Speaking of VRChat hiring, I kinda feel like the company should go ahead and hire community creator/merchant "lackofbindings" to make default avatars. Because, I mean, watch above. (Starts slow but shit gets real around 20 seconds in.)
I watch this somewhat whimsically, because amazing avatars like this once seemed pervasive in Second Life as well (as here, in 2007) but are much less prevalent. They're still around, to be sure, but you have to look in earnest, and they're definitely in less abundance on the active marketplace. My working theory, as I wrote in the book, is the launch of avatar-based mesh for ultrarealistic humans too quickly dominated the market after 2010:
Meta is now laying off thousands of employees while all but announcing that staff working on Meta's Horizon Worlds is next on the chopping block this year. So it's important to note that Rec Room and VRChat -- two metaverse platforms which have ironically thrived on Meta's own Quest platform -- are currently hiring:
All remote roles, too! That they're hiring is not a surprise, since VRChat has (by their own reporting) 10 million active users, while Rec Room (by my estimate) has well over 20 million users. What is somewhat surprising is that neither company was acquired by Meta, seeing that much or most of that user base -- nearly 70%, in VRChat's case -- use a Meta Quest headset. But oh well.
In VRChat's case, by the way, I know several staffers were deeply involved in Second Life back in the day, while the founders are very much aware of the platform. Also, I recently chatted with a VRC staffer who got their start as a community developer, and shared some about the VRChat corporate culture and advice on getting hired:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Lally O’Leary is a fun account to follow, in part because you never know what she will do next. I said something similar four years ago when I wrote about her back when she called herself Lally Starsparkle. Whatever her last name, Lally is sure to please. I love “The Photographer” where she makes the intriguing decision to leave a lot of space bin the field before the subject. It creates a sense of vastness that would be lost if her subject were up close in the foreground.
Last week's post on Second Life's huge geographic size as a unique selling point brought up some interesting points. Technically SL is probably not the "largest" if we're only talking about geographic size, but I think the apples to apples comparison question is precisely this:
What is the Geographically Largest, Contiguous, Multi-User, Fully Explorable, Online Virtual World?
By "contiguous", I mean there are no load screens in between areas, and by "fully explorable" I mean just that: Some online worlds like Eve Online, MS Flight Simulator, or even single-player worlds like Starfield are extremely large, yes, if judged only by map size. But the actual user explorable part of the map size is much less than that. I.E., MSFS basically models the entire world, but you can't, say, land your plane and walk into a nearby diner.
Video (also) via @brainthink.bsky.social, who has also happened to explore Second Life, and found it technically wanting: "The SL mainland is geographically large," they explain, "but the rendering times of structures and objects is absurdly slow. As a real life sailor, I tried sailing in SL once on a rezzed sailboat and quickly gave up. It wasn’t enjoyable at all, sadly."
That has at least somewhat improved since the SL grid moved to the Amazon Cloud in 2020. And while there are thousands of private sims that are not generally accessible, or require a load screen when teleporting there, the major mainland areas, as reader Kaylee West argues, makes for some sprawling, serendipitous adventures -- notwithstanding property owner ban lines:
Since Quest headsets and Horizon Worlds cannot succeed on the scale of Meta's ambitions (and certainly not in 2025), I'm reading [Meta CTO's internal memo] as a preparation for a major shift of focus away from mixed reality and Horizon Worlds towards augmented reality +AI glasses (at the end of this year or in 2026). (And I'm sure that Meta will find a way to describe this new focus as an evolution of their vision of the Metaverse. Maybe the new/true/real Metaverse or whatever. They'll come up with something.)
If this shift of focus towards AR glasses and AI is already planned, why not just announce it? I assume the purpose of this whole exercise (and its predictable outcome) is to rationalize the scaling down of the MR and Horizon Worlds teams, prevent or shut down internal discussions about this change, and give some employees a chance to leave or switch teams before they are fired.
But I'm biased because Meta's VR strategy never made much sense to me. Thus, I guess, I'll just wait, watch, and limit my engagement with the Quest platform.
"Despite the reductions," MSN reports, "Meta still has around 1,000 job openings in California, with hiring efforts focused on AI and other business-critical roles." So, yes, I agree with Martin that limiting engagement with the Quest is probably a good idea.
As for my original rant about Bosworth's memo, there's a pretty good conversation on it on LinkedIn, where it went mini-viral.
I joined Wagner James Au’s Patreon at the “Metaverse partner” level in October 2024, when I started work on my book about Second Life, since James’s New World Notes blog and Patreon user posts seemed the perfect place to publicize my project.
In the four months since, I’ve been both impressed and delighted by the results...
The most fascinating story about next gen AI in technology may not be about DeepSeek or whatever OpenAI is announcing, but reside in a 21 year old metaverse platform which has something no LLM can boast about: A simulated virtual world with terabytes of meta-tagged data constantly evolving.
That's my take, at least, talking with Linden Lab heads Brad Oberwager and Philip Rosedale recently. And while the company has added its own official AI-powered characters last year, the user community has been creating them for many years, even long before OpenAI existed. They recently got a demo from an SL community creator who connected LLMs to an upcoming RPG that blew their minds:
"The whole experience that he had built using AI was really very strong," Philip tells me. "And I think that's one of those cases where, if we can just get people to him, the ones that want to [play his role playing game] it was just awesome." (More on that game later.)
They also thought, he added: "Okay, let's modernize this and make it easily expand upon this stuff."
But doing that means taking incredible caution: "We're running a lot of tests on characters that are infused with AI personalities," Oberwager explains. "They're sort of next gen NPCs. We ran a test, we got feedback, we took the test down. It's not like it went sideways, but some people didn't like some things, but that's the point of the test."
"Using Runway ML is actually straightforward," he tells me, explaining the platform/technical process and artistic approach. "You start by uploading an image and describing what you want to see happen in the video. Then you wait to see how the output aligns with your vision. Personally, I’d estimate my success rate is about 25%. I define success as the output effectively conveying the emotion or sensation I’m trying to communicate.
"To make the process more efficient, I take notes on the wording and syntax that lead to favorable results for my specific goals. I’m mindful of the carbon footprint of this technology, so I prioritize producing meaningful, impactful results. If the outputs don’t show promise quickly, I end the session and reconsider the prompts or the source image. It’s easy to approach the tool like a hammer and just keep hitting anything and everything, relying on it to generate something interesting without much progress towards the original vision.
"With my paintings, for example, I was inspired by one of the more thrilling sensations in Second Life: the feeling of hopping just off the ground, hovering, and zooming closely over the landscape. I wanted to capture that same energy in my real-life paintings, so I tailored my prompts in that direction.
"Once the painting is adjusted in Photoshop, I upload it to Runway, add a text prompt I think will work, and wait for the render. It’s a bit like baking a soufflé—you hope it rises but prepare for the possibility of collapse."
"The resulting output was exciting enough to explore further. It sparked a realization about AI’s potential in art. The experience reminded me of when I first started building with prims in Second Life: the thrill of exploring a new medium of expression with an incredibly low barrier to entry.
"For me it’s a precision thing. Creating felt more precise in Second Life than painting on a canvas. Creating with AI feels more vague than painting, blurry in a way that’s difficult to focus. But this is temporary. We’re in the Daguerreotype era of AI."
All of this, of course, brings up numerous thorny topics about the clash between traditional art and gen AI. Berg is one of the few people highly qualified in both fields to discuss it with nuance. (Along with his SL art, he's an academically trained painter; on the tech side, he was a designer at IBM and more recently, worked on a visualization project for NASA, among other coolness.)
So Berg has some solid back to consider, for instance, the future of traditional art in the AI era, especially as it evolves:
"Although we might view the introduction of AI media through the lens of anti-AI sentiment as many do, that very sentiment could instead be viewed as a renewed appreciation of handcrafted works," he argues. "Regardless of one’s opinion of AI art, it has people talking about art and human agency in ways we haven’t in a very long time.
"The shaman who told stories by the community fire as the shadows dances on the cave walls may have taken exception to written glyphs, wondering how the human experience would be retained on cold stones. Despite the spectacle of AI, these themes and concerns are ancient. I’d be more worried if we looked at AI and rejected it wholesale than having the courage to see what it means to be human in a world in constant tension with the technology we invent."
Does that imply he plans to use gen AI in his own "official" works of art? In other words, works he'd show to the general public in a gallery setting, or even a platform like SL?
Background: Historically we mostly only feature images from SL's Flickr community for various reasons (longevity, embed features, etc.), but we also want to highlight the Primfeed's fairly large virtual world community as much as possible.
In any case, please tag your favorites Primfeed artists in comments so we can follow and/or feature them!
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Cursiichella recently posted this delightful picture and I immediately thought she’s Pippi Longstocking all grown up. I love the mischievous spirit she portrays. Definitely, she would lead an expedition to a circus.
For more of Cursichella’s spirited pictures, click here:
I keep being shown a viral Instagram post about someone tagging major real world logos that are showing up unauthorized in Second Life. So let's talk about it.
Will anything happen because of this one post tagging RL brands? Debatable. However, if someone were to professionally write to the legal teams at Chanel, Balenciaga, Kellogg's, McDonald's, etc., yes. Something could happen.
Only not in the way they think.
When you sign into Second Life for the first time, or whenever Linden Lab updates the Terms of Service, you have to agree before proceeding. Does anyone really sit and read the whole ToS? Probably not. But let me hit you with a couple of lines from section 6:
Linden Lab encourages the creation of original content in Second Life. You should not use copyrighted, trademarked, or celebrity material in Second Life.
So those items I showed you the past couple of months with Versace and Vuitton on them? You guessed it. They're breaking ToS.
"But, Ali. Fashion can't be copyrighted!"
No, it can't, for the most part. You can absolutely recreate a pair of Alice+Olivia jeans in the cut, style, and shape. What you can't do is take one of their embellished jeans and recreate them down to the EXACT graphic design down the legs. You could recreate them and put flowers down the legs, just not the exact ones that are designed specifically for Alice+Olivia.
You can recreate a Juicy tracksuit. You cannot put the exact Juicy logo on the butt.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting.
Langstrath Valley shot “Windmills, Sancho? I see Giants!” which portrays the most famous scene from Don Quixote... I loved the book when I read it in high school Spanish and dragged my friend to see the statue at Plaza de España. I love the book far more than “Man of La Mancha,” the musical.
Why did I decide to hunt for Don Quixote in Second Life? Chatting on the phone with a friend, I characterized a mutual friend’s action as quixotic. I then wondered why we pronounced quixotic so differently from Quixote. I had my stream choosing music for me based on a Ben Webster tune and, rudely, The Impossible Dream began to play. I have never liked that song. The algorithmic overlords should have chosen Dulcinea. Anyway, it made me wonder about Don Quixote in Second Life. There were some lovely surprises such as Langstrath’s picture that is so true to the story.
For more of Don Quixote in the Metaverse, click here:
Or I should say, adding next gen AI-powered NPCs, because as Brad notes, "the horse has been out of the barn" for years. But the promise and peril is far greater, now they can be more powerful than ever before:
"What we're trying to figure out is," he tells, "how do we give people the opportunity to have these NPCs, to build these characters, without all of a sudden, you know -- the classic one that everyone says is, 'Without a bunch of Nazis running around.'"
Read it all here, and don't miss the fascinating (if a little creepy!) story of the LLM-powered surfer NPC that Brad once met -- it's totally gnarly.
... We need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR. And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance. If you don't feel the weight of history on you then you aren't paying attention. This year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure...
You don't need big teams to do great work. In fact, it may make it harder. One trend I've observed the last couple of years is that our smaller teams often go faster and achieve better results than our more generously funded teams. Not only that, they are much happier! In small teams there is no risk of falling into bad habits like design by committee.
Start strongly boosting our metaverse KPIs or get fired this year.
... because the only time the leaders of a large company talk about the value of small teams is when a huge staff is about to become a tinier one. Also, I've personally heard multiple insiders talk about a coming cut, recently -- and have been hearing about Reality Labs' "design by committee" problem since roughly 2019.
It's tragic that Meta's staff is now bearing the brunt of the very fundamental mistakes that Zuckerberg and Bosworth themselves made over the last 10 years -- especially when these were foreseeable errors at the time.
To highlight just a few I've followed closely:
Zuckerberg/Bosworth spent billions to mass market VR, without researching (or knowing) why VR tends to make females literally vomit:
[Microsoft's] danah boyd is not an obscure researcher, but frequently cited in mainstream media and tech news sites. So when she ended her 2014 essay with a call for researchers across Silicon Valley to follow up on her initial findings, I assumed this would immediately happen.
It did not.
Reached while writing Making a Metaverse That Matters, she told me that few if any VR industry members contacted her after the essay was published. Neither did they even follow up with her in 2017, when a study published in Experimental Brain Research found that when women volunteers played a game in an Oculus VR headset, 78 percent of them experienced nausea. “To my knowledge,” she told me, “[Oculus and Meta] did not pursue any of those research questions.”
Over the years, I’ve asked several senior Meta staffers about this, [including Zuckerberg/Bosworth's PR team] and have received no adequate reply.
Zuckerberg/Bosworth did not follow the advice of former Facebook VP / Second Life co-founder Cory Ondrejka, Jim Purbrick, and other virtual world veterans they hired.
If you've been following the news about Facebook/Meta's metaverse project lately, you'll recall the slew of bad press when a female user was sexually assaulted in Horizon Worlds, leading the company to hastily add an avatar "boundary" system...
"I was literally banging the drum at Oculus Connect two years in a row," Jim Purbrick tells me, with evident frustration, even sending along the talk he gave on the subject at Facebook's own conference back in 2016. "I also told every new Oculus employee I met to read My Tiny Life in addition to Ready Player One, but the message didn't reach every part of the organization, sadly."
To the statement, "I believe Meta will successfully build the metaverse" (above), only 50% of employees answered yes. In November 2021, 77% of staff answered in the affirmative... 56% say their own CEO has not explained the metaverse clearly.
In a funny irony, Bosworth pinged me on Twitter when I pointed out that Meta seemed to be walking away from the Metaverse... in a statement he wrote that actually shows little knowledge about the concept. The painful irony is his own employees will now have to labor under the gun of that misapprehension.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Maloe Vansant has been a favorite artist of mine for years, something I said the last time I wrote about her. It’s as true now as then. Pictures like this are the reason why. The woman’s face is so beautiful, but in the texture of the skin we see the breakdown and deterioration. There are scratches and breaks in the surface and there is a growth of gold daubs of paint, flecks that fleck off, a kind of beautiful decay. The title is “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This” and it immediately reminds me of that video that frequently zoomed in on Annie Lennox and her castmates’ faces, but most often on her face. Even without the Eurythmics connection, though, this picture is extraordinary.
For more of the breathtaking imagery from Maloe Vansant, click here:
The new test ad for Second Life attracted quite a bit of opinions from longtime SL users, including some on-brand snark -- and this smart suggest from longtime virtual world explorer Kaylee West:
As a regular user of both SL (17 years) and VRChat (6 years), one of the big things that keeps me in SL and frustrates me with VRC is how much easier it is the change up my avis look and wardrobe in SL than VRC.
I also feel, strangely, that the continents are a big selling point. Many AAA games boast about how big their maps are, how you can endlessly explore every corner of their maps. [Emphasis mine! -WJA]
VRC has some biggish worlds, but nothing like SL's continents and Blake Sea. Only in SL can you buy a luxury yacht and sail for hours on end, stopping at different port and explore the surrounds, or jump in a car of your choice and drive around an extensive road network.
From another perspective, there appears to be a growing number of people looking for AI companions. I have made one for myself so that I have "intelligent" company when I travel around SL (not all of us are good at the socialising thing). Maybe making the creation of AI companions (actual avatars not animesh which can't be rezzed) easier and highlighting this as a feature of SL (as against Replika or Kindred) might draw these users in?
I believe something like those AI companions are coming soon, so set that aside. The map size point is a very good one, especially since SL is a single-shard virtual world with truly massive areas that are contiguous by land, air, or sea. (Yes, region crossings usually involve hiccups, but still.) It's a key differentiating feature of Second Life!
Consider: Currently Second Life's size is roughly that of Los Angeles (as Philip Rosedale recently noted in an interview), i.e. 1300 square kilometers.
Contrast that with some leading AAA online game worlds:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Damien Father (Father Daddy) has an exciting photostream. Regular readers will know I am a huge fan of pop art. I cannot resist pictures like this. Really, all they did was create a duotone in red with their snap and make a few repeats. But the idea is always what makes pop art special. I mean, most anyone could paint a Campbell’s Tomato Soup Can, but no one thought of doing that until Andy Warhol in 1961. I’ve seen the soup cans arrayed in a long line from one room to another and they are overwhelming and far more interesting and imposing than you might think.
I also have to point out the subtle cleverness of choosing that shade so that the face seems also a repeat of the background. I love everything about this pic. This is titled “Super Villain” which is also kind of clever as there is no outward manifestation of villainy, but that is the point, villainy comes from within not without.
For more SL-becomes-pop art perfection, click here:
There’s been a lot of discussion lately on the problem of retention of new users in Second Life. While the focus has largely been on the daunting UI and learning curve, along with common 30-day prohibitions, I think there’s a more salient issue which makes the majority of new signups give up within minutes or hours, never to return.
I believe the fundamental reason Second Life has a historic retention problem is simple: people have no idea what to do once they’re here. In the course of researching my book, it became clear to me that after an initial period of acclimation and discovery in SL, the majority of residents usually find something to do and keep them engaged — they find, or create, meaning and purpose in their second lives.
This shouldn’t surprise us: after all, isn’t RL like that? Children daydream about what they want to be when they grow up; we have goals, dreams, aspirations. Yet when someone first logs in to SL, they have absolutely no idea what they want to do. You could argue their first task is to learn how to get around, dress, and so on, but this is hardly stuff to grab our interest. And when you consider we’re trying to breathe new life into our world by recruiting Gen Z and younger Gen Yers whose brains are wired for ten- to thirty-second videos, expecting them to take time to read all the 1950s-style educational signage on Welcome Island is kinda unrealistic.
In the course of taking new photographs for my book, I’d enlisted some friends to pose for a pair of interior shots. Anyone who takes photos in SL knows that setting up a shot can be very time-consuming and, one would think, pretty boring for the draftees. Yet when I apologized to my models for what should have been a one-hour session turning into three, they all said they were enjoying it. How, I wondered, could anyone enjoy sitting around and occasionally being asked to trigger an expression or assume a new pose for three hours? I realized people like to do stuff, to be part of something. To belong.
One of the most engaged people I know in SL is my friend Rachel Blat. Here’s what she has to say:
"I have been in Second Life for almost 6 years. During this time I’ve learned many things, some of which keep me very busy. I am a professional surfer for the SLSA, the Second Life Surfing Association, which has two sessions per year. To participate in the competitions, a lot of training and knowledge of the different boards available in Second Life is necessary. I usually start my training with the board chosen by the SLSA on the beach where the competition will take place 15 days in advance, for 1 to 2 hours per day.
“When I’m not surfing, I am a photographic model and also co-owner of a modeling agency and producer of a story magazine. I divide my time photographing models and building scenarios where the stories take place. We have done Wild West, Cleopatra, Star Wars, and several other themes. There are 8 studios measuring 64x64 meters that are constantly being modified. When I have some free time, I usually brave the winds by sailing on the Blake Sea. I am also a mother in SL and my baby needs daily care. All these together make my SL happy and fulfilling.”
This dovetails with my own experience that some of the happiest people in SL are those whose SL is full and busy, whether it’s with DJing, participating in SL sports, fundraising, helping admin a sim, or running their own club, art gallery, cafe, etc. In the process, residents widen their connections and build meaningful relationships, in contrast to the sense of isolation and loneliness one can feel if one just hangs out alone in places where half the avatars are AFK. If you’re already lonely in RL (and so many are), the last thing you need is to reinforce that in SL!
So, imagine this as a new feature to the first-time SL user experience:
In a cultural milestone possibly relevant only to me, acclaimed movie critic Anthony Lane just reviewed Grand Theft Hamlet, a documentary shot completely in GTA Online, in The New Yorker. (Paywalled online only at the moment, alas, but I just blogged about the movie here.)
I'm fairly sure this is the first time The New Yorker has reviewed a machinima! The venerable magazine did review Life 2.0, the 2010 documentary about Second Life, but that only partly shot in SL. (I think roughly 30% of the footage is machinima.)
Linden Lab just started publishing new ads on YouTube for Second Life, one of which you watch here. ("It represents one variation of many that are being tested", the company tells me.) Screengrabs of it throughout this post.
It's part of a new and aggressive marketing campaign for Second Life -- basically the first one in nearly 4 years.
To get more context and strategy, read my latest interview with Linden Lab head Brad Oberwager and CTO Philip Rosedale below!
Inside Project Zero: Brad Oberwager & Philip Rosedale on Marketing & Designing a New User Second Life Experience
Project Zero is not simply a cloud streaming option for existing SL users. It's tightly integrated into an aggressive marketing plan with a growing budget, and a completely revised first-time experience that discards the "Welcome Island" model that's basically existed since 2003.
In my recent conversation with Linden Lab heads Brad Oberwager and Philip Rosedale, we explore their vision for growing the user base with Project Zero -- and why the company is re-starting external marketing of SL for "the first time in four years".
Yes, you read that right. In the nearly four years since Oberwager took over leadership of Linden Lab, the company hasn't much marketed Second Life:
BRAD OBERWAGER: [Y]ou know the adage, “I know half my marketing is wasted, I just don’t know which half.” When I came in, I asked [Linden staff], and they didn't know. Turns out it was 100% wasted.
So since I couldn't figure it out, I turned off all the marketing and it didn't have an impact on revenue or any of the financials, other than we weren't spending the money on marketing.
But it stopped, obviously, it stopped bringing people in. It's just that the marketing wasn't bringing people in that were converting into dollars. So we kept it [off] until we had an ROI we could prove out.
And it took us a lot longer. I figured it was going to be six months to turn marketing back on. It went a lot longer.
Now, with Project Zero and with different partnerships we have now, the ROI makes sense for money in the marketing. So starting small, $1,000 a day, it's going to go up fast.
So today [late December 2024] was the first day that we've spent a dollar on marketing in three years, nine months. And this is going to be great for all the creators, all the communities. We're going to start driving people back in only where we know where we're driving them, and we have different partnerships with different community bases, to start sending people not to just where we want them, but we're testing sending them to other places. We're going to test with Project Zero.
So come midway through the first quarter [of 2025], we should be on a much higher run rate for marketing than we've ever had before. It makes good sense for everybody. We're going to drive more revenue to the creators. The way our whole model is set up, we do well when other people do well; we are not able to monetize if other people in our world are not doing well. We don't really sell anything directly to anybody other than land, and even that, you only buy land from us if you're getting the benefit of it…
Next: Redoing the old first-time user experience, and partnering with MadPea games.
"2024 was a pivotal year for Reality Labs and positioned us for greatness in 2025," [Reality Labs' head Andrew] Bosworth wrote. "The team beat nearly all of last year's aggressive sales and user goals, growing RL sales >40% YoY overall," he added. "We are seeing massive sales growth in wearables and the Quest brand has never been stronger."
First off, it's strange Bosworth did not cite a single hard sales number in an "internal" memo. Also, saying "growing RL sales >40% YoY" (emphasis mine) is an important qualifier, as that only refers to VR/XR sales in retail/brick and mortar stores. Which isn't impressive if (as likely) 2023 was slow for retail -- especially as compared to 2024, when Meta's Ray Ban smart glasses were heavily discounted.
Meta's CTO Memo Was an Early Signal of Company Shifting Away from VR/Quest Toward AR & AI (Comment of the Week)
With news breaking that Meta is now laying off thousands of employees to focus on its AI products, this comment from reader Martin K last Thursday sure seem sadly prophetic:
"Despite the reductions," MSN reports, "Meta still has around 1,000 job openings in California, with hiring efforts focused on AI and other business-critical roles." So, yes, I agree with Martin that limiting engagement with the Quest is probably a good idea.
As for my original rant about Bosworth's memo, there's a pretty good conversation on it on LinkedIn, where it went mini-viral.
Posted on Monday, February 10, 2025 at 03:08 PM in AI, Augmented Reality, Comment of the Week, Making the Metaverse, Virtual Reality, Virtual World Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0)
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