This is a seriously impressive demonstration of Intel Labs' Enhancing Photorealism Enhancement project, which looks to me like a major advance in realistic 3D graphics. Very roughly summarized, it uses machines learning algorithms to merge 3D graphics with related footage taken from real life -- in this case, Grand Theft Auto Online, and video footage of a German city. (Notably not Los Angeles, even though GTA V is almost a direct mirror image of the LA cityscape.)
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Maasya excels at photos catching people in the act of being people. For example, who has not gone nose-to-nose with this terrifying fanged quadruped? She captures the strange relationship between humans and their feline overlords that is characterized by devotion on the one side and bemused curiosity on the other. The eye contact is everything.
“Fashion is at the epicenter of why people create avatars and connect with others on IMVU,” says Lindsay Anne Aamodt, the site’s senior director of marketing. “Part of that is because dressing up an avatar in a digital space gives people access to anything that they want to look like, and it’s hard to do that in the real world.”
... Now, she’s spearheading a first-of-its-kind virtual fashion show on IMVU that unites the real-world labels Collina Strada, Gypsy Sport, Mowalola, Freak City, Bruce Glen, My Mum Made It, and Mimi Wade with expert creators who know their way around the 3D meshing and texturing process that brings IMVU’s clothes and accessories to life. The show will stream on May 27, after which IMVU users will be able buy and dress their avatars in the designer looks they saw on the virtual runway.
Subscribe to IMVU's YouTube channel to watch the show. Reached by phone after a whirlwind of preparing for this event over the last 6 months, Lindsay tells me that it was Vogue's global director who first reached out to IMVU about covering the show, after hearing about it from one of the brands.
While there have been similar crossover events in other virtual worlds (for instance, Armani once had an official store in Second Life, with decidedly mixed results), this is the most prominent real-to-virtual fashion launch in some time.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Nora’s untitled picture is a fabulous naturalistic self-portrait. I love how comfortable and at-ease her avatar seems. She is kind enough to include the pose in the description. The pose is very appealing. Add to that, her use of black and white makes it all about light and dark, about shadows and contrasts, and she uses them brilliantly.
Nora really explores the different between pretty and beautiful, click here:
Rec Room recently reported over 1 million monthly users and a higher peak concurrency than VRChat. But when it comes to the two leading social VR worlds, VRChat seems to have a crucial edge: A far more active and ambitious creative community.
That statement is my personal estimation, to be sure. And to be fair, Rec Room does have some interesting user-made projects. But I follow both worlds pretty closely, and VRChat’s user-driven worlds and innovations consistently seem to hit on a completely different, higher level. Just in the last few months, for example, I’ve written about*:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Kimberlyann’s photostream is full of striking images. “Lone Wolf'' seems just terrifying to me and I love it. It makes me think of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, ostensibly the most haunted forest in the world. You don’t have to go out west to find ghost towns. There’s also this “Blair Witch Project” vibe, the blurred and ever-expanded trees.
Good conversation by readers around last week's post about a universal metaverse protocol, and whether we really need it. One reader was skeptical when I described Steam as basically "[A] metaverse portal, taking you from VRChat to Rec Room and beyond with a few clicks and several minutes of wait time", asking:
Are you serious when you're suggesting to readers of this post that we should be content with "a few clicks and several minutes of wait time" for hopping between destinations in the "worlds-wide meta-metaverse"... rather than striving for the simplicity (and instant transportation) of links between websites?
As broadband improves, I suspect we'll get to several seconds of wait time by this decade. But it's hard to see the clicks going away. Metaverse or not, we'll probably always need to go through some opt-in steps when going from one experience/IP realm to the next. Or as reader Adeon Writer puts it:
VRChat requires you opt-in to visiting any world it has not greenlit - so the idea of going from one experiences to [another] without clicks is a pipe dream. Even websites warn you when you are about to leave.
This points to a fundamental challenge to the Metaverse ideal, which typically describes a seamless immersive experience that is also open like the web:
This Saturday Night Live segment pretty much reminds me of every conversation I've had with a crypto-evangelist except the question I keep asking him (and it's always a him) is, "OK if it's so important how come hardly anyone is using it to buy goods and services?" over and over again until the crypto-evangelist casually mentions that they personally have made a lot of money from crypto. (You know -- actual money, the kind Michael Che holds up.)
I suppose we should credit Elon for being self-effacing, but on the other hand -- or maybe not:
Even more pertinent, a senior designer of Scavengers is Ben Batstone, a longtime Linden Lab veteran who got his start as a Second Life user known as Buhbuhcuh Fairchild. And he credits his work in SL for his design approach to Scavengers:
"I made my first shooter games in SL - those watermelon guns that griefers would use were using my scripts. Being able to iterate quickly and get instant community feedback was amazing as a novice designer.
"As far as what I am doing with [Scavenger developer] Midwinter, a lot of my efforts are around long term player engagement. I think I could view that very narrowly with a 'game designer' role: just game features, content and mechanics, but my time as a Linden made my belief that the stickiest content is other people, and the more we can get players interacting in positive ways, the more those players will return. So I'm pushing hard for driving social features and strong community programs, and trying to integrate that with gameplay. We're less than a week into Early Access so a lot of that is still in the foundational steps, but we've got some cool stuff on the way."
Their vision seems to be a game that makes a conceptual leap up hits like Fortnite and League of Legends, while incorporating virtual world-ish, persistent action:
As you can see from the video above and my dialog below, Mr. Bones himself makes for a friendly virtual companion in SL (he can even follow you on command!), but he’s also meant to show off Really Useful Script Corner’s feature set for customizable NPCs (Non-Player Characters).
“My basic chatbot has two functions - Chat and Responses,” lead developer Grace7 Ling explains, “Chat includes the bot being able to greet visitors and greet its owner. The bot can also remember who it has met before as well.” Her chatbot can also spout random things as a way of encouraging nearby SLers to reply.
As for responses, Grace means more than simple text-based replies. Responses include “doing something in response to a keyword or key phrase it hears, like giving a landmark or SLurl, or playing a sound or animation.”
Ms. Ling’s more advanced chatbot comes with a third feature: Chatter, which enables owners to specify multiple possible answers to a statement, with different probabilities for each. You can even expand your bot’s phrase recognition range by adding “brain-files” (i.e. notecards) to its database.
While Mr. Bones comes with the new Animesh Pro Edition chatbot script, Grace’s chatbot series includes a mesh human, a French bulldog, a parrot, and a mirror.
Her customers, she tells me, are already using them for a wide variety of NPCs in their own projects:
The Dirty Mind blog is by Taker Belmont. I got a kick out of post #41 with the banana swing. The banana outfit is such a clever choice. It has a sort of mod meets camp feeling. The gold pillars are too much which makes them perfectly campy.
Important comment/update to last week's post, when I cautioned against creating NFT from Second Life images. When the EFF lawyer I quoted referred to the "dark interesting mysteries" around IP ownership of user-created content in SL, Linden Lab had not addressed derivative works in its Terms of Service. Since then (in 2017, it looks like), the company has:
2.5 You also grant Linden Lab and other users of the Service a license to use your Content in snapshots and machinima that is displayed in publicly accessible areas of the Service.
You agree that by uploading, publishing, or submitting any Content to or through the Servers for display in any publicly accessible area of the Service, you hereby grant other users a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to photograph, capture an image of, film, and record a video of the Content, and to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the resulting photograph, image, film, or video in any current or future media as provided in and subject to the restrictions and requirements of an applicable Product Policy or other policy.
Reader irihapeti noted this clause, which effectively requires content creators to opt out from people using their content in an SL screenshot for commercial or other purposes:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
I love “To the Moon” from Alfred Wessex. I love how he shows the avatars’ love for each other in such a simple way, how she leans into him, how he rests his arm on her leg. It shows a couple attuned to each other in an ordinary moment enjoying the night sky. I also like the subtle light that illuminates some of the grass but fades quickly outside their magic circle.
Wessex does great fashion shoots; for more, click here:
This is a fun VRChat-based tribute to the beloved Doggface Fleetwood Mac skating video. Which would be great in itself, but VRChat being VRChat, it’s also a video promoting an upcoming VRChat world with physics-enabled skating:
“The world itself is based on Jet Set Radio Future, a game released back in 2002,” explains Lakuza, who created and stars in the video, and is a developer of this world:.
”It’s inline skating with a heavy emphasis on grinding across objects… it'll be the first VRChat world to allow for grinding in this manner.” He’s being modest: It’s probably the first VR-enabled skating game in any virtual world that’s not specifically engineered for skating. Anyway, follow him on Twitter for launch updates.
“I’m not clever enough to understand how it works,” says Lakuza, “but he's basically created a system of movement options that allows double-jumping, wall-running, grinding as well as being able to control acceleration speed over time.”
As for bringing the Doggface vibe into VRChat, he’s actually using the platform VR mouth tracking technology:
Metaverse technologist Kim Nevelsteen, who created that quite cool project which seamlessly connects different Minecraft servers to each other, has promoted an epic manifesto from the M3 group proposing Metaverse connectivity between a wide variety of virtual worlds, including WebVR, VRChat, Minecraft and beyond:
"People are searching for a standardized Metaverse protocol," Kim says, summarizing his purpose. "Even if that's achieved, the overhead of updating the integrated systems will impair a Metaverse. An architecture with dynamic evolution is required and currently IPSME is the only one that satisfies all criteria, as far as I know." (That stands for Idempotent Publish/Subscribe Messaging Environment, on which he co-authored this academic paper .)
This is all admirably ambitious, but with self-described metaverses like ROBLOX and VRChat already quite massive, I'm starting to wonder if we need a single Metaverse protocol connecting them:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
“The Magician” seems so perfect for a 1970’s roch concept album. I love the psychedelic exuberance of the picture with the mirror-like shards exploding outward from the epicenter where the Magician has materialized from some hole in the stage before some dramatic opening riff during which the rest of the band arrives. This is one of the many creative and exciting pictures by Hermes Kondor.
/SecondLife, the largest SL-related subreddit, recently grew past 10,000 subscribers. Over the years (it had only 2,000 subscribers back in 2015), it's evolved into a solid go-to hug for interesting and informative SL/virtual world-related content and conversation. Since it's on Reddit, the participants tend to skews towards SL veterans, especially developers and scripters, and unlike most (all?) social media hangouts for SLers, isn't an unceasing cascade of fashion pics and shopping announcements. (Though there's still a lot of that!)
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
I like pictures that confound me. “Snapshot 45” is confounding. She’s standing on a wall for a house that looks like it’s built on a dock and there are fish swimming by. It makes no sense which is perfect because I can imagine the fish are actually taxis swimming from fare to fare or the house is underwater and people have gills. On the side of being underwater, there is the seagrass and the sandy bottom. On the side of being aboveground, there is the electric pole with the isolators. Is it both? In Second Life it can be anything.
Setting aside Bill Maher's usual "Old Man Yells at Woke Millenial Cloud" tone, this is a pretty good and funny takedown of cryptocurrency hype, mostly hitting the right targets, such as its Ponzi scheme nature, for instance, and the absurdity of Tesla CEO Elon Musk promoting Bitcoin despite the fact that its environmental costs utterly undermines any green advantages achieved by Tesla the company.
Maher's rant, however, fails when he notes that major companies like Microsoft, Etsy, and Starbucks accept Bitcoin as a currency... without noting that hardly anyone uses Bitcoin to buy goods and services. As I wrote in 2015:
According to Linden Lab stats, Second Life has about 1 million monthly users, and about 125K+ hardcore users (i.e. in SL over an hour a day). Insiders tell me about 400,000 users regularly spend Linden Dollars. So with all that activity in mind, it's safe to estimate 100K Linden Dollar individual users a day. (Conducting a lot more total transactions.) Contrast with Bitcoin: The much-hyped currency -- lauded weekly in the tech and mainstream press for the last 4-5 years, with over $400 million invested in Bitcoin-related startups since 2012 -- is still used only about 100K times a day. (Which means unique users are significantly less than 100,000.)
The wild thing is, Bitcoin's daily transaction rates have not grown that much since then, fluctuating between 200,000 and 400,000. In another words, a daily transaction rate of a small city, and still less than Linden Dollar transactions in Second Life.
As usual, fellow HBO comedian John Oliver had a better take on the topic, back in 2018:
With its arresting visuals, sardonic dialog, and music like the ironic Sinatra throwback heard above, the LANG series is something Quentin Tarantino* might make, if he was in the mood to make a comedic neo-noir machinima in Second Life. Created by Zatch Ixchel and company, I wrote about LANG last January, and it's not only kept up its solid pace, but is now teasing Season 3 as coming soon.
"At this point, I’m inspired by the characters themselves, the world we’ve built here," Zach tells me, when I ask how he keeps inspired to keep creating episodes. "I want to know what happens to these people. I want to know why Lang is the way he is. I want to know if Sadie will ever be satisfied."
Watch Season 1 and Season 2 below so you're all caught up before S3 drops:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Chic at Phil’s Place has been keeping us informed of the best in fashion since 2008. As one of the old guard, she has kept going while many others have taken long sabbaticals (ahem, me!) or quit altogether. I love how she focuses on one item in Unseelie, the fabulous foot jewelry from Lassitude & Ennui.
Facebook's latest earnings report is once again playing the coy game of referring to Oculus device and software sales "as non-advertising revenue" without giving any specifics, so we must continue the coyly make install base estimates. And based on some rough but reasonable assumptions*, Facebook probably sold 1.4 million to 1.9 million Quest 2 units in the first quarter of 2021, a slight decrease in the estimated 1.5 million to 2 million Quest 2 units sold in the first quarter of its launch, in Q4 2020.
Or to put it another way: The Quest 2 probably has a total install base somewhere between 3 million and 4 million. Which isn't bad! That still trails PSVR's install base in absolute numbers, but then again the Quest 2 has been on the market for far less time. The next test is whether this revenue remains steady; if it does, by end of 2021 it'll hit the 10 million install base that Mark Zuckerberg arbitrarily set as the target for mainstream adoption. (10 million is still far smaller than leading game consoles, but that's another topic for another time.)
Any Open Metaverse Will Require an Opt-In Click (Comments of the Weeks)
Good conversation by readers around last week's post about a universal metaverse protocol, and whether we really need it. One reader was skeptical when I described Steam as basically "[A] metaverse portal, taking you from VRChat to Rec Room and beyond with a few clicks and several minutes of wait time", asking:
As broadband improves, I suspect we'll get to several seconds of wait time by this decade. But it's hard to see the clicks going away. Metaverse or not, we'll probably always need to go through some opt-in steps when going from one experience/IP realm to the next. Or as reader Adeon Writer puts it:
This points to a fundamental challenge to the Metaverse ideal, which typically describes a seamless immersive experience that is also open like the web:
Continue reading "Any Open Metaverse Will Require an Opt-In Click (Comments of the Weeks)" »
Posted on Monday, May 10, 2021 at 03:46 PM in Comment of the Week, Making the Metaverse | Permalink | Comments (0)
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