New World Notes

Want to Play a Free Alpha Preview of "Stay: Forever Home", the Upcoming AI Pet Sim for Quest?

Unlike the Convai-powered human NPCs we were recently discussing, AI-powered animals are far more interesting, believable, and frankly, appealingly un-creepy. So if you're interested in the best and latest in AI-driven virtual creatures, here's a chance to get a free Alpha preview of Stay: Forever Home, an upcoming mixed reality game for Quest headsets where you go on adventures with Ember, a magical, multi-color dawg imbued with its own unique life. (Watch some gameplay footage above.)

Click here to request early Alpha access to Stay: Forever Home.

Lead developed by game industry veteran Bernie Yee, the game promises much more than caring for a simple virtual pet.

Ember comes, Bernie tells me, with "a personality axis, multiple quirks and preferences, biological state."

Ember's AI code, he explains, "was taken from Sims AI and LMNO, the secret Spielberg game which didn't ship." In that defunct project backed by Steven Spielberg, a player would have escorted an alien creature called Eve across the country. So Ember's soul, so to speak, is distinctly Spielbergian.

"You add the AI into the mix with a dynamic environment and other (dumber) critters, it's pretty magic," says Bernie. "There was a build I played, a month ago, pre-DICE. i choked up because she felt so alive. So much of this is ALSO procedural animation, so it doesn't look like she's replaying animation timelines robotically."

Exploring a virtual world with Ember leads to some interesting emergent gameplay:

Watch: Creating Living Spaces inZOI's Build Mode in Creative Studio

With the wildly ambitious life sim inZOI coming out later this week, here's a look at the game's Creative Studio, now available as a demo here -- specifically the Build Studio, for customizing and creating buildings and living spaces. That's as opposed to the Character Studio, the demo of which went viral last year.  

How many NWN readers are planning on getting inZOI when it's available, by the way? Show of hands in Comments, please!

New Flickr Group Showcases The Most Realistic Second Life Screenshots

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

Gino Ginelli posted “Short Days and Long Nights” (above) in a brand-new Flickr group that was founded yesterday, one that seems exactly like what we need now. It’s called Realistic Second Life, Is It Possible? The advancements of Second Life, especially improvements in environment controls and PBR, there have been so many pics that may we wonder, is it Second Life or is it life? 

Avelith, the founder, writes in the group description:

Today I created a group in which I want to collect the most realistic looking pictures taken in Second Life. Portraits, staged photographs of couples, landscapes, still lifes... But all of them should be characterized by maximum realism, realistic lighting, realistic interior or exterior, realistic-looking avatars in realistic poses. Do you think this is a possible task? Let's try to trick our eyes! I'll be picky…

In just one day, the group has grown to 46 members and 125 pictures. I can’t wait to see its future. 

For more realistic Second Life, click here:

 

Metaverse Platforms Need to Appeal Beyond Their Core Player Community, or Face Slow Death (Comment of the Week)

Above: Radio Remembered How a Father's Lost Art From Second Life was Reborn in Fortnite

Good points by "EmptyEyes", reflecting on how algorithms tend to homogenize metaverse platforms:

Metaverses are weird beasts, outside of Fortnite, it feels like they refuse to compete with one another. They're like MMOs in that sense.

They cater very strongly to their existing communities and don't really try and change things too much for fear of upsetting those communities.

Trying to appeal to their "average" player only leads them to a slow death. They should be trying to capture as many diverse player groups as possible.

As you eluded to, social media sites understand this. The average is not truly mass market appeal. Mass market appeal is giving everyone exactly what they're looking for when they're looking for it.

In some mediums you just have to settle for the average, in others, like this space, you don't. If VRChat, Roblox, Rec Room, Second Life all appeal to different niches then that means there's lots of room to grow. Take something from them all. They are clear targets that you can say, "Hey I want to convert some of VRChat's players, lets add x, y, and z to make that happen."

Fortnite does this. I don't play myself (it lacks deep home decorating, character customization, adult content, and roleplay that's competitive with SL), but you can do so many things in Fortnite. You can build if you want, you can race, you can fight, you can play Rock Band, and so much more. There are so many niche audiences that it serves.

Also I'm not saying alienate your core audience. I'm saying that if you have the resources, you should grow your audience. Ensure your appeal doesn't drop to core users, appeal to new audiences as well, and then support them both.

Bonus points if you choose to grow into audiences that are at the intersection of large and easy to appeal to.

This connects nicely with the recent conversation around advertising Second Life. It's a mistake to create a marketing strategy based on what only seems to be the most popular activity in SL -- social fashion roleplay -- when that ignores the many multiple niches of other communities creating content that has a proven existing market. For instance:

Top 5 Posts Including the Rise of SL Social Network Primfeed, a Roblox/Second Life Crossover & a Firestorm Streaming Price Survey

• As Primfeed Adds Video Upload Option, Here's Some Pretty Impressive Stats for the Social Media Platform for SLers
• SLua: Why Roblox Creators Should Also Look Into Second Life's New Scripting Language
• Firestorm Streaming Survey Results: Most Aren't Interested... Unless It's Free.
• How Feedback Loops & Interest Algorithms Hurt Metaverse Platforms
• Is This List of Sunsetted Virtual Worlds From Habitat On Missing Any Titles?

New from Dutchie: Sexy Swimming Pool With Custom Animations & PBR Magic! (NWN Partner News)

The new Dutchie Swimming Pool for Second Life from my longtime media partner Dutchie is full of stylish PBR effects and swimmer animations, and was long in the making:

"I’ve always wanted to make a pool like the one in La Piscine, the French film from 1969 with Romy Schneider and Alain Delon," she tells me. "I was aiming for that stylish, slow, dreamy, sensual, atmospheric, lazy heat." (Watch the highly Gallic and sexy trailer here.) 

Getting the swimming animations right was key; dissatisfied with existing options, she went about creating new ones herself:  

As Primfeed Adds Video Upload Option, Here's Some Pretty Impressive Stats for the Social Media Platform for SLers

Originally posted on my Patreon

This machinima by the inimitable Teal Aurelia (read my profile of her ) was created as a fun way of introducing the long-awaited video option on Primfeed, the social media platform for Second Life users. (Short, lower-res clips for free users, up to 10 minutes on 720p for paying subscribers.)

Primfeed was originally launched last June as an alternative for SL users of Flickr, after Flickr policies around advertising irked many in the community, who believed the photo sharing service was being actively hostile to Second Life members. (When I interviewed Flickr's Community Manager, she told me that that's not the case.)

At any rate, Primfeed has since grown into a relatively active platform in its own right. Here's some stats:

SLua: Why Roblox Creators Should Also Look Into Second Life's New Scripting Language

Originally published on my Patreon

Last week's Second Life platform updates were mainly focused on the new Firestorm streaming option, but a long-awaited update to its scripting language might be even more important:

SLua stands for Second Life Lua, a language based on Luau (originally developed by Roblox), extended to harness the full power of Second Life’s existing functions. Think of it as LSL’s more powerful, versatile new cousin—offering you more flexibility, cleaner syntax, and features that make coding dramatically simpler.

Emphasis mine, because it's not only relevant to the thousands of SL creators who use LSL, but the hundreds of thousands of Roblox creators versed in Luau.

Signal Linden (Bennett Goble), head Software Engineer at the company, tells me Roblox's Luau and Second Life's SLua are pretty close: 

"It is the Luau virtual machine extended to work with Second Life," he tells me. "We've had to make changes to support the requirements of mobile agents (AKA moving between regions) which means changes to support serializing/deserializing the runtime state. To users, it is the same language, just with LSL functionality. So: the same events residents know from LSL, same functions, with subtle interoperability changes to the language."

This also opens up a new opportunity for scripters working in Roblox:

Cajsa's Choices: The Lushly Detailed, Animal Rich SL Images of Sara Baez

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

Sara Baez, like most of the artists I feature, is someone I have never met. Still I know one thing for sure about Sara. She likes dogs. Sara is not just a dog-lover, she’s head over heels for dogs. How do I know? Dogs are in nearly every picture she takes. Often there are other animals, too, but the central theme is dogs, dogs, and more dogs. She must spend a fortune on virtual kibble.

She wrote this about her picture, “Nem todo conto de fadas precisa de um príncipe às vezes, só precisa de sapos falantes e coelhos atentos” which translates into, “Not every fairy tale needs a prince sometimes, it just needs talking frogs and attentive rabbits.:” If this is her fairy tale come true, then she is the princess. 

For more of Sara with dogs, click here:

Firestorm Streaming Survey Results: Most Aren't Interested... Unless It's Free.

Here's the results of my New World Notes survey last week, asking SLers what's the most they would be willing to pay for the new Project Zero option of streaming Firestorm/Second Life on a browser.

As you can see above, a strong majority aren't interested in any option, even one that's free with advertising. About 15% were willing to pay $.50 cents/hour to $2/hour, but the most popular "paid" choice by far was the ad-supported, free version. (The Patreon member version of this survey garnered pretty similar results, with 32% preferring free with ads.)

Which is somewhat surprising, from one angle. Rather than pay, say, $2500 for a high-end gamer laptop that runs Second Life pretty well, why not get a low-end $500 laptop and stream a highly optimized version of Firestorm by the hour? Even at $1/hour, this would be more cost effective for most SLers.

However, from another angle, these results point out another reality: By and large, Second Life users are core gamers and/or power users who already own and prefer a high-end PC for many other applications beyond SL.

As promised, I showed these survey results to Linden Lab:

Cajsa's Choices: "Wishing On Airplanes" is an Impressive New SL Flickr Photographer to Follow

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

Wishing On Airplanes has a very new photostream with less than 100 followers, but her talent is so mature, I speculate there might be another account that is full of photos. Of course, she could be magical right from the beginning. She doesn’t say. But look at this seascape. I can almost feel the rocks poking my feet, the cool water, and most of all, the temptation to sit on the rock next to the mermaid and bask. It so beautiful composed with the curving line of the rocks meeting the water. It looks so real. 

If you wish for more from Wishing, click here:

How Feedback Loops & Interest Algorithms Hurt Metaverse Platforms (Comment of the Week)

Commenting on my post about the failure of Meta to grow Horizon Worlds, longtime reader/veteran technologist Martin K. offers a big picture view impacting multiple metaverse platforms, relating it to recent trends in US society. It helps explain, for example, why Second Life merchandise seems to be 80% fashion/home decor-related, and why VRChat seems largely to be comprised of furry/anime avatars: 

Why does Horizon Worlds not succeed in the same way as Facebook did?

Why is Second Life not able to grow its user base?

Why do so many talented creators leave Rec Room?

Let me zoom out a bit and look at a bigger picture.

Horizon Worlds, Rec Room, Second Life and other metaverse-apps with user-generated content are struggling with growing their user base.

One of my favorite concepts to think about some of these problems is laid out in the book The Big Sort by Bill Bishop published in 2008. One of its themes is political polarization of neighborhoods in the US. The idea is that there are several feedback loops at work that attract more politically aligned neighbors and push out people who don't "fit" into a neighborhood. This results in increasingly homogeneous neighborhoods.

My hypothesis is that there are analogous feedback loops in many UGC metaverse apps that lead to a rather homogeneous user base of each of these apps.

Typically it works like this:

Is This List of Sunsetted Virtual Worlds From Habitat On Missing Any Titles?

I'm working with Julian Reyes and the Virtual Worlds Museum on compiling the most complete list of sunsetted virtual worlds that have existed since the groundbreaking Habitat* in 1986.

But are we missing any? You can see the full still being revised list with descriptions and links of sunset worlds here on the VRM site, or review them in chronological order below.

We're defining "sunsetted virtual worlds" as platforms which are a) a multi-user but non-MMORPG virtual world depicted in 2D or 3D graphics, b) where users can customize their own space/room/realm/etc., and c) are no longer generally or commercially available to access online. 

