New World Notes

SL Special: Buy Summer Home Furnishing Bundles from Dutchie -- And Support Dutchie During a Difficult Real Life Health Crisis!

The Dutchie Spa Bundle is a special discount Summer offer from the beloved creator of SL furnishings, one of many bundles that Dutchie owner Froukje Hoorenbeek is offering now. (Many more below.) She's offering these as she's going through a real life health crisis that will take her away from SL content creation for awhile:

"What I have is two fractured vertebrae," she tells me, "and the operation is being done by a neurosurgeon and an orthopedic surgeon together. They are gonna put cages and screws in to fixate my spine and it's gonna take at least 4 hours for them. Afterward, I will not be able to work for at least 3 months, they tell me. Sitting will be hard to do during that time.

"We have pretty good health care in the Netherlands and I have insurance, so the operating costs are covered. The three months of recovery afterward are not."

So she is expanding her Marketplace offerings now ("as much as the pain allows me") as she prepares for her operation, and the long stretch afterward. Dutchie, a sometime sponsoring supporter of New World Notes (though not at the moment) is a longtime and much-admired SL brand, so if you are in the market for great virtual home furnishings, I hope you consider shopping on her store.

More Dutchie bundles below, and all my best for a speedy Dutchy recovery!

I Love Tim Sweeney's Vision for the Metaverse -- But Don't Get How Apple & Google Are Such a Threat to It

As a good compare and contrast with Meta's questionable vision for the Metaverse, here's a long weekend read -- a Financial Times Q&A with Epic Games' Tim Sweeney. Who might disagree, but I totally think this is his nice way of saying "WTF is Meta even thinking?":

[Meta's vision is] in many ways broader than Epic’s. We see this as a central entertainment medium, and they see this as a medium that will connect everybody across distances for any purpose including work, and just hanging out chatting. And they talk a lot about open platform principles: they’re not building a Meta walled garden, they’re trying to contribute to standards and practices that lead towards an open metaverse. And I really like that vision that they’ve articulated. On the other hand, there’s all their actual existing business practices and all their actual existing businesses, where they run ads associated with your content feed and don’t revenue share that with the creators of the content that drove the engagement. And there is an ad economy that is completely controlled by them, which is not an open ad economy and has all the manifestations of an entirely closed ecosystem.

Wait, Mark said we're going to go into the Metaverse to do office work... right?

I’m not sure if that vision actually works, because it’s not very fun to sit around in 3D and just talk to people. It gets really awkward really fast. A bunch of guys can’t get together and just sit in a room for hours and have a conversation, right? You have to be shooting darts or playing billiards or shooting hoops or doing something together to break up the dull moments and keep you entertained for a long period of time. And that’s what this medium does. I think if you strip the entertainment aspect from it, you end up with a super creepy version of America Online chat rooms!

I might go a step further and suggest playing with building blocks while in the meeting, as a kind of focus-creating 3D doodler, like Sine Wave does in Breakroom. But yes, if it's not inherently fun, I doubt it will scale.

My one question (and hopefully I'll get to ask Sweeney myself sometime), is why so much concern over Apple and Google controlling the Metaverse? Here's Tim's case:

Cajsa's Choices: SL Fashion for Friday from Carley Benazzi

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

Carley Benazzi is a blogger whose self-named blog is rich with pictures, but not cluttered with unnecessary bells and whistles. It’s very clean with huge photos and different shots of the outfit. I love how her hair and the outfit go together. 

• HAIR |  Yomi  – Tenshi  Hair – [email protected]The Warehouse Sale
• DRESS | ISON – aryana cutout dress

For more great style, click here:

"What's She Wearing" Tool Displays Fashion Credits of Nearby SL Avatars. But Beware Avatar Fashionista Drama!

My post on Strawberry Singh's tips for listing SL avatar fashion credits was the most shared on Facebook last week, so in service to the people, here's a similar tool but in a heads-up display, available for free in the Marketplace: The What is She Wearing HUD.

Strawberry herself shot a tutorial for it in back 2016 (watch above). Since then, however, she's observed some social dynamics around the HUD. Which is a fancy way of saying Drama:

Fun Web Tool Turns Virtual World Screenshots Into Classic Paintings, Including Frame & Visible Brushstrokes

わー。これは、楽しい(*´▽｀*)#SecondLife #sljp #Dinkieチャレンジ https://t.co/PwysGxa5nG pic.twitter.com/D3uDiAlA33

— Sanny Yoshikawa🌻🌻🌻 (@sannysquirrel) May 10, 2022

Classic Frame is a fun image converter that our Japanese correspondent Sanny Yoshikawa was playing with recently (above), and while it was designed to turn real life photos into classic paintings (frame and all), yep, it also works just as well with virtual world images, even turning pixels into paint swathes and blotches and brush strokes.

Here's one from another Japanese SLer on Twitter:

Photos From Cica Ghost’s Charming New SL Art Installation, "Garden"

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

Isabel Hocken is adventuring around Second Life. Recently, she stopped by Cica Ghost’s new installation Garden [teleport link here] and brought back some gorgeous pictures. I love the way the big flower fills the left hand third of the picture. It forms a sort of frame. It’s an excellent picture. 

For more, click here:

Three Fundamental Flaws in Meta’s Vision for the Metaverse

There’s a new long essay on Meta’s vision for the Metaverse from Nick Clegg, formerly a UK politician and now President of Global Affairs at Meta. (He was the company’s point person when Facebook and Instagram’s many failings were brought under harsh public scrutiny.) Given his position at the social media giant, Clegg’s essay has deep insights into Meta’s vision and strategy for the Metaverse. Give it a read, we’ll be here when you come back.

There’s actually much about it that I agree with, but with Meta putting the most money into Metaverse development of any company by far, it’s more important to point out key flaws which suggest a fundamental misunderstanding of how metaverse platforms work (and don’t work).

For starters:

Assuming that immersive 3D interaction is a “logical” evolution of text, voice, and video:

Clegg writes:

We don’t communicate through written words alone, so text-based internet services would never suffice. Static images are an important part of how we communicate, as are sounds and moving images. But we interact in three dimensions. We use multiple senses, body language, spatial awareness. We signify our intention to trust one another by looking each other in the eye, smiling, or warmly shaking hands. We express our feelings towards loved ones not only by saying what we feel but by expressing it physically. We show joy, sadness or anger through nonverbal cues that are embodied and experienced rather than written down.

Advances in speed and availability of connectivity have now reached a point that begins to make many of these three-dimensional interactions possible virtually. It is therefore logical that the next step in the evolution of the internet is one that reflects this.

Note the jazz hands employed to cover that last non sequitur. While it’s true that immersive 3D interaction is now much more feasible and affordable, it does not follow that it’s by and large more desirable than video or even text. Facetime was launched for the iPhone in 2013, but 75% of Gen Z and Millennials still prefer to text. And despite its affordable price point, the slow sales of Meta’s own Quest 2 headset should undermine any confidence that immersive communication is the next inevitable step. (As opposed to a successful niche.)

More questionable assumptions:

Star Atlas Sure Seems Less Like a Metaverse Platform & More Like an MMO

Star Atlas occasionally appears on my Metaverse Radar as a virtual world to potentially follow, but this report from CoinDesk leaves me wondering if it actually is a metaverse platform at all:

... Star Atlas has two tokens that drive all game operations: POLIS and ATLAS. POLIS is the governance token with a market cap of $14 million and ATLAS is the payment token with a market cap of $18 million, according to data from CoinGecko. Players buy ships, NFT-based space vehicles used to explore deep space, from the in-house marketplace to start the game. These spaceships with different details, crews and components are critical in a player’s capability to fight rival factions and discover assets scattered across the Star Atlas metaverse...

And so on. Little or nothing is said about powerful content creation tools, which is a core feature to the Metaverse.  Star Atlas's design document also says little about that, beyond a single vague reference to "optionality to incorporate player-created content". Compare and contrast Star Atlas with Dual Universe, and the former comes up short:

Watch: What Social VR / Metaverse Platforms Can Learn About User Safety from 2D Virtual Worlds

Here's the latest talk from Linden Lab veteran Jim "Babbage" Purbrick, who applied what he learned from Second Life and other pioneering virtual worlds in his work for Eve Online and Meta, with the focus here on user safety, i.e. keeping annoyances from trolls and other bad actors in the virtual world down to a dull roar.  

These are lessons, as he tells me, "from older, 2D and text-based virtual worlds [that] are often ignored by VR developers. This talk shows how we applied those lessons to Oculus Venues.

"Technologies change, people stay the same."

This is true. One key lesson Jim and his team applied was real time responses to active harassment. (Starting at around 29 minutes in.) If a troll is scurrying about causing problems during a live event, they need to be dealt with in real time, not after abuse reports have been filed by users and processed the next day: 

Today's Flickr Pick: Wow-Worthy Virtual World Landscape Photos

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

Some pictures are just so striking all I can do is say “Wow!” and sit back and enjoy them. This is a Wow! picture. I love the layers of mountains in the background giving the picture depth and texture. I love that we can see the knots in the rope webbing. Joanna Kitten has mastered the art of Second Life landscape photography. I was wondering if this was really SL or some video game when I saw the teleport link. Yes, she makes SL look this good. [Teleport link here.]

For more stunning landscapes, click here:

Top 5 Posts Last Week: What VRChat Gets About the Metaverse That Meta Does Not -- Plus When to Say "The Metaverse" vs. "A Metaverse Platform"

• Launching In Second Life: A Massive Education Campus Bringing Together Many Projects Into A Shared Serendipitous Space
• Metaverse: "The" Or "A", Capital Or Lower Case: A Naming Convention Proposal
• Watch: Improbable Demos Hundreds Of Concurrent VOIP-Enabled Players In Close Proximity
• Watch: What VRChat Gets About The Metaverse That Meta Does Not
• SL Fashion Blog Tip: How To Export Your Avatar Outfit Details To Text

Watch: Seracast's Fun Live Stream from The Seraphim Sim

Streaming live now from the Seraphim sim (click here to teleport), here's Del and Kess bringing their inimitable zaniness to your Monday. As a bonus, they're offering a couple of fatpacks full of various Outlet items to folks who show up!

Launching This Saturday in Second Life: A Massive Education Campus Bringing Together Many Projects Into a Shared Serendipitous Space -- UPDATE: Added Teleport Links for This Weekend's Opening

UPDATE, May 20: Bumped up post for the weekend launch. Teleport to the welcome sim here. SLurls to the Eduverse sims up now are:

• Science Circle: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The%20Science%20Circle/72/129/30
• Virtech: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Virtech/127/126/31
• Community Virtual Library: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Cookie/201/212/21 
• Mayo Clinic:  http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Mayo%20Clinic/121/170/34
• Whole Brain Health:  http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Inspiration%20Island/82/100/23
• University of New Mexico (at Rockcliffe): http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Rockcliffe%20Village/48/42/23

In the first flush of general interest in the Metaverse, literally hundreds of colleges and universities opened up a virtual campus in Second Life -- up to and including Harvard -- but most of that enthusiasm has drifted away in recent years.

Starting this Saturday at 11am PT, however, a group of dedicated educators are soft launching a new Second Life-based project with the help of Linden Lab: The Virtual Worlds Education Consortium: Click here to teleport. 

Unlike that previous era, where universities each had their own isolated (and usually empty) SL campus, these educators are creating an expansive, shared campus:

"[S]o that there is always something going around, green dots on the map, people come to check something out, see something else nearby, etc.," as VWEC member George Djorgovski (a professor at Caltech), explains it to me. "This alone can help the groups already in SL, increase the collaboration and resource sharing, etc. "

 

And they have strong buy-in from Linden Lab:

Cajsa's Choices: Friday Fashion Finds for Furries of Second Life

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

Rainbow Pixelfarts’s [Hyzura Resident] blog is called “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and Twirl a Whirl caught my eye with the sheer joy it depicts. Do you remember how much fun a hula hoop is? If you forgot, this pic captures it. 

•  |Hazy Doll| (by Cynful Ghost) Blu's Neon Hooping Pose Set @ Abnormality (ends May 28th) 

For more furry fashion, click here:

Discuss: Hilarious UGC Platforms-as-Dungeons & Dragons Alignments

For group chat, peep this hilarious D&D alignment chart by Redditor u/TheTrickyDoctor. Personally I'd put Second Life into the Chaotic Neutral category, but that's just me. It was posted in Reddit's VRChat group, so assume a bias there.

And if you want the creator's summary, read on:

Nadej Dae Turns Second Life Screenshots Into Otherworldly Imagery

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

Nadej Dae’s photostream is otherworldly. “Even trees have wings” is an excellent example. It’s a shot of a tree, a magnificent tree, but still just a tree. However by making this a duotone with bold light and shadow it seems foreboding and spooky, an alien tree from another planet perhaps. 

For more eerie pics, click here:

Metaverse: "The" or "A", Capital or Lower Case: A Naming Convention Proposal

I wrote out a definition of the Metaverse recently taken directly from Snow Crash citations -- my futile attempt to address the slew of "No one knows what the Metaverse is or when it will exist!" media coverage. Now here's another abuse worth addressing that sets my avatar's teeth on edge, as recently seen in a tweet from Gartner*, a highly reputed analyst firm:

It is expected that a Metaverse will provide persistent, decentralized, collaborative and interoperable opportunities and business models that will enable organizations to extend digital business

There. Is. No. Such. Thing. As. "A" Metaverse.

Here's my own naming convention, based again on Snow Crash, and on whatever expertise on this topic I can claim:

Watch: Improbable Demos Hundreds of Concurrent VOIP-Enabled Players in Close Proximity

As promised: company Town Hall for ⁦@Improbableio⁩ with m2 tech, same as we are using for otherside. All art placeholder. Everyone can speak in game. pic.twitter.com/FX5W9XBJrB

— Herman Narula (@HermanNarula) May 12, 2022

I haven't really written about Improbable in a couple years, when the single-shard MMO infrastructure startup/developer was struggling with heavy losses. This new local concurrency demo video is impressive, especially if (as CEO Herman Narula claims), the hundreds of people in-world everyone can also use VOIP.

Last month, by the way, Improbable spun out a (wait for it!) metaverse technology network called M2:

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Foxi McCalister's Cleverly Composed Avatar Portraits

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

Foxi McCalister has a way of presenting something completely incongruous as though it is the most ordinary thing and why did no one think of it before. Take “Numb….” for example. Of course someone can walk across the keys while the piano floats in the air, where else could it float? Her skin is dirty and scratched, as though she were still three and playing in mud puddles. Combine the roughhousing dirt and scratches with the genteel elegance of the ballet shoes and you get an illustration of the athleticism behind the dancer.

For more great pics, click here:

Watch: What VRChat Gets About the Metaverse That Meta Does Not

While VRChat does not actually describe itself as a metaverse platform (yet?), it is by far the leading contender in that space. I feel like I've been writing about that little appreciated theme for at least the last couple years, but this new video from Quintin Smith (Wired, Edge, Eurogamer) of People Make Games makes that case with copious interviews and examples (several of which I've also featured here, see below) and in a far more charming accent.

His video is a great and golden respite from the deluge of putative "metaverse" stories which generally turn out to be NFT-flavored cash grabs, or just as questionable, the latest bland announcement from Meta or another corporate giants. But as Quint tells me, they are missing something key about platforms like these:

SL Fashion Blog Tip: How to Export Your Avatar Outfit Details to Text

I just remembered there is a way to save your outfit details in the Outfits menu in the viewer. I made a quick video to show. pic.twitter.com/yGzxeXvqSi

— Strawberry (@strawberrysingh) May 11, 2022

In case you missed the update from last week's post, here's Strawberry Singh's walkthrough for exporting your avatar outfit details. As she shows in the above video, there's an option for doing just that in the viewer's Outfits menu. (She's using the official viewer, but this should also work with third party viewers.)  It's a partial solution to an ongoing problem in the SL social media ecosystem: Giving proper credit to the creators of all the items in a screenshot in a way that's not tedious and time consuming.  As she mentioned in our chat, it's what almost caused Strawberry herself to give up blogging and YouTubing:

Today's Flickr Pick: Intensely Colorful Avatar Portraits by Anastazja B

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

Anastazja B. shoots gorgeous photos such as “Just me” that are instantly recognizable for their unique style. Her pictures have intense color with deep shadows and bold bright colors. And flowers, nearly every picture is abloom in flowers. Browsing her stream makes me smile because who can feel grumpy looking at such a beautiful version of the world. 

For more blooming pics, click here:

Comparing the BTC Apple to the L$ Orange (Comment of the Week)

Reader Joey1058 has a fair point about my comparing the oranges of Linden Dollars to the apples of Bitcoin:

The US designated crypto as a commodity. So asking to use BTC as a currency is like asking to use gold and silver as an everyday currency again. The L$ is an inworld currency, and has been planned that way from the outset. Broadly speaking, Second Life holds it's own sovereignty, so exchanging Lindens for USD is like exchanging GBP for USD.

Both BTC and L$ require an exchange to convert to USD. Once converted, they get taxed. The difference in exchanges is that LindeX/Tilia do a full transaction disclosure to the Feds. Crypto exchanges do not. Which is why the Feds are attempting to regulate crypto. If you are not reporting your crypto cash-outs to the Feds, you are in violation of whatever rules the IRS deems to slap you with.

This is roughly right. Though overall, I'd still say L$ and BTC is a comparison of tangerines and oranges, i.e. citrus fruit with more overlap than apples:

Top 6 Posts Last Week, Including ROI for a ROBLOX Campaign & Second Life's Continued Robustness in Comparison to Crypto/Web3

• Throwback Thursday: That Time We Noticed Bitcoin Was Being Used Less Than Linden Dollars... In 2013
• Chipotle's Burrito Giveaway In ROBLOX Attracts 5 Million+ Extra Visits -- RoMonitor Stats
• As She Celebrates 15 Years In Second Life, Avatar Influencer Strawberry Singh Discusses The Tedium Of Creator Credits & Ways To Bring Back The Fun
• The Sandbox's Terms Of Service Says You Don't Actually Own NFTs Associated With The Sandbox
• Shock Web3 Stat: Way More People Still Buy Virtual Items In Second Life Than Buy NFTs On Coinbase & OpenSea -- Combined!
• Metaverse Content Creators In Developing Nations Can Do Quite Well -- Once They Break Into The Market

Watch: Seracast's Season 1 Finale, Bravely Recorded Live from the Seraphim Sim With a Highly Active Drinking Game

Streaming live and unedited this week, here's the latest fun and chatty episode of Seracast, broadcast from the Seraphim sim. Details from the blog:

As well as all the usual features and information we will be giving away 2 full makeovers to 2 lucky winners including head and body of their choice plus spending money for hair, accessories, clothes and skins. One winner will be chosen from the live audience and one from YouTube after a week. Catch up with the cast for how to enter on YouTube.

For this season finale, the ladies bravely and hilariously do a drinking game during the episode, hitting their cocktails whenever "SL", "metaverse", or Second Life" is said. Which they do a lot! They also chat about Strawberry's 15 years in the virtual world, which is fitting, as their video seems like the very kind of thing she was hoping to see more in the SL social media ecosystem.