New World Notes

FaceApp's Top Secret Plan for All Those Old People Photos -- Nylon Pinkney's Totally Plausible Theory

I'm Finally in VRChat as Hamlet_Au -- What Should I Do Next?

I swear any time I create a new account on a new-ish platform, some total tool has always already taken "Hamlet" as an avatar name before I can grab it for my own. But no worries: Connect with me on VRChat as Hamlet_Au.

I'm logging in via Oculus Quest, so I my options are somewhat limited compared to the full Oculus/Vive client, but so far, the new account creation process is not horrible. I like how you start in a lobby all your own, and have an option to teleport to a small, private home location all your own. (Second Life, by contrast, has always been plagued by an on-boarding process where your avatar is dropped into an orientation area used by multiple players, then plopped into a Welcome Area usually teaming with many more multiple players, who tend to make the Welcome Area unwelcome AF. Most people quit SL, disoriented and intimidated, somewhere in this process.)

On the down side, VRChat's account creation process is still very beta and user-unfriendly for anyone who is not already a hardcore gamer, so there's a lot to be improved. Anyway, that's my early experience. Who else reading these words is in VRChat? Please connect with me in-world and share your experiences and tips in Comments!

Cajsa's SL Flickr Pick: Let's Look at the Layered Imagery of Love Lethecus

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

I love ‘Breath of Air’ by Love Lethecus. It looks like she played with light leak layers and fabric layers in a collage with a pose of her avatar. She used colors that match and complement her avatar’s dress making it seem as though she is coming out of the flux of color.

Last Chance to Save Hangars Liquides: 15 Days Before Deletion, Creator of Second Life's Legendary Cyberpunk City Launches Indiegogo Crowdfunder

Djehan Kidd outside a Hangars Liquides apartment - available for a year with a $112 donation

Click here to consider helping save Hangars Liquides, Second Life's legendary cyberpunk city which is set to disappear at the end of this month. In a last gasp effort to preserve the metropolis, lead creator Djehan Kidd launched this Indiegogo campaign, which would cover the costs of the underlying sims for a year. Fittingly, the perks for donating are parts of Hangars Liquides to call your virtual home -- for a $112 donation (above), you get a Hangars Liquides apartment for a year; for $1,121 USD donation, you get a premium rooftop loft (below) which Ms. Kidd can customize for you by request.

Djehan Kidd is doing this crowdfunder because Linden Lab does not allow non-profit organizations like hers to rent out land -- which is what led to Hangars' imminent demise in the first place -- while donations are permitted. And there's no other way for her to save it in its existing form. As her crowdfunder explains:

Sansar Rave Attracts 1K+ Visits in VR, But Way More Watched, Than Logged In

Above: Sansar's Monstercat: Call of the Wild Experience, inset with peak player usage on Steam and viewership on Twitch

After two years of extremely low user numbers in Sansar, Linden Lab's recent partnership with electronic music label Monstercat seems to have paid off in some relatively significant usage:

Monstercat: Call of the Wild Experience is a VR space where the music label will host artist meet and greets, giveaways, and more. [Linden Lab CEO Ebbe] Altberg didn’t give me exact numbers but over a thousand people watched the show in VR via Sansar. “Tens of thousands of people watched the concert across Twitch, Mixer, and Huya, and over a thousand people around the world attended the event in Sansar - across 6 continents, 65 countries, and 675 cities. Fans feel more connected and immersed in the music they love, while artists, in turn, effectively reach more people and places in a single day than they'd reach on a real-life tour. “

That last line is a bit questionable, because while 1000+ people might have visited last Friday's VR-based concert rave, it doesn't look like 1000+ stayed for that long -- according to Steam, peak Sansar usage through Valve's platform reached 172 maximum for that day. Assuming as many came in via the direct client, that's more like 300 users at any one time. So what's likely is there were a lot of short-term visits throughout the duration of the show.

In any case, that's something of a moot point, because the show did attract a lot of viewers:

Second Life Avatar of Obama Depicted at Age 63 at End of Trump's 2nd Term

Second Life avatar photographer Flight of Osiris created this striking portrait of Barack Obama's avatar in Second Life, but six years from now. "[I] thought if Donald Trump finishes two terms as president then Obama would be 63 at the time and I assumed would be brow beaten having seen his legislation accomplishments undone," Osiris explains.

While there are several avatar mesh heads of Obama for Second Life, they depict him as he was when he was President. "[I] used layers and a few filters to give him more wrinkles," says Osiris, "a bit more shadowing round the eyes and some shine on the head to make his hair appear whiter, plus black and white images have a vintage quality to them, so people naturally appear older."

The portrait's title, as you might have guessed, is "Good Luck America":

How AI Will Change the Nature of MMOs - My Latest for the Upcoming Game Seed

Here's my latest post for Seed, the exoplanet colonization MMO from Klang Studios -- this one exploring how the rise of artificial intelligence will change (and already has changed) the way virtual worlds are experienced and played. I talk with several developers on this topic, including, of course, Philip Rosedale, who believes that AI in the truest sense of the term will emerge on its own from within virtual worlds:

Tilia Survey Results: New Payment Service/Personal Info Policy Won't Change Most SLers Linden Dollar Behavior - But 1 in 5 Say They Will

Here's the results of our not-so-scientific survey of SLers about Tilia, Linden Lab's new payment service company that they'll have to switch to this month -- while also having provide their social security number and other personal data, if they make cash-out transactions. With 112 responses, nearly 68% say these changes won't impact their usage of Linden Dollars. 

Somewhat concerning for Linden Lab, however, is that nearly 1 in 5 say these changes will likely cause them to use L$ less:

Cajsa's SL Flickr Pick: Chisato Kuriyama Photographs Virtual Teen Adventure

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

“I’m a firestarter, twisted firestarter” is an exciting photo by Chisato Kuriyama. Her avatar seems a bit young, but then the work of fighting for freedom is often done by youth. Her avatar is a busy one, skateboarding, swimming, and defending the world. I love that her avatar really looks like a teen and I love her many action shots.

William Gibson & Others Note, Celebrate, Mourn SL's Hangars Liquides

Here's the correct teleport link to visit and explore Hangars Liquides, Second Life's legendary cyberpunk city that's still set to close at the end of this month. Thanks to a retweet of my story by William Gibson, this viral Reddit thread, and massive social media shares by Second Life users past and present, the city has been inundated by visitors. However, my post originally included a teleport to a store in Hangars, and not the official landing spot. (Shopkeeper Beev Fallen helpfully added the proper teleport to his showroom.) 

The original post also includes some lovely tributes to Hangars and its lead creator,  Djehan Kidd:

Should Libra Be Legal? Here's Why Congress Should Ask Linden Lab to Testify

Congress is currently debating the status of Libra, the cryptocurrency backed by Facebook, with one bill proposed to ban it and other cryptocurrencies like it outright:

Called the Keep Big Tech Out of Finance Act, the bill would apply to any company with at least $25 billion in annual revenue that offers “an online marketplace, an exchange, or a platform for connecting third parties.”

Covered firms would be banned from creating and operating digital currencies, a provision clearly targeted at Facebook’s Project Libra. But the measure’s broad parameters could also effectively outlaw financial products offered other major tech firms.

Companies subject to the bill — which appear to include Facebook, Google and Amazon — would also be banned from offering a slew of financial services such as banking, investment management, securities exchanges, financial advice and money transmission.

Lawmakers and regulators in both parties have expressed fears about Libra and Facebook’s ambitions in the financial services industry. Even so, the proposed bill would likely face substantial opposition from Senate Republicans concerned about regulatory overreach in the financial sector. 

This might be a good idea, but the problem is that the wrong people are talking about it in the public arena.  Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin may have serious concerns about Facebook's Libra, but he's seriously ill-equipped to express any opinion on virtual currency. But for that matter, the top executives at Facebook and the other big tech companies also have little to no direct experience with virtual currency.

Which is really why the people Congress should be talking to executives at Linden Lab, creator and publisher of Second Life. Here's why:

Top 5 Posts Last Week: Legendary SL Cyberpunk Sim Hangars Liquides Set to Close; VR Hacks & Slow VR Sales

• Nylon Pinkney Is Online: What's Stylish In Second Life? It's All In Your HUD
• Second Life’s Most Acclaimed Cyberpunk City Will Disappear This Month -- The Life And Death Of Hangars Liquides, As Told By Its Mysterious Creator
• Watch: Creating And Sculpting Physics-Enabled Objects In AR/VR
• Oculus Quest Is Great In Short Bursts - So Probably Won't Sell Well Until The Price Comes Down
• Is It Too Late To Curb SLers' Use Of Badly Optimized Mesh Bodies?

Hangars Liquides' photo by 3D Dixie.

Nylon Pinkney Is Online: What's Stylish in Second Life? It's All in Your HUD

Watch Live at 9am PST: How to Use Mood Lighting & Post Effects in Sinespace

In this week's masterclass tutorial, Adam Frisby, founder of Sinespace (a proud sponsoring partner to NWN!), shows you how to create mood lighting and use the new Post Effects stack in the Unity 3D-based virtual world. (Also streamed live on Twitch.)

Questions? Post in Comments here, or even better, in Sinespace's Discord server for developers, which are most active on weekdays.

Second Life’s Most Acclaimed Cyberpunk City Set to Disappear This Month -- The Life & Death of Hangars Liquides, As Told By Its Mysterious Creator

Hangars Liquides, a cyberpunk city created in Second Life by an elusive 3D artist known only to the SL community at large by her avatar name, “Djehan Kidd”, is among the virtual world’s greatest works -- shadowy, moody, awesome.

Unveiled into the metaverse in June 2007, it has surely attracted hundreds of thousands if not millions of visits over its 12 year history. As its reputation spread through the virtual world, numerous cyberpunk roleplay groups flocked to it, adopted it as their oven, turning it into their staging ground for ongoing stories they created on the fly.  Over the years, they have uploaded thousands and thousands of HL screenshots and videos, documenting their adventures (many of them inevitably Adult-rated). They even started renting apartments from Djehan Kidd, so that they could have a permanent (albeit virtual) home address in Hangars Liquides.

During that time, as this reputation grew, the outside world took notice: It was featured by the UK Guardian in 2014 (see above); cyberpunk godfather William Gibson mentioned it on his Twitter feed; Oprah Winfrey herself once posed in front of a giant poster depicting the city.

At the end of this month, however, Hangars Liquides is destined to be deleted from Second Life, at least as it exists in its current form -- so click here to visit it in Second Life while you still can.

As with countless other beloved sims that have left Second Life, Hangars’ fate was sealed by Linden Lab policies, chief among them the high cost of monthly tier. And that is even though Hangars is owned by a non-profit French media organization of the same name, and qualifies for Linden Lab’s nonprofit discount.

“As a cultural nonprofit organization,” Djehan explains, “Second Life has become unsustainable for me. Several months ago, I was told that the new Terms of Service for nonprofits did not permit us to offer rentals anymore; as a result, the city couldn't pay for itself any more.” 

As Hangars became unsustainable, the real person behind Djehan Kidd (at right) was increasingly swamped by the demands of a project based in another floating, magical city -- but more on that down the way.  

Linden Lab has been in contact with Djehan in recent months, and there’s talk about the company making an exception to the “no rentals” rule, since that’s how she subsidizes HL’s operation. There’s also discussion of Linden Lab itself taking over Hangars, to preserve it -- but that may only consign the city to becoming a ghost of its former self. (When the Lindens acquired Svarga, a fully operational ecosystem, some of its scripting went awry, breaking its simulated cycle of life that made it an early masterpiece of SL.)

In any case, Linden Lab has not announced anything to Djehan Kidd as of yesterday, and so the city as it stands has only a few weeks more to remain.

“So I am going to have to send a ticket asking to close everything down on July 31st,” Djehan explains, “and tell [the Linden rep] who submits the regions for preservation to tell me if they preserve Hangars Liquides or not, so I can move on.”

But again, even if the Lindens intercede at the very last moment, Hangars will likely no longer exist now as it has since 2007. But before it went away, Djehan Kidd told me the story of the city, how it came to be, its thriving culture over the last 12 years -- and the surprise opportunity that came from it.

Watch: Creating and Sculpting Physics-Enabled Objects in AR/VR

Creating and interacting with physics-enabled objects that seem to exist in the real world -- another dazzling feature to Modbox, a multiplayer sandbox game from Toronto developer Lee Vermeulen, who's rigged his Vive VR headset to display an AR experience. (Read all the details on his blog.) 

"This 'Hull Brush' idea was added to TiltBrush by Jeremy Cowles back in July 2018," he explains. "Pretty brilliant way to sculpt 'game ready' assets! Low performance cost and creates low poly objects with convex physics (which also means easy shattering in Modbox).

Cajsa's SL Flickr Pick: Kidman Latte's Elegant Pics of Summer Fun

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

Kidman Latte’s photostream is a delicious blend of fashion and decor photos for her blog called Kidman’s Palette. She has a distinctive style that is exemplified by simplicity and consistency. Each of her photos is framed like a Polaroid with her name and a tag for decor or fashion. I love the yin and yang of this picture and the beautifully balanced small floating flower pots. There is a careful symmetry at play that is just enough off balance to feel dynamic, not static.

Oculus Quest is Great in Short Bursts - So Probably Won't Sell Well Until the Price Comes Down

So I've been steadily falling in love with my Oculus Quest, the first VR headset I've ever tried that looks and feels like it could eventually be a near-mass market product: The seamless connection between it and your smartphone, the fact that it immediately starts up in your virtual Oculus home the moment you put the headset on, even the gorgeous packaging -- the Quest team fixed just about all of the little friction points that makes previous headsets so clunky and off-putting.

But I say "near-mass market", because having used it at length, I can also see its limitations: Fundamentally, no matter how seamless and user-friendly the Quest's VR experience is, it's likely that most consumers will only want to use it in limited bursts. (20-30 minutes a day seems about right.) It's not just the heaviness of the headset itself, or the inevitable chafing and discomfort caused by a headset gripped tightly to your face, or even the social discomfort of being blind to family friends.

Survey: Will Switching to Tilia Change How You use Linden Dollars?

Now that SLers have had a few days to process Linden Lab's announcement of a new payment subsidiary they need to switch to by the end of this month, here's a survey to gauge how that change might impact their usage of Linden Dollars. As this is a quick temperature check, I've made the question and answers as open-ended as possible:

Cajsa’s SL Flickr Pick: Indigo Claire's Eclectic & Stunning Photostream

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

I struggled to choose only three pictures from Indigo Claire’s stunning photostream. With many artists I love several photos but can choose a few that represent their work. With Indigo Claire, her experimentation produces so many disparate styles it is impossible to point to a picture and say “this one is representative.”  With “Let’s Make a Summer”, Indigo names her inspiration, the artist/photographer Jan Saudek. He has taken many photos in front of the same window which may be an inspiration, but Claire does nothing derivative. The fish in this photo are a recurring motif in Claire’s photos.

Is it Too Late to Curb SLers' Use of Badly Optimized Mesh Bodies?

The debate over badly optimized mesh bodies in Second Life continues in NWN comments, but Subversive Vavoom (love the name) argues that the debate is basically moot:

SL is mostly a shopping and sexual simulator if you pay attention to where the money is being spent. If wearing mesh bodies that are poorly optimized were only a couple years old, I could understand the outrage. We're way past that now. Every single major sales event is geared towards them, and has been for more than six years. When everything is being created for the top four mesh bodies including rigged accessories, you can't possibly think thousands of creators are just going to stop. It's as if the people saying this haven't really played SL very much in the last few years. Go to Uber, Fameshed, Collabor88, and look around. That's where the most money is being exchanged in-world on apparel. There's no stopping that kind of popularity, and frankly it just shows how out of touch you are with the platform if you think it could.

The popularity of poorly optimized mesh bodies has been well-known for quite some time, but in my opinion, assuming there's no way to address the bad externalities they cause (i.e. lag for everyone) is a mistake. Another reader, Summer Haas, suggests some changes that would allow people to keep their resource-heavy mesh in the privacy of their home/skybox, but nudge them to optimize better in social spaces:

Top 5 Posts Last Week: Libra and Tilia Trouble, Improving Second Life as a Platform, and Bad Optimization as Virtual World Pollution

• Nylon Pinkney Is Online: Totally True Reasons Linden Lab Introduced Tilia
• Consumer Advocacy Groups Criticize Facebook's Cryptocurrency -- But Miss Its Potential "Vice Coin" Problem For The Poor
• Linden Lab Requires Second Life Users To Register With Payment Subsidiary By August 1st - With Social Security Number & Other Real Life Info Required For Cash-Outs
• Poorly Optimized Avatars Are The Pollution-Spewing SUVs Of The Virtual World
• Veteran SL Developer On Problems Plaguing Second Life As A Platform -- And Solutions To Improve It

Nylon Pinkney Is Online: Totally True Reasons Linden Lab Introduced Tilia

Now at Madrid's Círculo de Bellas Artes: Experience a Real Forest in VR, Presented by Metaverse Curator Cristina García-Lasuén

"ON, Temperate Forest, Winter" (v1) by OPEN THIS END (trailer) from Cristina Garcia-Lasuen on Vimeo.

If you're in Madrid this Summer (and don't you wish you were), there's a major VR art installation which just opened up at Círculo de Bellas Artes, one of the city's major art centers: ON, Temperate Forest, Winter.  (Trailer from a previous showing above.)

Presented by curator/art director Cristina Garcia-Lasuen, who also put together a collection of Second Life machinima at the World Expo in Shanghai back in the day, "Temperate Forest" is a highly detailed recreation of a real location:

Watch: How to Animate Avatars in Sinepace

In this week's masterclass tutorial, Adam Frisby, founder of Sinespace (a proud sponsoring partner to NWN!) shows you to animate humanoid avatars in the Unity 3D-based virtual world. Topics covered include animation overrides, using the animation controller, implementing facial gestures, and more.

Questions? Post in Comments here, or even better, in Sinespace's Discord server for developers, which are most active on weekdays.