Here's our list, nearly 50 in all, so far:

• Habitat (video game) - 1986 to 1988
• ‍MicroMUSE - 1990 to 1994
• CitySpace - 1993 to 1996
• Horseland - 1994 to 2019
• The Palace  - 1994 to 2001
• Active Worlds - 1995 to 2010
• Cybernet Worlds - 1995 to 2010
• CyberTown - 1995 to 2012
• KidsCom - 1995 to 2019
• Starbright World - 1995 to 1997
• OZ Virtual - 1996-1999
• WorldsAway - 1995 to 1998
• SAPARi - 1997-2003
• Forterra Systems - 1998-2010
• Worlds.com - 1998-2020

Virtual world titles from 2000 onward below:

Cajsa's Choices: In Praise of PK Singular Aesthetic for Second Life Imagery

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

PK’s could be called the power of looking away. So many of his pictures show him looking away from the camera, around corners, into the distance. Just one picture could be intriguing, but if you look at a page of him looking away as on his About Page, the effect is exponential. It makes me swoon, especially with his pop art sensibility, his fascination with the geometry created with light and shadow, his love of duotones that distill a screenshot to its essence. It is all just wonderful. .

For more from PK, click here:

Top 6 Posts Including: Ex-Meta Devs on What Went Wrong With Horizon Worlds & Linden Lab Shifts Marketing to Feature User-Made Content

• Anti-AI Backlash in Second Life is Out of Control (Comment of the Week)

• Linden Lab Hiring Director of Strategic Insights to Help Grow Second Life, Identify Features / Products SLers Actually Use
• What Went Wrong With Horizon Worlds? Former Meta Devs Share Surprising Insights -- And a Solution to Still Save It
• Watch: Upcoming Firestorm Viewer Comes With Powerful On-Screen Avatar Poser Feature
• BREAKING: Linden Lab Updates Second Life's Official Flickr Group to Leverage ONLY User-Made Images/Video for Future Marketing, Chair Confirms
• Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2025年2月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan

SL Survey: What's the MOST You Would Pay to Regularly Stream Firestorm on a Browser, to Get High Quality Graphics on Even Low-End Laptops & Smartphones / Tablets?

Project Zero now has a Firestorm option, so you can stream Second Life on a browser using the virtual world's most popular viewer, with an introductory discount price of 5 hours for L$250: Go here quickly to get the special offer.

However, that's not likely to be the price when this option is officially launched -- hence the survey above. What's the MOST you would pay to regularly stream Firestorm on a browser?

Try it out now, and then take the pricing survey! And yes, I'll share the results with Linden Lab, which may or may not impact the final pricing.

BREAKING: Linden Lab Updates Second Life's Official Flickr Group to Leverage ONLY User-Made Images/Video for Future Marketing, Chair Confirms

Originally published on my Patreon

The description and rules to Linden Lab's official Flickr group for Second Life images were recently updated to emphasize that user-made images and video uploaded there may be used in future ad campaigns for Second Life:

By submitting your photos or videos (the “Submissions”) to the Second Life Official Flickr feed of Linden Research, Inc. (the “Company”), you acknowledge and agree to the following terms:

You agree to participate in the Company’s marketing campaigns program  (the “Program”). As a participant of the Program, you hereby grant to the Company a perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable, and cost-free right and license to use, distribute, or sublicense (through multiple levels), and otherwise exploit in any manner whatsoever, all or any portion of your Submissions, for the purposes of marketing, promotion, and/or outreach for and about the Second Life virtual world.

After top SL creator Bars Simpson noticed this change, I confirmed with Linden Lab head Brad Oberwager that the purpose is indeed to leverage SL user-made images for future marketing.

"It is correct that we only want to use Second Life content for future ads," Oberwager just messaged me. "And anyone who wants to submit ads, we will review and test." (Emphasis mine, as it bear emphasizing!)

This Flickr rules update, by the way, was led by SL social media doyenne Strawberry Linden.

This comes after a recent dust-up due to Linden Lab using AI/stock images and videos to A/B various messaging, in preparation for an official campaign, and community members subsequently outraged by the artificial depiction of the virtual world -- especially when there's so much user-created content out there that's far superior.  

"After talking to you about how people feel," Brad explains to me, "I had all our terms reviewed to make sure we did not violate anything if we used Second Life 'stock footage'."

That final point is important:

Watch: Upcoming Firestorm Viewer Comes With Powerful On-Screen Avatar Poser Feature

Courtesy Spooky Pumpkins, owner of the Wraith brand in SL (socials & links here), watch this seriously cool new feature for Firestorm, now available in preview. Explains Spooky:

"If you use their poser, you'll now see a gizmo on each bone... and on-screen selection for the bones. You can legit rotate [bones] from the joint itself ON YOUR SCREEN instead of fiddling with sliders. I don't know if this is on any other version than the newest preview build (beta viewer) which has some issues with the nested menus in the inventory window BUT this poser SLAPS."

It does sure seem slap-tastic! This is currently (and only) available in VERSION 7.1.12.77526 - BETA VIEWER.

More from Wraith's owner on how to get this bet now:

Cajsa's Choices: Tooku Fadlan's Totally Fantastic Second Life Photos

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

Tooku Fadlan shot this amazing pic at Luane’s World, a popular photo destination. [SLurl teleport link here] The sunshine beating down on the meadow suggests a hot summer day. The grass is bright green and the sky is blue and all is right with the world. And with this picture. Tooku uses the bikes and fence as a leading line into the picture creating a sense of energy even with everything is stationary. 

For more from Tooku, click here:

What Went Wrong With Horizon Worlds? Former Meta Devs Share Surprising Insights -- And a Solution to Still Save It

Originally published on my Patreon

After writing about Meta’s highly misguided $50 million bounty for developers to create content in Horizon Worlds, a former software engineer at Horizon Worlds reached out to me. They had read my latest book, where I devote a chapter to Meta’s many missteps in trying to build the Metaverse. 

But this engineer had even more surprising details to share.   

By request, I’m keeping their breakdown anonymous, but it rings true to everything other Meta employees past and present have told me, both on the record and off. For good measure, I also just gut checked it with two other developers who have recently quit working on Horizon Worlds. (Meta itself has declined to respond officially to my many requests for comment, beginning in 2023, after my book interview with Zuckerberg fell through.) And at least one of them believe Horizon Worlds can still be saved -- read their solution at the end.

It's an important story to share. For one thing, it helps explain why Horizon Worlds is floundering, with far less active users than Second Life (now 21 years old), let alone VRChat and Rec Room, which are far more popular on Meta’s own Quest headset. Despite billions spent in development and marketing, including a literal Super Bowl ad, Horizon Worlds has roughly 300,000 users, versus Second Life's 500,000.

For another, it helps explain why the Metaverse "failed" in the general public's eye, since most people assume Meta was the leading developer of the technology.

I’ve always believed the fundamental problem is that Meta leadership never truly understood the Metaverse, and simply treated it like a 3D version of Facebook. In interviews for the book, it also became clear to me that most of the people working on Horizon Worlds weren’t themselves experienced or passionate about virtual worlds.

Indeed, in 2022, Meta leadership sent out an internal memo requiring employees to dogfood Horizon Worlds more (i.e. actually play it).

It was actually worse than that, this ex-developer tells me. Required to dogfood their own virtual world, the engineer tells me, many Meta staffers automated their dogfooding:

Favorite Photos from a Whole Huge Flickr Group Shooting Midnight in Paris... in Second Life

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

“Midnight in Paris” by Pedro may be the name of this gorgeous, exciting picture of the Eiffel Tower but it’s also the name of the Second Life sim where it was shot and of a Flickr group dedicated to the sim. I love how dynamic this picture is and it is just one of a surfeit of fantastic pics in the Midnight in Paris Flickr group. The sim is extraordinary and the pictures in the group reflect that. [To check out the sim, click here to teleport.]

For more from Paris in Second Life, click here:

 

Linden Lab Hiring Director of Strategic Insights to Help Grow Second Life, Identify Features / Products SLers Actually Use

Linden Lab is now hiring a senior level director in charge of strategic insights:

We are looking for an experienced and analytical professional with deep expertise in leveraging advanced analytics to drive strategic business initiatives and operational efficiency. As the Director, Strategic Insights, you will utilize detailed data analysis, experimentation, statistical modeling, forecasting, and the development of key reporting tools and metrics to guide business decisions.

This is the first senior level hire by Linden Lab since 2021, when the company went in search of a VP of Engineering. And Philip Rosedale returning as CTO, of course.

The actual job description is somewhat vague, so I asked Linden Lab Chair Brad Oberwager for an example of what "strategic insights" would actually entail in this role.

"A hypothetical example would be learning how to make the mobile app better," he tells me. "Analyzing use cases and seeing what residents are using the app to accomplish, and then putting it into strategic planning."

And this is a pretty serious budget outlay for Linden Lab, since the salary is around $250,000/year plus benefits.

"We are investing in creating products that the residents want," Oberwager explains. "The more they use those products, like mobile, the more we invest in them.

The reason they need someone to lead strategic insights is that the features/updates that are most loudly asked for by the existing user community are not necessarily what grows overall usage:

Cajsa's Choices: Great Avatar Group Photos & Powerful Illustrated Poem by Jane Bang

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

Jane Bang celebrated her birthday playing Mario Kart with friends. It’s been over five years since I last featured Jane and she is still hanging with friends and having fun in Second Life. The title, “Party Like It’s 1999” takes us back to a time when the scariest thing was Y2K and the songs we loved weren’t played on “oldies” stations. Since that 2019 article, Jane has opened Space Cadet which specializes in poses and pose attachments so there are some vendor pics in her stream but her fun-filled pics continue. 

For more in the life of Jane, click here:

Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2025年2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.

 

 

Anti-AI Backlash in Second Life is Out of Control (Comment of the Week)

There's been a good discussion in last week's post about SL creators debating whether they should use gen AI in their content, with a pro-AI position from "SatanicPanic":

1.If someone prefers not to use a ConvAI bot, they are entirely free to make that decision. Forcing others to conform to this preference, however, infringes on individual autonomy. Technology should remain a personal choice, not a mandate.

2. Prohibiting individuals from using AI tools as part of their creative process is not only absurd but also counterproductive. Such restrictions amount to extreme gatekeeping, stifling innovation and creativity. Many creators rely on AI to streamline their workflows, whether it’s generating textures, brainstorming ideas, or automating repetitive tasks. Denying them access to these tools forces them to waste valuable time and resources on manual alternatives, which could otherwise be spent on refining their craft.

3. Preventing platforms like Second Life from utilizing AI in their development processes is an incredibly short-sighted move. AI has the potential to accelerate development cycles by automating complex processes, analyzing data more efficiently, and enabling developers to focus on higher-level tasks. By rejecting these advancements, the development process becomes unnecessarily slower and more cumbersome, ultimately harming both developers and users.

The behavior of certain anti-AI groups has reached an alarming level of hostility and irrationality. These individuals have turned their opposition into a form of crusade, engaging in online witch hunts to expose anyone suspected of using AI tools. This behavior not only disrupts the lives of creators but also fosters a toxic environment that discourages innovation and collaboration. In many ways, this movement resembles a quasi-religious ideology, complete with its own skewed moral framework that vilifies technological progress.

I fully expect the next meeting for ConvAI bots to be filled with a bunch of protestors, unaware of what they are even talking about.

No word on protestors against ConvAI bots yet but I'm still looking!

I do definitely see some level of hostility around AI that's out of control. For one thing "artificial intelligence" is a broad, broad umbrella that includes applications that have been in virtual worlds for years without any objection.

There are also use cases of gen AI that seem generally non-controversial. When I wrote about the image to 3D mesh AI converter (above), for example, I noted that many SL merchants would find it useful for rapid prototyping purposes. (I.E. "Hey fam, before I go through the trouble of creating/rigging/branding it, would you even want a shoe like this in SL?")

Would anyone be against that use case?

Further, the idea that Gen AI will "take people's jobs" is still far from proven. Like I've pointed out before, the US unemployment rate remains low (though that's changed recently for totally unrelated, Elon-flavored reasons), and Gen AI's promise to make creativity much more rapid and cost effective is very much lacking any substantial examples.

In any case, I'm planning to run a short survey on the topic soon, and am open to suggestions on questions to ask. For instance: