New World Notes

Launching This Saturday in Second Life: A Massive Education Campus Bringing Together Many Projects Into a Shared Serendipitous Space

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:

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.

Friday Fashion Finds from SL Style Maven Gidge Uirza

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

The “Asian Pacific Heritage Festival” is a post from Gidge Uirza. If you didn’t know it by now, Gidge is my best and oldest friend in Second Life. We met when I got stuck underneath a stairway and couldn’t get out. She blogs at It’s Only Fashion, the blog we started back in 2008. She is still blogging strong. Old Guard, indeed. She went to the Asian-Pacific Heritage Festival today and wrote about. That’s what is so great about her blogging style. She does things and then writes about. It’s not just fashion, it’s lifestyle, SL lifestyle and it akes her blog great. 

Featured at the Asian Pacific Heritage Festival [teleport here]

• Snack: So Silly Japanese Dango Decor by Kiki Chaika
• Headpiece: =Zenith=Flower Headpiece by Miffyhoi Rosca

For more Gidgery, click here:

Throwback Thursday: That Time We Noticed Bitcoin Was Being Used Less Than Linden Dollars... in 2013

With Bitcoin's experiencing an utter bloodbath today, this may come across as "I told ya so", but hopefully not. For nearly 10 years, Bitcoin promoters and major investors have never been able to answer a question I started asking in 2013, and kept asking over the years: If Bitcoin is such an important virtual currency, why does it have less daily transactions than Linden Dollars in Second Life?

This isn't to say Linden Dollars are superior to Bitcoin -- which after all, are a virtual currency intrinsically tied to a social game MMO platform. However, after all that hype, you'd think Silicon Valley would be quick to have the same skepticism for Bitcoin as they did for Second Life after it failed to deliver on its promises in 2006-2008.

Daily BTC transactions have grown somewhat since then, but remain below 300,000 per day, as compared to Second Life's 400,000+.

Why? Short answer: Because the value of any money -- even and especially virtual money -- is created by a community which agrees to value it. Even and especially a virtual community. Linden Dollars have that. Bitcoin never really did.

Again, this isn't said with any triumph, because thousands if not millions of people have bought into the Bitcoin hype, and are now suffering. But the thing is, another blockchain-based speculation bubble is still happening, and the same principles still apply:

Chipotle's Burrito Giveaway in ROBLOX Attracts 5 Million+ Extra Visits -- RoMonitor Stats

Remember Chipotle's ROBLOX giveaway last month, offering free real burritos for the first people to play Chipotle's virtual burrito builder game? This one:

Chipotle Burrito Builder on Roblox, a new simulation experience that will challenge players to roll burritos in the metaverse to earn Burrito Bucks, the brand's in-experience currency on Roblox1, starting on April 7, National Burrito Day. The first 100,000 Roblox players to successfully roll a burrito will earn enough Burrito Bucks to exchange them for an entrée code that can be used on the Chipotle app, Chipotle.com, or Chipotle.ca

While the announcement attracted much coverage, few to no reporters followed up about its actual ROI.

So I did! By contacting the folks at RoMonitor Stats, which tracks experience metrics on the metaverse platform for kids. 

While I was skeptical at first, the results they sent me seem pretty impressive:

Tab Tatham Takes Interior Design Photos of Second Life Homes More Sumptuous & Detailed Than Real Life Photos in Dwell Magazine

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

Tab Tatham is a Flickr microblogger whose style is maximally appealing. Whiskey Monday pointed me her way with this comment, “I LOVE it so much. I'm a maximalist and this just makes me want to move in.”  

I’m not a maximalist and this makes me nervous, but that does not mean I don’t think it’s gorgeous. I admire the exuberance, the abundance of color, texture, and layers of elements to catch my eyes, but every item on the floor makes me think of Dorothy McHugh calling that she’s fallen and can’t get up. [Click here for hilarious compilation.] Thankfully, trips and falls in Second Life never leave a bruise. 

For more maximalist designs click here:

As She Celebrates 15 Years in Second Life, Avatar Influencer Strawberry Singh Discusses the Tedium of Creator Credits & Ways to Bring Back the Fun

Strawberry Singh, who became the SL community's top social media influencer and then went on to work for Linden Lab in 2019, has a new post celebrating her 15 years in the virtual world. It includes a surprising confession -- she almost quit SL entirely, mainly due to the tedium of posting credits to her avatar fashion reviews:

I had been feeling like the creative light Second Life had always been for me was diminishing because I was getting bogged down with doing mesh head reviews. I have to be honest with you, I absolutely hated doing those videos. I had come to a point where I loathed all the time I was putting into reviewing things and sharing style credits and not being able to just be more creative and have the time to do fun things in Second Life.

"Writing out style credits for every single item I was wearing in each post was a lot of work back then," she tells me. "I had so many blogs just saved as drafts at a time and I couldn't publish them until I took at least 30 minutes to sit there and write out all the style credits. It was time-consuming, exhausting, and not fun at all." (She hastens to add that she's still glad she made those reviews: "[A]s much as I was tired of it at the end, I know how important those videos were and many people have reached out to me and said that they learned a lot from [them].")

This is actually a common theme in SL social media, and a recurring complaint that comes up when Cajsa writes about Second Life fashion blogs -- either the creator credits are non-existent, incomplete, or not informative enough for readers to know where they might buy those listen items. It's the blessing and curse of a virtual world where everything is user-generated: If you're really trying to give credits to every creator whose work is depicted in a screenshot, it's a painstaking process where you will need to credit the creator of everything in view, up to and including the literal sky.

That to one side, Strawberry has ideas for how the community could inject more fun into the social media ecosystem of SL:

Study: Online Video Meetings Impair Creativity -- Opportunity for Virtual World-Based Conferencing?

The title of the study published in Nature is "Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation", but it's specifically referring to Zoom-style online video calls:

 In a laboratory study and a field experiment across five countries (in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia), we show that videoconferencing inhibits the production of creative ideas... Specifically, using eye-gaze and recall measures, as well as latent semantic analysis, we demonstrate that videoconferencing hampers idea generation because it focuses communicators on a screen, which prompts a narrower cognitive focus. 

This tracks with my personal experience. I do countless editorial/brainstorming calls on Zoom and Skype video, and to make real substantial creative progress, find myself putting a browser window in front of the video feed, so I don't get distracted by people looking at me (looking at them). Or only having my camera on for the Hello and Goodbye portions of the call.

This strikes me as an opportunity for virtual world/metaverse platform-based meetings where typically, there is no direct eye contact, and the visual cues are immersive 3D graphics:

Today's Flickr Pick: Wren Alcyone Depicts SL Avatars Like Art Nouveau Paintings

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

Wren Alcyone has a lovely stream full of beautiful and fantastical portraits. Recently, she created a four-part series that reminds me of Art Nouveau painter Alphonse Mucha (if he could have worked with neon). With “Ducky” she uses his motif of a frame adorned with vegetation that reflects her outfit. I love it when someone does an homage to the artists of the past. I love it even more when it is a cheeky homage like a neon frame. So much fun! 

For more Muchaesquerie, click here:

The Sandbox's Terms of Service Says You Don't Actually Own NFTs Associated With The Sandbox

While I've written about how The Sandbox's blockchain-based metaverse platform has a small user base despite (because of?) NFT sales from major brands, Indiana University associate law professor João Marinotti recently made an equally salient point -- you don't actually own the NFTs associated with The Sandbox:

If The Sandbox “reasonably believes” you engaged in any of the platform’s prohibited activities, which require subjective judgments about whether you interfered with others’ “enjoyment” of the platform, it may immediately suspend or terminate your user account and delete your NFT’s images and descriptions from its platform. It can do this without any notice or liability to you.

In fact, The Sandbox even claims the right in these cases to immediately confiscate any NFTs it deems you acquired as a result of the prohibited activities. How it would successfully confiscate blockchain-based NFTs is a technological mystery, but this raises further questions about the validity of what it calls virtual ownership.

The Conversation reached out to The Sandbox for comment but did not receive a response.

Much more here. I took the screengrab here from The Sandbox's Terms of Service, and the terms are as drastic as Marinotti describes them.

I don't necessarily blame The Sandbox for having such a drastic "in case of emergency break glass" clause to cover itself.

Today's Flickr Pick: This SLer Turns Screenshots Into Clownishly Surreal Comics

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

Pete Clownie’s stream is hilarious. He is having fun. Here we see him in a competition Clown vs. Seal. My money’s on the seal. He asks what we think the bet was for. Add your ideas. 

For more fun, click here:

Shock Web3 Stat: Way More People Still Buy Virtual Items in Second Life Than Buy NFTs on Coinbase & OpenSea -- Combined!

Shocking or hilarious (depending on your point of view) stat of the day from the sarcastically-named Web3 is Going Great blog:

[Though Coinbase] claimed to have 3 million users on its [NFT marketplace] waitlist, the public marketplace release has gone shockingly poorly given Coinbase's existing reputation. The platform has yet to see more than 200 transactions in a given day (compared to OpenSea, which regularly sees more than 100,000 transactions a day, or its smaller competitor LooksRare which sees more than 1,000 daily).

As I noted back in January, NFT sales compare quite poorly to virtual item purchases in Second Life, which hasn't been considered a "hot" platform in tech since at least 2010. But Second Life still attracts about 200,000 daily active users, and it's fair to estimate each of those users buy an average of 1-2 virtual items per day. (At a conservative guess; 3-5 per day is probably more accurate.) In other words, at least twice the daily sales than OpenSea, and 1000x more the NFT sales on Coinbase.

Somehow this reality hasn't registered with the many companies, brands, and celebrities involved in NFTs:

On its site Coinbase claims 65 million+ users, and is currently getting 47 million+ monthly visits, according to SimilarWeb. OpenSea gets even more visits: Nearly 78 million/month! Then there's all the promotion of NFTs by celebrities including Snoop Dogg, Grimes, Emily Ratajkowski, Eminem, Reese Witherspoon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Mila Kunis, and Paris Hilton. (Who cringe-ingly declared herself "Queen of the Metaverse".)

Despite all that attention, NFTs are attracting less actual sales than the platform known by most people as "Oh yeah, that thing from The Office, right?"

Metaverse Content Creators in Developing Nations Can Do Quite Well -- Once They Break Into the Market (Comment of the Week)

Great comment from a reader based in Brazil, expanding on my point (and that of a fellow Brazilian) about the difficulty for metaverse content creators in the developing world to succeed, due to high costs of entry:

It works the other way round too, the $ is very valuable and gets me a higher standard of living than using that dollar in the USA.

I can eat well, afford rent and my bills, all from Second Life content creation. Adobe prices their monthly subscriptions in the local currency too, but yes [avatar software creation tool] Marvelous Designer is very expensive compared to Adobe's monthly subs.

Reader "Reiille" from Mexico, echoes that point:

 1 USD is worth 20 pesos to us, which of course, if you earn that back in revenue, it can be a huge financial help. I myself have been trying to break into the market, but the investment to be made to put a new brand out there is more than I can afford, so it's been a slow burn. 

So while breaking into a relatively static market* like Second Life is difficult for creators in the developing world, once they do break in, they have a tremendous edge:

Top 6 Posts Last Week Including Linden Lab's First CMO & Why BONELAB Could Be Garry's Mod-for-VR

• Throwback Thursday: Wild Metaverse Predictions We Experts Made... In 2006
• For Metaverse Creators In Developing Nations, Second Life's Costs To Entry Have Grown Too High
• We Love How This SL Artist Depicts Avatars In RPG-Style Trading Cards
• Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2022年4月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan
• Watch: How BONELAB Could Become The Garry's Mod For VR
• Linden Lab Hires First CMO. Is It Good Or Bad That He Has Little Or No Metaverse-Related Experience?

Screengrab above via this multiplayer demo from YouTube's Downloadable Content.

Watch Now: Latest Seracast Discusses Linden Lab's New C Suite Hires, SL's New High Concurrency Sims & Much More

The latest Seracast from the creators of Seraphim SL is live! Highlights include a convo around my post this week on the new C suite members joining Linden Lab, and the recently announced high concurrency sims. (The ladies then discuss how these new sim offerings might work with sales events.)

Also be sure to take Seraphim's home and garden survey , which includes 8 chances to win L$5000.