New video from SeraCast to watch over the weekend: "This week's highlights are a massive giveaway for early access to a the huge Legacy Spring Fair and a further contest for winning Legacy bodies coming on Sunday," Del tells me. "We also discuss the new SL University and Del has a conspiracy theory on an expected ramping up of new residents and the onboarding of them." They also discuss my posts about coming regulation to metaverse platforms, and the saving of the Tempura sim.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Pretty Things, Nice Life is a striking decor and fashion blog by Victoria K. James. I really like her most recent post Crane & Koi which she admits is a much more saturated color than her usual. I love that tub and the birds!
"Yeah," I said. "Jon Stewart even did a segment about it on The Daily Show."
"Really?"
Yes really and you can watch it here. (Note to Comedy Central: Did you forget to enable embed settings?) Jon Stewart even had an embedded reporter in Second Life: Rob Riggle as the bodacious avatar Beowulf Porpoiseburg.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Kia Kiyori hitchhikes through Second Life, snapping what she see. This untitled picture captures another sign of spring, baby animals. In this case, she snapped some baby pigs who are intently checking out a robin. Pigs are among the smartest animals, smarter than dogs and make fine pets. They sure are cute as piglets. I love how Kia used depth of field, sharpening the focus on the bird they are watching. I also love the way she gives the SLurl if you want to visit yourself: “Hitchhiker's Guide to Nelipot”
Just got this pretty amazing breaking news note from Shawn Whiting, Head of Influencers & Partners at Rec Room:
"Shortly after the holidays, Rec Room crested 3 million VR monthly active users... A majority of those VR monthly active users are Quest 2. [Emph mine - WJA]
"We're very happy with the VR growth but at this point VR is a pretty low percentage of our monthly players. Rec Room is seeing much more growth on iOS, Android, PlayStation, and Xbox due to there being billions of those devices out there collectively."
So that's something! Last December I estimated Rec Room had 4-5 million monthly active users across all devices, but based on Shawn's wording, total Rec Room numbers is likely to be well over 10-12 million MAU.
This is quite an impressive milestone for metaverse platform growth -- and more key, for usage of the Quest 2 headset on metaverse platforms. Quest 2 has an install base over 10 million, so at least 15% of that (i.e. 1.5 million) are active on Rec Room.
With so much online conversation over hat's a fair revenue split between a metaverse platform and content creators on it -- thanks to Meta and its just-announced 47.5% cut for Horizon -- I'm curious what the share is for Second Life. It can be as little as the L$ cash-out processing fee, or as much as monthly tier to rent a whole private island (or several).
Two survey questions below. (Use a desktop/laptop for best performance.)
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Koe’s “Spring” captures the joy of sitting yourself down in a field of flowers in the spring. The air is fresh, the sun is warm but not hot. This is a picture of mimosa flowers, though, and I think they grow on trees, This picture actually makes me think of goldenrod, an infamous allergen that tortures many people in the spring. Luckily, not me.
As part of Meta's Horizon monetization announcement, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had an in-world chat/demo with several community creators (watch below). And before I get too ranty, let me start by saying that's a smart and good thing! If you want to foster a positive and thriving metaverse platform community, you definitely want to show the community that their creativity is highly valued, even and especially by those at the very top of the company.
So that's a small but solid step in the right direction.
That said, around 6 minutes in, while talking about Horizon's collaborative creation features, Zuckerberg says something so jaw-dropping I had to watch it several times to make sure I heard it right.
One of the things that we're trying to do differently is the whole co-developing experience and the fact that everything you're building is in Horizon itself... it really is just different from all the other experiences out there. [Emph mine - WJA]
Maybe I'm missing some context, but it's difficult to conceive of a context where this statement is accurate. In-world, collaborative creation has existed in virtual world/metaverse platforms for at least 20 years. Actually more like 22 years, because this was a core feature of Second Life when it was still an alpha demo called Linden World. Like some guy wrote:
As Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka spoke to their financial backers, a projector displayed a live video feed of Linden World, projected on the wall. Other Linden staffers were in-world, running a demonstration that the investors could watch. A few of them were using the building tools the staff used to create content. And as it went on, the investor’s eyes drifted away from the meeting, and to the screen... This, everyone realized, was what made their world unique.
Later on, Minecraft and other platforms launched with similar functionality.
But surely Zuck knows all this. So maybe he's just referring to in-world collaborative creation in social VR. If so, he'd be on slightly safer ground. But there are other metaverse platforms which already have this feature -- including platforms compatible with the Quest in the Quest app store.
Here's what collaborative creation in VR looked like in Rec Room three years ago:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Myra Wildmist has a photographic obsession with observing her avatar from a distance that I find lovely and compelling. “The Passage” is one of my favorites, a glorious picture of her walking out of a tunnel or cave. She is not completely silhouetted, there is just this touch of light on her shoulder. I love how the darkness of the stone creates this frame for her. It’s simply wonderful. She seems to be seeing herself through the eyes of a voyeur.
Meta, a latecomer to metaverse platform development, just announced the launch of a marketplace for user creators in Horizon Worlds, and you can see the potential problems right in the immediate details:
[A] “handful” of Horizon creators will be able to sell virtual items and effects in the worlds they create for others to explore. The idea is that creators can sell everything from access to a VIP section of their world to virtual items like jewelry or a special basketball, according to Meaghan Fitzgerald, the product marketing director for Horizon...
Meta will be taking a cut of what creators sell, though exactly what that take can be is a bit complex. For Horizon purchases, Meta is taking a 25 percent cut of the percentage that’s left after a platform fee. For platforms with a 30 percent fee, like Meta’s own Quest Store for VR titles, the creator will be left with a little over half of the sale price (the math there being that Meta is taking 25 percent of 70 percent).
Emphasis mine, as it bears emphasis. It's good that Meta is giving (some) users access to monetization -- by definition, a core feature to a metaverse platform -- but this initial roll-out comes with some obvious challenges:
In real life, unlike in SL, cities do not exist within a vacuum. They rely on state and federal funding as well as local taxes and other things such as Occupational License fees (OLF) and other financial endeavors to survive. They also depend on regional and federal agencies and entities to do things such as maintain the power grid, build and maintain roads, establish and regulate infrastructure. To run a city in Second Life is a wholly independent endeavor, which is offered little to no support by Linden Lab. Now, some will point to the SL Region Preservation Society, or SLRPS, but the reality is that SLRPS does not support infrastructure in Second Life in any capacity outside of the protection of historically important properties.
Here's the latest episode of Seracast, the fun and chatty YouTube vlogcast hosted by Del and Kess, co-founders of Seraphim SL. The top highlight is announcing that June 18 is the date of SeraPride, the LGBT+ fundraising extravaganza to benefit Rainbow Railroad. (New World Notes will also be part of that event, more details soon.)
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Tea Break is a delightful post at Kurimu-Kuma, an adorable blog with great decor pics as well as fashion. Created by the bear-obsessed Kuma, cuteness abounds everywhere you look. This post featured a lot of items from the event Bloom that ended April 2nd, so items should be showing up in the stores soon, if not already. It caught my eye because I have had to reduce my caffeine intake thanks to some health issues and am exploring herbal teas. I am a bit obsessed with the shelf on the left. Of course, what I really want is that cutting board with the grapefruit.
We would like to inform you, that after our decision to close Tempura, we were contacted by Linden Lab and made the decision to accept maintenance of our region by joining The Second Life Region Preservation Society provided by Linden Lab.
We have received so many messages from SL residents about closing Tempura and we are very happy that it will exist still.
Please enjoy Tempura sim as you have been in all these years. We would like to express our gratitude to Linden Lab who recognized and decided to keep Tempura as part of Second Life existence. Thank you everyone who loves Tempura!
- Kikunosuke Eel/Tempura Island Team
P.S. Special Thanks to Mr. Wagner James Au for his support
This restoral happens two weeks after the blog reported its imminent departure, which strongly suggests the Linden team scrambled to save it after its departure. Last week I had suggested this might happen, while warning that there's a flip side to preservation:
Even when Linden Lab takes a sim over, that doesn't mean what's meaningful about it will continue on. An active user community, first and foremost, brings meaning to the virtual world.
Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts), who chairs the subcommittee, seems to have a surprisingly solid understanding of virtual worlds. He described virtual worlds as a “glimpse into future [and] a window into current reality for millions of people.” He noted that “at their best, virtual worlds are vehicles for understanding across boarders and in communities.” The concerns he listed were also on point: consumer protection, intellectual property protection, online banking, gambling, and child protection.
Most of those concerns are still concerning, and yet to be adequately addressed!
Philip's appearance was a friendly fact-finding one, but that was when metaverse platforms like Second Life only had hundreds of thousands of active users. Now they're used by nearly half a billion people, the plurality of whom are minors in the United States. (And in the US, minors enjoy a special legally protected status.) So the next time subpoenas start flying, CEOs should expect the questions they get from Congress to be much more pointed.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Call Me Kiss shot this charming “Imagine Few Fences.” She includes a link to the sime [teleport here] so you can find it yourself. She shot it without and with a fence without any post-effects through Firestorm, using the Depth of Field option.
In the weeks since my interview in The Atlantic, officials/staffers with at least two major world power governments have reached out to me, asking for advice as to how they might regulate metaverse platforms. I won't name them specifically, beyond saying that they're from member nations of the EU/NATO, and that this is in addition tothe EU Commission looking into metaverse regulation announced recently.
In fact, I just had a very off-the-record chat with one of these government research groups yesterday, and was impressed by the level of knowledge they already had about metaverse platforms and their underlying technology, most especially VR headsets.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying: Government regulation is coming. So if you're a metaverse developer -- or for that matter, create and sell content on metaverse platforms -- you should anticipate that legislation directly targeting you will soon be up for serious consideration.
And unlike with social media platforms and the Internet giants of the last decade, which gained unsustainable reach and power long before governments could catch up, metaverse regulators have something of a head start.
This shouldn't be too much of a surprise, when (for example) 40% of United States Congress members are Gen X or Gen Y -- i.e., people who grew up with games and online virtual worlds, and are often personal users of them. (As just one notable example, AOC is not only a gamer but uses platforms like Twitch as part of her political outreach.)
What kind of regulation should we expect? If a metaverse developer asked me that, I'd be tempted to say, "C'mon, you should already know what they're concerned about."
That aside, here's at least some of the topics I'm pretty sure (or know for a fact) that government bodies are looking into now, framed in terms of five starting questions*:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Neah Westfall’s stream is full of gorgeous photos. While most of her imagery are beautiful landscapes or snaps of small details in the landscape, she occasionally shoots pics of herself such as this beautiful ballet photo. “Dream Dancer” (above) is lovely and cropped close and off-center so it’s so much more interesting than a full shot.
Click here to apply as a booth participant at Hair Fair, the annual SL community fundraiser event that sells amazing virtual hair styles for avatars, with a portion of all sales donated to Wigs for Kids, a non-profit that creates real wigs for children experiencing hair loss due to chemotherapy, alopecia, and other issues. Launched in 2006, the annual event led by Sasy Scarborough is attended by a large percentage of the Second Life community, and has converted L$ sales into USD cash donations approaching $100,000.
Sasy tells me that roughly 50,000 SLers -- about 1 in 10 of the active user base! -- attend every year, with most of the donations made through hair sales. A labor of love run by her and her partner Mel Vanbeeck (pictured here), Sasy tells me it's the stories that attendees and donors tell her, which make it most meaningful.
"[T]hey often share something that happened to them, a family member or a friend, and I cry and then I share with my team and then I cry more," she tells me. "People stop me during the event and share information and how much it means to them that we do it, or that they also donate their hair to Wigs for Kids, or are going to now that they know about it from the event."
She and co-managers Vanbeeck and Whimsy Winx, are also in contact with the real life non-profit during the event: "[T]hey are so happy about what we do and genuinely think that Second Life and what it is and how it functions is amazing and over the years have even come in [the virtual world] to see the builds and the event, which is just awesome."
The booth application is here, with a deadline of April 24. As an inspiration lewk book for 2022's event, here's some favorites New World Notes has featured over the last 15+ years:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Kunisaki Izumo is a fascinating SL avatar and about as meta as they come. Based on the manga character of the same name, our Kunisaki imagines himself all grown up and running a kabuki theater company on Izumo island. Just as men played women’s roles in Shakespeare’s time, onnagata are men playing the female role. Kunisaki is an onnagata actor. This is a picture of Kunisaki playing Sagi Masume, the Heron Maiden. [For a guide to the kabuki play Sagi Masume: click here] I love that it is a blue/black duotone. It’s very dramatic. Kunisaki created an album from his theater’s performance. [Click here for album.]
Tempura, the popular and much-loved Second Life island, is now gone from the grid, with only screenshots and video to remember it by, another victim of SL's high monthly server maintenance fees. As when any other beloved virtual place meets a digital death like this, community members post well-meaning if belated ideas on how to save it:
Could these amazing regions be resurrected in OpenSim (Kitely)? Seems such a shame to lose them altogether. -- Kaylee West
Hypergrid and OpenSims are using SL's open source software and are in most cases entirely free. SL has the largest infrastructure but its been killing creativity and beauty in the name of profit for over a decade. Tempura can exist at no cost or $5 a month really. -- Domino Effect
OpenSim definitely is an option! The first challenge there is, the original owner/creator would have to expedite that process, and be prepared to see their works "ripped" and copied by others for uses in other worlds -- content theft in OpenSim remains an ongoing problem. The other challenge is that OpenSim continues to have a small active userbase, with the top 10 OS grids attracting fewer than 20,000 active users. (Active users in the aforementioned Kitely: Fewer than 1300.) An OpenSim version of Tempura may not attract enough regular visitors to justify even a $5/month fee, especially when you add on the (presumably free) community management time.
Another option, as longtime SLer Saffia Widdershins writes, is plead for patronage from Linden Lab:
OpenSim definitely is an option! The first challenge there is, the original owner/creator would have to expedite that process, and be prepared to see their works "ripped" and copied by others for uses in other worlds -- content theft in OpenSim remains an ongoing problem. The other challenge is that OpenSim continues to have a small active userbase, with the top 10 OS grids attracting fewer than 20,000 active users. (Active users in the aforementioned Kitely: Fewer than 1300.) An OpenSim version of Tempura may not attract enough regular visitors to justify even a $5/month fee, especially when you add on the (presumably free) community management time.
Another option, as longtime SLer Saffia Widdershins writes, is plead for patronage from Linden Lab: