New World Notes

WATCH: Video Preview of Crystal Frost, Unity-Based SL Viewer -- Test Client Available in 2 Weeks!

Well this is exciting -- the first video preview of Crystal Frost, the upcoming third party viewer for Second Life that runs in Unity. Created by SLer and longtime developer Berry Bunny (Kallisti#2038 on Discord), the frame rate is a bit slow, but the graphic enhancements are pretty clear. And yes, the wandering cube is the avatar.

"Rendering avatars requires decoding rigging data from meshes," Kallisti tells me, "and I currently have not looked into how to do that just yet."

She tells me a playable version will be available "in a couple of weeks tops", first for people who are members of her Patreon.

Bonnie Bots Are Basically the Chinese Gov't Spy Balloons of Second Life

I am still waiting on an announcement update from the developers of Bonnie Bots, the highly controversial project that collects and publishes publicly accessible Second Life user data on the web. In the meantime, I've been wondering how to quantify all the controversy over Bonnie Bots, when other data collecting bots have garnered far less outrage. 

And then the Chinese Communist Party were caught floating a spy balloon over US soil.

Causing much of the American public to collectively freak out. And that reaction also seemed out of whack, because whatever data the balloon gets is a relatively minor form of surveillance, against far more pervasive and intrusive projects that generate way less outrage. (Hello, TikTok.)

But this exchange between KCRW's Madeline Brand and New York Times security expert David Sanger explained why the reaction is so different:

Madeline Brand
And so the fact that we can see [the balloon], we get all outraged over it. But as you say, this kind of surveillance and scooping up of personal data and all sorts of technological spying has been going on between our two countries and other countries. Of course, Russia comes to mind and. And yet, this balloon story has really had sticking power.

David Sanger
Because you could see it and because it's a physical intrusion on our sovereignty, and people react to a physical intrusion of our sovereignty more than they react to a cyber intrusion on our sovereignty.

Emphasis mine. Because, yes: The Bonnie Bots are basically acting like CCP spy balloons hovering over the virtual world of Second Life.

Bonnie Bots' spokesperson Skyler Pancake agrees with that analogy:

Get Well Soon & Happy Valentine's to Flickr Columnist Cajsa Lilliehook!

Image via Casja's Flickr

Hope readers join me in wishing Happy Valentine's and best wishes for a quick recover to Cajsa Lilliehook, New World Notes' indispensable columnist covering the best of virtual world imagery. She's currently home, resting and recovering* from a successful surgery last week, and hopefully will be back to writing Cajsa's Choices soon.

Meantime, here's some recent-ish romantic imagery posts from Cajsa to enjoy for the holiday:

ChatGPT Tries to Write Bios of Second Life Avatars, Mistakes One for a Character in Greek Myth, Another as... Sarah Palin's Daughter

Over one billion people use a virtual world avatar of some kind. (Factoring in the half a billion+ on a metaverse platform, and the hundreds of millions who play MMOs and various multiplayer games.) Many if not most of them are such avid users, they frequently share content about their avatars (screenshots, video, blog posts, etc.) on social media. However, the people training ChatGPT and other AI text generators apparently did not get that memo.

We challenged readers to ask ChatGPT and AI Writer to write a bio of their avatar, and well, they were special:

Scylla Rhiadra got:

"In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew encountered the two similarly dangerous situations of Scylla Rhiadra and her counterpart Charybdis. Odysseus was so taken by the beautiful Scylla that he wanted to win her affections, so he requested a love potion from the witch Circe."

This it TOTALLY wrong: Odysseus should know that he doesn't need a love potion to win my affection.

Reader Mondy got, well, I don't even know what ChatGPT was going for here, but Sarah Palin somehow came creeping in:

Top 7 Posts Including: Fun With ChatGPT, Amazing Indie Projects for Unity, and Making Virtual World Screenshots Look Like Old World Paintings

• How To Make Virtual World Screenshots Look Like Old World Paintings
• Viewfinder, Which Started As A Viral Brain-Melting Game Demo, Finally Coming To Steam & PlayStation 5 With New Features, Story
• These Stunning Images Inspired By Degas' Famed Ballerina Paintings Actually Started As Second Life Screenshots
• Unity For Second Life Project Launches Discord Featuring Live Dev Streams
• Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2023年1月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan
• No, ChatGPT Can't "Write" Code. It Even Makes Up Code That Doesn't Exist.
• AI Weekend Challenge: Ask ChatGPT Or Another AI About Your Avatar

AI Weekend Challenge: Ask ChatGPT or Another AI About Your Avatar

This screencap above is not a biography of Cajsa Lilliehook, New World Notes' longtime, beloved Flickr columnist, but a sophisticated, well-funded AI sure thinks it is. It's the result Cajsa got when she asked AI Writer to create her Second Life avatar's biography, and the results are pretty hilarious and a bit insane. The entertaining part is you can kinda tell what the AI was going for -- and also see how far it went off the rails:

"When you look at the sources," as Cajsa observes, "you can figure out some of the bizarre stuff. Someone used one of my pics to illustrate a blog post." And then AI Writer pulled some information from that blog post. "I wrote an article on Dutchie (two actually) and then there was that Dress Me Up blog challenge from years ago when I challenged someone to dress like a character from Mad Men." (Someone's avatar, that is.)

Dutchie Design is a longtime sponsor of New World Notes, which might have further confused the AI. And Cajsa also documents Republicans who are sexual predators on a major political blog, using her avatar name as a pseudonymous byline.

At any rate, this is likely yet another example of AI like ChatGPT spinning out of control when it's no longer on its pre-set tracks. If the AI hasn't been trained to "understand" that individual people also own virtual world/MMO avatars that they also talk about on social media, hilarity ensues. I bet if the avatar was from the Elder Scrolls Online or another more traditional MMORPG, the AI would get even further confused!

By the way, here's what AI Writer when I asked it for the biography of my own SL avatar, "Hamlet Au": 

How to Make Virtual World Screenshots Look Like Old World Paintings

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

Now that's we've all marveled at Scylla Rhiadra's stunning tributed to Degas paintings, Scylla pulls back the curtain to explain her techniques for turning raw Second Life screenshots into an image like the one she created above.  (Original here on her Flickr.) While these images include multiple avatars, they are actually all her:

My basic process is to start with a composition that is, most often, comprised of multiple figures – because part of what I want to capture is the relationship between the young dancers, which must have been simultaneously close and supportive, yet also fiercely competitive. Rather than using a small army of alts or friends, all of these figures employ my own avatar, and the images are produced by a composite of multiple shots of each. I take separate depth maps for each, as well as supplementary shots to deal with things like clothing glitches and subtle lighting effects.

“The Dancer VII: Les coulisses” (above) includes six figures, and was composed of nearly 20 different shots merged or worked together in different ways. (Interestingly, Degas began his own training as a painter by producing paintings from photographs, and he remained interested in photography throughout his life.)

Next comes post-processing in Photoshop and running it through a free Adobe app:

 

Viewfinder, Which Started as a Viral Brain-Melting Game Demo, Finally Coming to Steam & PlayStation 5 With New Features, Story

Remember Viewfinder, that utterly cerebellum-frying Unity demo from 2020 by game design student Matt Stark? I'm psyched to say it's finally becoming a full-fledged game, available soon for PlayStation and Steam. (In fact, here's the fully built-out Steam page.)

Viewfinder is for everyone who played the Portal games and said, "Yeah that was fun but it doesn't make my brain mushy and hurty enough." Basically it puts you in an interactive world where you take a "Polaroid photo" of the surroundings -- and once taken, the photo becomes its own little interactive, manipulable, physics-enabled world.

Probably best to just watch the trailer above, to see what I mean. (And read below for how this was done technically.)

Since getting picked up by indie publisher Thunderful (which also put out the seriously fun title Steamworld Heist, among other hits), Matt tells me that he his team have added quite a bit to that already stellar gameplay mechanic:

These Stunning Images Inspired by Degas' Famed Ballerina Paintings Actually Started as Second Life Screenshots

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

I saw Scylla Rhiadra’s stunning "The Dancer VII: Les coulisses" and immediately recognized it as an homage to Edgar Degas and his series of paintings of dancers. Scylla doesn’t just focus on the same subject matter, she captures his use of light. (I have written about her facility with light in 2020 and 2021.) 

She has a fascination with light and shadow that reflects Degas' own. I love how she makes her work seem like a painting you could find at The Louvre. I asked her about her project and about how she creates her painterly effect. Her answer was so well done, I decided to just turn the rest of the column over to her and get out of the way:

I enjoy dancing, in both RL and SL (I’m better at it in the latter), and I have produced more than a few images on the subject, but I also like the way that dance, and most supremely ballet, transforms the human body into kinetic art comprised of shapes in motion, without losing the "human" that is defined by that body. It is also sometimes one of the more complicated and interesting ways through which we connect with one another, whether it is through a choreographed dance performed together, or expressed more intimately through romantic or sexually-charged couples dancing.

For the rest of Scylla’s story, click on:

Unity for Second Life Project Launches Discord Featuring Live Dev Streams - Starting Today at Noon PT!

Click here to join the Discord server for Crystal Frost, the Second Life viewer on Unity project I blogged last week and the brainchild of longtime dev Berry Bunny (Kallisti#2038 on Discord). Starting today at Noon PT, Bunny's going to livestream her development of Crystal Frost there, an eventually announce the release of a usable client:

"I will be posting screenshot highlights to the public areas of the Discord after I finish each coding session," she tells me. "Basically the Discord will have daily updates and screenshots Mondays through Thursday, and once I get a somewhat usable client going (even if it's not ready to replace other viewers), which I hope to do by the end of the month, I'll be posting weekly binaries."

She also launched an optional Patreon for the project:

 

Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2023年1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.

 

 

No, ChatGPT Can't "Write" Code. It Even Makes Up Code That Doesn't Exist.

Fun comment from reader Ravelli Ormstein, spinning off from my post about how full of fail ChatGPT is when you ask it a question you're an expert on:

First, I asked ChatGPT to write a LSL script that would turn on a light when the sun went down. It wrote a nice script, but it didn't work because the AI was using an LSL function that didn't exist. So I complained about it. The AI apologized and fixed the script by using another non-existent function.

This went on until I specifically asked for a script that only used existing functions. The script was usable and in the style we usually write them, with a 300 second timer. The AI kept apologizing for making mistakes until I asked it never to apologize again.

This is an important point, because I've seen some people claim that ChatGPT can write Second Life apps in Linden Script Language (or for that matter, any coding language). No.

Very roughly analogized, ChatGPT is like a natural language version of Google search. So if you ask ChatGPT to write a working script that happens to already exist in its massive database, you may sometimes get lucky with an actual useful response. Otherwise, you'll only get an answer that's most probabilistically coded to appear like a useful response -- in other words, the AI version of Making Shit Up. 

Anyway, more fun from Ravelli with ChatGPT, with a plot twist:

Top 5 Posts Including: Metaverse Competitors Slow Meta Quest Growth, a Unity Viewer Project for Second Life & Richard Bartle Tries Telling Basic Virtual World Concepts to a Web3 Crowd

• Why Bonnie Bots Attract Backlash Across Second Life, While Grid Survey Bots Do Not: Tyche's Take
• Richard Bartle, Top Virtual World Expert, Tries Explaining Core Problems With NFT & Blockchain At A Crypto Conference. It Does Not Go Well.
• BREAKING: Veteran Developer Creating New Second Life Viewer... For Unity!
• Meta's Quest 2 Price Increase Due To Competition By Rec Room & VRChat, Contributes To Slow Install Base Growth
• Bonnie Bots Update: Avatar Search Function Removed From Website After Discussion With Linden Lab; Expect More Updates Soon

Bonnie Bots Update: Avatar Search Function Removed from Website After Discussion With Linden Lab; Expect More Updates Soon

Here's the latest update to Bonnie Bots, the data-hoovering bots which collect publicly available Second Life user information and publish it to the web:

The website no longer has the Avatar Search function, a feature which caused the most controversy and contention among the SL community.

This removal comes after the Bonnie Bots team had yet another conversation with Linden Lab. However, this reportedly wasn't done due to any policy violation:

"Linden Lab has never required us to make any changes to the website," as spokesperson Skyler Pancake tells me. "Suggestions have been made by Linden Lab which have provided additional insight, but any changes made have been decided by our team internally."

This is hardly the last word in this saga, however. In response to the user protest, Linden Lab just posted (a few hours ago) an update on the official blog:

Meta's Quest 2 Price Increase Due to Competition by Rec Room & VRChat, Contributes to Slow Install Base Growth

Meta's Q4 2022 earnings report was earlier this week, with revenue from Reality Labs, its XR/metaverse division, bringing in $727 million -- down from $877 million in Q4 2021.

So now it's time to play everyone's favorite guesstimating game: How many Quest 2's were sold, and what's the total install base?

Assuming that $727M is mostly from Quest 2 sales (now at $399), that comes out to about 1,800,000 units. That's the high end. Factoring in revenue from app sales etc., let's call that 1.5 to 1.8 million Quest 2 units sold during the Q4 2022 holiday season. 

That's quite a dip in sales! When it sold at $299 over the 2021 holidays, it sold around 2.9 million units (give or take). I'm not surprised, though; increasing the MSRP on an appliance even though it hasn't fundamentally improved is, well, bonkers.

Now let's look at the total Quest 2 install base:

BREAKING: Veteran Developer Creating New Second Life Viewer... for Unity!

Above: "Vastly more realistic lighting. This is a sunset in Crystal Frost."

SLer Berry Bunny (Kallisti#2038 on Discord) is a longtime developer who's been working on various Second Life projects for well over 15 years. Along with some impressive in-world games, she's done mixed reality projects for Italia Telecom and a nursing school experimenting with Second Life as a distance learning tool, among others.

Her new project, however, is somewhat more ambitious:

Crystal Frost, a new third party Second Life viewer that runs on Unity.

Yes, that means Crystal Frost should (eventually) work on mobile, displaying Second Life on a smartphone. 

If she succeeds, Crystal Frost would also offer a substantial leap in graphics quality for Second Life. (See the images in this post, courtesy Bunny, including the comparison with Firestorm below.) But Bunny has even greater ambitions than better graphics:

"Having a modern graphics engine that's multi-threaded, easier modability, implementing ray tracing and proper VR is super easy," as she explains. "I have ideas about how to implement VR and make it feel like VRChat. But I need to make the client stable and get rigged meshes working before I even attempt it. Also, theoretically better performance than the Linden Lab-based viewers, if I do it right." 

VRChat is actually a large part of her motivation for taking on this project: "'[I'm] wanting to see SL become better, and wishing that VRChat had something comparable to SL's robust inventory and modular avatar system." (And also she's bored and wants a fun challenge.)

Above right is a pic via Bunny showing off another feature: "Local light support, translating SL's old school lights to real world physically based material type lights, specified by lumens, via Unity's HD Rendering pipeline." 

How is this even possible, and what does Bunny need to get this project hopping along faster? (Sorry.) Read on:

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Beautifully Challenging Images by Alias Amethyst

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

Hellhound is one of those artists that I value because they force me to stretch the boundaries of my aesthetics. At first glance, Alias Amethyst is is not the sort of picture I “like.” But then what is liking? It’s such a tepid emotion. This artist wants to provoke, not to be liked. I’m guessing but I think this artist wants their pictures to be loved or hated, but nothing so passionless as liked. Is like even part of the Goth sensibility?  Of course, they wrote “I hope you like it.” So what do I know? 

Since this picture is demanding so much from me, asking me to think beyond the surface, one truly wild idea came to mind. The braces with their vulpine made me think of kintsugi, the art of repairing pottery with gold, making a pot that was broken and repaired more beautiful and valuable than a new pot. Ostensibly, braces are to remediate problems with the teeth, but these braces add those incisors, creating a kind of beauty in the repair. It’s a thought. 

For more pics that challenge my aesthetic, click here:

Richard Bartle, Top Virtual World Expert, Tries Explaining Core Problems With NFT & Blockchain at a Crypto Conference. It Does Not Go Well.

 

Richard Bartle, the game industry's most respected expert on virtual worlds and the virtual economies in them, was recently invited to speak at a UK cryptocurrency conference about the immense challenges of integrating NFTs and blockchain into a virtual world (to put it diplomatically). He recently posted on social media what happened next, and with permission, I'm republished it here.   

 

 

I was in London yesterday evening to sit on a panel for an informal group called the Crypto Circle. The members are all people who are interested in crypto-currencies, mainly on the investment side (seed fund investors, hedge fund managers, regulatory bodies, banks) but also including tools creators and commentators.

 

The reason I was on the panel was because of the conflation of blockchain, web3 and metaverse concepts. People seemed to be of the opinion that blockchain tech would be a boon for gamers and that this would extend to the metaverse as a whole. I was invited merely to explain why it wasn't all quite as blissfully rosy as they perhaps thought it was.

 

In the end, the panel didn't get much to say; members of the audience started asking each other questions.

 

I did explain some of the issues arising from the use of NFTs and play-to-earn for games, but people either ignored them, brushed them aside or doubled down on them.

 

Delightful Second Life Photos Depict the Virtual World from a Bird's Eye View

 

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

 

Erika Xaron fooled me with this photo. My first thought on seeing it was Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire.” I found myself singing sotto voce, “Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free.”

 

But this is not one bird, it’s many. And they have company. Look closely, that’s no cuckoo in the nest. What is truly delightful is that she has taken pics with friends before, as in “We used to be friends” and “My Friends.”

 

 

For more wild looks at the world, click here:

 

Why Bonnie Bots Attract Backlash Across Second Life, While Grid Survey Bots Do Not: Tyche's Take

Pictured: Tyche with one of her data-collecting bots

As we watch the controversy over Bonnie Bots roil in angry comments across the Second Life media ecosystem, I've been curious about a mysterious discrepancy:

Grid Survey has been using bots to collect and display Second Life sim and user data for well over 10 years. Run by Tyche Shepherd, it's attracted very little controversy among the community; indeed, many SLers eagerly await her regularly summation of the latest data on community forums.

Why so much appreciation for Grid Survey, and so much outrage over Bonnie Bots?

"I think its a matter of perceptions," Tyche tells me. "From very early on when I started the project, I realized there was a lot more data I could collect including avatar information, but I really didn't want to collect things which were not required for the main task, which in my case, was measuring and monitoring the size of the grid."

Another reason might be that the Bonnie Bots don't look like "bots", and from a distance, look like a standard fashionista avatar. That's led some to fear that Bonnie is an alt "spying" on them.

"Ah an Uncanny Valley hypothesis," Tyche says, when I suggest this idea. "It's probably more the frequency of visiting -- I'm sure a lot of observations are just records in Visitor Lists."

That's another big difference -- Bonnie Bot visits are seriously incessant, compared to Tyche's bots:

 

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Picturing the Virtual World From a Unique Perspective

 

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

 

Ice Rock demonstrates that where you are shooting from is as important as what you are shooting at when taking a picture. 

 

Take  “The Lighthouse”. By shooting low, the moon seems even bigger. I love how the lighthouse light crosses into the night, dividing the picture into three separate horizontal lines, it’s amazing. He also chose Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” as your soundtrack for your visit to B Sori. 

 

And here is your rowboat link to B Sori.

 

For more looking at the world from a different angle, click here:

 

Top 6 Posts Last Week Including: Metaverse Platform Hiring Boom, Exposing ChatGPT's Parlor Trick & Data-Gathering Bots Roil Second Life

 

• Bonnie Bots, Explained: Team Behind Controversial Second Life Data Tracker Respond To Feedback, Also Notes: We're Hardly The Only Ones Collecting Public Avatar Data

 

• I Thought ChatGPT Was Impressive. But Then Someone Asked ChatGPT About A Topic I've Written Two Books On.

 

• We Love These Second Life Images Inspired By Photographer Herb Ritts, Filmmaker John Waters & A Hipster Norman Rockwell

 

• BREAKING: Bonnie Bots Team Meets With Linden Lab, Promises Opt-Out & Masking Features For Second Life Users

 

• Despite Widespread Tech Layoffs, Metaverse Platforms Currently Have 800+ Job Openings

 

• You'll Never Believe How This Incredibly Detailed Second Life Image Was Shot

Bonnie Bots, Explained: Team Behind Controversial Second Life Data Tracker Respond to Feedback, Also Notes: We're Hardly the Only Ones Collecting Public Avatar Data

Last night I teleported to a cozy patio with a firepit on a tiny asteroid to talk with the team of Bonnie Bots, the little Second Life user data website causing enormous controversy across the Second Life community. Since the imbroglio flared up, they have updated the site's homepage with this disclosure:

 

Information about Second Life should be freely accessible by all. We intend to make previously obscured information available to all residents, enable open use of the information, and expand available toolsets to further content creation.  All information collected and made available is publicly accessible and is not, and never will be, utilized for any monetary gain. We support individual privacy and will never attempt to obtain information not contained within or relevant to Second Life.

 

"We understand there are people upset about us releasing our data publicly," as team spokesperson Skyler Pancake explains. "However, people need to understand there are individuals and groups collecting this data secretly. Anyone with a little effort can easily collect this information and include it in seemingly harmless objects. The concern shouldn't be over us releasing this information publicly but who else is privately maintaining such databases and not informing anyone."

 

As the team and I chatted on the asteroid, one of the Bonnie Bots itself primly sat in silence. They warned me to take a picture of her quickly, because she was programmed to go back on her rounds across the Second Life grid soon.

 

While the Bonnie Bots team has bore the brunt of this controversy, they wanted to make it clear that they are hardly the only people collecting data on Second Life users -- and how much is already publicly accessible for people to collect off them:

 

 

Visit TraveLover SL to Find Fun Places to Visit in Second Life

 

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

 

Recently a reader commented that she wished to see a travel blog. I thought that was a great idea and thought of TraveLover SL whose most recent post is Trekking Over the Amazing Amazon. TraveLover SL is an adventure blog by Nesca Fey [Feyonce.Resident.] Her posts are well-imagined travel adventures.

 

The Amazon has twelve sims to move about in. According to Nesca, this is the place to feel like the Tomb Raider. It sounds like great fun, you get a HUD at the beginning if you want to do the adventure but you are free to wander independently and take pictures. Her post is sprinkled with facts about the Amazon, the real place. 

 

Your helicopter dropoff to the Amazon River.

 

For more adventure, click here:

I Thought ChatGPT Was Impressive. But Then Someone Asked ChatGPT About a Topic I've Written Two Books On.

 

ChatGPT continues to generate incredible hype, buzz around Silicon Valley, and grand pronouncements that its soon going to replace writers and teachers, even accountants and lawyers.

 

But before you believe any of that, here's a simple test to try:

 

Ask ChatGPT about a specific subject that you know very well. And take a close look at the results.

 

I thought about that when Redditor "FLAPJACKU" asked ChatGPT a simple question: "What can Second Life do to improve its systems?"

 

The answer (see above) reminds me of that famous story about the amazing harpsichord-playing robot from the 19th century: