New World Notes

The Subtle Power of PBR in Second Life is Much More Than Mirrors

Now that PBR graphics are fully launched on Second Life, we're seeing a barrage of pics and videos showing off reflective/mirror effects made possible from physically based rendering. But it's this video of a swimming pool created by SL content creator Bhad Craven which recently caught my eye -- watch. It's not so much the mirror effects per se, but how the light reflecting on linoleum tiles and metal surfaces adds a subtle sense of realism and immersion.

"PBR is a game changer," Bhad affirms, laughing. "I hope people start to like it as much as creators. It's so much faster since baking isn't a thing. It makes my items actually shine, not having to fake reflections is great."

Not that developing in PBR is easy -- here's some notes of caution/advice from Mr. Craven:

What Virtual Worlds / Metaverse Platforms Now Have Between 10,000 - 200,000 Monthly Active Users?

I recently shared the top 10 most active metaverse platforms I'm tracking, with Meta's Horizon Worlds trailing at slot #10 with 200,000 monthly active users.  I'm now working with Julian Reyes of the Virtual Worlds Museum to chart the top 11 through 20 most popular worlds -- i.e. virtual worlds/metaverse platforms which currently have between 10,000 - 200,000 MAU.

To qualify, a given virtual world has to fit these three basic criterion (along with active usage):

• Immersive virtual worlds with avatars that are not primarily games/MMOs.
• Enables users to build their own world/space and invite friends into it.
• Currently online, out of closed beta, with over 100 active users.

Here's ten likely candidates which might now qualify for status in slots 11 through 20:

Perfectly Composed SL Landscape Photos by Natalia Corvale -- With Teleport Links to Take You to Them Too!

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

Natalia Corvale takes landscape pictures that could be used in a composition textbook. Here is Bella’s Lullaby, a lovely and favorite sim for photographers. She takes a picture of the lighthouse from a more interesting perspective and it’s framed as an excellent example of the Rule of Thirds which she likely used to crop this picture. I also like how the small island, its shoreline, and the ocean form concentric rings of open space. 

She also added the SLurl to take you there if you want to go and it’s so cute, the way she did it with emojis, I have to replicate it here:

 ✈✈✈✈✈

For more of Natalia’s excellent landscapes, click here:

inZOI Life Sim Gameplay Videos Beginning to Roll Out -- Let's Watch!

After nearly a month worth of buzz because of the character creator alone, we're starting to see some gameplay preview videos of inZOI, the upcoming life simulation game from South Korean-based KRAFTON. This one above by Sarah Thwaites is a good place to start; if you want to jump right to the creation tools, that happens at around 6:20.

Overall, the graphics and features are impressive, though as Thwaites suggests, the world part of the simulation seems pretty sterile. I sure would love to get a chance at some gameplay (and I've sent out multiple requests), but I'm a mere virtual world blogger, not a gamer streamer like 3MG, who shows us all the zany, somewhat NSFW fun to be had with inZOI already:

Meta Could Be Turning Horizon Worlds Into a Cross-Platform Virtual Machine (Guest Post)

Above: Experience offered on the Meta Horizons page

Meta Connect is happening next week, and longtime New World Notes reader Martin K, an executive who works in XR, recently sent me some intriguing thoughts around Meta's Horizon Worlds. On the surface, it's an also-ran metaverse platform that has such a tiny user base, it barely registers on my platform leader chart.

But Martin argues that Horizon Worlds is destined to be a different arrow in Meta's quiver:

The Meta Connect 2024 conference is approaching fast, and there is no doubt that Meta will talk about their metaverse-app Horizon Worlds at the conference. Even though Horizon Worlds was announced almost 5 years ago (at the time as "Facebook Horizon"), and even though Meta bought and closed competing metaverse apps (e.g. Crayta), and even though Meta is aggressively luring its users into Horizon Worlds, the app is still far less popular (according to Google trends) than other metaverse apps competing on Meta's platform, e.g., Roblox, VRChat, or Rec Room.

Which begs the question: why is Meta clinging on to Horizon Worlds? What's their plan for it? 

Here, I suggest a change of perspective:

TikTok's "Very Demure, Very Mindful" Meme Spreads to Second Life's Flickr Community

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

In early August, TikTokker Jools Lebron offered viral advice about dressing for work. She pointed out that her clothes at work were demure and she remained mindful of why she was hired. There might be a slight, deliberate contrast between her glamorous looks and her “very demure, very mindful” advice, but that’s the point. She’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, especially in subsequent videos and she has sparked the “very demure, very mindful” meme.

I was curious if there were many very demure, very mindful people in Second Life posting to Flickr. And yes, there are!

Pengu Blep seems to have taken a riff off Jools being “very demure, very mindful” at a bar where she left her ID. I think they have captured the idea well, demurely, mindfully drinking and even one demure and mindful woman sitting on the bar. What more could you ask for? 

For more demure and mindful pics, click here:

New On My Patreon: Why Gizem Went Beyond Berry & Second Life (But Came Back Again)

New on my Patreon: Excited to finally run my in-depth interview with Gizem Mishi Akin after months of mystery about her departure from her famed virtual world fashion brand, Blueberry. We talk about that and many things -- including of course her new SL brand/mainstore The Kiwi Co. Sample:

[Her] trajectory has been something to behold: First stumbling upon Second Life as a college kid in her home country of Turkey, she came to America, and quickly created a behemoth brand of virtual world fashion. And as hype over the Metaverse hit in recent years, expanded her SL-based brand, Blueberry, into Roblox, ZEPETO, and other massive platforms.

She was on her way, in short, to metaverse royalty across many platforms.

And then, suddenly, Gizem announced she and Blueberry were leaving Second Life...

Join my Patreon to read for free.

Top 5 Posts Including Roblox's Steam Competition Play, Explosive Growth of Second Life-Based Social Network & IBM's Forgotten Experiment in Metaverse Interoperability

• VRChat Guide: Five of the Best Brain-Melting Worlds to Explore
• Second Life Mobile Update: Latest Version Fixes Android 13 Issue -- And Now Allows Access to All SL Sims of All Maturity Ratings
• Roblox to Offer Steam-Like Revenue Share to Game Developers for Their PC-Based Roblox Experiences
• Primfeed Stats: In First 2 Months, Social Network for Second Life Users Getting 10K+ Weekly Visits from 35K+ Registered Users -- Who Post 4,000 Images Per Day!
• Metaverse Interoperability Across Multiple Platforms Was Tried By IBM & Linden Lab But Didn't Catch On -- Here's Why.

Which of These New-ish Second Life Brands Interest You Most -- Luova, Manikin!!, NeutralTones, RudeGirls Shapes, or Star Quake Shapes & Beauty?

Thanks to readers who recommended these new-ish Second Life brands (below) to feature this month, all of which have been in the virtual world for 5 years of less, have a social media presence, and are on the marketplace. In alphabetical order, those include:

Luova, Manikin!!, NeutralTones, RudeGirls Shapes, and Star Quake Shapes & Beauty.

Info and links below. After you've given them all a look, please post in Comments about which of these interests you the most -- we'll be profiling the one(s) most selected with their own post! 

Here they are:

Friday Fashion: Killer Male Avatar Styles Made By Matty King

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

Matty King asks a question we should all ask ourselves from time to time. “Am I the monster?” Perhaps we are all monsters in someone’s life. There’s someone down the street with an overactive car alarm who is a monster in mine, but they have no idea I exist. I wish I didn’t know they exist. None of us can live without impinging on others in ways we may not even be aware of. Fortunately, Matty looks good while doing it. I love those few stray hairs that fall forward on his forehead. That’s some great hair. 

• HAIR: Modulus - Reave Hair /NEW@ The Men’s Department - ends Sept 30th

For more looks from Matty King, click here:

VRChat Guide: Five of the Best Brain-Melting Worlds to Explore

Originally published on my Patreon 

You know a virtual world is compelling when its inhabitants kick against the walls of reality until they finally succeed at bursting through. Here’s five of my favorite VRChat worlds which create what’s seemingly impossible on the platform to totally rewrite the limits of our virtual experience.

While I can’t claim these are the absolute most boundary breaking worlds, many were recommended by some of the most popular and beloved creators on the platform:

Fractone (pictured above)

VRChat website landing page here

Created by Japanese player “Raii”, Fractone is a fully realized simulation of a music synthesizer replete with all the controls you’d expect from one in real life, which also generates music in real time as you play it. (Watch a demo basic here; watch a live concert, complete with a light show, right here.)

Beloved VRChat game developer Jar considers it among the most technically ambitious worlds on the platform.

“To me that’s impressive because by all means that shouldn't be possible to make and yet there it is,” as Jar puts it. “Also not many digital synthesizers are multiplayer/collaboratively compatible, even outside of VR, so that’s cool.”

Four more below!

Casja's Choices: Eripom Moonwall Stylishly Showcases the SL Weapons That She Creates

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

Eripom Moonwall is the kind of weapons designer and arms manufacturer I can get behind - a virtual weapons designer. We last visited her armory / Flick stream in 2021, and now with the Combat 2.0 system coming to Second Life, we thought we'd check in again. I am constantly amazed by her stunning pictures and videos and the fabulously realistic sims she has created when not at her day job as a Tokyo security analyst.

Personally the only rifle I have ever had was an 1873 Winchester Octagon Barrel. It was my grandfather’s and given to me when I was around twelve. It was longer than I was tall. I can’t quite imagine shooting an automatic rifle, but if I were to take it up, it would be in Second Life. 

For more action-packed pics, click here:

Second Life Mobile Update: Latest Version Fixes Android 13 Issue -- And Now Allows Access to All SL Sims of All Maturity Ratings (UPDATED)

Update, 9/12: Added some additional background around Maturity rating access and App Store rules at the bottom of this post!

Pretty big update to the Second Life mobile app project posted by Linden staffer Bridie recently. First off, support for the app on Android iOS 13 has been restored, a problem that popped up (reported by "0xc0ffea") last week. 

Even more notable, notes Bridie: "Premium Plus, Premium, and Plus members now have freedom to explore ALL of Second Life -- including regions across all maturity ratings!"

So that's something! Here's the direct downloads for Premium users:

• Second Life for iOS on the App Store.
• Second Life for Android on Google Play.

As for the recent problem with Android 13, my guess the previous build had some kind of compatibility issue that was updated?

Anyway, the all region access is quite notable:

Roblox to Offer Steam-Like Revenue Share to Game Developers for Their PC-Based Roblox Experiences

Roblox the company's seriously one-side monetization split for creators on the platform (75/25, in favor of the publicly traded corporation) has been a canker on its truly massive user base for quite some time. So lopsided is it, that more users creators in Second Life still make more revenue from that virtual world's vastly smaller consumer pool.

The latest update announcement from Roblox's CEO, however, promises some fairer revenue splits (with strings):

We are announcing new economics, where developers will be able to price their paid access experiences for purchase in real currency value¹ on desktop and earn a higher revenue share. Experiences selling at $9.99¹, $29.99¹, $49.99¹ will receive 50%, 60%, and 70% revenue share, respectively. We’ll roll this out for people to purchase on desktop this year, with plans to later expand to other supported devices.

The footnotes in that excerpt, by the way, warn that only direct revenue purchases in cash from the PC edition of the platform get that share.

Emphasis theirs, which seems intentional. This will make Roblox PC experience rev shares (on the high end) on par with Valve's Steam, which also pays out 70% to game devs on that platform. (Which also happens to mostly be a PC-based platform.) This makes me wonder if Roblox is also hoping this revenue offer is appealing to PC game devs who want an alternative to Steam.

Overall, the big catch is this:

Cajsa's Choices: The Charmingly Oddball Photos of Cocolinox Fhang

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

Cocolinox Fhang (DeCuir) says he’s not a photographer, “just a big kid coloring.” Well, maybe so, but he colors outside the lines with verve and imagination. Who else looks at a power line and thinks tightrope? Here we have a daring funambulist daring not only gravity, but electricity. There should be some disclaimer, though, that says “no avatars were harmed in the creation of this picture.” 

For more coloring outside the lines, click here:

Primfeed Stats: In First 2 Months, Social Network for Second Life Users Getting 10K+ Weekly Visits from 35K+ Registered Users -- Who Post 4,000 Images Per Day!

Primfeed, the new social media platform for Second Life users (positioned as an alternative to Flickr at launch) is seeing some pretty impressive user activity since launching in June.  By July, according to SimilarWeb, it reached nearly 1 million total visits for the month (938K, to be more exact); then in August, traffic fell only slightly, to 842K/month.

"The growth is stable," Primfeed creator Luke Rowley tells me, "not as much as the first month's, since there is a limited number of SL residents. But the usage is 100% stable."

As evidence of that stable activity, Luke shares some solid user stats with me (along with some interesting insights on usage trends, and clickthrough rates):

Cajsa's Choices: Some Spectacularly Scary Clown Avatars of Second Life

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

First Snow recently posted “Do You Want Me to Give You a Balloon?” which made me think of the movie It even if this isn’t the same clown. I guess It's the red balloon. I like this picture quite a bit. It is very moody and evocative of scary things that go bump in the night. OR perhaps I have a different scary clown in my head. 

For more scary clowns in the run-up to spooky season, click here:

inZOI Publisher Responds to Controversy Over Generative AI in Its Upcoming Life Simulation: It's Proprietary & Only Trains On Our Content

There's continued buzz for inZOI, the upcoming life simulator/character creator game from South Korean-based company KRAFTON -- but also some gamer grumbling over reports that inZOI reportedly includes content created by generative AI. Such as this rant:

It’s unclear if the database used for these tools draws from stolen work, or if it’s an internal database created entirely with Krafton’s work, but blog posts and videos from the company have said that they use tools like Midjourney and Diffusion to create art, at least in the development process. Either way, it still largely negates the need for the studio to employ 3D modellers, essentially making those jobs redundant, and generative AI also has a well-documented environmental cost that further muddies the ethics of these tools.

There's been enough grousing, in fact, that someone at KRAFTON posted an official announcement on inZOI's Discord:

Metaverse Interoperability Across Multiple Platforms Was Tried By IBM & Linden Lab But Didn't Catch On -- Here's Why.

Why the Metaverse is Beating Gen AI https://t.co/0CegcGDiSk

— Open Metaverse Interoperability Group (@open_metaverse) September 6, 2024

Thanks to everyone from the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group especially host @jimmy6DOF for the fun and spicy conversation last Friday -- you can listen to the whole thing above (starting around 4 minutes in), with some particular spiciness around 36:30, where I mention that metaverse interoperability of virtual objects has been tried before and fairly failed, a topic I go into at length in my book. So below is a somewhat edited excerpt on that subject:

 

Gizem & The Battle to Make Virtual Money Real: Free Excerpt to Making a Metaverse That Matters on My Patreon!

My in-depth interview with Gizem Mishi Akin of Blueberry fame is coming soon, but meantime, I've posted an excerpt of Gizem's incredible Second Life story from my book Making a Metaverse That Matters on my Patreon, free for all members:

Once upon a time, a girl sitting by herself in an ancient city traveled through a looking glass full of lightning and changed her life forever. 

Gizem Mishi was a college student in Istanbul when she came across a YouTube video of “Skye Galaxy”, a bohemian-looking avatar with a powerfully resonant voice, performing in a virtual world to a throng of swaying fans. This was how Gizem first discovered Second Life. By the time she attended her second Skye Galaxy performance, she had learned the world’s creation tools sufficiently well enough to create a polka dot dress for herself -- her first item of avatar clothing for the platform...

Join for free to read the rest. Featuring an amazing photo of Ms. Mishi in Turkey! Plus read New World Notes' 2009 profile of Skye Galaxy here.

Top 5 Posts Including: Why the Metaverse Works, New Combat Game In Second Life, and Ted Chiang vs. AI-Made Art

• Here's Why the Metaverse Works, Leading to Massive Platforms Like Roblox, Fortnite & Many More
• Linden Lab Launches "Combat 2.0", Red vs. Blue Team FPS Map in Second Life. Featuring Fiercely Fighting Furries. UPDATE: It's a Showcase of LSL Combat2 Now Rolling Out Across SL.
• Ted Chiang, Acclaimed Literary Author & Microsoft Technical Writer, Succinctly Explains Why AI Can't Create Art
• Readers: What Special Second Life Sims Are Still Standing? Please Report Your Favorites Here!
• Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2024年8月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan

Ted Chiang, Acclaimed Literary Author & Microsoft Technical Writer, Succinctly Explains Why AI Can't Create Art

UPDATE, September 9: Added link to Chiang's novella, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, which is included in his book Exhalation.

Can AI create art? Ted Chiang is quite possibly the best qualified person in the world to answer this question, being both a technical writer for Microsoft and also an acclaimed literary writer, whose incredibly thought-provoking and moving science fiction stories transcend the genre. (One of his stories is the basis of the great 2017 movie Arrival.) 

In the New Yorker, Ted Chiang has an incredibly succinct way of explaining that, no, AI in itself probably can't create art:

Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.

If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making. There are various ways it can do this. One is to take an average of the choices that other writers have made, as represented by text found on the Internet; that average is equivalent to the least interesting choices possible, which is why A.I.-generated text is often really bland. Another is to instruct the program to engage in style mimicry, emulating the choices made by a specific writer, which produces a highly derivative story. In neither case is it creating interesting art.

Chiang allows that there might be enough creator-driven intentionality and choice for a human artist to leverage AI into actual works of art -- I'd cite Nettrice Gaskins here, for visual art -- but if it's a matter of making an AI prompt more and more (and more) detailed, you might as well skip ChatGPT and just write the goddamn story yourself.  

Speaking of Chiang, his 2010 novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects (link below) is a brilliant if disturbing weave of virtual world avatars and AI:

Readers: What Special Second Life Sims Are Still Standing? Please Report Your Favorites Here!

I recently posted about seven spectacular Second Life sims to see on my Patreon, a report which took longer than I originally expected.

Why? Because going through my list of sims that I've visited/admired/written about over the years -- most filed under New World SLurl -- I discovered that many or even most are completely gone. As in, you click the SLurl now, and either it's a completely different place, or just completely gone from grid.

Like the one above: Steelhead Bay, a very cool seafaring steampunk sim that was restored in 2017. Sometime in the last several years (I didn't get the memo), it's gone to digital aether. I know that sims and sim owners come and go all the time, but these are places created with a lot of love and dedication, and tend to have dedicated communities around them.

So I'm asking readers, if you're so inclined, to explore the world and check in with your favorite sims, see if they're still standing -- and if so, report back here! 

And speaking of which, here's my list of favorite/noteworthy sims, and here's seven that are definitely still standing. (At least they were last week.)

Linden Lab Launches "Combat 2.0", Red vs. Blue Team FPS Map in Second Life. Featuring Fiercely Fighting Furries. UPDATE: It's a Showcase of LSL Combat2 Now Rolling Out Across SL.

Update, 9/6: Just heard from Brett at Linden Lab: The combat sims are a showcase demonstration for a system upgrade: "This is our expanded/improved combat system that is rolling out on the grid. Here's a wiki page that discusses it in a bit more detail."

When Linden Lab posted this video about an hour ago, I first assumed the company was highlighting a user-made combat game in Second Life -- but no, it's very much a Linden operation:

Step into the action with Combat 2.0, where players join either the blue team at Concord or the red team at Lexington. Engage in dynamic PVE and PVP battles, perfect for beginners and veterans alike. Equip yourself with free weapons and experience thrilling, fast-paced combat in this ever-evolving combat destination owned and run by Linden Lab.

So that's surprising! I believe the Lindens haven't launched an official game in SL since its Pokemen Go-esque Tyrah & the Curse of the Magical Glytches game in 2017.  I just gave Combat 2.0 a shot, and it's fairly fun if  traditional team-based FPS.

Here's the official teleport links, which nudge you to create a new account:

• Join the blue team at Concord  
• Join the red team at Lexington  

If you're having trouble with those entry points, just click here to teleport directly into Concord.

Along with red vs. blue team combat, there's a free-for-all zone. Since I didn't enter through the official links, I might have missed a HUD to track scores and hitpoints (beyond the default damage meter) but I'll give it a proper play later.

I'm not seeing any background on the game from official Linden channels, so I'll ping them now. Kudos for launching a game that could draw in new users, though I am surprised they're going with FPS as the genre to grab gamers:

Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2024年8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.