Writes Violet: “The picture has been made entirely in SL, the background textures taken from the photo directly and then pasted on SL objects to recreate the room. It was not an easy process and I'm not happy with how it turned out, but it is the start of a fun project I feel.”
High Fidelity’s HRTF technology, which stands for “Head Related Transfer Function,” maps speech to different virtual locations by subtly adding a time delay between stereo channels and replicating the way that high and low frequencies would sound entering the ear depending on a sound’s origin. The result, long used in social VR, gives virtual social experiences a sense of physical presence that good records have been pulling off for ages. Think listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon in stereo with good headphones but instead of sound effects and instruments playing around your head, you’re hearing the people you’re hanging out with arrayed in virtual space.
"If people are going to talk in groups online, they are going to need to use spatial audio to understand each other," Philip Rosedale tells me, shortly after the announcement dropped. "We've put in 8 years (so far) working on doing spatial audio right, and are super happy to have people in the Clubhouse community now able to take advantage of this experience!"
This is the latest, fascinating plot twist in Philip's Metaverse ambitions, originally borne with the founding of Second Life, then re-emerging in his latest start-up, High Fidelity, which was originally founded as a Metaverse company. (Before, that is, pivoting in 2019 to focus on this spatial audio feature).
But where Second Life and the original High Fidelity struggled for mass adoption, it's finally been achieved, if only through spatial audio:
Kitchen Versus Kitchen is a zany new world game in VRChat (click here to play) from a mysterious developer known only as Jar. Her hit VRChat worlds are so popular, they account for roughly 1 in 10 of the virtual world's total user activity, and are more popular than most VR games made by established game companies. (Seriously: More on that below.)
This new game, as you might imagine, takes its inspiration from solo/local co-op cooking games which seem ideal when translated into a social VR setting.
"I've played games like Overcooked and Diner Dash before and really enjoyed them with friends, and since VRChat is a social game it just seemed like a natural fit to do something similar," she tells me. "Also game mode aside, there was (and still is?) just an overall lack of worlds with cooking activities and everyone loves cooking, myself included."
As is screamingly apparent from the trailer above, the race to cook the right recipe in time quickly leads to all kinds of culinary mayhem. Getting all that to work in VRChat on a technical level, says Jar, was no easy job:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Val Cloud’s blog Dear Inventory is full of great posts featuring her own products with other people’s creations. I was completely taken by the pose. Look at her hand holding the strap. She didn’t credit the pose, but that is probably because she uses the Black Dragon viewer which has such powerful in-world pose tools. She has a tutorial here but I don’t speak Portuguese. She has a separate blog for her store Guapa, so she does not over-promote in this fashion blog.
Click through to her post “Sienna” for additional details or below:
As with previous parts of the Primer, Part 6, "Interchange Tools + Standards and the Metaverse" delves into just how difficult making a Metaverse worth the name will be. Because while many say the Metaverse is the Internet's next generation, the actual Internet was launched by academics and government researchers who valued open standards. But the major companies/platforms which are likely to launch the Metaverse are very much closed, for the most part:
All of the video games console operating systems, which are required to use console hardware, have chosen not to support open or third-party rendering API collections, such as OpenGL or WebGL. Instead, Microsoft Xbox exclusively uses Microsoft’s DirectX, while Sony uses its GNMX for PlayStation. Mobile devices typically support multiple standards, but they often restrict (or outright block) access to many drivers, which helps drive developers to their proprietary offering. PC and Mac are more open, but they’re optimized for Microsoft’s DirectX and Apple’s Metal APIs. As a result, a developer’s software needs to be written specifically for each platform’s ‘standards’. Fortnite needs to use Microsoft’s DirectX for Xbox, and Sony’s GNMX for PlayStation, Nvidia’s NVM for Nintendo Switch, and Apple’s Metal for iOS. Only Google’s Android has built its solution around OpenGL, but one could argue its dominance with Chrome and Chromium controls these standards for the web.
GPUs also have their own flavor of these protocols, too. Nvidia’s drivers are effectively a ‘platform’ that developers utilize to access a PC user’s hardware, working in concert with Microsoft’s DirectX, for rendering.
But if companies like these want to keep their standards closed, their customers, unified, can demand otherwise. As Matthew writes, the runaway success of Fortnite caused gamers to clamor for the chance to play together with their friends on other devices -- and their clamor grew so great (as did their threats to take their eyeballs elsewhere), even proprietary AF Sony finally complied:
Last week's launch of Facebook's Horizon Workrooms garnered a lot of guffaws due to its sheer Zuckerbergian much-ness, but beneath the VR-for-office meetings platform is some impressive tech.
When you reach out and touch the virtual desk your hands touch the real desk. As long as the important virtual objects within arms reach are mapped to real objects, the virtual environment can be much bigger than the available real space while maintaining the illusion that every virtual object can be touched as well as seen.
Jim (who left Facebook late last year) allows that this is not the type of set-up you want to be strapped into for your entire day: "Currently you wouldn't want to use a Quest all day," as he puts it. "But you could easily attend several typical hour long meetings a day without feeling uncomfortable."
Throughout the pandemic, the Oculus group developing Workrooms would actually use their own platform to hold meetings:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Heidi Rewell gives her pictures the best titles on Flickr. I mean, even if they were not good pics, you would want to look just for the titles. But they are good pictures, so bonus!
Take “Did you know that? Some unicorns like to dress up as horses.” She sets her horizon one-fifth of the way up, leaving the sky to fill the picture using the unofficial rule of fifths. The horses are nearly hidden by the tall grass but that seems appropriate when they are unicorns disguised as horses.
For more beautifully illustrated facts, click here:
Twelve years ago, Bonny Greenwood was floating in outer space on an asteroid doing tai chi to trance music when she struck up a conversation with a friendly passerby. (As one does.)
Then again this is a common thing to happen in Inspire Space Park, a suborbital galaxy that’s been floating high above Second Life since at least 2007 -- created, as the founders told me back then, “to make the perfect ‘chill’ place in SL that wasn't about sex, or ads”. (Watch me twirl above the galaxy below.)
It was co-created by Earth Primbee, and as a testament to the community that’s developed around Inspire Space Park over its lifespan, he is still after all these years able to cover land tier costs from donations:
“It is the feeling one gets when the music and scene combines,” Primbee muses to me. “Maybe you are dancing, doing Tai Chi, meditating, or orbiting and find that moment where it all comes together. It is a peaceful feeling. People need that and the people have insured it stayed. Became a home of sorts. A place where many have met for the first time. A shared place for them after.”
Inspire’s original co-creators have since moved on, and Primbee himself has largely turned over operations to three women. Which brings us back to Bonny, among the triumvirate of the galaxy’s new managers:
Last month I estimated that Upland, the blockchain-backed mirror world real estate trading MMO, probably had about low-to-mid six figures of active users; now here's a pretty good data point of users who actually play Upland long enough to buy virtual real estate in it. A very active Upland user sent me the data above, drawn from up2land.com, a player-driven analytics site.
"[T]hese numbers reflect only the UNIQUE players making transactions each month," my source tells me, "Either Sales, Accepted Offers, or Minting properties. It does not reflect the total number of players -- there are many [who] might go months without making a transaction - and some players may be counted each month. But it does give an indication of the trend of the game."
So unique players defined on those terms have ranged from 54,000 to 102,000 in recent months. My source suspects the dip in May is attributable to less advertising during that month. But these numbers likely do not include a lot of new users just playing around with the free-to-play game's starting money:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Tooku Fadlan’s “Amrun” may end up my favorite picture of the year. When I saw it, I just said, “Wow” before sitting there looking at it for I don’t know how long. I love the moody lighting from the moon through the clouds. Or should I say moony lighting? I love the shadow of the fence creating this parallel set of leading lines diverging as the land rises and falls. It is just magical.
But just how much of a personality does Alejandro actually have? Skeptical that the Turing Test pretense would come crashing down pretty quickly, I sent several questions to August for him to ask "Alejandro". But rather than just pose random generic queries, I asked them as if I was a pretentious a-hole freelancer writing for a pompous art magazine, challenging the AI on his authenticity as artist, whether he's an AI sell-out, and, of course, about having sex with his human groupies.
"I think of this whole disability as one joke that God put on me... I don't think I would be the person I am now without this disability. It's helped my perspective on the world."
Here's the latest interview from Syrmor, the Toronto-based embedded reporter in VRChat, in a characteristically surreal and zany yet but also profound interview with someone who speaks about their real life through the safe distance of their avatar -- in this case, a wheelchair-bound British guy with cerebral palsy and a Wailugi avatar. After a good natured North American trolling (referring to football as "soccer" never fails to enrage a Brit), Syrmor's questions evoke powerfully honest answers from "benjiboi420" about his life online -- questions that would be socially difficult to ask or answer in another context.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Vanka Machiavello’s “Art is in the eye of the beholder” caught my eye as I was browsing Flickr with its simple red, black, and white color story. I love how the red on the wall seems to bounce back and color the street. I love the grittiness of the textures in the brick and the bike. It seems to tell us a story without even having an avatar to convey the message.
To see what other stories bike can tell, click here:
With Linden Lab banning Gachas in Second Life at the end of this month, " irihapeti" and others have noted the rise of Gacha-ish systems like the one above:
Many professional gacha machine makers have developed conveyor machines ready for the 1 September rollout date.
Those that haven't will have to close down their gacha operations.
The basic conveyor machine will display an item from the set. When the customer purchases the displayed item, the machine will 'randomly choose' the next item to be displayed. Customers can buy it or not as they please.
The items in the conveyor machine can be NoCopy Transfer.
So basically systems like this are Gacha-like, except without a completely randomized reward aspect that made Gachas so popular, and also a form of gambling. (And also, for many, so fun.) It also looks like a direct response to a question fielded by Linden Lab in its original announcement banning gachas:
Visible, physical changes to your avatar body based on how you interact in-world. (Watch the demo above!)
“If your avatar dives into water or goesswimming, he or she will emerge with water droplets on the face and body, and dripping wet,” says HUD creator Grace7 Ling. “If your avatar is tired or sleep-deprived (according to the HUD), they will get eye bags. Don’t drink enough water, your avatar gets chapped lips; don’t shower for days, your avatar starts to look grimy! Izzie and I think this will raise the level of realism for roleplayers who desire a truly immersive experience.”
So pretty much Second Life meets The Sims. Here’s all the details from Grace herself:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Skye Donardson has started a brand new blog called The Feathered Nest. She loves to buy homes and decorate them and decided to share her nest feathering adventures. The initial post, “Let’s Get Started” provides tips on buying homes so they fit on your land.
We’re at a critical inflection point. This ultra high-tech ad-driven machine, epitomized by Facebook, represents a new kind of Trojan horse that we’ve only just recently welcomed into our world. Night is falling and the sacking has barely begun. In the future, we run the risk of being so entranced by our shiny new gifts that we lose the will to fight entirely.
On the other hand, if Facebook and others really become true privacy-first, consumer-first companies with business models that reinforce it, if they listen to criticism and welcome independent oversight, they could still become the core companies we depend on, with enough meaningful introspective data and the right protections to actually make our lives better than today.
I just hit up Avi to quibble a bit with his roadmap; while it looks roughly plausible to me, I spy some problems for Facebook's plans: For instance, Quest 2 sales are slow, the PSVR is giving them heavy competition, and Horizon (from what I'm told) is having development challenges; and now, a lot of people are laughing at that Workroom thing. Wouldn't all that change this roadmap?
I usually blog Matthew Ball's Metaverse Primer on Thursdays, but this new exposé by freelance UK journalist Quintin Smith (Wired, Edge, Eurogamer, Kotaku) is important viewing now -- and is just as important if not moreso for the future of the Metaverse, and whatever it becomes.
In his report (watch above on his People Make Games YouTube channel), Smith delves deeply into the ways ROBLOX monetizes user creators on its massively popular platform -- many or most of whom are minors -- with mechanics that he deems so exploitative, he compares them at one point to the infamous scrip that abusive companies used to "pay" its workers.
"For me," as Smith puts it to me, "the most egregious part of the whole story is the platform's minimum withdrawal amount of 100,000 Robux, which equates to $350 US when a developer withdraws it. If you take into account Roblox's cut of 30% of every transaction on the platform, it means a developer needs to have taken 143,000 Robux from its users before they're allowed to withdraw it as actual cash."
In practice, Smith goes on, this tends to lock ROBLOX creators into the system: "The cost for users to buy 143,000 Robux is around $1430. So your game needs to have raked in $1430 in Robux before you, the developer, receive so much as $1." (Also, a ROBLOX developer can only cash out if they have a $5/month premium subscription.)
"If you accept that we need to treat minors who are doing a job better than we treat adults doing the same job," says Smith, "that's just abhorrent. Especially when you consider the platform is encouraging kids to come and work for them."
He tells me he reached out to ROBLOX the company about his report, but received no reply.
Then again, even as ROBLOX enjoyed a speculator IPO earlier this year, few if any reporters have explored the company's monetization policies:
"Very happy to see it out after lots of lobbying that VR for work shouldn't just be an aspirational future dream for Michael Abrash keynotes, but something that could be useful now," as Jim puts it to me now, who left Facebook last year. "Something I was convinced about because Second Life had already been useful for work, as discussed here." (Jim last featured on on New World Notes here.)
The Facebook project was actually started before the pandemic, and enables up to 16 Quest 2 users to be in the same virtual space, with 50 others able to join by video streaming. Despite Second Life being a seed of its inspiration, Jim tells me he's most psyched by its mixed reality features:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Polvere Di Gesso’s “The Man Who Sold His Shadow” evokes such a feeling of alienation. He is leaning forward intent on the screen which seems to be melting, becoming disembodied. His reflection below is divorced from him and from what now appears to be a painting on an easel. His shadow leans back, not forward. How alien to your own life can you be when your shadow does not follow you? Blue is a cold color, the color of sadness, of the Blues. The empty landscape without boundaries or walls and the cold blue are all evocative of loneliness and alienation.
His inspiration was the song “Storia dell'uomo che vendette la sua ombra” which gives us the title. I listened to it and liked its creepiness. It reminds me, in a way, of Leonard Cohen who never tried to sound pleasant. Of course, in literature there is Peter Schlemihl who sold his shadow to the devil for lots of money but being without s shadow, society rejected him. Without our shadows we are alien. Though, The Inkspots used to tell us, “We three we ain't no crowd. Fact is we ain't even company. That's my echo, my shadow, and me.”
For more stark, yet emotionally powerful pictures, click here:
Here’s a fascinating new report on avatars and gender from longtime game culture researcher Nick Yee, based on a survey of nearly 3,000 gamers. Nick’s topline takeaway is that 1 in 3 men prefer to play as female avatars, which is more than many might assume.
Two other learnings stand out to me even more:
Avatar gender preferences among players have remained basically the same since Nick started studying questions like this during the peak of Everquest -- over two decades ago! This despite the fact that MMOs have become much more mainstream since then, attracting many millions of players where they once only drew hundreds of thousands.
“This implies that whatever is causing this to happen (for both male and female players) has been consistent for the past 20 years,” Nick tells me, “so it's a function of some stable sociological dynamic and/or how we've been making games/avatars for the past 20 years.
“Back in EQ days, I think it was easy to imagine that this phenomenon was idiosyncratic to MMOs, because the genre was more niche back then. But perhaps the MMO findings were always pointing at deeper, stable findings given that much of MMO mechanics and the live services model is now everywhere.” (In other words, online games like Overwatch and Fortnite also have heavy MMO features.)
Nick’s other standout finding: Very few females want to play as male avatars. Seriously few:
Once others heard about the money that was made off of this one piece, more individuals wanted to create A.I. art. While there was still some money made off of subsequent A.I. artwork sales, nothing came close to the $432,500 price point. [Christie's auction bid for an AI art work of - WJA]. This is due to the fact that the value (being the first of its kind) was not applicable any longer, and the story/artist’s history was missing.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Panda Bandana’s “Frogmore 3.0 Photo Contest” picture is a great picture of someone painting in Second Life. For me, a picture of someone painting should show a canvas that reflects what is in front of the painter. Most of the Easel/Canvas/Pose sets allow people to change the canvas texture and it’s a sign people are thinking about the entire picture, not just snapping away.
I have always liked pictures of people painting. There’s something so meta about the pictures. It’s an old obsession. When I went to El Prado, rather than rush through the museum, I spent over an hour looking at Las Meninas. I am a firm believer in seeing a few great things over trying to see everything and will never forget how huge and fascinating the painting is
Wow, the next picture feels like a painting of a painter painting, click here:
SL Gacha Creators Scramble to Create Gacha-Like Systems Without a Gambling Mechanic Before Linden Lab's September 1 Deadline
Image/system by dazai voom
With Linden Lab banning Gachas in Second Life at the end of this month, " irihapeti" and others have noted the rise of Gacha-ish systems like the one above:
So basically systems like this are Gacha-like, except without a completely randomized reward aspect that made Gachas so popular, and also a form of gambling. (And also, for many, so fun.) It also looks like a direct response to a question fielded by Linden Lab in its original announcement banning gachas:
Continue reading "SL Gacha Creators Scramble to Create Gacha-Like Systems Without a Gambling Mechanic Before Linden Lab's September 1 Deadline" »
Posted on Monday, August 23, 2021 at 03:32 PM in Comment of the Week, Economics of SL | Permalink | Comments (13)
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