbreaking 4,144 Concurrent Players in Same Space, Appearances by Lead Devs & Improbable CEO as Giant Avatars

Update, June 2: Added more details on the giant avatars.

If you're wondering how well last weekend's stress test went in ScavLab, the sandbox testing platform in Scavengers, take a look at this fairly jaw-dropping video featuring excerpts from the event. A rep with Improbable, which provides Scavengers' server architecture, tells me they racked up 4,144 peak concurrent players in the same space.

Which is a pretty incredible number -- previous virtual worlds/MMOs can typically handle 50-120 locally concurrent users (often with a lot of lag), and several hundred users on the high end. If the test can consistently hold up as a benchmark for average consumers, this represents a massive leap in single-shared virtual world technology.

Oh yeah, the titan-sized avatars you sometimes see moving through the scene?

Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2021年5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.

 

 

Second Life Search & Shopping Has Been Broken for Years (Comments of the Week)

Great comment thread on Whiskey Monday's excellent and helpful rant last week, on all the frustrations customers take on when trying to shop in Second Life. Some of these, such as allowing content creators to use non-standard symbols in their store listings, even though that utterly frustrates SL's search function, could have been fixed years ago. 

"What's sad is that these problems have been an issue for YEARS, ever since I joined SL and probably from before too," as longtime reader CronoCloud Creeggan put it. "I generally give up at the 'item is a gacha' point."

Some of the problems with SL shopping could be addressed the store owners' themselves. Speaking of which, reader Mondy has a gripe around brand offers for their groups:

Top 5 Posts Last Week, Including Advice for Second Life Brands & A Chat With the Creators of Happy Hill Dog Park in VRChat

• Second Life Brands: Here’s Why It’s So Hard To Give You Linden Dollars -- Plus Three Ways To Make It Much Easier
• This Artist Creates & Photographs Massive Abstract Sculptures In Second Life
• Inside VRChat's Happy Hill Dog Park, The Virtual Dog Experience Created By Academics To Study Real Life Well-Being & Social Isolation
• TV Producers Searching For Virtual World Performers For Masked Singer-Meets-Avatars Reality Competition
• Send LGBT-Themed Avatar Pics To Our #Virtualpride Challenge By June 9th!

Add Combat to Your Really Needy HUD Roleplay System with an Injuries Add-On & Futuristic Gun for Taking & Giving Damage (Partner Post)

Here’s two new items from proud New World Notes sponsoring partner Really Useful Scripts Corner which effectively turn its Really Needy HUD roleplay tool into a combat system:

• The Injuries add-on for the HUD
• The new release of a sci-fi themed submachine gun that’s compatible with the HUD.

Ably demonstrated by Really Useful’s lead developer Grace7 Ling above, these items aren’t technically part of a combat system, but they can certainly be used as such:

“It is a natural extension to simulating physiological needs (hunger, thirst, energy, etc.) that roleplayers would also like to simulate health damage as a result of not meeting those needs, or due to injuries,” she explains. “The Linden Lab damage system is too simplistic and inflexible, while some other systems are focusing only on combat rather than roleplay.”

“The Injuries add-on enables wounds that automatically appear on your avatar’s body if shot by a firearm, courtesy of tattoo layers made by cosmetics creator Izzie Button, who is a partner.” It even displays bloody splatter and mist when a shot hits home, and also comes with walls that display bullet holes. (More features here.) 

It was inspired by Second Life’s many roleplay communities where some users take on roles such as the police and EMT workers:

Tomorrow: Join a Truly Massive Event With 1000s of Avatars in the Same Space in ScavLab, the Sandbox Testing Platform in Scavengers

Tomorrow (May 29) at 11am PT is the first massive-scale community event in Scavengers, the survival/sandbox game with some Second Life in its DNA.

And I do mean massive, because Scavengers runs on Improbable's Spatial OS:

"We reached over 1,800 players in our closed test in April, so we're hoping to beat that," Rob Whitehead, co-founder and CPO at Improbable, tells me. "However, this first public event will allow up to 5,000 players - although the tech allows for greater player numbers, we found that 5,000 was the max level of density for an enjoyable gameplay experience. We're designing new game modes/events that will go beyond this number."

Here's how to join the event:

• Download Scavengers on Steam or on EGS
• Boot the game
• Go to the main menu (you may need to first complete/leave the opening tutorial)
• Make sure you queue up for the "ScavLab game mode" before the 11AM PT/7PM BST event

Should be a fun and interesting experience even if you're not a hardcore gamer, and are mainly interested in experiencing the latest in Improbable's technology for truly massive, single shard worlds, and the feeling of being surrounded by thousands of avatars. And yes, I do mean surrounded: