New World Notes

Afrofuturist Nettrice Gaskins Creates Utterly Stunning Art With Midjourney

Dr. Nettrice Gaskins, an acclaimed Afrofuturist scholar who pioneered the Deep Dream neural network as an art medium back in 2019, is now experimenting with Midjourney, the new AI project that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to generate new imagery.

The results, some of which you can see here, are deliriously stunning. Nettrice's image above, for example, was generated by a line from Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (one of her favorite novels): 

“For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it."

"[Midjourney] tries to understand human language," Dr. Gaskins explains. "It's about the text; the order of words. The cool thing about NLP AI (Midjourney, DALL-E, etc.) is another person can use the same exact text prompts (same order, etc.) and never be able to duplicate the ones I generated. This means every single image is one of a kind / unique."

Here's another that she generated through inputting the text, "Afrofuturistic Black woman botanist in trippy alien utopia":

Metaverse Safety Week Announced to Help Prevent "Cambridge Analytica 2.0" & Other Security / Privacy Crises

Registration is now open for Metaverse Safety Week, an online conference from XR Safety Initiative (XRSI), the brainchild of Linden Lab veteran Kavya Pearlman.

"It is essential to getting things right at every level. especially when it comes to safety, privacy and cybersecurity," as she tells me. "Currently besides the XRSI privacy and safety framework there are literally no frameworks that factor these aspects into the risks assessment, along with factoring in several converging technologies."

This is probably why we regularly see huge privacy crises like this one happening in metaverse platforms even when they're backed by companies spending billions to produce them.

And the problems seems to be getting worse, not better:

This is What Paris Looks Like in VRChat, Which You Can Access With Meta Quest

In case you're wondering, there's roughly a dozen Paris-themed worlds in VRChat, the metaverse platform that's accessible through Steam and Meta's Quest platform -- including this one, "Paris Tour", an explorable portion of the City of Lights including the Eiffel Tower. It even comes with classic French music and a racing game! 

I note this because at the moment, seemingly half of Twitter is gawking at a recent announcement that Meta's Horizon Worlds is expanding into France -- because the official announcement looks like this:

SL Name Survey Results: 75% Wouldn't Pay to Change Their Avatar Name

What's the value of an avatar name? With 138 responses, here's the results to our survey, "Will you spend $15 to $50 to change your Second Life account name?" (Which is how much it costs to do just that, via a new Linden Lab offer.) Nearly 75% answered No.

In Comments to the survey post, readers were mostly not impressed:

"I really don't understand why this needs to cost money. There is no justification for this... why does it cost money? It's not like the Labs are employing someone to sit there and mash through a pile of paperwork forms."

Then again, the results also show that over 1 in 10 respondents are so interested in changing their avatar name, which when you think about, is quite a lot:

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Musician in the Metaverse on Multiple Instruments

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

mSilverwolf loves music and it shows in his pictures of himself playing various instruments in Second Life. “The Sax” is a gorgeous black and white with lots of fog. It comes with a song, as well, an old favorite, “Pride and Joy” by Stevie Ray Vaughan. [To listen, click here.]

For more musicianship, click here:

France's Le Monde Remembers the Fall of Second Life's Biggest User-Run Bank & The Limits of Virtual World Libertarianism

French-fluent readers, the great Le Monde of France has a new article on a famous old story from the virtual world economy, part of a larger series on the topic: Comment Ginko Financial, la plus célèbre banque de « Second Life », s’est écroulée -- i.e. "How Ginko Financial, the most famous bank in “Second Life”, collapsed".

Ginko, as longtime readers may remember, was an SL-based financial service offering incredibly high interest rates to users, attracting high skepticism over its management and cash liquidity, not to mention allegations that it was a Ponzi scheme, until Linden Lab finally shut it down.

As I discuss with Le Monde reporter Florian Reynaud, the Ginko case was another lesson for Linden Lab on the limits of libertarianism. Florian also managed to get an official statement on Ginko from Linden Lab, but it's very broad -- because,  he tells me, the Lindens don't have anyone still employed there who even remembers that far back.

Read the Linden Lab statement below along with an English excerpt (albeit with a mediocre translation from Google):

No, Virtual Reality is Not In Its "Early Days" (Comment of the Week)

Above: Nintendo's consumer VR launch in 1994 

Is the market for VR headsets small and active usage apparently low (especially among Gen Z) because virtual reality is still in "early days"? Reader Nadeja thinks otherwise:

I don't think we are in the early days of VR. The earliest HMD were made in the 1960s. NASA worked with HMD in the 1980s, Nintendo had something too. [See above - WJA] Then there were several commercial releases in the 1990s. Now we are in the 2020s.

I rather think that VR headsets aren't so practical and human-friendly. I'm not talking about the technical limitations, the lack of peripheral vision, nausea, the risk of hitting or stumbling on anything as you have essentially a blindfold... but about the HMD device itself.

You could say that someone can wear a HMD for hours, but in general sunglasses and eyeglasses are probably about as much as one can take, and some people still prefer contact lenses.

We need a paradigm shift around HMDs. When VR will be as widespread as smartphones, we would likely not use HMDs, but something else.

Fun fact: In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg predicted that VR HMDs would replace the smartphone by 2025. With the smartphone market currently at about 6.5 billion, compared to VR's total install base of maybe (and at most) 30 million, I'm sort of guessing that's not going to happen.

The categorical mistake, I think, is not realizing that unlike VR, mobile phones had an immediate and obvious broadly valuable use case from the very beginning:

Top Posts Last Week: Amazing SL Imagery, SL's Constantly Delayed Web/Smartphone App & Virtual Real Estate Advice for Snoop Dog

• Survey: Will You Pay $15-50 To Change Your Second Life Account Name?
• Second Life For Web / Mobile Indefinitely Delayed Again (Again)
• What The Sandbox & Snoop Dogg Could Learn From Second Life
• This Creator Illustrates Her Graphic Fantasy Story With SL Avatar Photos
• Stunning SL Life Avatar Portraits Created To Look Like Classic Hollywood Starlets

What The Sandbox & Snoop Dogg Could Learn from Second Life

Anthropologist Tom Boellstorff has a new thought-provoking essay on The Conversation, pointing out the importance of learning from metaverse/virtual world history. For instance, what Second Life's real estate management policies can teach new metaverse platforms like The Sandbox:

Second Life originally had “point-to-point teleportation” (P2P). You could arrive anywhere in an instant. But in 2003 Linden Lab, the company that owns Second Life, disabled P2P. Residents trying to reach a destination would appear at the nearest “telehub.”

This had implications for real estate. Valuable for businesses and entertainment, plots of land near telehubs sold for top dollar — until 2005, when Linden Lab suddenly announced the end of telehubs and the return of P2P.

Land near former telehubs no longer had special value; some people lost thousands of dollars. The most powerful landlord can’t change the laws of physics, but Linden Lab could literally recode scarcity out of existence.

Fast-forward almost 20 years. Land next to Snoop Dogg’s virtual mansion is scarce: A plot could cost $450,000 because The Sandbox doesn’t have P2P. But were the company to suddenly add P2P, that $450,000 investment could become nearly worthless. 

The thing is, The Sandbox's actual user growth is tiny, so the value of Snoop's Sandbox property is negligible. By implementing P2P, Linden Lab created universal inherent value in Second Life real estate, no matter the specific location in Second Life. Partly for that reason, unsurprisingly, there are far more active users in SL than in The Sandbox.

Second Life for Web / Mobile Indefinitely Delayed Again (Again)

Good SL-for-smartphones and the web scoop from Daniel Voyager, who took furious notes at Linden Lab's recent in-world web user group meeting, where Reed Linden admitted bringing Second Life to the web/mobile is going a lot more glacially than anticipated (watch at around 32:20):

I would say it's coming slowly; there's there's a lot of struggles, but it's not a straightforward project. No, I don't have any hint what it would look like. I mean there's a few that already exist, that are third party implementations. And one of the big struggles that we're having is whether we partner with one of those, or we try to build something in-house, and if we try and build something in-house, will it be as good as you know, these other implementations?

Linden Lab is also considering a streaming solution (a la the late lamented OnLive), but, says Reed, "you're paying by the hour with those, so there's just a lot out to work out there".

Reed mentions an official version "might" look like Lumiya, the extremely popular third party Android app that was published about a decade ago. The entire answer seems so preliminary that it seems like little substantial has been done to bring Second Life to the web/mobile, nearly a year after an iOS implementation was put on pause. It's pretty mind boggling. 

Daniel's take:

SL Style Blogger Toshiya Sato Features Action Fashion & Looks from the Okinawa Summer Festival!

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

Toshiya Sato is a fashion/roleplay blogger whose blog is simply named after him. His most recent post is named for the date posted - in this case, 070822 and highlights the Okinawa Summer Festival happening all this August in SL: Click here to teleport.

I love his kimono to which he adds elements to ratchet up the menace. I also very much appreciate him including the dates of the events so someone coming along in January of next year does not hunt in vain. 

• OKINAWA EVENT: 05.08.22 - 30.08.22
• GABRIEL: KIMONO SUMMER 2022 FATPACK - Gianni, Jake, Legacy
• GABRIEL: FACE VEIL FATPACK (resizable)
• SEKAI: JAPANESE FAN FATPACK (animated, resizable)
• RAVEN BELL x CONTRAPTION: BLANC HAIR + THE GREAT FOX MASK UNISEX (on face, on hair)
• FAMESHED EVENT: 01.08.22 - 27.08.22
• REZZ ROOM: FOX ANIMESH (companion, holdable)
• LAOHU TATTOO UNISEX - Classic AV, BOM(Bakes On Mesh), Omega - 4 TONES @ JUNA ARTISTIC TATTOO MAINSTORE MARKETPLACE

For more great cosplay outfits, click here:

This Creator Illustrates Her Graphic Fantasy Story With SL Avatar Photos

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

Brooke FiftyOne has created a serialized story of the adventures of the Valkyrie, Rune, like something from the Poetic Edda. Her stories may be a little less safe for work than the Elder Edda, but they are fun. I love to see someone making a truly epic effort to do something new and exciting.  

For chapters from the story, click here:

Mid-Week Open Forum: What Topics Should New World Notes Cover More Often?

As my material self is on a short Summer trip this week, the microphone is yours. What topics would you like to read and see more of on New World Notes, and why?

Stunning SL Life Avatar Portraits Created to Look Like Classic Hollywood Starlets

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

Mina Arcana’s “Feelings” brought my late-night Flickr browsing to a dead stop. It was in someone’s faves. Sorry, I forgot whose, but I am grateful because she was new to me. I absolutely love this shot and yes, the illusion is created by a free gift from Zibska but it is powerful and heart-stopping because of her choices. She chose black and white, the background, the nail caps, the pose and they make all the difference. She seems to focus on head shots and has produced a stream of extraordinary portraits. 

For more stunning portraits, but of classic Hollywood stars, click here:

Survey: Will You Pay $15-50 to Change Your Second Life Account Name?

New Linden Lab offer, new SL user survey (above, take on laptop/desktop for best results):

That’s right, as [last week] everyone can change their avatar name regardless of their subscription level. Not just the Premium subscribers that have always been able to do so, but all of our Basic accounts as well! This is something we’ve been trying to offer for a long time, and something that we get requests for on a consistent basis, so we couldn’t be more pleased to finally be able to announce it.

As an exciting new option for Basic accounts, here’s what it looks like today. Not only do you have the option to change your avatar’s first name to anything you can imagine, but we also offer a rotating list of last names to give your avatar (even if you don’t already have one) that are updated on a regular basis. We will continue to make updates to the available last name pool, so if these options aren’t for you, stay tuned for future updates. You can also suggest your favorite name on our suggestion form, new names are chosen from there!

Will be interesting to compare/contrast the results with our resent survey on Premium+ upgrades.

This Artist Creates Amazing Digital Paintings from Second Life Screenshots

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

Christina Geddins-Swot’s recent “Cyber Meets Watercolours” appeals to me so much. I love how the background became an abstraction of color. The avatar looks painted. This is achieved through using filters in photo-editing, but she had to used depth-of-field in the original photo to blur the background so it would become so abstract. The planning for this watercolor began with the Second Life screenshot that she turned into a work of art.  

For more, click here:

Since Only 5% of Gen Z Uses VR Every Day, is Meta Wrong to Promote Virtual Reality Like a Mainstream Technology? (Comment of the Week)

Responding to our question on how many active users on the Quest VR headset there are, a reader points us to a recent market survey which suggests that use is quite tiny, especially among Gen Z:

Piper Sandler completes 43rd semi-annual Generation Z survey of 7,100 U.S. teens...

While 26% of teens own a VR device, just 5% use it daily. 48% of teens are either unsure or not interested in the Metaverse

This prompts reader "lieisacake" (LOL) to observe:

Top 5 Posts: Roblox Moves Into Web3, Upland Owns the NFT Market & VRChat Usability Hacked for Labyrinth Coolness

• Listen: I Talk About Metaverse Art, AM Radio & Cao Fei For ArtNet's Podcast
• Exclusive: Upland Real Estate Game Quietly Becoming An Immersive Metaverse Platform With Nearly 300K NFT Owners
• Watch: VRChat's Horizon Adjust Feature Used To Recreate David Bowie's Classic Escher Maze Scene From Labyrinth!
• Roblox Hiring Web3 Senior Engineer To Put Virtual World Items & Transactions, Possibly NFTs, On The Blockchain
• Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2022年7月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan

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

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

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

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

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

Fashion Friday: An SL Style Blog That Defies Convention

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

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

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

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

For a stunning transformation, click here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Dr Ocelot (@doktorocelot) August 1, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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