New World Notes

VR Developer Trapped in Quarantine Maps His Real Life Home, Turns It Into a Treehouse Escape in VR

After being stuck in the same space for so long, I decided to try mapping it to a virtual treehouse for a more relaxing atmosphere. I think it would be great new feature if Oculus could make the home environments mapped to your real home pic.twitter.com/dL7XCOtXEe

— Emanuel Tomozei (@eman_insilico) April 4, 2020

Like most of us, developer Emanuel Tomozei has been largely trapped at home under quarantine these last few weeks. Unlike most of us, Tomozei is an AR/VR developer by specialty, and so was able to turn his home into a virtual world he could escape into:

"After being stuck in the same space for so long, I decided to try mapping it to a virtual treehouse for a more relaxing atmosphere," he explains on Twitter. (See above.) And so when he's wearing his Oculus Quest, he can still walk over to and sit in his couch -- it's just that instead of staring at the blank wall in front of him, in VR it looks as if his couch is on top of a tree house with a view of the lush forest below.

Creating a VR world that maps exactly to his real life apartment, as you might imagine, took some effort:

How This Amazing Second Life Image Was Made Without Post-Processing

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

When I featured this incredible image “Strange Visage” by Razor Cure last week, I wondered how he created it. My imagination was more vivid than reality, though. I thought he shot two photos showing two avatars at different scales and putting one on the other. Or perhaps he had a gigantic avatar. But no! 

Razor Cure's repy: “There are giant avatars in SL, but the face behind me is a piece of scenery. It's my avie standing on his giant hand!”

He gave me this SLURL to What’s Lost Spirits and sure enough, there are some giant sculptures there:

Do Most New Second Life Users Not Know It's Mostly User-Created?

The current SL account creation page with opt-out for e-mail updates

Reader Luther Weymann, who describes himself as a tech industry veteran who last ran a company with 1000 employees, describes his experiences using Second Life during his retirement years -- and his impression of new users, and what they have to cope with:

I started with my first avatar on January 1, 2004, while browsing the web waiting for the Rose Bowl to start on television. That's how I discovered SL. That was 16 years ago. Like many in SL over 16 years, there is nothing I have not done or tried. SecondLife became my only hobby.

So, during the last 8-9 months, I've been looking at the nearby avatar list wherever I go and finding lots of avatars that are one or two days old. I find them at Big Daddy's dance place wondering how to fit in and dance or in large retail stores, not really knowing how they got there or someone on the mainland just frozen, not knowing what to do or somehow on an island in the Blake Sea not understanding where they are.

And in all cases, I send an IM that says, "Hi, I see you're 1 day old, new to SL. It can be difficult getting started, is there anything I can do to help you?"

The response is immediate and heartfelt. They don't know what to do. None of them know how to rez a prim, or have ever heard of the SL Market where you can search for L$0 clothing, none of them know how to change clothes or why their feet stick out of their shoes, or part of their body is transparent or what a sandbox is or where to look if you give them something.

None of them, really none of them, know that everything they see except the sky and ground was made by SL Residents.

And every one of them will eventually ask this question "Is this worth it?" because they have never been told this is a do-it-yourself world with no support or help getting started and it just seems so impossible for them to understand what is going on.

This is somewhat anecdotal, but it is also my impression that most first-time users don't know Second Life is a user-created world, or even know about prims. I certainly haven't seen many (any?) recent ads for SL which promote prim-based creation, even though that's something that would immediately be appealing to tens of millions of former Minecraft players in search of a new game world to play in.

Again this is anecdotal, but Luther's sense is that most new users aren't joining SL to create, but in search of something more essential:

Top 7 Posts Last Week, Including: Half-Life: Alyx's Killer VR App Status in Doubt; Due to Coronavirus, Real Life Artist Moves Her Show to Second Life

• Real World Crisis, Virtual World Escape
• Second Life Images Inspired By Our Fight Against COVID-19, Found As I Myself Recovered From The Virus
• Half Life: Alyx Usage Figures Suggest It's Not VR's Killer App After All
• Unable To Present Her Work In Los Angeles While In Quarantine, Renowned Afrofuturist Artist Nettrice Gaskins Sets Up Gallery In Second Life
• With Sansar Gone, Second Life Needs A New Vision -- And Strawberry Linden Appointed CEO
• Sinespace Expands To Launch Breakroom, 3D Social Hub For Remote Teams

Sinespace Expands to Launch Breakroom, 3D Social Hub for Remote Teams

Breakroom is a new product for PC, Mac, Android tablets, and tethered VR headsets from sponsoring media partner Sinespace -- excerpt from the official announcement:

Sine Wave Entertainment today announced the launch of Breakroom, the 3D social hub for remote teams who want an online, immersive space to meet, team build, organize events, and host meetings.

With more and more teams working from home -- most recently in response to the Coronavirus -- major organizations are turning to online services that can replace brick and mortar office functionality. 

But standard conferencing and collaboration tools are not built to meet the social and wellness needs. Breakroom provides the video conferencing and media sharing tools you would expect from any collaboration platform, and combines it with colorful, welcoming online world filled with team-building exercises, brainstorming sessions, casual games, competitions, live events, office parties, breaktime meetups and everyday staff chitchat.

Watch the teaser video above. Breakroom is an enterprise spinoff of Sinespace for companies and non-profit organizations, and free for schools to use.

Sinespace the virtual world for everyone is still expanding, and will roll out some new features for users and creators soon. I asked Sinespace co-founder Adam Frisby about the project and how it affects the existing world:

Cajsa's Friday Fashion Choice: Second Life Style & Travel Blogger Heidi Rewell

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and style

HeidiRewell.com is a combination of travel and fashion blogging. “Containment Day 15: Neutral” is an example of her travel blogging. A strong, color-saturated photo with the SLURL. I love her bold colors which are usually created by layering a duplicate layer on top of the original with either the Soft Light or Overlay blending mode.  (Taken at MOTORHEADZ CAFE)

Here's a great example of her fashion blogging:

Real World Crisis, Virtual World Escape

Second Life Images Inspired by Our Fight Against COVID-19, Found As I Myself Recovered from the Virus

My RL view as I write this post, and of my "troll" tree

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

Before I share my latest round of Second Life photos inspired by the Coronavirus pandemic, I should start with a personal update, after my doctor diagnosed me as likely having the virus: 

I believe that I have recovered from COVID-19. Nearly all my symptoms are gone. The big difference for me is that I feel good, not like something run through a wringer a few times. There is this irony brought about by the lack of Coronavirus tests: When you are sick, you must presume you have it. When you get better, you must presume you did not.

So now I have a cold. Really! Life has a sick sense of humor.  

Now, on to Venicio Armin’s photostream, which is full of beautiful images, mostly lush and gorgeous landscapes. But recently, he did a series of photos in response to the pandemic: 

Animal Crossing Players Cleverly Converting Game to Launch Real Life Political Protests, In-Game Sales

Animal Crossing island of Joshua Wong, leading Hong Kong democracy activist

Animal Crossing: New Horizons has only been on the market for under two weeks, but its user-generated content features have already encouraged quite a lot of emergent gameplay. Hong Kong protesters are using the game to create protest imagery on their islands -- including the Animal Crossing island of Joshua Wong, one of the movement's seminal figures, who tweets: "The #Covid_19 pandemic has halted public demonstrations, so protesters are taking their cause to Animal Crossing"!

"I'm in love with the ways Animal Crossing has become a full-on Second Life-style virtual social space despite Nintendo's actively hostile infrastructure," game academic Em Lazer-Walker observes. And as an example of that, notes how Animal Crossing players have figured out how to sell virtual items within the game:

Nettrice Gaskins' Virtual Art Show in Second Life Becomes Crossover Hit

Click here to directly teleport to the MuseWeb gallery

Tuesday I told you about how Afrofuturist artist Nettrice Gaskins was supposed to show off her Deep Dream-based portraits at a conference in Los Angeles, but because she couldn't travel due to the Coronavirus quarantine, showed them off in a virtual gallery in Second Life. Since then, as it turns out, the SL gallery has been deluged by visitors, many showing up to meet the artist herself in avatar form. (Nettrice is s "Nettrice Bethune" in SL.)

The New World Notes post itself has gone mini-viral, shared upwards of 1000 times on Facebook alone. "Many people are not familiar with SL," Nettrice tells me, "so they're interested... curious, especially now." In fact, one of the people sharing the post was Monty Ross, Spike Lee's co-producer on the masterpieces Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X and (my personal Spike Lee favorite), Mo' Better Blues.

It's fair to say her art is being seen in Second Life now by more people (or at least a far wider range of them) than if she had just showed them off in Los Angeles. So while the Coronavirus is among the worst things to happen to humanity in a long time, it is also leading to some wonderful creativity and new connections. Or as Dr. Gaskin puts it, "It’s times like this when you realize the world ain’t so big."

Nettrice, by the way, is making another appearance at the gallery around now (1pm-ish Pacific time), but even if you can't meet her in Second Life, you should definitely see the show there -- and read about how she created these works here.

Cajsa's SL Flickr Pick: Behold the Unbridled Badassery of Razor Cure

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

Razor Cure’s photostream is one of the most exciting on Flickr, one Hamlet described as unrelenting badassery a while back. This picture is so cool. Posing his avatar on the pointing finger, it’s exciting and fresh. 

Here’s the thing. Razor Cure’s stream is not a single story, every picture is a new story:

Half Life: Alyx Usage Figures Suggest It's Not VR's Killer App After All

Today's Half-Life:Alyx stats on Steam

Couple somewhat surprising data points (via SteamDB) since Half-Life Alyx debuted last week, attracting the highest user concurrencies (nearly 43,000) for a VR-only game:

• Usage hasn't reached anywhere near that peak since then. I had thought the game might have seen a significant uptick last weekend, as people who bought it would have more free time to play. (Then again, under quarantine, don't we all have way more time on our hands?) But, no.
• If you look at Half-Life: Alyx's usage patterns, there's almost always way more people on Twitch watching Half-Life: Alyx being played, than actually playing Half-Life: Alyx. That was even true shortly after Alyx went live last week, with nearly 100,000 Twitch viewers watching while half those numbers played.

Maybe I'm missing something, but this data strongly suggests two suppositions:

Kimika Ying Creates Second Life Photos Inspired by Tweets & Real Life

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

Kimika Ying’s “Curiosity Rover” adds a touch of sarcasm with a photo of the Mars Rover on Explorer Island. It appears she was inspired by a tweet from SarcasticRover, a twitter account that says stuff like:  “Suddenly spending the rest of eternity on a lifeless planet devoid of any human contact while wandering an endless wasteland doesn’t seem so bad." It is one of the pictures in her Pandemic album.

Another Twitter-inspired pic below:

Unable to Present Her Work in Los Angeles While in Quarantine, Renowned Afrofuturist Artist Nettrice Gaskins Sets Up Gallery in Second Life - Today!

Click here to visit the MuseWeb art gallery in Second Life, where a special event is taking place today:  Acclaimed Afrofuturist artist Nettrice Gaskins will be there in avatar form today at around 11am and 1pm PST to show off her gorgeous artwork -- stunning portraits of black artists using Deep Dream AI algorithms as a kind of palette. (She's "Nettrice Bethune" in SL.)

Dr. Gaskins was originally planning to present this work in downtown Los Angeles at the MuseWeb conference, where she would also do a keynote talk with Cory Doctorow. But with the Coronavirus quarantine in full effect, she and the conference organizers have rapidly scrambled to turn it into a virtual event. ("Everyone is scrambling," she tells me. "This was supposed to be a face-to-face event.") 

Fortunately, MuseWeb has an island in Second Life, and Nettrice is an SL veteran, having first used it in her education and art work nearly a decade ago. So she was able to go in-world to upload her works and prepare them for a public, virtual world showing.

Once again, click here to visit the impromptu gallery and if you're lucky, meet the artist as avatar there too.

With Sansar Gone, Second Life Needs a New Vision -- And Strawberry Linden Appointed CEO (Comment of the Week)

Most readers weren't exactly enthused about Engadget's interview with Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg talking about his company's defenestration of Sansar, his calling Second Life a "cash machine", or of his list of improvements to Second Life, such as moving its infrastructure to the cloud. It inspired this rant from reader "Anne Frank" (I sure hope that's her real name):

Color me skeptical. I have about as much faith in these plans as I do that the US is moving in a good economic direction. It just assumes that the little people are always going to be along for the ride.

Why should I care about "the cloud"? Why should I care that their power structure is preserved after their huge failure? Why should I care that moving some free WindLight settings might become a commodity? Let's all hold hands and get stupid together. I didn't hear anything about "names". I guess now is not the time to want anything more than making sure you don't get less. Yay for us.

This is an unimaginably horrible time in our history, but we can celebrate an uptick in SL business. It's all good, babe. We're here for you and we're not planning to do a damn thing to make your experience better in the future.

Did I hear about any generous economic incentives to actually encourage broken people to engage in their tired old game? What are they giving to the future?  They seem to be giving their own well-being and we're supposed to be happy about that and give them our resources.

If ever there was a time for vision, it's now. If ever there was a time to lay the foundation for a better world, it's now. My god, the message LL should be sending is one of hope and compassion to its users. It should be sending an invitation to rally the troops to build, network, and engage. LL should be engaging directly with its base and its world.

Speaking of vision, Anne ends with a pretty visionary proposal of her own:

Philip Rosedale, SLers and Me Tweet About Overhauling Second Life's UX/UI & Whether Third Party Viewers Could Do It

Hiring a 5 person team of great UI/UX designers with a game industry background to fix Second Life’s vexing user interface & 1st time user experience would have cost about $5 million.

Instead, Linden Lab spent about $50 million developing Sansar.

Which they just gave away. https://t.co/KKNqGQmkl6

— Wagner James Au (@slhamlet) March 28, 2020

If you're on Twitter you may enjoy reading or contributing to a tweet thread I started over the weekend (I blame quarantine fever) by somewhat ranting about the opportunity cost of spending so much on Sansar when a fraction of that budget could have been spent on overhauling Second Life's first time user experience and user interface. Philip Rosedale comments, as do several other smart SLers with developer chops.

Top 8 Posts Last Month, Including: Sansar Acquired by Little-Known Wookey, the Corovirus Reshapes Second Life

• Sansar Platform Acquired By Wookey Project Corp, Linden Lab Confirms
• Alyx Estimate: 8-12% Of Compatible Install Base Playing Half-Life VR Game
• Cajsa's Choices: Powerful Coronavirus-Themed Second Life Images -- That I Found After My Doctor Said I Myself Likely Have Coronavirus
• In Coronavirus' Wake, Virtual World-Based Educator Using Both Zoom And Second Life To Teach Her Classes
• Cajsa's Choices: Images From My New Flickr Gallery, "Coronavirus In Second Life" -- And Coronavirus Advice From My Doctor In Real Life
• Italian Second Life User Criticizes Coronavirus-Themed Content Sales In SL
• Linden Lab "Very Profitable Company" With Sansar Gone, CEO Tells Engadget, Says Cloud Deployment & Other Improvements To Second Life Still In Works
• Danielle's Totally Productive Quarantined Work-At-Home To-Do List

Danielle's Totally Productive Quarantined Work-at-Home To-Do List

Linden Lab "Very Profitable Company" With Sansar Gone, CEO Tells Engadget, Says Cloud Deployment & Other Improvements to Second Life Still in Works

Good long Engadget interview with Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg just posted, who addresses much (if not all) the speculation around the recent acquisition of Sansar by an unknown company called Wookey, and how it will affect the future of Second Life. I've heard much Internet chatter that Linden Lab or even SL itself is now facing dire times, but in contradiction to that, Ebbe is ebullient:

With Sansar off its books, Linden Lab is now "a very profitable company," according to Altberg. "Second Life is an older, very established cash machine that works really well, and right now, we're seeing some tremendous growth happening as we speak. Whereas Sansar is a VC, more long term, need-more-investment-type-of-thing. Mixing those two within one small studio like Linden Lab was kind of tricky, so it was easier to have them go separate."

...  Linden Lab, meanwhile, is going to double down on Second Life. The company is currently in the middle of moving its cloud-based infrastructure to a third-party platform. "Instead of having to nurture and build and maintain our own infrastructure for a lot of things, we're going to be able to rely on someone else doing it for us," Altberg explained. Linden Lab is also working on a number of user-facing improvements, such as the ability to customise worlds and "trade environments in ways they haven't been able to do before."

Good to know the cloud deployment of SL is still happening, though kind of odd that it's moving to an unspecified "third-party platform", when the project was originally specified as going to Amazon Web Services.

As for Wookey, the mystery of what it is and how it will turn Sansar into "a new generation of online AR/VR experiences" (Linden Lab's words) remains, though I suppose Ebbe drops a few hints there:

Cajsa's SL Friday Fashion Blog Pick: Gogo's Juicy Bomb

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

Juicybomb is among the oldest and most popular Second Life blogs. Gogo is the main blogger, though she shares her blog with her friend Cake. One of the excellent features of her blog is that she does more than list credits. In “Coronavirus and Second Life” she speculates what the effect of coronavirus will be on Second Life. She’s less concerned about the operations of SL, since many staff worked remotely in the first place, but what about the many residents who are laid off to reduce the spread of the virus? She even has a proposed solution. And of course, this comes with her always recognizable photos. Clean, well-lit, and instantly recognizable as Gogo. 

• Exile – Gwen
• Decoy – Renee White Top, Mini Shorts @ the Arcade
• Pink Fuel – Delina (Peach) Skin

Here's Gogo's post on for a new mesh head from LeLutka:

Italian Second Life User Criticizes Coronavirus-Themed Content Sales in SL

Photo near Ellendir Khandr, and her SL avatar (both courtesy Ellendir) 

We've uneasily chuckled at all the satirical Coronavirus-themed content that's been springing up in the Second Life Marketplace over the last few weeks, most of it avatar fashion accessories. But longtime Italian SLer Ellendir Khandr recently posted this important reminder in the Facebook group Second Life Friends: 

I live in Italy where are a lot of people are dying everyday. I'm sick to see some [Second Life] designers that sell masks or other things against COVID-19.

I just ask for RESPECT, and if you want do something, donate to the Red Cross instead of making a joke about a thing that is taking so many lives.

Quoted with her permission. Ellen went on to tell me her real life situation, and as you'd imagine, it's incredibly dire:

Cajsa's Choices: Anton, Fantastic Second Life Flickr Photographer

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

Anton’s photostream is full of life and romance. This picture is so striking, shooting straight into the sunlight. This untitled picture is a great example of the rule of thirds. The horizon begins one-third from the bottom, the tree is one-third from the left. 

Anton’s pictures get a bit more romantic in the next pics.

How to Hack the Video Player in Half-Life: Alyx and Rickroll Her in VR

So it turns out that some of the monitor footage inside of #HalfLifeAlyx are just webms inside a folder, AKA you can change it to whatever you want. Already contributed my part pic.twitter.com/9pJxD9gP2j

— ThatAverageJoe (@AverageJoeSFM) March 26, 2020

If you're one of the many thousands currently playing Half-Life:Alyx and you have the tech skills to pull this off, here's a wacky hack to try: Go inside the game's folders, find the one labeled "intro_world_heist.webm", and replace it with another WebM video. It's a bit tricky to get working but Toby Norman posted these tips on Twitter so he could Rickroll Alyx:

Cajsa's Choices: Images from My New Flickr Gallery, "Coronavirus in Second Life" -- And Coronavirus Advice from My Doctor in Real Life

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

Gwen B completely captures exactly how I now feel in her photo “Covid-19.” I admire her composition, the use of the Rule of Thirds in placing her avatar, the use of the triangle to connect the text and the subject. It’s bold and brilliant. 

If you are interested in how Second Life is capturing coronavirus, I have created a whole gallery of pictures to enjoy, if that’s the right word. (Slideshow above.) I also thought I would share my doctor’s advice since she is an infectious disease specialist who recently diagnosed me as likely having the virus:

• My doctor said there is no approved treatment and that all treatment is oriented to your symptoms. So just use whatever over-the-counter drugs you would use for the symptoms you have. 
• The new one for me was using my albuterol inhaler to ease my breathing. I have it for allergies and didn’t know it would work for chest congestion. It never occurred to me. 
• All the rest is pretty normal: As needed, take acetaminophen, cough syrup with dextromethorphan, cough drops, fluticasone, and sudagest. 
• She also said call 911 if it’s hard to breathe or your temperature is over 103. Guess they don’t want folks just showing at the hospital up willy-nilly.  

Hamlet asked me how seeing these pictures make me feel while I am sick, presumably with COVID. I feel all sorts of things. The TP hoarding images make me laugh, as they seem to mock the ridiculousness of buying 144 rolls of TP, though diarrhea is on the list of possible symptoms. Thankfully not for me, since I didn’t stock up. 

I am touched by the SL photos of social distancing that portray the alienation that comes with staying at home, separating ourselves from the fabric of life. There is this tremendous irony that the most communitarian thing we can do is to isolate ourselves. 

Back to images. What is a pandemic without a rush on toilet paper? SL has its own take on the shopping frenzy as seen in the pictures below:

In Coronavirus' Wake, Virtual World-Based Educator Using Both Zoom and Second Life to Teach Her Classes (Comment of the Week)

As educators discuss the appeal of Linden Lab's new post-Coronavirus land discount for schools, teacher and reader Kaylee West offers a unique perspective on using virtual worlds as a pedagogic tool now that her students can't be in the same room as her:

Like many other institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic we are using Zoom for live online classes, and Zoom and similar platforms are excellent for a lot of the teaching we need to do. However, they can't do what virtual worlds like Second Life can do (simulation and multiuser collaboration), so my SL lessons will continue.

For the first time, however, I won't be physically in the same computer lab as my students, but will use a combination of Zoom and SL to conduct the classes. Zoom, with its screen sharing capability, will enable me to brief students at the start of a lesson, and help them solve technical problems during the lesson, which is much easier if you can see their screen.

For me, this has been one big area that I would love to see better developed in SL -- some form of desktop or screen sharing. Maybe this takes development into a whole other technical area that Linden Lab can't support, but it would make the functionality of SL much greater for assisting students and newbies during lessons. Still, if LL wants SL to be able to compete with platforms like Zoom and Collaborate for certain types of interaction, they will need to look at features like screen sharing, etc.

Hopefully someone at Linden Lab notices that last request. Kaylee's been using Second Life as a teaching tool in her university for 12 years, and has noticed some interesting (and positive) advantages to that over the years: