New World Notes

Listen: I Talk About Metaverse Art, AM Radio & Cao Fei for ArtNet's Podcast

What Is the Metaverse? And Why Should the Art World Care? is a new-ish episode from The Art Angle, the podcast from acclaimed art world news site ArtNet. I had a great time (despite an allergy flare-up) talking with host Tim Schneider, who interviews me alongside art curator Tina Rivers Ryan and artist Sara Ludy, whose SL-based art I briefly covered here.

Here's some highlights (though of course the whole thing is a good listen):

• 4:25: History of the Metaverse starting with Habitat in the 80s, ActiveWorlds in the 90s; flowing into its origins in Snow Crash, and my working definition based directly on the novel. From that I talk about Snow Crash's early influence on Second Life, to the founding of Second Life and my writing in it, and the first metaverse hype wave in 2006-2008, when major universities and companies put stakes in the virtual world.
• 13:45: I talk about the art world of Second Life, from the Flickr photographer community that Cajsa covers so well, to acclaimed artists Cao Fei (aka China Tracy) and AM Radio (aka Jeffrey Berg)
• 24:00: My take on blockchain-based metaverse platforms, and the categorical mistake I believe they're making.
• 32:20: The valuable social potential of the Metaverse, versus social media. Fellow guest Tina Rivers Ryan points out some serious potential downsides which I also happen to agree with. I've written frequently, for example, about avatar-based racism that is also problematic in the virtual world.
• 40:15: Second Life's influence on current metaverse platforms, especially VRChat.

Cao Fei's first SL art project below, the machinima I.Mirror, along with links for more reading, and highlights from AM Radio's career:

Fashion Friday: An SL Style Blog That Defies Convention

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

Kid Joe’s blog is called Infinite. That makes sense because his blog defies all fashion blog conventions. .It’s not just that he goes back and forth between male and female avatars and mixes contemporary fashion and roleplay outfits. It’s that his pictures are often very editorial. The possibilities are, in a word, infinite. 

Take the post “Awakening” which showcases a makeup set from La Maldita Bruja. It’s a blog post for one item and wow, does it ever make that front and center and so fantastic that even I, a person who dislikes tattoos, started thinking how much I wanted that before I remembered I don’t like tattoos. 

• Makeup (with feathers) "Aphophis" by La Maldita Bruja.
  Exclusive for Abstrakt event. The event closes today

For a stunning transformation, click here:

Exclusive: Upland Real Estate Game Quietly Becoming an Immersive Metaverse Platform With Nearly 300K NFT Owners

Yesterday I mentioned that "nearly all" metaverse platforms built around web3 features (blockchain, NFTs, crypto) have little or no active users. I qualified it that way because I recently found out about a possible exception:

Upland, the mixed reality real estate acquisition game (and the first customer for Linden Lab's Tilia payment service), sells NFTs associated with individual plots of land. And so far, the game/metaverse platform has over 285,000 unique Upland NFT owners. (Screengrab above, as shared with me by the Upland team.)

285K might not seem like much, as compared to say Roblox or Fortnite, but it is massive when compared with the current NFT market. As I noted last January, there are roughly 360,000 NFT owners in the entire world across the main blockchains. But Upland's NFTs, as co-founder Dirk Lueth told me recently, aren't tracked by Cryptoslam and most other blockchain analytics firms.

In other words, Upland reportedly has nearly as many unique NFT owners on its own platform as there are NFT owners across all other main blockchains -- and far more NFT owners than Axie Infinity, The Sandbox, Decentraland, and other wel-known blockchain-based games/metaverse platforms.

Notably, most Upland NFT owners aren't active NFT speculators on other platforms, as is usually the case. According to an internal survey, 65% of Upland NFTs owners don’t own NFTs outside Upland.

Hopefully regular readers are wondering if Upland is even a metaverse platform at all. What with its flat 2D experience for the web and mobile browsers, it's not a 3D immersive virtual world, which is key to the classic metaverse definition. 

That is true. But here's the thing: Now that it has an active user base in the six figures, the company is gradually rolling out immersive virtual world features beneath the Monopoly-esque property game -- starting with a casual 3D racing game that's currently in Alpha. Watch:

Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2022年7月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan

Sanny Yoshikawa が、New World Notesのなかから、毎月おすすめのバーチャルワールドニュースを日本語で紹介します。

Sanny Yoshikawa covers the monthly virtual world highlights from New World Notes for virtual Japan.

 

 

 

Virtual World Tributes to Western Movies by Sergio Leone & Brokeback Mountain

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

Seduce is someone I have featured before back in 2020 but when I saw this shot that could have come straight from one of  my brother’s favorite movies For a Few Dollars More [click here] the second in the trilogy with A Fistful of Dollars [click here] and The Good the Bad and the Ugly [click here.] This pic could come straight from the movie poster. All three films have famous theme songs from the composer Ennio Morricone. The song from the third movie is one most of you will have heard as it’s often used in satiric western spoons. Seduce shot this and a few other pics as a tribute to several great Westerns. 

For more tributes to the wild, wild, West, click here:

Watch: VRChat's Horizon Adjust Feature Used to Recreate David Bowie's Classic Escher Maze Scene from Labyrinth!

Thanks to #VRChat's new Horizon Adjust feature, you can do cool stuff! Here's an homage to the movie 'Labyrinth' I made to demonstrate! pic.twitter.com/OZvVoiovCK

— Dr Ocelot (@doktorocelot) August 1, 2022

VRChat's new Horizon Adjust feature may have been mainly added to address usability concerns  -- it allows someone who's confined to a bed to comfortable use VRChat -- but very much on brand, the VRChat creator community has already created a seriously cool bonus use case: Gravity-defying special effects!

For instance, here's creator "Dr Ocelot"  using Horizon Adjust to re-create a classic David Bowie moment; the classic Escher maze from Labyrinth. (Above; original below for comparison purposes.)  

Almost all of this clip, Ocelet tells me, was shot "in camera" in VRChat -- here's how:

Roblox Hiring Web3 Senior Engineer to Put Virtual World Items & Transactions, Possibly NFTs, on the Blockchain

I owe finding this current Roblox job listing to the sharp eyes of Roblox_RTC, a Roblox-related news source -- the massive metaverse platform is hiring a Senior Software Engineer, Web3 to complete tasks including "develop web3 solutions and integrate them with existing Roblox tech stack across Roblox", and "help decide the future of web3 in Roblox and the nature of our web3 solution". Specifically:

This is an opportunity for you to challenge your engineering talents by building something new, sharing expertise, adopting innovations contributed by other engineering teams and improving our bottom line. As a senior engineer you will help Roblox Marketplace to be web3 ready and support billions of items and transactions to happen both on the blockchain and Roblox.

Virtual items registered on the blockchain are more typically called by another name: Non-fungible tokens, i.e. NFTs. But I wouldn't assume Roblox is about to put out NFTs, because the job description strongly suggests "the future of web3 in Roblox" is still being decided. 

Whatever the senior engineer does, it's a pretty mysterious move into web3 for Roblox:

Today's Flickr Pick: Alma Creates SL Images Rich With Stories & Ideas

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

Alma has an intriguing photostream. Take this picture. I knew at first glance it was Bonnie and Clyde and if I didn’t, she confirmed it with her song choice, “The World Will Remember Us.” [Click here.] Everything fits, the clothing, the car, the drawn pistole - all suggest Bonnie and Clyde immediately. 

It’s odd how people recall their connections to infamous criminals like Bonnie and Clyde as though they were good people. I knew this old man in real life who gave Clyde an apple. My great-great-grandfather hid the James Brothers in his barn. This very suspect family legend was confirmed by the historical society in Iowa so maybe it’s true. It seems so unlikely. I wish I had a dollar for every time I was told Ma Barker and her gang hid out for the Winter on the big island on the lake where I lived. If that were true, they would have turned themselves in just to warm up.  

For more of Alma's stories, click here:

VRChat User Concurrency Back Up to Pre-Mod Ban "Protest" Levels -- Update: Now 6000+ Over Last Week's Protest Levels

Update, 8/3: Yesterday's peak concurrency was 70,478 -- well over 6,000 concurrent more users than last week Tuesday, when the protest started. As I suspected, the trend remains: VRChat gonna VRChat.

As I suspected last week, the "protest" by some VRChat users over the company's ban on modified clients has all the indications of a vociferous but small subgroup, rather than reflecting any broad community uprising. You can see that in the user concurrency levels from this VRChat dashboard, which today shows a 5,581 increase of users from last Monday, when the announcement was posted.

One week later, the only indication that there was even any kind of user disgruntlement is on Steam, where thousands have since barraged VRChat's listing with a negative review. But even there, the loss is a few thousand concurrent users at most, and is offset by growth from the Quest userbase. Also, a little bird tells me we may see much more growth evident today at the peak time of 8pm PT, so stand by there.

As I wrote last week, some of the mod ban protest was legitimate, since there was concern that a few mods improved VRChat's usability, such as text captions for deaf users, contrast for colorblind users, for people who are bedridden, and so on. VRChat management very quickly addressed those concerns with an update to the original announcement:

The Power of Avatar Photos Shot With Dramatic Lighting & Angles

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

Robyn Smith experiments with light and angles to create fascinating photos. For example, “Set Fire to the Rain” as a bright light in high contrast to the velvety darkness of the shadows. It’s a stunning chiaroscuro photograph but I have to page back to March to find something similar. She is an experimenter and you will find blown-out pics that are blindingly white and black and white negatives as well as color pics with and without shadows. While nearly all the pics are of her avatar alone or with someone, there is tremendous diversity in the style of lighting and framing. 

For more examples of her range, click here:

Forget the Quest 2's Install Base -- How Many Quest 2 Owners Are Active? (Comments of the Week)

Above: Most popular games in the Quest store as of today

I spent much of last week pondering the mystery of why Meta hasn't announced that the Quest 2 has crossed a 10 million unit install base (as it almost certainly has by now, based on earnings reports). Reader Zack makes an even better point:

Consider Meta might actually experience terrible numbers of ACTIVE users... I personally worked in VR since DK2 days, 2015 or so. I own a Quest 1, and although I believe in this tech's future, I still have to fight my way into my next VR session, every not so often time I decide to wear it.

So only guessing here... if say 50%+ of Quest2 owners don't even use their headsets past the first 30 hours of "novelty and excitement" phase... THAT would be really embarrassing for them... and I feel that's the reason why 10M units is not enough to have a self-sustaining ecosystem.

While Zuckerberg did say 10 million was Meta's magic install base milestone, Zack's point helped remind me to double check Zuck's specific wording in 2020:

We had this milestone in our mind that first we needed to get the technology to the place where you could have a standalone headset, it could be portable, it could be high quality — do the tracking and all that. And Quest was the big milestone on that. Then, from an ecosystem perspective, we believed that if we get to 10 million units active, then that’s kind of a critical magic number.

Emphasis mine! That could really solve the mystery: Maybe 10 million Quest 2 units are sold, but that doesn't mean 10 million are being actively used. 

Martin K. chimes in on that tip:

Top 5 Posts Including: The Mystery of the VRChat "Protest" That Didn't Move & The Quest 2 Milestone That Didn't Bark

• Open Now: LynchLand, A Whole Second Life Sim Devoted To The Art & Characters Of David Lynch
• Quest 2 Install Base Must Have Passed Zuckerberg's 10 Million Target By Now - So Why No Meta Announcement?
• Incredible Second Life Fan Tributes To Music Videos By J-Hope Of BTS
• Steam Protest Against VRChat's Mod Ban So Far Leads To Little Change Of Actual VRChat Usage On Steam
• FTC Action Against Meta's Acquisition Of Within Seems Poorly Placed When Meta Is Losing Badly To Rec Room & VRChat

Open Now: LynchLand, A Whole Second Life Sim Devoted to the Art & Characters of David Lynch. Premiere Party This Weekend!

In heaven, everything is fine. You got yours and I got mine... Click here to visit.

That's right: The David Lynch fan group in Second Life that I wrote about last month has gone ahead and opened up a whole dedicated sim devoted to Lynch's imagination and tributes to scenes and characters from his most memorable works (with a decided Twin Peaks skew). It's open now, and this weekend starting tomorrow at 4pm PT, there's an official opening party. Dress code is "sensual black attire", and an owl mask will be given out upon arrival.

Here's some more glimpses of LynchLand courtesy of group leader Myrdin Sommer, who is financing the sim with a couple other founders: "Cate infinity, SurfSide66 and me, we pay the rent and we hope we get some Lindens in the Land-tip jars at events... the sim is there to have creative events and if people like to hang around in LynchLand that is perfectly fine, all terrain is accessible, so they can stay at the cabins etc. all they want, or just come and take pictures."

So if you're a Lynch fan too -- or David Lynch himself, as he's known to make the occasional metaverse visit -- consider tipping! More images and event details below:

Fantastic Friday Fashion Ideas for Male Avatars from an Annoying Ram

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

Arietemolesto is a blog from Caesar Langer. I am guessing it is really Ariete Molesto which Google Translate tells me means “annoying ram”. Well, I am not annoyed by this blog post The Riding Begins.It’s very weekend casual and perfect for a bike ride if it were not going to be 100𝆩 today. I love the pose which looks completely natural. 

• Top: Unfolded – Rayan Jacket (@ TMD)
• Pants: Unfolded – Ares Jeans
• Shoes: Gutchi – BSKT Sneakers M1 (@ ACCESS)
• Pose and Bicycle: Secret Poses – Bicycle Ride

For a slightly less casual look, click here:

Mystery: Quest 2 Install Base Must Have Passed Zuckerberg's 10 Million Target By Now - So Why No Meta Announcement?

With Meta's Q2 2022 earnings report out now, it's once again time to engage in some Quest 2 install base tea leaf reading. I've written about this multiple times (most recently here), but the basic gist is: Most or nearly all the revenue from Meta's Reality Labs division comes from sales of its Quest 2 hardware device, with an MSRP of $299. So doing the back-of-envelope math:

• Back in April, I calculated the Quest 2 install base as about 11-13 million.
• According to the latest revenue report, Q2 revenue for Reality Labs was $452,000,000 million.
• Which suggests up to 1.5 million more Quest 2 units were sold between April and June 2022.
• Giving us a grand total Quest 2 estimated install base of 12-14.5 million units maximum.

Even at a very conservative estimate, Quest 2's install base crossed over 10 million months ago.

Which brings up a new mystery: Why hasn't Meta announced Quest 2 hitting a 10 million milestone?

10 million is, after all, Mark Zuckerberg's (somewhat arbitrary) target goal for the Quest 2. As he put it in 2020:

Incredible Second Life Fan Tributes to Music Videos by j-hope of BTS

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

Bulletproof Next is a K-Pop tribute band in Second Life inspired by BTS who have a Flickr account for their band and poster art. Band members include Chiaki xue, kakarot nosantou, and Sopha Portal and many others.  Yesterday they  featured this fabulous recreation of a scene from the percussive Arson video by BTS member j-hope. [Click here] I like how he bends at the waist, curving into the already slightly askew picture. It’s a clever bit of composition that makes this pic even more interesting. This pic was taken by kakarot. I just hope they aren’t too literal a tribute band and don’t go on hiatus. 

For more band pic, click here:

Steam Protest Against VRChat's Mod Ban So Far Leads to Little Change of Actual VRChat Usage on Steam

VRChat July '22 concurrency via SteamDB

Ever since a user protest against VRChat's recent announcement banning mods led to a bombarding of bad user ratings on VRChat's Steam page, I've seen dire warnings of disaster for the platform. But having covered user protests on metaverse platforms for quite some time, my general rule of thumb is:

Isabella Rumsford Creates in SL a Literal Rendition of a Classic Movie Line

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

Isabella Rumsford’s picture was inspired by the lines from It’s a Wonderful Life [click here]: “What is it you want Mary. What do you want? You want the moon? Just say the word and I'll throw a lasso around it and pull it down.” 

Isabella made this as literal as could be and it’s beautiful. I love how she balances the moon with her avatar and the earth with the light from the sun or the spaceship. You can see the shadow of the moon falling on the earth which I think is a nice detail. It’s just wonderful all the way around. 

For more intriguing scenes of second living, click here:

FTC Action Against Meta's Acquisition of Within Seems Poorly Placed When Meta is Losing Badly to Rec Room & VRChat

Above: Within's Supernatural on the Oculus store with nearly 10,000 user ratings

Fairly big bombshell just dropped:

The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday filed for an injunction to block Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, from buying a virtual reality company called Within [producer of the highly popular fitness app called Supernatural], potentially limiting the company’s push into the so-called metaverse and signaling a shift in how the agency is approaching tech deals... John Newman, the deputy director of the F.T.C.’s Bureau of Competition, said the agency acted on the Within deal because Meta was “trying to buy its way to the top.” The company already owned a best-selling virtual reality fitness app, he said, but then chose to acquire Within’s Supernatural app “to buy market position.” He called the deal “an illegal acquisition, and we will pursue all appropriate relief.”

Maybe I'm missing something, but Within's Supernatural is nowhere near "the top", even in the Quest 2's ecosystem of some 10-12 million headsets. With nearly 10,000 user ratings in the Oculus store, Supernatural likely has usage in the six figures.

That's not nothing, but claiming that's "the top" misses the big picture: Meta is currently losing the platform war on its own platform. Compare Supernatural's usage with numbers announced by the metaverse platform Rec Room last April:

VRChat Community Wracked by Protest Over Ban on Modified Clients

Above: Steam's VRChat ratings bombarded by protesters

A Metaverse platform is nothing without a thriving community, but the flipside is portions of that community can seem to endanger the platform. VRChat is experiencing that now, due to an announcement that seems benign on its face:

“Modified clients” are a large problem for VRChat in a variety of ways. Malicious modified clients allow users to attack and harass others, causing a huge amount of moderation issues. Even seemingly non-malicious modifications complicate the support and development of VRChat, and make it impossible for VRChat creators to work within the expected, documented bounds of VRChat.

In order to prevent that, we’ve implemented Easy Anti Cheat (EAC) into VRChat. If you’ve played Apex Legends, Fortnite, Gears of War, Elden Ring, or many more, you’ve seen Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC)...  The integration of EAC means that all modified clients are blocked...

Every month, thousands of users have their accounts stolen, often due to running a modified client that is silently logging their keystrokes as well as other information. These users – often without even realizing it! – run the risk of losing their account, or having their computers become part of a larger botnet. 

Excuse me while I recover over flashbacks around various modified third party-made Second Life viewers which were banned for having dubious features. As with Second Life, a highly vocal number of VRC players have been protesting VRChat's move since it was made, include bombarding its Steam listing with bad reviews. Which as you can see above, is also an indicator of how small the protest is: Less than 10,000 users have recently posted a negative review. (Based on various figures, I'd estimate VRChat has about 5 million monthly active users, give or take.)

Do the protestors have any legitimate points? Somewhat, in the sense that some mods include some features that provide text captions for deaf users, contrast for colorblind users, and so on. But then again, from VRChat the company's point of view, thousands of users are reportedly having their accounts actively stolen by modded viewers every month.

Which side is right? Rather than weigh in, I'll quote a famed and highly respected member of the VRChat creator community, who requested I quote them anonymously, "due to the toxicity online" (their words), and provided great context on the situation:

Flashback: Roblox Abandoned China a Month After a Pro-Taiwan US User Accessed the Chinese Version Through the Great Firewall

Shelf under Could Be Coincidence, Could Be Something Else: Vice News has a fascinating in-depth look at Roblox's attempt to launch in China, including plans to accommodate the Chinese government's expectations around censoring content that suggests, for instance, that Taiwan is independent from China. Last December, however, Roblox abandoned China for mysterious reasons:

[I]n July 2021, Roblox launched LuoBuLeSi, the Chinese version of its platform. Other documents show some of the mechanisms it had in place for complying with Chinese regulations, including a game “whitelist” and moderation features for display names in the country. 

Roblox’s time in China was exceptionally short lived. In December 2021, the company closed down LuoBuLeSi without going into detail about why. Soon after it shut down, the company said that it was working to relaunch after making “necessary investments” to its “data architecture” but did not provide any additional information about closing.

The Chinese market for online games is extremely large (as I saw first-hand a decade ago), so it's strange that Roblox would give up on it so quickly.

As it happens, exactly a month before that (November 2021), a notorious Roblox user and popular YouTuber did pull this pretty cyberpunk stunt off:

Today's Flickr Pick: Ambre Singh Creates Comic & Conceptual Images in Second Life

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

Can I love a Second Life photographer simply because her pictures make me giggle and sometimes even laugh out loud? Yes, yes I can.

Ambre Singh’s picture is cute but when you add the title “Sitting on the Duck of the Bay” it goes from cute to hilarious and memorable. It made me want to do a deeper dive into her photostream. She’s not that fond of clothing, particular bras and shirts, and beach living gives her the freedom to live comfortably au naturel. However, being humorous does not take away from her artistry. 

For a fabulous SL homage to a classic painting and more, click here:

Top 5 Posts Last Week, Ft: Axie Infinity Loses 1M Daily Users, Linden Labber Teases SL Web Access, and Immersed in the Metaverse With Matthew Ball

• Matthew Ball Interview: The Metaverse Author On Government Regulation, Advice For Beginners Getting Started & Second Life's Importance To Its Future (Part 2 Of 2)
• Linden Lab Bringing Back Second Life Cloud Streaming For The Web?
• Matthew Ball Interview: The Metaverse Author On Mainstream Awareness, Negative Implications, NFTs & Blockchain -- And An Exciting New Vision For Interoperability (Part 1 Of 2)
• Breaking: Axie Infinity Lost 1 Million Daily Active Users In The Last 4 Months!
• In Praise Of Rec Room's Live Creation & Teaching Features -- And A Defense Of Its Cartoonish Graphics

Matthew Ball Interview: The Metaverse Author On Government Regulation, Advice for Beginners Getting Started & Second Life's Importance to Its Future (Part 2 Of 2)

Update, July 22: Bumped up for weekend reading/conversation!

Read Part 1 of our Q&A here. 

In his book The Metaverse, Matthew Ball touches on Second Life and even speaks with the late, beloved CEO Ebbe Altberg about the dangers of breaking user-generated content through platform updates.

During our Q&A this week we had a chance to chat about what Second Life can teach new metaverse platforms.

“We're discovering so many things about virtual societies and communities, there's so many emergent behaviors, and many of them have been discovered or surfaced before," Matt tells me. "Second Life is such a great example. I was telling you the other day when I was asked that question, Is Second Life over or underrated?

"I think it's underrated, because we and I for a long time underappreciated how many behaviors evolved that actually can’t really happen elsewhere that teach us a lot about what to build, what not to do, and how to speak to users upon which you rely on for an economy and user-generated content. Learning that history is important.”

As to the future, much more of our conversation below: Advice for getting started in metaverse development, the important metaverse news announcements that have come out since his book was published -- and what he'd say about government regulation of the Metaverse, if someone like Senator Elizabeth Warren asked:

Friday Fashion: Fantastic Vampiric & Cyberpunk Style from My Dark Fantasy

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

My Dark Fantasy is Yana Nightwich’s exciting and quite erotic blog featuring roleplay vampires, fairies, and warriors as well as highlighting intriguing places.  Romantique is a safe for Google post with a gorgeous avatar who is still a little bit spooky. For myself, I don’t wear tattoos or piercings in my first or second life, but I know they are popular. I think she looks gorgeous. 

• THIS IS WRONG  Sumukhwa IV tattoo (Evo X) F @ Hongdae event
• Stealthic - Ardesia hair @ Anthem
• [Cubic Cherry] {Shinku} rose deco (R) [email protected] The Vault
• Guwopp - Becky Necklace [email protected] The Vault
• SFU - Umbra Piercings @ The Vault

For more futuristic fare, click here: