New World Notes

Ask Narrator AI: LLM Guides New Players Into Crack Den, Second Life's Long-Running MMO

If you want a glimpse of how AI/LLM technology might be used to bring new users into the virtual world, check out Ask Narrator, a new-ish feature to Crack Den, the long-running role-playing MMO built in SL:

Click here to teleport, then get the HUD on the nearby table.

"This feature is more than just a tool," lead developer Nadir Taov tells me, "it’s a glimpse into how AI can transform onboarding and deepen connections in our virtual community. As someone who’s passionate about UX, I see this as a game-changing way to empower players, especially newcomers, to integrate into our gritty, immersive world."

Nadir built the Narrator on top of GPT4o and other LLMs, based on the Crack Den story bible which goes back to 2008. He tells me it's already improved user engagement. It's also a glimpse of an even more ambitious project he has coming soon:

 

Now on My Patreon: Philip Rosedale on Completely Re-Making Project Zero's UI

Now on my Patreon is part 2 of an in-depth chat I recently had with Philip Rosedale on Project Zero, the company's code name for streaming Second Life on a browser. (Which you can still try for free here, in increments of 10 minutes,) In this section, we get into his strategy on completely re-imagining the UI of Second Life -- and the very hardest aspects they'll eventually get to!

Join free to read it all here, and consider subscribing for extra benefits.

Cajsa's Choices: Icy Fun from Hope Oakley

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

Hope Oakley is having fun and I love to see it. Her photostream is a celebration of what brought most of us to Second Life in the first place, meeting people, forming friendships, and having a blast doing whatever they feel like doing.”HopeVandelJazzy Skating” is delightful. I love the humorous touch of the person on the left of the chorus line starting to fall. They joys of skating.

For more of Hope having fun, click here:

Stars Reach, Raph Koster's Ambitious Galaxy Sandbox MMORPG, is Crowdfunding Its Launch -- Here's Why.

Stars Reach, Raph Koster's highly ambitious "galaxy sandbox MMORPG", has been in development for several years, but just took a somewhat unexpected direction -- a Kickstarter to finalize development:

Developed by industry veterans, including the visionary behind Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, Stars Reach pushes the boundaries of simulation and immersion in MMOs, delivering an experience where your choices shape the universe.

With your support, we’ll build a game that is truly for the players, where you can become a pioneer in a galaxy and your every action leaves a lasting impact.

Stars Reach has been funded by investors for the last five years, so we are well along in development. We have already built the core technology, and the game is playable right now. We have multiple planets, combat, crafting, fully modifiable worlds, player building, outer space, and more, all working already. There are already hundreds of players who have been playing for six months, adventuring and building cities together.

The Kickstarter itself is expected to launch in a month or so, but you can follow the page here. 

"This is our way of taking more control over our own destiny, in a way that we think will benefit our players the most," Raph tells me.

That's not to say they're moving away from traditional fundraising completely: "We’ve been in active conversations with a number of folks over the holidays and in the new year," he tells me. "But in this kind of world we can’t wait around to see if something happens there." 

By "kind of world", he means a highly volatile investment ecosystem, where online games -- especially ambitious, completely new IP like Stars Reach -- are struggling to get continued funding.

Here's the economic situation now, as Koster see it:

Watch: Grand Theft Hamlet, Madcap Machinima Documentary About Trying to Stage Shakespeare's Play Live in GTA Online

I have no choice but to blog Grand Theft Hamlet, an acclaimed all-machinima documentary about two out-of-work actors who during the pandemic, log into Grand Theft Auto Online to try and stage a live production of Shakespeare's most famous play.  Watch the trailer above!

Now playing in the UK and debuting in the US this weekend (check local listings), more from the official site:

Cajsa's Choices: Hallucinatory SL Imagery by Nadej Dae

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

Nadej Dae’s picture feels like a hallucination. “On ferme les yeux des morts avec douceur c'est aussi avec douceur qu'il faut ouvrir les yeux des vivants,” Google translate tells me this means “We close the eyes of the dead gently; it is also gently that we must open the eyes of the living,” I’ve written about Nadej before, fascinated by her imaginative photography. To me, it feels like she walks between worlds and brings back images to show us. .

To see where Nadej takes us, click here:

Inside Project Zero: Philip Rosedale on Linden Lab's Strategy to Grow the SL Userbase with Cloud Streaming (Part 1)

Originally published on my Patreon here

Just before Linden Lab test launched "Project Zero", its code name for streaming Second Life on a browser, I had a deep dive conversation with CTO Philip Rosedale on how Zero fits into the overall strategy of growing the SL user base.

One point he mentions (that I initially missed, coming back from the holidays): Starting last week, they're letting a select number of new sign-ups try out Project Zero, to see if that helps retention.

"Basically, their first session will be just completely over the browser," as Philip told me last month.

I'll follow up on that soon, but for this week, here's part one of my Q&A with Philip on Project Zero's overall strategy -- including price considerations, why they're launching it now, and much more:

Philip Rosedale: We're gonna see if we can get streaming to work well enough to be a mainstream way of accessing Second Life. What we're doing, one, is we're using a streaming infrastructure to transmit the actual rendered view of the world. And then the second thing is, in a manner a little bit similar to the mobile app, we're gonna rebuild the UI from the ground up using modern HTML components…

For right now, there's going to be limited capacity and time limits on that, but it's going to be like, probably 10,000 people a day or more should be able to roll through and just try it out a little bit, so everybody can kind of see what we're doing and get a feel for it. 

And then a few days after that, probably on Monday the 6th, we'll start factoring as an A/B test, a good fraction of the user signups through this thing. Basically, their first session will be just completely over the browser.

Our feeling is there's a lot more people that are similar to the people using Second Life today that could be using it than the number of people we currently have. 

So our mindset there -- and this affects how we're approaching marketing and branding and everything else -- is that what we what we should do first, is remove the two big barriers that doubtless keep people, like all people that are in Second Life, from using it: One, basically just the inability to run it on their computer, or the fact that it just runs way too slowly on their computer to get access to Second Life. 

As you know, different groups of people that are using [SL], there's lots that clearly would like to be able to use it with lower end machines. And in fact, we have a large cohort of people -- which we've really seen over the last couple of quarters, because we've been challenged by the updates to PBR and rendering, the rendering core and everything that went out with Firestorm in June. We can tell that there's lots of people that don't quite have fast enough computers to run this stuff anymore, and so moving directionally worse for them, not a good thing. 

So we basically started working on [streaming] a couple of months ago. and we're ready to start testing it. 

Right now, the way we're doing it stage one, is we are just streaming the existing Second Line viewer UI as it is, no changes to it. But then during January, you'll see us start turning off most of the elements of the UI and then rewriting, in the most important order, basically rewriting the UI as modern HTML React [code], in the same way that we've been able to do with the mobile client. 

Wagner James Au: On any browser?

PR: We've been obviously mostly testing on Chrome because that's the most common target, but it works on Mac and Windows, no dependence on GPU. And the thing we're gonna say to people, is it's basically just, If you can watch Netflix on your computer, you’ll be able to [stream Second Life].

Next up: Latency tests, pricing considerations, and riding the back of failed AI experiments.

Cajsa's Choices: Warm & Cozy Virtual Spaces Photographed by Kumomi

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

Kumomi loves to shoot pictures of her home and surroundings. This picture really called out to me because it looks so comfy and cozy. It’s 36° F and chilly where I am IRL, but this gave me a virtual warming up.

I love how cuddly this feels with all those pillows and blankets. It appeals in appearance, but in real life, every single one of those pillows would be on the floor. I can’t stand pillows! I like a flat pillow so my neck doesn’t bend. I also would probably chuck most of the covers. I like one thick quilt. But my way never looks cozy. This room will raise the room’s perceived temperature at least ten degrees. 

For more of Kumomi’s coziness, click here:

Top 5 Posts Including a New Concurrency Peak for VRChat & Ambitious Single-Shard Grid Architecture for Resonite

• Second Life Streaming Launches to Select New Users This Week -- And More from My Latest Interview with Philip Rosedale
• Resonite Creating Single-Shard Grid Enabling Infinite, Contiguous Realities
• Watch: In Love Me, Two Sentient AIs Played By Kristen Stewart & Steven Yeun Become Human Avatars After Civilization's End (January 31)
• In New Records, VRChat Hits Nearly 140,000 Concurrent Users --- And 200+ Users in Single Instance
• Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2024年12月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan

Cajsa's Choices: Supremely Cool Avatar Self-Portraits by Ines Lauria

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

Инес Масуки ...🚭, or Ines Lauria, chose this single picture for her Flickr showcase and it’s an apt choice as it very much captures her sensibility. Despite the “No Smoking” symbol in her account handle, it’s a bit of work to find a picture of her without a cigarette. She seems very much the laconic, cool young mod, casually dressed with a cigarette in hand. The sort of cool edge that makes even the most casual clothes seem like high fashion. 

For more from Ines, click here:

Second Life Streaming Launches to Select New Users This Week -- And More from My Latest Interview with Philip Rosedale

Now on my Patreon is the start of an in-depth interview I did with Philip Rosedale on Project Zero, the company's code name for streaming Second Life on a browser. 

One point he mentions (that I initially missed coming back from the holidays in early January): Starting this week, they're letting a select number of new sign-ups try out Project Zero, to see if that helps retention.

"Basically, their first session will be just completely over the browser," as Philip told me last month. I'll follow up on that soon, but for this week, here's part one of my Q&A with Philip on Project Zero's overall strategy -- including price considerations, why they're launching it now, and much more. 

Join my Patreon for free to read first here.

Watch: In Love Me, Two Sentient AIs Played By Kristen Stewart & Steven Yeun Become Human Avatars After Civilization's End (January 31)

Coming January 31 (at least in the US) in the acclaimed indie movie Love Me, Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun are a sentient buoy and satellite (respectively) who meet, fall in love, and re-create themselves as human avatars who live out the end of humanity together. The trailer at least looks pretty powerful, though I'm avoiding reviews so I can watch it fresh.

More about the movie soon-ish, I hope: I recently reached out to the movie's writer/director team, Sam and Andy Zuchero, themselves married in real life, who put me in touch with the studio's publicist about an interview. 

Then again, the very next day, all parties involved (including me) likely fled Los Angeles at the coming of a raging, city-consuming firestorm. So our interview about a movie about the end of civilization may be indefinitely delayed. Which is an extra layer of tragic irony none of us needed right now or ever.

Resonite Creating Single-Shard Grid Enabling Infinite, Contiguous Realities

Frooxius, lead developer of Resonite, the crowdfunded metaverse platform with 10,000+ active users, recently revealed his new vision for a single shard virtual world grid. Unlike, say, Second Life, where the grid are sims interconnected in a way that resembles the real world, the Resonite approach will be much more brain-melting:

"It's a bit like seamless grid," as Froox puts it to me, but more generalized. Grid is one of possible arrangements, but not the only one. The goal is to enable each domain to be arbitrary arranged relative to the others -- and even move relative to the others."

So another words, you could be crossing from one "session" -- basically Resonite's version of what Second Life calls a "sim" -- and walk into one that's totally different. I.E. go through a barn door and end up on the Moon.

"Yeah, you could have a doorway that enters a completely different session," he tells me, when I run that scenario by him. "Or you have a big house somewhere in a big world. You enter it and inside is a whole new session - potentially even bigger on the inside. The house could be a tiny one too, so you shrink down to enter it."

Frooxius believes this architecture will open up new possibilities that a Second Life-like grid doesn't easily enable:

"With SL grids you can't really make whole planets, solar systems or galaxies, that are recursively subdivided. You can't have a session inside a spaceship that can travel through worlds. With this approach you have a lot more possibilities and flexibility."

But wouldn't this break immersion, since there's no coherent whole? Is a random jumble of very different realities even a "virtual world" at all?

Frooxius argues otherwise:

Virtual World Writing Delayed by Real Life Conflagration

Apologies for the delay in blogging, but this was the view from our Los Angeles neighborhood last night, followed by an inverted pyramid of black smoke which blotted out half the morning sky. I'm safe and out of (relative) danger, and hope to be back posting on my usual pace tomorrow, when the material world has stabilized (relatively).

Stay safe, everyone, and care for the people around you as much as you can!

Cajsa's Choices: Tupper Moran's Delightful Rockwell-Esque Americana Re-Enacted by Second Life Avatars

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

Tupper Moran wrote in the description for “The Puppy Shower” that she likes Norman Rockwell and Thomas Kinkade’s artwork and aspires to offer an homage to their work with her own. She seems to trend more toward Rockwell by featuring several people in the midst of living life, the way he did. In “The Puppy Shower” they are all laughing because the puppy just shook water off to dry while giving the woman a shower. It’s a fun picture and does have that feeling of Americana that was central to Rockwell and Kinkade’s work. 

“The Trick or Treat Gang Cometh, Again” is another slice-of-life Americana, the annual candypalooza that occurs when families knock on neighbors’ doors and are rewarded with candy.

The title made me look for an earlier Trick or Treat Gang picture and from 2022, I found this delight: 

 

My Five Metaverse-Related Predictions for 2025 on Meta, Apple, Roblox, VRChat & Second Life

Just to put my 2025 predictions in digital concrete:

• Apple won't announce Vision Pro 2 this year. This one feels inevitable with sales still slow and production of Vision Pro 1 already winding down.

• Thanks to the launch of Linden Lab's mobile app and cloud streaming, Second Life increases peak concurrent users by at least 20%. That would mean hitting a CCU of around 55K-60K.

• A leading metaverse platform start-up will be acquired or announce itself as being on an IPO track. Despite (or rather because) of VRChat's painful layoffs last year, I think that startup is best positioned to jump to this next level -- especially after hitting another peak concurrency record.

• Roblox reaches 100 million daily active users. This one feels a bit like a cheat, since the company just announced hitting 88.9 million last quarter. But a big juicy milestone like that will still encourage a reassessment of the Metaverse concept, and renewed interest in Roblox in particular.
• Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses will not reach a 2 million install base this year. A research firm estimates Meta reached 1 million shipments late last year, but I seriously doubt that growth will continue to any great degree.

In New Records, VRChat Hits Nearly 140,000 Concurrent Users --- And 200+ Users in Single Instance

As expected, VRChat hit another platform concurrency record over the New Year's Eve holiday, hitting nearly 140,000 CCU as peak. (136,589, to be exact.) That's a new record breaking the last one of 100,000+ on NYE of 2023/2024, though falling a bit short of the 150,o00 I predicted last month. 

This continued usage growth is pretty impressive for VRChat the company, especially after coming out of some painful layoffs in 2024, when 30% of the staff were let go. Despite those cutbacks, another milestone was achieved. Ironically, while avid VRChat users know all about that, most of the tech world was still on holiday when it haappned, and probably didn't notice. 

VRChat community head Tupper has the details on Bluesky, where they also reveal a new record: Over 200 users in a single, uncapped shard/instance. Up until now, VRChat instances are usually capped at around 50, but the company did some updates to grow the potential of its instanced concurrency:

12 Amazing Second Life Images We Couldn't Feature Last Year. So Here They Are to Start 2025!

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

I suppose opening the new year by looking back at the old year is a bit at cross-purposes, but I can’t resist. I thought it might be fun to highlight some favorites that for one reason or another, I failed to highlight in 2024. I love this gorgeous picture from January. It’s called “Walk with Me” from Vee. She erases most of her picture, leaving the essentials. You just see her legs, the shadow tells you it’s a sunny day and there are the wildflowers along the path suggesting she’s enjoying some free time outdoors. In an interesting play on the rule of thirds, her subject fills one-third while white space fills two-thirds of the picture. It’s brilliant.  

Aria Blackwood posted “I’ll Find Someone Like You” in February. I love the way the structural details of the building seem almost like lace in the silhouette, while the fronds of the pine trees look like feathers. The sun is setting behind the house, the light creating a vignette framing the picture beautifully.

Samyi posted “Paris Piage” in March. He uses Depth of Field in an interesting way. The sharpest part of the picture is a rivet in the folding chair. Everything becomes more blurred as they are more distant from that rivet. The way he frames the picture, he almost divides it into quadrants, but the rivets are perfectly in place for the Rule of Thirds. 

Sari Choche posted “At Night” in April. I love this for capturing exactly how I feel when I wake up in the middle of the night, confused. The circle of light over her head could be the flash of a camera but to me, it is the disappearing remnants of a dream, the kind of dream that wakes you up in the middle of the night. This picture made me feel seen because I seldom know why I wake up in the middle of the night, but I will sit up and my thought balloon is exactly this empty. 

For more 2024 favorites I missed , click here:

 

Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2024年12月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan

Sanny Yoshikawa が、New World Notesのなかから、毎月おすすめのバーチャルワールドニュースを日本語で紹介します

Sanny Yoshikawa covers the monthly virtual world highlights from New World Notes for virtual Japan.

 

 

Readers Predict Meta, Primfeed, Roblox, Valve, Vision Pro News in 2025

Loving these 2025 metaverse-related predictions from readers, starting with:

The Lab will purchase Primfeed within the next 24 months. You read it here first. -- Peter Stindberg

That sounds quite possible!

Here's several more from Martin K:

Top New World Notes Posts Including Browser-Based Streaming for Second Life, and Highlight Posts from 2024

Above: At my office in Waterhead via Project Zero

• Open Forum: What Are Your SL / Virtual World / Metaverse Predictions for 2025?
• Casja's Choices: My Five Favorite Second Life-Themed Flickr Groups of 2024 -- Consider Joining Them in 2025!
• BREAKING: Linden Lab Test Launches Browser-Based Streaming for Second Life -- And You Can Try it Now!
• My Personal Top Ten Favorite / Important New World Notes Posts of 2024

Open Forum: What Are Your SL / Virtual World / Metaverse Predictions for 2025?

Post your own predictions for highlighting here and on New World Notes, the more concrete and easier to validate, the better!*

I'll start with two of my own:

• Thanks to the launch of Linden Lab's mobile app and cloud streaming, Second Life increases peak concurrent users by at least 20%. I predicted something like this would happen last year, but muffed it. But I'm still bullish on this happening in 2025!

• A leading metaverse platform start-up is acquired or goes on an IPO track. This is another prediction I missed in 2024, but I actually think VRChat's painful layoffs last year better position them for this happening (if they want) in 2025.

I'll think of more predictions over the weekend, but want to read yours first!

I usually post an open forum for New Year predictions in late December, by the way, but this time, when I got the sense something big was coming in early January, had to move it to this week.

Casja's Choices: My Five Favorite Second Life-Themed Flickr Groups of 2024 -- Consider Joining Them in 2025!

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

Joanna Kitten’s “To the Lighthouse” is just one of thousands of pictures of Second Life birds in Second Life Avians, a Flickr group organized by Bella Blackheart.She took an interesting approach to the Rule of Odd Numbers. There are five birds, four in the background and one in the foreground, in the upper right. I confess, for a moment or two, I mistook the umbrella for a corvid which made me laugh and love this picture even more. I love birds but am allergic to their feathers, fortunately I am not allergic to Second Life birds. So the bird groups are dear to my heart, which puts this group on my list of favorite SL Flickr groups of 2024, and the first to be featured in today’s column. 

For more of my favorite Flickr groups, click here:

BREAKING: Linden Lab Test Launches Browser-Based Streaming for Second Life -- And You Can Try it Now!

Above: At my office in Waterhead via Project Zero

Starting now -- and starting 2025 with guns blazing -- you can try out browser-based streaming of Second Life, enabling you to experience the virtual world with maximum graphics settings displayed on a web browser, even on low-end PCs/laptops -- go here to access it for up to 10 minutes.

I just tried it out, and it's pretty impressive, even in this early test phase. Teleporting to sims is quicksilver fast, taking less than a second. Right now, you access it through Linden Lab's existing default browser, but in future iterations, the streaming user interface will completely change. (More on that below.)

This streaming project, internally dubbed “Project Zero”, has been in development even before Philip Rosedale rejoined Linden as CTO in late 2024, is hands-on proof that the company is not completely pinning the future of Second Life to the new mobile app. Project Zero is shaping up to be the way new users will first experience the virtual world, seamlessly and beautifully, whether or not their machine can manage SL's full 3D graphics.

A Surprising Solution to Post-PBR Problems

Project Zero also an answer to a problem Oberwager acknowledged during another briefing last year: Second Life’s recent upgrade to PBR graphics caused a drop in log-ins among the existing user base, as people with lower end machine had trouble displaying physically based rendering.

“We have come up with an incredible fix that will have an amazing impact on all current and future residents," he told me last month. I initially thought he was referring to bug fixes, but no: It’s a whole new way of experiencing Second Life, and when it’s officially rolled out, will come with a modern upgrade to the UI, re-built from the ground up.

I should say a new old way: Linden Lab originally tested out browser-based streaming of Second Life in 2010, then again in 2015, from well-funded startup OnLive. (Disclosure: I helped OnLive launch that project on the marketing side.) It worked pretty well, but broadband and computing costs were too expensive back then to make it scalable. Since then, however, those prices have come substantially down, driven in part by the recent boom in large language model AI programs like ChatGPT.

2025, Linden Lab believes, is the year Second Life streaming is finally ready to deploy with Project Zero. 

In internal testing, Philip Rosedale told me on a recent briefing, they’re getting zero latency. It doesn’t even necessarily require super high-end broadband. “If you can watch Netflix [on your machine],” as he put it, “you can do this.”

Another key difference from the 2010 and 2015 deployments: 

My Personal Top Ten Favorite / Important New World Notes Posts of 2024

If you missed these stories over the year, I hope you give them a second look: They're among my personal favorites and/or the ones I believe will remain relevant for the coming year.

Study Suggests Emotion & Player Agency More Important Than High-End Graphics in Virtual Experience

 "Field of view and visual realism – achieved through cutting-edge graphics and usually powered by high-end headsets – can be relatively unimportant in creating a believable VR experience. Far more important is the way a user is made to feel (e.g. happy or scared) within the virtual environment, the study found." This specific study was conducted in VR with over 300 volunteers, but the results probably apply to flatscreen 3D experiences just as neatly...

CONFIRMED: Adam Schiff's Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act Would Apply to Video Games, Virtual Worlds & Metaverse Platforms

While the 2024 election means Schiff's specific bill is dead in the water, the gen AI intellectual property controversy will likely come to a head in 2025. (Or stagger on, bloody and bedraggled, through protracted court battles.)

US Government-Funded Researchers Found That Women Using Quest Devices Much More Likely to Experience VR Nausea. No One in Meta/the VR Industry Has Contacted Them About It.

I can't believe the tech/VR industry hasn't given this revelation wider (hardly any?) coverage, so I'll keep bringing it up until they do:

Dr. Kelly tells me no one at Meta, let alone the VR industry at large, has contacted him about these findings.

“I'm not sure why they haven't reached out,” he tells me by e-mail. “My guess is they have their own ideas of how to solve the problem of cybersickness, but I don't think the industry track record on that is very good.”  

He adds that they may just be unaware of this research (from a NSF-backed, well-ranked science and technology-focused university), but I tend to agree about the unimpressive track record. Then again, no one at Meta contacted danah boyd about her findings, even though she’s a senior researcher at Microsoft.

Seven more beneath the break!