New World Notes

Top 6 New World Notes Posts from Last Week: Metaverse Lessons from The Matrix, Animesh Launches, Aliens Evolve, Much More

• Magic Leap Launches Avatar Chat With AR Chatroom & Media Sharing, Cartoonish, Low-Detail Avatars
• Humans Want Struggle, Not Perfection: What The Matrix's Agent Smith Teaches Us About Creating Successful Virtual Worlds
• Space Invaders Meets Darwin: Mini-Game Where Waves Of Aliens Pass Genes To Next Generation -- And Evolve
• Animesh, Enabling Animated Mesh NPCs & Autonomous Creatures, Officially Launches In Second Life
• Star Is Reborn: Rising EDM Vocalist Briefly Returns To Second Life To Test Out New Material Through His Avatar, Skye Galaxy
• Since Second Life Is So Difficult To Use, Linden Lab Should Pay New Users To Learn How To Use It

Watch Live: Acclaimed Game Designer Warren Spector in Sinespace

Cassie's Clips: Previewing Genus Head's New Motion Captured Animations

Exclusive to New World Notes, Ms. Cassie Middles previews an ambitious new update to the Genus mesh head -- motion captured animations for facial expressions:

"Now the head has mocap and there's several resting animations, fluid moving animations, gestures, and eye, brow, and mouth phases of animations," she tells me. I'm impressed, because it's incredibly difficult to mocap facial expressions, since they involve so many muscle groups.

It's not 100% perfect, she allows, but still smashing: 

Magic Leap Launches Avatar Chat With AR Chatroom & Media Sharing, Cartoonish, Low-Detail Avatars

Continuing in its now familiar "Where's the fricking whale we were promised?" theme, Magic Leap just announced Avatar Chat with media and browser sharing features in (what looks to be) a small, augmented reality chatroom setting. If you were hoping to see vivid recreations of your friends as full featured 3D avatars displayed right in front of you, seeming to be sitting on your couch or resting against a wall or whatever, this is not for you: The avatars are extremely low-detailed, disembodied heads.

In fairness, the limited graphics seems to be by design -- probably because this is meant to be a light application for content sharing. Still, the lack of "Wow" factor continues to be a frustration for Magic Leap:

Humans Want Struggle, Not Perfection: What The Matrix's Agent Smith Teaches Us About Creating Successful Virtual Worlds

If you want to know why some virtual worlds like Minecraft are huge, while others like Second Life remain a relative niche, watch this scene from The Matrix, which is actually about creating the virtual world of the Matrix itself. Agent Smith reveals that the AIs first tried to create a perfect virtual world for its human users, but the humans rejected it. For Will Burns, Vice-Chair for IEEE's Virtual Worlds Standard Group, this is the key challenge virtual world developers face:

"When you build a perfect world without needs or wants, it inevitably is rejected," as he puts it. "Because that's not how humanity works. Humanity thrives in the pursuit of progress and something to work toward.

"So when you introduce those needs, those imperfections and whatnot, suddenly humanity thrives, rises to the occasion. When you stop giving them everything and their entire existence is no longer on a whim of wants, but no needs... something fundamentally changes in how that society works. They strive and overcome. You give them challenges, limits to face and overcome. That way, you no longer end up with 'Bored God Syndrome'. People logging in and saying 'What's the purpose here?'.

"If everything is a matter of want but not need, then it's boring. If nothing really serves a need, people get bored. Introduce those limits to overcome, those challenges, and they come together not just for want, but for necessity. And that's how civilizations arise in their complexity. And by no means should you give them that pre-defined complexity prebuilt. You just hand them the system that lets them do it themselves and ultimately requires it."

 The challenges define and shape how the virtual community evolves:

"In this manner, airports means something when built. It's not a joyride (though you could have tours). But it serves a real purpose of faster travel. Highways, sea ports, etc. They serve a bigger purpose. And they are created with the intention of solving a problem. That's the big take away. What does such a thing solve in a virtual society? Does it have a purpose other than superficial? In that moment, you realize the secret to a successful Metaverse. Is it superficial only? Then you have Bored God Syndrome and it gets rejected. Just like the first Matrix."

That changes if the developer imposes struggles and challenges: 

Cassie's Clips: How to Use Backlighting & Projectors to Make Second Life Screenshots Look Amazing Without Post-Production

Today NWN's YouTube correspondent Cassie Middles shows Second Life photographers how to use backlighting and projectors to create amazing, "in camera" effects: 

"So, backlighting is something so many bloggers requested to learn and use for their photos," as she puts it. "This is where there's a solar glow in the background but doing it without too much post-production work. With a few projector lights and a good WindLight, it can make something go from plain to ethereal, casting light into sheer moments and adding a unique flow to it that makes your avatar to pop out."

Part 2 below:

Space Invaders Meets Darwin: Mini-Game Where Waves of Aliens Pass Genes to Next Generation -- And Evolve

Invaderz is a cool little microgame (space bar to shoot, A/left arrow and D/right arrow to move) which demonstrates some big potential for artificial life in games: It's basically like the classic game Space Invaders, but any time you kill an invading alien, a genetic algorithm passes its genes on to the next generation of invaders. Sometimes those genes mutate, and sometimes those genes make the invaders more dangerous. In other words: The aliens artificially evolve to become better predators.

"Usually in a more traditional genetic algorithm," developer Victor Ribeiro tells me, "A mutation has only a small chance to happen, like 1%." To speed this evolutionary simulation up, he coded the mutations to happen 10% of the time. "Playing the game you might see some enemies that are very similar to another, with just one small difference: the mutation. That small difference will affect how the enemy moves; maybe it will affect it in a positive way, maybe not. The thing is, that mutation is unique."

So over time, they could theoretically evolve to the point where the aliens are better than the human player. (Darwinian theory in action, only with more pew-pew-pew sounds!)

In tests, Victor has seen the aliens evolve to become faster, so "by the time [the bullet] arrives at the enemy's location, the enemy will be long gone."

The code is available on his GitHub if you want to play with it. Seems like this could be a great system to implement into full-fledged simulation games. The thing to keep in mind, as Victor cautions, is that evolution is a long process and most mutations are not a benefit or disadvantage, especially in a game context: 

Animesh, Enabling Animated Mesh NPCs & Autonomous Creatures, Officially Launches in Second Life

Dance, Donnie, dance, like animated mesh is finally here:

Because, as the official SL blog just announced, it is:

Animesh, first announced a year ago (!), allows independent objects to use rigged mesh and animations, just as you see today with mesh avatars. This means that you can now have wild animals, pets, vehicles, hair, zombies …. The possibilities are in your hands! 

Mad respect for the self-knowing "(!)".  I've gotten many reports from SL content creators that they're experiencing an economic downturn, but Animesh is just the thing to boost the virtual world marketplace -- and quite possibly lead to some great innovations. Multiplayer FPS games in SL where enemies no longer look like herky jerky puppets, mini-RPGs with highly detailed character interactions.... and, of course, inevitably, much virtual sex with NPCs.

Flickr Announces It Won't Delete Creative Commons-Licensed Images -- Escape Hatch For CC-Tagged Virtual World/MMO/Game Screenshots?

Above: Political satire image created in Second Life, given a Creative Commons license, and uploaded to Flickr before November 2018

Many virtual world users who upload mass amounts of screenshots to Flickr are concerned that many of them will soon run afoul of the company's new policy limiting free accounts to 1000 images, with images over that number to be deleted (unless a user becomes a Pro subscriber). However, it looks like there's a possible escape hatch for at least some of those images -- the Creative Commons license. As Flickr's CEO just put it in a blog post:

We won’t be deleting anything that was uploaded with a CC license before November 1, 2018. Even if you had more than 1,000 photos or videos with a CC license. However, if you do have more than 1,000 photos or videos uploaded, you’ll be unable to upload additional photos after January 8, 2019, unless you upgrade to a Pro account.

So that implies a Second Life-based image like the one above, by Cajsa Lilliehook, won't be removed. In my observation, most SL screenshots on Flickr ironically carry the default "All rights reserved" tag, however, so this conversation wouldn't apply to them. But a substantial number have a CC tag -- partly because Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig was an early adviser to Second Life, and even appeared in SL on occasion, so the CC concept is fairly well known within the community.

The next question, of course, is if this policy applies only to photos and videos, or also to screenshots and video. And that raises a whole host of follow-up questions:

Star is Reborn: Rising EDM Vocalist Briefly Returns to Second Life to Test Out New Material Through His Avatar, Skye Galaxy

In case you missed it over the last few months, Skye Galaxy briefly returned to Second Life for a series of live performances. Touted across SL a decade ago as the virtual world's first breakout pop star for his great vocal stylings and songwriting, he went on to become just that with a viral live video performance, later flying to Europe to perform with a top DJ, among other milestones. (I'm intentionally not mentioning his real life name in case he wants to keep his avatar and real world brands separate.)  

"I came back for a bit, wanted to stretch the vocal cords and try out some new tunes," Skye's owner tells me over e-mail. If you missed his latest in-world shows (like the one above), there's a chance you might get another chance soon:

Linden Lab: Social VR is "The Future of Spectator Sports", Promises A Major eSports Partnership Next Month

Do you want to watch an immersive 3D experience while in another immersive 3D experience? Linden Lab thinks you do. Interesting new interview on the Cheddar (LOL) news network with Linden VP Sheri Bryant, who drops hints of a big eSports partnership with Sansar coming next month, announcing, "We believe social VR is the future of spectator sports." In terms of eSports, she mentions incorporating elements from a live game into the Sansar experience -- for example, a dynamically updated, 3D game map. (I assume like in those "war rooms" in the Star Wars movies, where the battlefield is represented in a cool holographic map.) 

Maybe social VR is the future of real world spectator sports (which very much remains to be seen) but I'm not sure why Linden Lab keeps insisting this is the case with eSports. So far, their existing eSports partnerships don't seem to be increasing Sansar usage. But to be fair, it's still early days. The deeper problem is this seems to misunderstand the popularity of eSports viewing on a platform like Twitch:  

Since Second Life is So Difficult to Use, Linden Lab Should Pay New Users to Learn How to Use It (Comment of the Week)

Minecraft's simple building interface

Great long comment from Will Clip, who's developed popular games for both Second Life users and for other platforms, responding to the point that understanding Second Life's complexity has become a kind of game in itself:

In my opinion Linden Lab could do so much more helping to ease the 1st steps for new users to improve the user retention rate.

I am a content provider in SL myself. Whenever I find some time to create something new I try to come at it with understanding that for most of the people facing something new, something they are not used to is scary and frustrating.

Creators goal should be to make 1st steps for people when they are trying the new product as easy and fun as possible. Good user interface experience makes distinction between a good and bad product.

Often to the point that even if the product looks better looking, most users will prefer to use the product that is easier to use because using something that is easy to operate is already rewarding by itself.

In my opinion Linden Lab should maybe employ or temporary hire an user interface specialists that would look at SL as a whole and come out with some pointers about how to make SL more easy to use. LL should use the new knowledge to organize content developers, give materials (invest, market) and provide new and better tools for content creation in Second Life.

Will says he's seeing similar complexity in Sansar. But unlike most other virtual worlds and social VR platform, Linden Lab has a key advantage. Which leads Will to propose a novel idea: Pay Linden Dollars to new users to learn how to use Second Life. As he writes:

Top 7 Stories Last Week: Spector in Sinespace, Dolby in HiFi & Much More

• Meet Warren Spector In The Virtual World: Sinespace And Escapist Host An Hour With The Influential Game Designer, Nov 17 At 3pm (PST) - RSVP Now!
• Holodeck VR Uses Hybrid Tracking To Map Virtual World Experience Onto Real World Location With Up To 100 Users In The Same Physical Space
• Watch: How To Make Second Life Look Like An Animated Line Drawing
• Thomas Dolby, Pop Star & VR Enthusiast, To Perform Live In High Fidelity
• Let's Watch A Sansar Experience Take Forever To Load On A High-End PC
• SLer Confusion Over New Flickr Announcement Leads To "Witch Hunt" Fears
• Second Life's Open-Ended User Interface As An MMO Is So Complicated, Mastering The UI Is How To Level Up

Cassie's Clips: Sneak Peek of SL's Romp Fashion Event This Weekend Ft. Sexy Clothes You Can Adjust While Wearing & Boots You Can Hold

Here's a speak peek video of this weekend's Romp event in SL, from NWN correspondent Cassie Middles. (Warning: Somewhat NSFW, just like Romp itself.) Key item is what she's showing off here -- the Mirage Abbacci, with user-adjustable clothing items. Watch to see what I mean, because "adjustable" doesn't quite convey how cool this is.

"Romp is an event that I hold near and dear to my heart," she tells me. "It was actually my first ever adult shopping experience I've ever had where kink and BDSM were seen as quite normal. Beautiful furniture, accessories, decor, and amazing things like this outfit by Mirage.N.A here. Vanilla Bae was the first store I ever found that had interactive clothing like this, but the boots were what sold me -- the fact that you can wear them or carry them over the arm, I think is amazing and perfect for roleplay. If you check out their Fickr feed, you'll see so much more interactive outfits there as well for both genders, though Mirage mostly works with Belleza bodies so make sure to read or demo before trying."

Romp starts tomorrow. Links after the break!

Fantasy & Sci-Fi Avatars & Accessories in Sinespace for Cosplay Fun

NWN partner Sinespace has a ton of fantasy and science fiction-themed avatars and accessories available in its in-game store -for instance, this amazingly detailed, surprisingly buff "full body" zombie avatar, by Gorgelay. (I'm posing here in the BlakOpal region foyer.) So it's the perfect place to search for cosplay options if you feel like dressing up (and you totally should) for Warren Spector's Sinespace event next week.

Creator who wants to customize your own avatar's skin, tattoos, or makeup? Watch this Sinespace tutorial:

How to Make Second Life Look Like It's Cel Shaded à la Borderlands

Because so many readers loved that hack for making Second Life look like a line drawing (someone is already using that to make a "Take on Me" machinima, right?), here's another set of tweaks to make Second Life look like it's cel shaded, as above -- you know, like in the popular Borderlands games. This hack, unsurprisingly, comes from SL graphics master NiranV, creator of the Black Dragon SL viewer. All you have to do, he explains, is adjust SL's screen space ambient occlusion settings: "Set SSAO max scale very low, scale super high, its factor super high and strength super low and viola, you get cel shading via SSAO. For a better effect turn off light softening."

If that's a bit over your head like mine, don't worry -- here's the settings to play with in the Black Dragon viewer, and some tips for doing it in the official viewer:

Meet Warren Spector in the Virtual World: Sinespace and Escapist Host an Hour With the Influential Game Designer, Nov 17 at 3pm (PST) - RSVP Now!

Click here to RSVP for a very unique Sinespace event I'm proud to co-host November 17 at 3pm (PST): An hour with renowned game designer Warren Spector (Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Deus Ex, Epic Mickey) who'll discuss his latest game, Underworld Ascendant, the future of game design, getting started in games, developing in Unity 3D, and whatever else our virtual audience of avatars cares to ask him. The event (and live video stream) is being co-hosted by The Escapist magazine, with editor-in-chief Russ Pitts interviewing Warren alongside me.

The acclaimed titles Warren has helped lead development on have been incredibly influential on the art of games, helping pioneer a new genre of immersive simulation which rewards player creativity and choice. Its heirs include the Thief, Dishonored, and BioShock franchises, among many, many others. His new game, Underworld Ascendant, is very much part of that tradition, and is a spiritual successor to Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss.

Created way back in 1992, Ultima Underworld game is not only a landmark in 3D simulation games -- it helped inspire the development of virtual worlds. As I wrote in The Making of Second Life, it was a key reference for Philip Rosedale, as he started formulating the framework that would eventually become Second Life:

Holodeck VR Uses Hybrid Tracking to Map Virtual World Experience Onto Real World Location With Up to 100 Users in the Same Physical Space

Holodeck VR is a fairly unique twist on location-based VR experiences with a lot of potential. For one thing, it uses light, low cost Gear VR headsets, rather than bulky systems where the user is tethered to cables or a heavy backpack. For another, it's using a patented hybrid tracking technology which incorporates both optical and radio signals, which is reportedly able to coordinate the location of up to 100 items or people in the same virtual/real life space. In other words, a multi-user virtual world experience mapped onto the location of users in the real world. 

Based in the EU, Holdeck VR's platform is already being used at theme part locations in Europe, including a location tie-in for last year's Valerian movie from Luc Besson. Longtime game developer Barbara Lippe is the company's co-founder and head of content, and she tells me the tracking technology they're using took 16 years of development at the German Fraunhofer Institut, before it was even ready for users wearing VR headsets, so they could navigate around each other without colliding:

Watch: How to Make Second Life Look Like an Animated Line Drawing

This is a fantastic visual effect for Second Life created by Kitsune Shan, simply through adjusting settings in the Firestorm viewer: Rendering the virtual world into what looks like an animated line drawing. It screams out for being used in machinima and music videos -- or as Sasy Scarborough put it to me, when she sent this video my way, "Turn name tags off, it would be an amazing short film." Yes.

How to create this effect? Watch the video until the very end, where you see the setting levels she used in the UI. Kitsune figured this out through trial and error noodling:

Thomas Dolby, Pop Star & VR Enthusiast, To Perform Live in High Fidelity

Dolby singing "She Blinded Me With Science" in VR rig for audience in High Fidelity

Recently a distinguished academic showed up in High Fidelity as an avatar, researching social VR platforms to use in the Music for New Media program at the Peabody Conservatory. "He didn't identify who he was at first but did share that he was a professor looking for a medium to teach VR and music design," High Fidelity's Ryan Downe remembers. "After sharing contact information, he reached out and revealed his identity and my colleague spent some time helping him get familiar with our platform."

The professor, who teaches at Johns Hopkins University, also happens to be pop star Thomas Dolby -- yes, the one who was massively blinded by science -- and is appearing live in High Fidelity next week, singing into an audio stream piped into the virtual world while his VR-controlled avatar performs. (Click here to reserve a slot at November 17's FUTVRE LANDS Virtual Reality Festival.)

Dolby has been working directly with High Fidelity on a number of performances previous to that -- not just appearing as an avatar, but making dynamic use of the social VR platform:

"We collaborated with him on a pair of Halloween-themed events at our 'Zombie Island' domain," as Ryan explains. "From a perch above the island, he musically scored the event in real-time as visitors (most of whom didn't know he was there) ran into jump scares and zombies played by live actors."

So far from being a "special celebrity appearance" event, Dolby's appearance in VR is very much part of his explorations as a musician and performer. (Not unlike how, in VR's last generation, Duran Duran's Simon LeBon was an avid user of Second Life before his band officially created a presence there.)

Watch: Minecraft-Type Voxel Building Game Demo Created in VRChat

Some enterprising VRChat user named Shadow Forest has created a Mindcraft-ish experience in VRChat. (See screencap, showing the VRChat interface interacting with Minecraft-type building blocks.) Which fits a rule of thumb I've come to have: Any time you give users enough tools to build inside a virtual world, they'll build another one inside it.

"It's more of a concept for now," as Shadow Forest tells me. "There aren't any major objectives in gameplay yet beside having fun building things inside a voxel game inside VRChat! It's more of a challenge of 'can you achieve this?' using the limitations of VRChat, with no c# scripting besides provided ones.

It's created with VRChat's shaders, and while it doesn't come with creeps to kill you and such, the basic creating tools are there in simulated form, via some clever use of the game's shaders: "It's all shader magic plus cameras to feed shaders to other shaders as data! The entire world exists only in the shader."

Video from Shadow Forest's Twitter, where there's some more technical Q&A for how this was done:

Upgrading Your Flickr to Keep Your 1000s of Pics? Try This Discount Code

Since a lot of New World Notes readers are avid Flickr users and because Flickr is going to remove photos from free accounts which exceed a new 1000 image limit and because NWN readers typically have thousands of virtual world images on their accounts, here's a discount code for upgrading to Pro: If it's still valid, entering "FLICKRPRO30" will get you $15 off the first year.

Give it a try and if it's no longer valid, please let me know in Comments! And yes, as noted on Monday, virtual world/game/MMO screenshots are totally welcome on Flickr as long as they're tagged as such.

Question for readers: How many are planning to pay $50 a year to upgrade their Flickr?

Hat tip: Carl Thibodeaux and MangroveJane.

As We Wait Forever for Election Day Results to Arrive, Let's Watch a Sansar Experience Take Forever to Load on a High-End PC

If you're tired of refreshing Twitter or your favorite news site homepage, waiting impatiently for midterm election results, why not instead watch this Sansar experience attempt to load on a high-end computer with very decent broadband:

While some Sansar experiences are larger than entire AAA videogames, most experiences (a platform developer tells me), are about 5-8 gigs. However, watch what happens when Alexandria Brangwin attempts to load one that's relatively small:

Avatars Against Trump: Election Day Edition

This from Koi Madzuko, who adds this:

Eligible Voters 2016: 250,056,000 (estimated)

Votes Cast 2016: 138,847,000 (estimated)

This time, show up!

Yes. Far as avatars are concerned (and this is probably #452 on the list of currently bad things), here's a list of all the Senators who voted to approve Ajit Pai, the FCC chairman who has been adamantly working to gut net neutrality, which experts like Philip Rosedale have warned poses a dire threat to the future of social VR and virtual worlds. Just yesterday the Supreme Court let stand the Obama-era regulation, but telecoms which support its repeal are already calling on Congress to pass new laws to undermine it. In other words, vote.

More Avatars Against Trump pics here -- submit your own image or video here. 

SLer Confusion Over New Flickr Announcement Leads to "Witch Hunt" Fears

Last week's widespread concern that Flickr's new policies would lead to virtual world photographers being booted off the platform were so acute, Flickr's support team was bombarded by pleas from Second Life users, some fearing they were about to be victims of a "witch hunt". That's literally the words from a Flickr support rep contacted by NWN correspondent Cassie Middles-- see message at right, with reassuring words that virtual world photographers are very welcome on Flickr, as long as their images are properly tagged.

This is similar to what Flickr's own CEO said in a message board and on Twitter (below) -- that the company fully supports virtual world photography. So basically, the SL community was unnecessarily roiled by a panic over a non-existing policy, apparently by the words in this Flickr blog post announcing a new effort to curb Spam:

Flickr has always been a vibrant, photographer-focused community. And we want it to always be a safe place for our members to share and appreciate images they love. Flickr is not a place for people who have nothing to do with photography to sell things or otherwise influence our members.

However, nothing in Flickr's statement says anything specifically about virtual world screenshots, and the overall context of the blog post is about minimizing Spam. When I started looking into allegations that Flickr was planning to ban virtual world photographs, it quickly became evident an updated version of the telephone game, except with avatars, was taking place. And so the last people to learn about Flickr's supposed plans were Flickr staffers themselves. ("I don't know where the idea that you aren't 'real' photographers," Flickr's clearly bewildered CEO told one SLer, "or that virtual photography is somehow spam, came from but that's not from me.")

Takeaway from this totally needless Sturm und Drang? On the positive side, this suggests how tight-knit the Second Life online community is, that a rumor could spread so quickly. By the same token, it also suggests how vulnerable it is baseless conjecture or, dare I say, fake news.

And for the future?