New World Notes

Want to Try IMVU? The Mobile Metaverse Has Weekend Extra Credit Offers

My recent post on the massive growth of IMVU, the mobile-based metaverse, provoked a lot of conversation and curiosity. And so if you're interested in trying it out -- or you already have an account, and want to see what's new -- Lindsay at IMVU just let me know about two special Credit offers this weekend. (Click below for details.)

To be sure IMVU is a fairly different experience than traditional virtual worlds like Second Life, but some readers have found value in both:

"I started in IMVU, after being given a writing assignment for the Metaverse Tribune as Allen Eppenberger a few years back," longtime reader Joey1058 says. "At first I couldn't see how it was useful. But it grew on me. And I actually spend more time in IMVU than SL. I will say there is more drama in IMVU as opposed to SL."

Now to the offers, first for existing users:

Buy a 10,000 Credit package for $9.99 and get an extra 2,000 PROMO CREDITS*.

*One bonus credit package reward per account. Purchase must occur on IMVU’s app before 8/2/20, Sunday, 11:59 PM PST. Bonus rewarded within 24 hours.

Offer good from Friday, 12am PST - 8/2/20, Sunday, 11:59 PM PST

 And below, details for new IMVU users:

Visit in SL: Amazing Sim With Multi-Varied Themes -- With An Open Call For SL Artists Who Want to Freely Host Their Works There

This SL sim called Sinful Retreat (saucy) is a worthwhile explore this weekend, whether you're in search of an artful location -- or you're an artist who wants a location to show off your work. Click here to teleport.

First the location: "[I]is a land of incongruent realities," owner and lead creator Chuck Clip tells me. "A Victorian town built on a bridge leads to a gothic Basilica. all of it looking over a post apocalyptic trailer park, with a portal that leads into a story book forest." Sounds like a club Stefon would visit... with his mom.

And now the opportunity for artists:

Find SL Sites to Visit By Visiting the SL Blog, Living in a Modem World

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

“A Touch of Dim Sum Gardens in Second Life” is one of many travel posts from the prolific historian and explainer of Second Life, Inara Pey. Here she explores a beautiful Asian-inspired full sim with gardens, statues, and so much to see she discovered new things on her second visit. There are several photos and a well-explained travel tour of the Gardens in her post. 

• Dim Sum Gardens (Malrif, rated General)

Another post with what seems a fun challenge below the cut:

Watch: Will Second Life's New AWS Cloud Deployment Improve Performance?

Linden Lab is starting to test a new deployment of Second Life running on the Amazon Web Services cloud, beginning with a copy of Blake Sea on the Second Life Preview Grid (known as Aditi)  -- and virtual world explorer Nodoka Hanamura just arrived from the sea with this video, putting the cloud through its paces in many vehicles. (Action starts at around 1:30 in.)

The most notable result? Near-seamless sim crossing, a much-desired but near-elusive goal. As you'll see in the video, there's a split-second pause when traveling from one sim to another, resembling what it looks like in many open world games -- as opposed to the several seconds or more rubber band-ing mess it's usually like in SL.

Frame rate, Nodoka tells me, what's fairly decent: 

Real Life Video Rendered Into Beautiful Fractal-Like Art Via Multiple Programs

Filmmaker and animator Chadrick Scott (a fellow Linden Lab alum from back in the day) has been posting some seriously gorgeous computer animated clips like this to his Instagram. They began as real life video, but as Chadrick tells me, evolved into these fractal-like videos through some heavy post-processing via multiple programs.

"Starts with a [RL] model, but I use everything from After Effects to random apps. My favorite is Mirror Lab or Glitch Lab for the Android, but I don’t use that solely. Sometimes a piece of work will go through 5-6 programs before I put it up on Instagram."

His advice for achieving an affect along these lines:

SL Flickr Pick: Emi's Beautiful Beach Photos Drenched by the Virtual Sun

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

“Blinding” is the word not just for this picture, but for Emi’s stream of sundrenched photos. She has a love of the sunlight that cannot be denied. We see her from the back, lit by a blinding sun and framed by fiddlehead ferns and other foliage. It’s well done and shows her uniquely sunny style. 

More sunny pics ahead:

VR's Pandemic Winter: Oculus Quest Only Now Reaches 1 Million Unit Install Base, According to SuperData, Which Downgrades HMD Sales Forecasts

The numbers from Nielsen analytics company SuperData seem to welcome us to VR's winter season:

The growth outlook for augmented and mixed reality (AR/MR) headsets has been revised downward due to Q2 setbacks for consumer AR/MR. We now estimate that AR/MR headsets will only account for 23% of XR revenue by 2023, down from a prior projection of 36%. Magic Leap experienced mass layoffs after it failed to appeal to consumers or developers of consumer software. The company has now pivoted to focus on enterprise customers. Similarly, smartglasses maker North was acquired by Google, reportedly for less than the firm had raised in venture funding. There are reports Apple is testing AR devices, and a product from the company will certainly grow the consumer AR market overnight. However, we believe a consumer AR headset from Apple will not arrive until 2022 at the earliest and will take some time to reach true mainstream adoption. 

More here. While SuperData also reports that the Quest outsold the PSVR in Q2 2020 (the second quarter since Q4 2019 that this has happened), the Quest install base remains surprisingly now:

SL Flickr Pick: Gwin Leshelle Creates Kawaii Pics to Brighten Your Day

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

If you want to feel happy, just go to Gwin LeShelle’s photostream where a bright, cheerful world of kawaii pastels and brights wait to brighten your day. I love her photos because they make me feel happy. She manages to deal with a Flickr trend I don’t like, framing the photos sideways to make them good for group banners, in a way that does not drive me nuts. As you see, there is enough of an angle to make this a picture I can enjoy without turning my head or my screen. Seriously, folks, everyone and their cousin is turning their photos 90°, be original and turn it °45 to 60° or even not at all. 

More kawaii happiness below:

If COVID-19 Kills Off the Hands-On VR Demo, How Can VR Grow?

Earlier this year when the pandemic hit for the first time, my family and I were fairly well-prepared, in the sense that we had a huge supply of sanitary wipes on hand, even when store shelves had been completely wiped out of every bacteria-killing product.

Why? Because late last year, I had been spending quite awhile doing VR demos. Which basically means wiping down the equipment with sanitary wipes, every time another person steps up to give your VR product a try.

It's really the paradox of virtual reality: Convincing people it's a powerful technology means spending quite a lot of time physically touching them in real life. "Eye condoms" like the one here -- popular at VR conferences, often handed out right at the entrance -- are a laughably thin level of sanitary protection. They might help prevent infection from bacteria on the VR headset, but you're still in close contact with one or more strangers throughout a typical VR demo, sharing the controllers, holding and positioning people around so they're tracked properly, often literally holding hands with them, so you can make sure they're properly clicking the proper controls. 

I thought about all this after Upload VR's Ian Hamilton made a very astute point:

Top User-Made Games on ROBLOX Played as Much as Top Company-Made Games on Steam

Pictured: Today's top played games on Steam via SteamDB; inset is today's top played game on ROBLOX, Adopt Me

I get the impression many virtual world enthusiasts don't quite grasp how massive ROBLOX is, so here's a comparison:

• Adopt Me, a user-made roleplay pet care game on ROBLOX, created by a small team of grassroots-level prosumer developers, has been visited over 10 billion times, and today at this writing, is being played by nearly 700,000 concurrent users.
• Which means Adopt Me is being played today by more people playing games on Steam like Grand Theft Auto V and PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS, created by international companies worth billions which employ hundreds of developers and staffers to make and serve these games.

See the data above. While ROBLOX is generally pigeon-holed as a "kids game", the company behind it very much has building the metaverse as its ultimate goal, and are paying its user creators fairly well to make that happen:

SL Flickr Pick: Gorgeously Ambiguous Female Avatar Photos by Bee

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

Bee’s D.U.S.H.A. caught my eye with its brilliant chiaroscuro effect. It has the tone of light and shadow from the old Dutch masters, but really what it reminded me was an old SCTV sendup of Ingmar Bergman. If you watch it, you will understand. It must be the heat making me lightheaded. If you get a kick out Ingmar Bergman satires there is none better than De Dűva.I must confess my friends and I took to saying “H2Oska” for water for far too long.

More of her striking use of lighting that seems to add subtext to her photos.

What It Would Take to Truly Upgrade Second Life (Comment of the Week)

Fascinating conversation in response to Luther Weymann's somber analysis of Second Life's prospects under new ownership, featuring many comments by readers who seem to be longtime veterans of the game/tech industry, or at least write with that level of expertise.

Among them is  Russell Skyther, who wrote this really sharp breakdown of what it would take to upgrade Second Life. It's partly a response to an earlier comment arguing that "Updating SL isn't really all that hard cause they have done it is how we got mesh and rigged mesh and now animesh. They can continue to keep layering new content and it'll work just fine."

Skyther argues otherwise:

The issue isn't that you can't update Second Life's code. or even rewrite it from scratch. BOTH have been done, see: OpenSimulator, an Open-Source clone of SL functionality that's close enough [that] most 3rd party clients support it out of the box.

But ability isn't the same thing as willingness. And far from being 'not all that hard' as the above comment states, each one of the examples features: Mesh, Rigged, animesh, and now Bakes on Mesh are all hacks onto an engine that wasn't designed for it. Now you can do that, and they did. But that incurs a serious performance penalty unless you redo the entire graphics pipeline (which they didn't). That's what this guy's talking about. It's not that you can't update or rewrite SL, it's that it's not cost effective to do so on a level that would give you acceptable performance.

To better explain SL's codebase issues. This is what I would consider a minimum for a true SL-like game in 2020 (VR Chat isn't really SL-like, but more of a Sansar that worked):

Top 5 Posts Last Week, Including a Second Life for IMVU

• Watch Here: STÖMOL, The First Feature-Length Cyberpunk Thriller Shot Entirely In Second Life!
• How IMVU Became A Massive Mobile Metaverse When No One Was Looking
• Second Life Screenshots Made Into Breathtaking, Ansel Adams-Like Imagery
• Second Life Community Quickly Raises & Donates Over $11,000 For Black Lives Matter & Other Justice Orgs
• SL Enthusiast & Veteran Tech Exec Predicts Dark Future For Virtual World

Watch Here: STÖMOL, The First Feature-Length Cyberpunk Thriller Shot Entirely in Second Life!

Update: Bumped up for weekend viewing!

As promised, New World Notes is very proud to debut the feature-length machinima by Huckleberry Hax. Put your headphones on, dim the lights, and press play. And join me below for director's comments (with potential spoilers) and running comments from the audience in the aisle!

Tomorrow in Sinespace: Miro Shot Presents a Virtual Interactive Radio Show with DJ Tobi Lynn, Powered by Dash Radio

UPDATE: Show embedded below!

A Second Life Fashion Blog That's Also an Avatar Roleplay Diary

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

Everlina Kindred has a different approach to blogging. She creates her pictures and provides what details she chooses to highlight on Flickr and uses her pictures to illustrate her diary which she posts to about twice a month. This pictures of for Entry #68 and in-character diary of her role play. This comes complete with a tarot reading 

• Hair by Doux (Dam1710)
• Palazzo Jumpsuit by Sallie (Sallie Takao)

An earlier diary describing school activities next.

How IMVU Became a Massive Mobile Metaverse When No One Was Looking

In a recent chat with New World Notes readers about the future of Second Life, many wondered whatever became of IMVU, the 3D chat-based world that once was seen by some as rival to SL itself -- and by others as a low-end version of the metaverse.

Let me tell you what's happened with IMVU over the last few years and since you last likely thought about it, if ever at all.

IMVU has become massive in just about every sense:

It has 7 million monthly active users.

And 1.2 million daily active users.

And a peak daily concurrency of 140,000 users.

And peak average daily concurrency of 120,000 users.

These numbers, as any regular reader will tell you, far outstrip any peak metric Second Life has ever achieved, in recent times with about 600,000 to 900,000 monthly users (depending how you define a "user"), and a peak concurrency that's never exceeded the mid-five figures.

It's also massive in terms of company revenue: According to App Annie, it's a top grossing app right behind the white hot video sharing app TikTok (see attached pic below).

It's also massive in terms of a virtual marketplace, with 50 million items in the catalog, made by 50,000 active creators.

Yes, IMVU added Adult-rated content in 2014 -- but no, that's not why it's grown so large:

Listen: High Fidelity Adds New Demo With Ambient Effects to Its 3D Audio-Based Virtual World -- And a Wedding Venue for Virtual Marriages!

Click "JOIN LIVE DEMO" here to try a new demo of High Fidelity, the 3D audio-based virtual world from Philip Rosedale and crew. (Headphones and mic strongly recommended!) As you'll hear, the demo immersively dives you into a pool party where you seem to be surrounded by music and dozens of people, talking (or sometimes ranting!) all around you. At least 65 of them are audio-based bots -- a new feature added to the platform.

"I think there are 65 bots there... and two DJ sources in that map," Philip tells me. These ambient effects join a new set of updates announced recently on the HiFI blog:

Second Life Screenshots Made Into Breathtaking, Ansel Adams-Like Imagery

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

Kato Salyut is limiting his work to black and white, as he explained in his “About” page: 

“As part of my effort to protest the current political climate in DC I am limiting my colors to mono and duo-tone images. Occasionally a glimpse of color can be seen when there is a crack in the power structure. Always looking for that crack and hoping it grows letting in even more color. I love color, rich greens, reds, gold and blue. I am always tempted to post in color. Unfortunately the air in DC is so putrid, the decisions against humanity and the environment are unforgivable.”

In his skilled hands, black and white is not limiting though. This “Landscape” is rich in detail and reminiscent of the great Ansel Adams whose best work was in black and white. I love the detail in this picture, how the rock face is not just a plane of gray, but this mottled mix of colors, the roughness of the rock and the lichen are captured in high relief. 

Kato Salyut has a surreal side to his work in his next photo.

Play in Luxembourg: Authentic 19th Century City Simulation Which Started in SL & Sansar But Moved to ROBLOX

1867 Historical Role Play is a simulation game in ROBLOX with a fascinating virtual world history. It began as a Second Life-based project sponsored by a real life museum, and then expanded to Sansar... but then hit some cost and platform barriers. As Hauptmann "Cyberpiper" Weyder explained to me last year:

[T]he problem lies in the rather volatile nature of the SL community. You do something new, nice, interesting, and folks will come. In order to keep it up though you have to put in a bug work load, mainly organizing one event after another. But despite our best efforts, traffic waned. Gosh we offered free housing to our 1867 community!! Rare in SL! The contract with the [RL] museum came to an end, and frankly we could not afford to pay 7000.-€ tier to Linden Lab a year out of our own pocket!

Sansar has been a disappointment. We managed to do a whole street eventually, but had to start over because of too much lag, trying to figure out ways of more efficient texturing or building. Also Sansar had promised mobile development, which was then taken off the roadmap, a big disappointment for us.  

Cyberpiper just let me know that he and his team have greatly expanded the simulation in ROBLOX, to the point where it's as geographically large as the original SL sim:

Second Life Community Quickly Raises & Donates Over $11,000 for Black Lives Matter & Other Justice Orgs

After a month-long fundraiser in Second Life rapidly put together by dozens of contributors and volunteers during the first Black Lives Matter protests in real life, the organizers of SL's Stand for Justice have converted all the donations and purchases made by the community in Linden Dollars into US dollars, and have donated them to Black Lives Matter and several other select groups -- from the site: 

Having raised a total of $11,159.64 after processing fees, we have now made donations to 4 of the 5 charities as shown in the screenshots above. Black Visions Collective are now no longer accepting donations...As a result, we sent out a poll to the Stand For Justice group in-world asking them to choose between several options as to what we should do with the remaining funds. It is as a result of this poll that the remaining funds were donated to the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform.

To insure transparency and trust, screen captures of all the cash donations and the Linden Dollar cash-out processes are displayed on the Stand for Justice site. Since then, the site has also expanded to become a great resource for Black Lives Matter-related links, both for real life and the virtual world -- including this list of Black-owned Second Life brands.

Huge credit goes to organizers Barb and Jack (aka OMGWTF Barbecue and Jack Nimble in SL), who've worked tirelessly in the background to make such a massive fundraiser succeed on such short notice. And I do mean "background":

Amazing Untouched Environmental Photos Shot in SL With Black Dragon

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

It’s been a while since Loverdag has been featured here. Because her work is so distinctive, I thought I must have already done a post about her. She is one of my favorite SL artists. But I so loved this unedited photo “Dream Village” that I decided to search to see if it’s been over a year, and tadah! I haven’t written about her at all. So what makes me love this? It’s probably not intentional but she captures the lighting before a hailstorm. The clouds are cirrus, the fair weather clouds, but the dark sky with the light so intense and slightly yellow is a sign of hail. With the high winds, the leaning telephone pole, and the precarious buildings that could be dismantled by high winds and it gave me that exhilarating feeling I would sometimes get right before a storm. I can almost smell the freshness of the air. 

More stunning landscapes below -- as with the one above, taken with the Black Dragon viewer without post-processing.

STÖMOL, Feature-Length Cyberpunk Machinima Shot Entirely in Second Life, Has Its World Premiere on New World Notes This Thursday!

STÖMOL! You've seen the trailer, you've read interviews with its lead creator Huckleberry Hax and co-star Caitlin Tobias. (Or if not, watch below.) You've also noticed Chris Nolan's Tenet has now been indefinitely postponed and are looking for a substitute brainy science fiction thriller to watch.

Starting this Thursday at 3:10pm SLT/Pacific, bring your popcorn and watch STÖMOL as it makes it world premiere here on New World Notes. Click play right then and join us in the watch party in Comments or in YouTube live!

After which, STÖMOL is going wide, premiering in SL at Town Hall Island, a four region amphitheater that can fit up to 200. Get all the details from Huckleberry Hax's blog.

Xanax Blackout is a Bettie Page-esque Avatar Who Creates Amazing, Boundary-Pushing SL Imagery

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

x a n a x b l a c k o u t is a queen of the erotic with an avatar who is kissing cousins with Betty Page and an eye for exposure of the not-quite-over-the-edge kind. This picture attracted me with its use of black and white to bring it down to form which is where all the shapes and angles are highlighted. It is a microblog post about chairs - and yet, somehow, the chairs have a whole new context.

More remarkable work ahead:

SL Enthusiast & Veteran Tech Exec Predicts Dark Future for Virtual World

You read the optimistic view of Second Life's future from a top SL brand owner, now here's a necessary counterpoint from longtime reader Luther Weymann, a retired technology industry veteran who last ran a company with 1000 employees, and is an eloquent supporter of SL's creative power. Despite his love for the virtual world, his view as an experienced tech exec is quite bleak: 

The software that runs SL cannot be radically changed or updated, too much will break and the time it takes to fix massive changes only results in more problems. This is the inherent problem with very old software that a lot of people have worked on and the code is now very difficult. Happens to many legacy software that never gets a full rewrite every four or so years to stay competitive.

SL is not a growth business and any review of the user base will tell a good business person that diluting their investment so they can raise the capital to rewrite a new SL from scratch for use by the current user base is not good business. It's better to take the current profit and don't rock the boat.

That in mind, here's the scenario for SL that Luther sees coming down the road: