New World Notes

Listen: Wall Street Journal Launches Epic Four Part Series on Second Life!

Been looking forward to this for months (it's been that long in the making, I did my 2 hour recording with the podcast team in July) -- The Wall Street Journal's podcast on the founding of Second Life:

We’re in a metaverse déjà vu moment. Companies are spending billions of dollars creating new metaverses, imagining a 3D virtual future. But there’s a metaverse that’s already been around for decades. In this world, people have started businesses, built homes and fallen in love as avatars. In a new four-part series from The Journal, producer Annie Minoff heads back into that largely forgotten metaverse – Second Life – to tell the story of the metaverse we already have and what it can reveal about the one that’s coming.

Stream on Spotify above, or listen or read the transcript for Part 1 here; also available on Apple Podcasts here.  

BREAKING: Neal Stephenson Himself is Making His Own Virtual World Called... THEE Metaverse

Lamina1, the Metaverse-as-a-Service startup co-founded by Neal Stephenson, just published a white paper adding much more detail to the platform that they are building -- join their Discord to get it. 

The core announcement, however, is this: Neal Stephenson himself is making a virtual world:

 

 

Neal Stephenson’s THEEE METAVERSE

Under active early-stage development, Neal Stephenson’s THEEE METAVERSE promises a richly-imagined interactive virtual world with an unforgettable origin story. Built on the Lamina1 chain, creators will come to experience Neal’s vision and stay to develop their own. Stay tuned for more details.

This might surprise people who assumed the Metaverse was simply a fictional conceit from his 90s novel Snow Crash, but most of his subsequent books and career have been building up to this point. As he told me in a long interview recently, when I asked him how his novels influenced Lamina1:

“After I wrote Snow Crash I got to know people in the tech industry who had read the book and who had been working on projects like Habitat…  and they had figured out long ago that you couldn't build these kinds of virtual communities without basically, other people's code running on your hardware. So they've gotten really interested in the problem of how do you do that without letting them take over your computer and then began to look to cryptographic solutions as a way to create that kind of controlled execution environment.”

Some of his other novels have also explored and  expanded on the original Metaverse concept:

“If you look at the Diamond Age, that is a book whose entire plot makes no sense unless you assume the existence of a worldwide network that can transfer money anonymously. So now that the girl in that book, Spence, and Miranda know each other through a virtual environment for years, but they have no way to establish each other's real world identities, because of this anonymous system. The whole plot story basically revolves around that….

“In REAMDE, that’s explicitly about a video game in which real world money can be used, to carry out financial transactions and about the kind of various complications that arise from that. Fall is kind of in a sense a sequel to REAMDE, to re-engage some of the same characters and sort of takes that to the wildest possible extreme.“

As for this white paper, much of it delves deeply into how it will integrate with web3 technology (blockchain, crypto, etc.) For virtual world/metaverse developers, here’s some of pacific technology Lamina1 is creating:

This Amazing Machinima of a Tiny Cosmic Void Was Made With No VFX -- Because You Can Actually Get a Tiny Cosmic Void in Second Life

This short experimental but seriously cool machinima by rising star creator Vrutega (read his SL spotlight profile here) looks like it was made in After Effects or some other post-production platform, but it was actually recorded entirely in Second Life.

"Everything was shot in-world," he tells me. "No VFX was used for this. I used an interactive skybox and changed the WindLight to match the hue of the DarkStar Pocket item I was holding."

And yes, you can get a copy of your own DarkStar Pocket this weekend at the Tokyo Zero event in SL - [click here to teleport].

Self-taught, Vrutega did later add the sharp audio effects:

Second Life Fashion Blogs Are Overwhelmed By Lingerie & Swimsuit Spreads. Artifex Silence Is a Stylish Break from That.

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

Artifex Silence is an SL fashion blog by Artifex1 Voxel. This is Post 61. Artifex is minimalist blogger. No fancy titles, no descriptive text, no details on what appealed to her, but she takes great pics and offers complete, well-organized credits. This appealed to me because it’s something someone might actually wear. It also perfectly captures this time of year. It’s starting to get a bit chilly in the morning, so a light sweater is a comfort but it’s hot in the afternoon and you know legs don’t feel the cold the way arms and shoulders do. So there it sits halfway between summer and autumn. Perfection in dressing for the season. 

• Zenith| Sadie- Black
• Betrayal| BLANC Graffiti Bag
• Kibitz| Kyla’s earrings
• Kunglers| Jaiska ring
• Gos| Hi Top
• MINIMAL| VIBE Backdrop 3

I like Artifex Silence, I like Artifex’ style. She’s not flashing bits and boobs to draw your attention. She’s getting attention with taste and style. I confess I am sick to death of blogs with nothing but lingerie and swimsuits. Do these avatars not have lives outside their bedroom? Artifex is no prude but she knows clothes express more about you than your lingerie. Fashion is story-telling. Lingerie is the preface. Clothing is the novel. There are too many unfinished stories in fashion blogging. 

For more fashion perfection, click here:

Watch: Powerful YouTube Series on People Transformed Through Fortnite Creative

"Created in Fortnite" is a really beautiful and moving YouTube series from Epic Games, mini-documentaries of diverse individuals whose lives have been transformed by becoming builders in Fortnite Creative. Here's one above on GQuanoe, who created the much-shared tribute to MLK's "I have a dream" speech in Fortnite.

Also cool: Grace Lind Hubbell at Epic, who helped put this together (with Victory Pictures), got her start in Teen Second Life. Her avatar name was Lucky Figtree, and she worked on SL-based experiences like Global Kids and Relay for Life back in the day. And now here she is, helping lead a big budget production for Epic Games. In other words: it's a documentary series about people who've been transformed by the Metaverse, told with the help of someone who's been transformed by the Metaverse.

Here's another one featuring Sophieex, a young British mother (sorry, mum!) who became fast friends and Creative collaborator with a New York-based creator called Caiya:

Look: Wild, Neon-Lit Second Life Avatars Photographed by Celestial Machine

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

Welcome to Celestial Machine’s world, a neon-bright, wild, and frenetic world as crazy as anything you can imagine. But he can imagine it. And it’s brilliant. I am at a loss to describe his work, but I love it. And just so you know, it only gets wilder from here. 

For even wilder pics ahead, click here:

This VRChat Explorer Photographs Beautiful Worlds Like These -- But The Most Popular One Here May Surprise You

Neomance is another great VRChat explorer. Like Bradlee, he explores the platforms' many worlds, takes breathtaking photos of his favorites, and posts them in a dazzling cascade on his Twitter.

Like many -- most? nearly all? -- of the active VRChat community, he discovered VRChat through "random YouTube videos, and I got on to socialize with random people".

Unlike most others, he's spent 2 years actively exploring the platform, deeply browsing the user-created worlds, and learning to photograph them like a pro. (That's even led to a few for-hire VRChat photography jobs.)

Here's five of the favorite recent worlds he's photographed -- tweets include creator credits and info for visiting them yourself:

• Abrepear
• suishogu (pictured at right)
• Ecology (pictured below)
• Forest Magic Shop
• Floating Delight (also pictured below)

If you've explored VRChat at all, you'll notice that many of the most popular and well-visited worlds aren't necessarily the most beautiful -- and vice versa. In fact, of the five worlds listed here, the most popular one might surprise you:

This Flickr Creator Makes Second Life Look Like Paintings You Can Visit

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

Michael Lysios lives in a very beautiful world that he shares with us on Flickr, with pictures that show places in Second Life as we’ve not seen them before. It’s just all so beautiful. And he adds a SLURL so you can teleport to see the place yourself. The sky in “Cherishville” is stunning and I love how the line of the road is accentuated by the bushes and then the fence. It directs our eyes, but so subtly. [Teleport here]

For more of the natural beauty of Second Life, click here:

How to Play With Second Life's Puppetry Project -- If You're Hardcore!

Linden Lab only recently announced its Puppetry Project, enabling real time control of Second Life avatars through webcams and other movement tracking devices. But unsurprisingly, while the project is very much in Alpha, hardcore SLers are already unpacking and setting it up. That includes Judas Shuffle (love the avatar name, that's him above), who recently posted some very detailed instructions for doing so yourself. Word of warning before clicking, this is for an unreleased project and requires some tech savvy (or extreme patience) -- so click here and read with caution.

"My favorite experience in virtual worlds so far was smiling at someone and having them smile back," Judas explains. "If it all works as well as it should it will bring people closer together." 

Hilariously, he got it going and posted these instructions only days after it was announced, which suggests some strong desire to see it in Second Life. ("A user in the beta grid got it working with my instructions.") To be sure, the final version should be relatively plug-and-play, but, "The [current] release as-is is about letting coders see what they can do with it. The puppetry build I would think means if you have the know how you could connect it to anything."

Yes, anything, not just webcams. In fact, Judas sent me this video of SLer Chaser Zaks running the Puppetry viewer through Blender:

Watch: Shopify Experimenting With Mixed Reality, AI-Powered Fashion

AI is enabling some really magical experiences. 🪄

Originally planned to share this tomorrow, @sergeyglkn scooped us! 😜

Keep on eye on this space. It moves fast! 💨 pic.twitter.com/Of8PgJWZMM

— Russ Maschmeyer (@StrangeNative) September 19, 2022

This is a fun and impressive demo: Online e-commerce site Shopify prototyping AI image generation used in fashion. (Russ Maschmeyer is AR/VR head at the tech company.) It was created in collaboration with Sergey Galkin, who explains how it was made on his own Twitter thread: "The prototype was made in Snapchat Lens Studio + post-processed in Adobe After Effects. Images were generated by Dalle 2." 

They're demonstrating this for a real world clothing context, but the virtual world applications are even more obvious. (I mean how many wacky T-shirts does the average consumer really buy, versus new avatar outfits?) Being able to adjust the style, fit, and composition of the clothing item itself seems like the next obvious next step.

Today's Flickr Pick: Look How Light Leak Effects Add Realism & Nostalgia to Virtual World Screenshots

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

m●ne ​​​​​​​shoots inviting pictures of herself having fun and living life in Second Life. “When the Sea Meets the Sand” is a great example. She’s enjoying the sun, the fresh wind off the ocean, the sun breaking through. She uses a light leak overlay to suggest the flash of the sun on the film. If you’re interested in using light leaks, this online photo editor has a nice explanation.  

For more gorgeous light leaks, click here:

Second Life Users: Media on a Prim Griefer Exploit Discovered; Update Your Firestorm Viewer!

Media on a Prim is a cool Second Life feature which enables users to stream web-based media content on primitives in the virtual world. It's also now being used for a griefer exploit that Linden Lab just patched up:

Today I was at a rental office and noticed a few people hanging around the welcome area, thought nothing of it then suddenly and simultaneously my viewer (Latest Firestorm) opened up search and some offensive words appeared in the text box, as well as a "create new group" window, with some errors appearing on the screen. I quickly left and closed out all these windows. It was quite a scary experience and I was only one click away from clicking the OK to create a random group at a L$100l cost. - AmerAaron

Fortunately, it's really just a griefer exploit and apparently not something that could be used for highly malicious hacking. As Firestorm QA rep Whirly Fizzle (yes) explains:

Midjourney Solely Credited as Article Illustrator in Major News Publication

The sharp eyes of New World Notes' image curator Cajsa Lilliehook caught what looks to be a pretty major breakthrough (or first step toward disaster, depending on your point of view): The Bulwark, a major US news analysis publication, is using Midjourney to create illustrations for their articles -- and crediting Midjourney as the image source. (As opposed to, say, an actual human illustrator.) From a cursory search, this seems to be the first example of Midjourney used for a non-tech, non-grassroots illustration by a professional publication that would normally pay a graphic artist and/or image bank like GettyImages or Shutterstock for work like this. 

So this is notable! Also notable: It's not very good. Meant to illustrate Trump's questionable legal defense fund, the image doesn't convey any of that context at all, and actually looks more like a pro-Trump graphic. (Except, that is, the "Save America" slogan is washed out by the background -- a sloppy look, whatever your political perspective.) In other words, a human illustrator would have done a much better job.

But then again, hiring a human is a lot more costly.

Top Posts: User-Made SL Commerce Tools Acquired by Linden Lab & I Talk About Metaverse Sex & Other Topics on a Steampunk Train

• Watch: Chatting Second Life, Metaverse News & Virtual Sex On A Steampunk Train
• The Community-Made Train Systems Of Second Life Are Over 15 Miles Long -- Take This Map To Start Riding!
• Linden Lab Buys User-Made Commerce System Too Valuable To The Second Life Community To Fail
• Best Laptops For Second Life: Recent MacBook Air Model Runs SL Surprisingly Well (With Some Graphics Settings Tweaked)
• Monday Memory: Before Mesh, Amazing Avatars Walked The Virtual World

Watch: Chatting Second Life, Metaverse News & Virtual Sex on a Steampunk Train

Just went live on YouTube: Episode 2 of New World New featuring Isabelle Cheren and me. This time we referenced Rydia's train map and shot the whole thing on a steampunk choo choo traveling through the SL mainland. Topics we discuss:

• Linden Lab's purchase of CasperTech
• Flickr's new Virtual Photograph category
• A VRChat explorer guide
• Mourning The Queen and others in virtual worlds.

Plus viewer questions from Gogo and Max Grafth: Will Second Life be around 10 years from now, and, of course, virtual sex: I.E., "Adult content: the make or break of virtual worlds?"

Friday Fashion: Styles for Male Avatars from Kai Wirsing

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

* SK * Hawat @ Engine Room is a recent post at Blue a blog by Kai Wirsing. I love the steampunk sensibility and the adorable zebra cat. A much more compliant cat than I have. I can barely get her to let me put her collar on. I just love his cravat. It is so lush. Most items are at the Engine Room event which starts on the 20th. For more info on the event and the teleport link when it opens, click here.

At Engine Room

• * SK * Hawat Giani by Bronte Denja
• * SK * Hawat Hat ( Resize ) 
• Blue Blood - Birdskull (Add)  by Cherelle Capra
• [A ] Inuit Shoes Legacy M Fatpack by Mr. Lambert (mister.mercury)
• [A] Steamvape 0.4 W/Hold  by Mr. Lambert (mister.mercury)
• Dirty Rat - Large Telescope [DECOR]  by n0th1ng Ackland

Elsewhere:

• Hotdog - Cravat Bow V2 . [email protected] by Hayden (hot.doge)
• [Rezz Room] British Shorthair Onesie Adult Animesh by Barazor

For the world’s best laundromat, click here:

The Community-Made Train Systems of Second Life Are Over 15 Miles Long -- Take This Map to Start Riding!

This is a pretty amazing map to the community-made train systems cutting across the Second Life mainland (click here for high res version, also available for free in the Marketplace), created by Rydia Lacombe, and updated from her 2021 edition. If they look longer and more complex than many real life train systems, you're right there -- they're longer, Rydia tells me, than the system in a major city in Scotland.

"Calculations in 2014 estimated that there was about 30 kilometers of track on the mainland. I would assume that this number is roughly correct - with the main line at least 12 km!" Rydia tells me. "This means that the SLRR Main Line is larger than the Glasgow subway system - which is fairly neat."

Anyone can ride these at any time, by the way -- just get a train (there's free models) drag it onto the track, and it'll snap to the rails, and you're ready to go. (Info below.)  I just took a leisurely train ride with a famous YouTuber, and can confirm it's a cool way to enjoy the rolling scenery while having a fun chat.

"I just like drawing maps," Rydia tells me, grinning. "I used to be told off in elementary school because it wasn't 'normal'. I just think it's neat."

There's also a broader motivation for her: 

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Rikutojam's Virtual Photos Are Rich With Color & Emotion

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

Rikutojam [email protected]’s “The Summer Twilight” is the trippiest picture I have seen on Second Life Flickr. His most recent pic (see below) caught my eye and I started browsing his stream and BAM! Suddenly, my head swam and I had vertigo. I didn’t think I could get vertigo from a picture, but I have gone back and looked at this pic five times now and every time, my head swam and my eyes rolled in my head. It needs a warning label. Still, how cool is it that there is a picture that can do that? Perhaps it’s because it’s not just on an angle, but that he is looking up as well? I am curious. Have any of you had an involuntary physical reaction to a SL picture? 

For see what caught my eye, click here:

Linden Lab Buys User-Made Commerce System Too Valuable to the Second Life Community To Fail

Here's the latest lesson for metaverse platforms:

• If you give your user base incredibly powerful content creation and scripting systems, some of them will create in-world products and services that become so popular with the user community, they'll effectively become integral to the virtual world.* 
• That also means if these user creators were to suddenly quit (boredom, business, sudden death, etc), the entire virtual world economy will feel the shockwaves.
• So, congrats: Your user-made product or service is now an official part of the platform. Get out your checkbook.

Latest example just announced today: Linden Lab acquired Casper Tech, creator of various virtual world commerce services (rental systems, vendors, etc.), run by a mostly-anonymous Second Life user known by his avatar "Casper Warden". (Interview below.)

"My feeling is that this is a risk reduction move," longtime SLer Da5id Kronfeld observes. "So many people rely on Casper that the service suddenly vanishing represents a significant risk to the SL economy."

Variations of this have happened to Second Life before, with (for example) the L$ open exchange system and the SL Marketplace ecommerce website originally starting as user-made platforms.

"I suppose it shows they're still keen to keep Second Life going as a project if they're investing money in some aspects of it," Sler Natalie observes. (Then again, it's probably more cost effective to buy CasperTech rather than hiring 2-3 Linden Lab engineers to recreate its functionality.) Echoing other veterans, she suspects Linden Lab will adding extra costs to use CasperTech's tech: "I can see Caspervend being a subscription thing, maybe bundled into a Creators tier which would be Premium Plus AND Caspervend etc."

All that to one side, it seems like a necessary move (and much congrats to Casper). That said, it does feel like another duct tape fix on top another duct tape fix, with the Second Life platform kept online by successive layers of short-term hacks, since it would be too costly to do what's really necessary: Overhaul the entire thing.

On that front, very longtime Second Life user Allegory Malaprop has an excellent and salty rant:

Flickr So Popular With Second Life Photographers That Flickr Adds a "Virtual Photography" Category to Platform -- Here's How to Use It

If you're among the tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of Second Life users who upload SL screenshots and video to Flickr, you'll want to watch this Flickr video tutorial above from Strawberry Linden, explaining how to add Flickr's new Virtual Photography category to your SL Flickr content. More info on the Flickr blog:

Virtual photography is an emerging art form specializing in photos taken inside a video game or virtual environment... we’re introducing this new category with two types of photography in mind: video game photography and content shared by the Second Life community.

As that suggests, this category was created primarily to serve the huge SL community on Flickr.

"The Flickr community manager was on Lab Gab back in May and she said they were looking to implement this feature for the SL community on Flickr," Strawberry tells me. (Watch that below.)

Ironically, Flickr itself was first created as an image sharing tool for a virtual world called Game Neverending, so it's fitting that another virtual world community has since embraced it as their own.

Flickr even sought SL creators' feedback on before adding it:

SL Image Creators Starting to Blend Midjourney Pics With the Virtual World

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

Loony Perl's “Daddio at PsyLounge” makes me want to go there, even though with a name PsyLounge, I can imagine they play techno and I want my music analog. But where else would you find a human-sized corvid working as a DJ. Real-life corvids are probably smart enough to be DJs if the only had the right-sized equipment. A crow has “adopted” a friend of mine and brings him presents of nuts and found objects such as a button and a rubber band. I love corvids, though I think in real life, corvids like jazz. 

Like other SLers, Loony's been experimenting with Midjourney and blending the virtual world with the AI image generator. Click here:

Best Laptops For Second Life: Recent MacBook Air Model Runs SL Surprisingly Well (With Some Graphics Settings Tweaked)

Thanks to reader "dkronfeld" for sending this photo which effectively demonstrates a pretty surprising point he made in a recent open forum: With the right settings, Second Life runs pretty damn well on a recent model MacBook Air! Pictured above is his 2020 MacBook Air with an M1 processor, 16GB RAM, and the 8 core GPU. (This one here, with a starting price of $999.)

Emphasis on "right settings", though, as dkronfeld explains:

Roblox Stats: 52M DAU, Down From 54M In Q1' 22; UPDATE: 58.5M DAU in July

Today's quick metaverse platform stat shot from Nasdaq on Roblox:

At the end of the second quarter of 2022, Roblox had 52.2 million Daily Active Users (DAUs) globally, which, however, declined from 54.1 million reported at the end of first-quarter 2022... Roblox is suffering from a reduced engagement level. In second-quarter 2022, hours engaged declined from 11.82 million to 11.29 million sequentially. Moreover, bookings declined 4% year over year to $639.9 million. Daily paying users also decreased from approximately 676K to 667K. Additionally, monetization per daily paying user decreased 3%.

Emphasis mine, because huh? I'm getting the impression that Wall Street doesn't realize metaverse platform use tends to be seasonal, specifically: It generally goes down in the Summer when people are offline and on vacation. I'm actually surprised hourly activity in Roblox went down so little. Update, 4:00pm: Or maybe that was just a temporary dip -- Matt Ball just reminded me that at its developers' convention last weekend, Roblox announced 58.5 million Daily Active Users in July.

Speaking of which,  Roblox is actively getting into ad monetization in the weirdest way possible:

This Artist Turns Second Life Screenshots Into Powerful Pop Expressionist Surrealist Images

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

Natalia Seranade may begin with a Second Life screenshot but she ends up closer to Pop Expressionist Surrealism, a modern art form sometimes called Lowbrow. (Eric Drummond Smith wrote a primer on the form here.) One of the essential elements he discusses struck me as most closely describing Natalia’s work: “Emotion, improvisation, and immediacy are central ends and means of our work.” When you look at “Plenitude” (above) isn’t your first reaction emotional? A reaction based in part on her color story. Red, black, and white, such visceral colors.

For works that are more explicitly pop and pop art, click here:

Monday Memory: Before Mesh, Amazing Avatars Walked the Virtual World

Latest addition to my New World Notes Classics archive (bottom right column) is my interview in 2007 with Tasrill Sieyes, who tells me about turning Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase into a Second Life avatar:

 I was showing someone my abstract avatars that I have made, and they mentioned that making a 3D form of Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” would be great... [S]he loves the painting and after seeing my other work she wanted to see what it would look like transformed into SL form...

It is an interesting feeling [being this avatar]. Kind of... freeing. I am not bound by the normal limits of anthropomorphic avatar.  And I can think far more artistically. I don't know [why], to be honest. I don't think too much about how my various bits of art make me feel, I just let them make me feel, and let it wash over me.

More here, and see also my interview with the creator of this amazing exoskeleton. Created before the coming of mesh and mesh-enhanced avatars in 2012 or so, they illustrate how diverse and innovative Second Life avatars used to be.