Posted on Monday, August 08, 2022 at 01:22 PM in Comment of the Week, Virtual Reality | Permalink | Comments (1)
Posted on Monday, August 08, 2022 at 11:59 AM in Weekly Recap | Permalink | Comments (0)
What Is the Metaverse? And Why Should the Art World Care? is a new-ish episode from The Art Angle, the podcast from acclaimed art world news site ArtNet. I had a great time (despite an allergy flare-up) talking with host Tim Schneider, who interviews me alongside art curator Tina Rivers Ryan and artist Sara Ludy, whose SL-based art I briefly covered here.
Here's some highlights (though of course the whole thing is a good listen):
Cao Fei's first SL art project below, the machinima I.Mirror, along with links for more reading, and highlights from AM Radio's career:
Continue reading "Listen: I Talk About Metaverse Art, AM Radio & Cao Fei for ArtNet's Podcast" »
Posted on Friday, August 05, 2022 at 02:20 PM in Art projects in SL, Grotesque Self-Aggrandizement, Making the Metaverse | Permalink | Comments (0)
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Kid Joe’s blog is called Infinite. That makes sense because his blog defies all fashion blog conventions. .It’s not just that he goes back and forth between male and female avatars and mixes contemporary fashion and roleplay outfits. It’s that his pictures are often very editorial. The possibilities are, in a word, infinite.
Take the post “Awakening” which showcases a makeup set from La Maldita Bruja. It’s a blog post for one item and wow, does it ever make that front and center and so fantastic that even I, a person who dislikes tattoos, started thinking how much I wanted that before I remembered I don’t like tattoos.
For a stunning transformation, click here:
Continue reading "Fashion Friday: An SL Style Blog That Defies Convention" »
Posted on Friday, August 05, 2022 at 11:53 AM in Cajsa's Choices, SL blogger link, SL Fashion | Permalink | Comments (0)
Yesterday I mentioned that "nearly all" metaverse platforms built around web3 features (blockchain, NFTs, crypto) have little or no active users. I qualified it that way because I recently found out about a possible exception:
Upland, the mixed reality real estate acquisition game (and the first customer for Linden Lab's Tilia payment service), sells NFTs associated with individual plots of land. And so far, the game/metaverse platform has over 285,000 unique Upland NFT owners. (Screengrab above, as shared with me by the Upland team.)
285K might not seem like much, as compared to say Roblox or Fortnite, but it is massive when compared with the current NFT market. As I noted last January, there are roughly 360,000 NFT owners in the entire world across the main blockchains. But Upland's NFTs, as co-founder Dirk Lueth told me recently, aren't tracked by Cryptoslam and most other blockchain analytics firms.
In other words, Upland reportedly has nearly as many unique NFT owners on its own platform as there are NFT owners across all other main blockchains -- and far more NFT owners than Axie Infinity, The Sandbox, Decentraland, and other wel-known blockchain-based games/metaverse platforms.
Notably, most Upland NFT owners aren't active NFT speculators on other platforms, as is usually the case. According to an internal survey, 65% of Upland NFTs owners don’t own NFTs outside Upland.
Hopefully regular readers are wondering if Upland is even a metaverse platform at all. What with its flat 2D experience for the web and mobile browsers, it's not a 3D immersive virtual world, which is key to the classic metaverse definition.
That is true. But here's the thing: Now that it has an active user base in the six figures, the company is gradually rolling out immersive virtual world features beneath the Monopoly-esque property game -- starting with a casual 3D racing game that's currently in Alpha. Watch:
Posted on Thursday, August 04, 2022 at 02:25 PM in Blockchain, Making the Metaverse | Permalink | Comments (6)
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.
Continue reading "Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2022年7月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan" »
Posted on Thursday, August 04, 2022 at 02:00 PM in ニューワールドノート 日本語版 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Seduce is someone I have featured before back in 2020 but when I saw this shot that could have come straight from one of my brother’s favorite movies For a Few Dollars More [click here] the second in the trilogy with A Fistful of Dollars [click here] and The Good the Bad and the Ugly [click here.] This pic could come straight from the movie poster. All three films have famous theme songs from the composer Ennio Morricone. The song from the third movie is one most of you will have heard as it’s often used in satiric western spoons. Seduce shot this and a few other pics as a tribute to several great Westerns.
For more tributes to the wild, wild, West, click here:
Continue reading "Virtual World Tributes to Western Movies by Sergio Leone & Brokeback Mountain" »
Posted on Thursday, August 04, 2022 at 12:17 PM in Cajsa's Choices, Flickr SL | Permalink | Comments (0)
Thanks to #VRChat's new Horizon Adjust feature, you can do cool stuff! Here's an homage to the movie 'Labyrinth' I made to demonstrate! pic.twitter.com/OZvVoiovCK
— Dr Ocelot (@doktorocelot) August 1, 2022
VRChat's new Horizon Adjust feature may have been mainly added to address usability concerns -- it allows someone who's confined to a bed to comfortable use VRChat -- but very much on brand, the VRChat creator community has already created a seriously cool bonus use case: Gravity-defying special effects!
For instance, here's creator "Dr Ocelot" using Horizon Adjust to re-create a classic David Bowie moment; the classic Escher maze from Labyrinth. (Above; original below for comparison purposes.)
Almost all of this clip, Ocelet tells me, was shot "in camera" in VRChat -- here's how:
Posted on Wednesday, August 03, 2022 at 04:07 PM in VRChat | Permalink | Comments (0)
I owe finding this current Roblox job listing to the sharp eyes of Roblox_RTC, a Roblox-related news source -- the massive metaverse platform is hiring a Senior Software Engineer, Web3 to complete tasks including "develop web3 solutions and integrate them with existing Roblox tech stack across Roblox", and "help decide the future of web3 in Roblox and the nature of our web3 solution". Specifically:
This is an opportunity for you to challenge your engineering talents by building something new, sharing expertise, adopting innovations contributed by other engineering teams and improving our bottom line. As a senior engineer you will help Roblox Marketplace to be web3 ready and support billions of items and transactions to happen both on the blockchain and Roblox.
Virtual items registered on the blockchain are more typically called by another name: Non-fungible tokens, i.e. NFTs. But I wouldn't assume Roblox is about to put out NFTs, because the job description strongly suggests "the future of web3 in Roblox" is still being decided.
Whatever the senior engineer does, it's a pretty mysterious move into web3 for Roblox:
Posted on Wednesday, August 03, 2022 at 03:03 PM in ROBLOX | Permalink | Comments (0)
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Alma has an intriguing photostream. Take this picture. I knew at first glance it was Bonnie and Clyde and if I didn’t, she confirmed it with her song choice, “The World Will Remember Us.” [Click here.] Everything fits, the clothing, the car, the drawn pistole - all suggest Bonnie and Clyde immediately.
It’s odd how people recall their connections to infamous criminals like Bonnie and Clyde as though they were good people. I knew this old man in real life who gave Clyde an apple. My great-great-grandfather hid the James Brothers in his barn. This very suspect family legend was confirmed by the historical society in Iowa so maybe it’s true. It seems so unlikely. I wish I had a dollar for every time I was told Ma Barker and her gang hid out for the Winter on the big island on the lake where I lived. If that were true, they would have turned themselves in just to warm up.
For more of Alma's stories, click here:
Continue reading "Today's Flickr Pick: Alma Creates SL Images Rich With Stories & Ideas" »
Posted on Wednesday, August 03, 2022 at 01:44 PM in Cajsa's Choices, Flickr SL | Permalink | Comments (0)
Update, 8/3: Yesterday's peak concurrency was 70,478 -- well over 6,000 concurrent more users than last week Tuesday, when the protest started. As I suspected, the trend remains: VRChat gonna VRChat.
As I suspected last week, the "protest" by some VRChat users over the company's ban on modified clients has all the indications of a vociferous but small subgroup, rather than reflecting any broad community uprising. You can see that in the user concurrency levels from this VRChat dashboard, which today shows a 5,581 increase of users from last Monday, when the announcement was posted.
One week later, the only indication that there was even any kind of user disgruntlement is on Steam, where thousands have since barraged VRChat's listing with a negative review. But even there, the loss is a few thousand concurrent users at most, and is offset by growth from the Quest userbase. Also, a little bird tells me we may see much more growth evident today at the peak time of 8pm PT, so stand by there.
As I wrote last week, some of the mod ban protest was legitimate, since there was concern that a few mods improved VRChat's usability, such as text captions for deaf users, contrast for colorblind users, for people who are bedridden, and so on. VRChat management very quickly addressed those concerns with an update to the original announcement:
Posted on Tuesday, August 02, 2022 at 02:22 PM in VRChat | Permalink | Comments (3)
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Robyn Smith experiments with light and angles to create fascinating photos. For example, “Set Fire to the Rain” as a bright light in high contrast to the velvety darkness of the shadows. It’s a stunning chiaroscuro photograph but I have to page back to March to find something similar. She is an experimenter and you will find blown-out pics that are blindingly white and black and white negatives as well as color pics with and without shadows. While nearly all the pics are of her avatar alone or with someone, there is tremendous diversity in the style of lighting and framing.
For more examples of her range, click here:
Continue reading "The Power of Avatar Photos Shot With Dramatic Lighting & Angles" »
Posted on Tuesday, August 02, 2022 at 12:22 PM in Cajsa's Choices, Flickr SL | Permalink | Comments (1)
Above: Most popular games in the Quest store as of today
I spent much of last week pondering the mystery of why Meta hasn't announced that the Quest 2 has crossed a 10 million unit install base (as it almost certainly has by now, based on earnings reports). Reader Zack makes an even better point:
Consider Meta might actually experience terrible numbers of ACTIVE users... I personally worked in VR since DK2 days, 2015 or so. I own a Quest 1, and although I believe in this tech's future, I still have to fight my way into my next VR session, every not so often time I decide to wear it.
So only guessing here... if say 50%+ of Quest2 owners don't even use their headsets past the first 30 hours of "novelty and excitement" phase... THAT would be really embarrassing for them... and I feel that's the reason why 10M units is not enough to have a self-sustaining ecosystem.
While Zuckerberg did say 10 million was Meta's magic install base milestone, Zack's point helped remind me to double check Zuck's specific wording in 2020:
We had this milestone in our mind that first we needed to get the technology to the place where you could have a standalone headset, it could be portable, it could be high quality — do the tracking and all that. And Quest was the big milestone on that. Then, from an ecosystem perspective, we believed that if we get to 10 million units active, then that’s kind of a critical magic number.
Emphasis mine! That could really solve the mystery: Maybe 10 million Quest 2 units are sold, but that doesn't mean 10 million are being actively used.
Martin K. chimes in on that tip:
Posted on Monday, August 01, 2022 at 02:49 PM in Virtual Reality, Weekly Recap | Permalink | Comments (8)
Posted on Monday, August 01, 2022 at 12:13 PM in Weekly Recap | Permalink | Comments (0)
In heaven, everything is fine. You got yours and I got mine... Click here to visit.
That's right: The David Lynch fan group in Second Life that I wrote about last month has gone ahead and opened up a whole dedicated sim devoted to Lynch's imagination and tributes to scenes and characters from his most memorable works (with a decided Twin Peaks skew). It's open now, and this weekend starting tomorrow at 4pm PT, there's an official opening party. Dress code is "sensual black attire", and an owl mask will be given out upon arrival.
Here's some more glimpses of LynchLand courtesy of group leader Myrdin Sommer, who is financing the sim with a couple other founders: "Cate infinity, SurfSide66 and me, we pay the rent and we hope we get some Lindens in the Land-tip jars at events... the sim is there to have creative events and if people like to hang around in LynchLand that is perfectly fine, all terrain is accessible, so they can stay at the cabins etc. all they want, or just come and take pictures."
So if you're a Lynch fan too -- or David Lynch himself, as he's known to make the occasional metaverse visit -- consider tipping! More images and event details below:
Posted on Friday, July 29, 2022 at 02:37 PM in Events, New World SLURL | Permalink | Comments (0)
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Arietemolesto is a blog from Caesar Langer. I am guessing it is really Ariete Molesto which Google Translate tells me means “annoying ram”. Well, I am not annoyed by this blog post The Riding Begins.It’s very weekend casual and perfect for a bike ride if it were not going to be 100𝆩 today. I love the pose which looks completely natural.
For a slightly less casual look, click here:
Continue reading "Fantastic Friday Fashion Ideas for Male Avatars from an Annoying Ram" »
Posted on Friday, July 29, 2022 at 12:07 PM in Cajsa's Choices, Flickr SL | Permalink | Comments (0)
With Meta's Q2 2022 earnings report out now, it's once again time to engage in some Quest 2 install base tea leaf reading. I've written about this multiple times (most recently here), but the basic gist is: Most or nearly all the revenue from Meta's Reality Labs division comes from sales of its Quest 2 hardware device, with an MSRP of $299. So doing the back-of-envelope math:
Even at a very conservative estimate, Quest 2's install base crossed over 10 million months ago.
Which brings up a new mystery: Why hasn't Meta announced Quest 2 hitting a 10 million milestone?
10 million is, after all, Mark Zuckerberg's (somewhat arbitrary) target goal for the Quest 2. As he put it in 2020:
Posted on Thursday, July 28, 2022 at 03:00 PM in Virtual Reality | Permalink | Comments (5)
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Bulletproof Next is a K-Pop tribute band in Second Life inspired by BTS who have a Flickr account for their band and poster art. Band members include Chiaki xue, kakarot nosantou, and Sopha Portal and many others. Yesterday they featured this fabulous recreation of a scene from the percussive Arson video by BTS member j-hope. [Click here] I like how he bends at the waist, curving into the already slightly askew picture. It’s a clever bit of composition that makes this pic even more interesting. This pic was taken by kakarot. I just hope they aren’t too literal a tribute band and don’t go on hiatus.
For more band pic, click here:
Continue reading "Incredible Second Life Fan Tributes to Music Videos by j-hope of BTS" »
Posted on Thursday, July 28, 2022 at 01:05 PM in Cajsa's Choices, Flickr SL | Permalink | Comments (1)
VRChat July '22 concurrency via SteamDB
Ever since a user protest against VRChat's recent announcement banning mods led to a bombarding of bad user ratings on VRChat's Steam page, I've seen dire warnings of disaster for the platform. But having covered user protests on metaverse platforms for quite some time, my general rule of thumb is:
Posted on Wednesday, July 27, 2022 at 04:42 PM in VRChat | Permalink | Comments (3)
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Isabella Rumsford’s picture was inspired by the lines from It’s a Wonderful Life [click here]: “What is it you want Mary. What do you want? You want the moon? Just say the word and I'll throw a lasso around it and pull it down.”
Isabella made this as literal as could be and it’s beautiful. I love how she balances the moon with her avatar and the earth with the light from the sun or the spaceship. You can see the shadow of the moon falling on the earth which I think is a nice detail. It’s just wonderful all the way around.
For more intriguing scenes of second living, click here:
Continue reading "Isabella Rumsford Creates in SL a Literal Rendition of a Classic Movie Line" »
Posted on Wednesday, July 27, 2022 at 02:23 PM in Cajsa's Choices, Flickr SL | Permalink | Comments (0)
Above: Within's Supernatural on the Oculus store with nearly 10,000 user ratings
Fairly big bombshell just dropped:
The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday filed for an injunction to block Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, from buying a virtual reality company called Within [producer of the highly popular fitness app called Supernatural], potentially limiting the company’s push into the so-called metaverse and signaling a shift in how the agency is approaching tech deals... John Newman, the deputy director of the F.T.C.’s Bureau of Competition, said the agency acted on the Within deal because Meta was “trying to buy its way to the top.” The company already owned a best-selling virtual reality fitness app, he said, but then chose to acquire Within’s Supernatural app “to buy market position.” He called the deal “an illegal acquisition, and we will pursue all appropriate relief.”
Maybe I'm missing something, but Within's Supernatural is nowhere near "the top", even in the Quest 2's ecosystem of some 10-12 million headsets. With nearly 10,000 user ratings in the Oculus store, Supernatural likely has usage in the six figures.
That's not nothing, but claiming that's "the top" misses the big picture: Meta is currently losing the platform war on its own platform. Compare Supernatural's usage with numbers announced by the metaverse platform Rec Room last April:
Posted on Wednesday, July 27, 2022 at 01:06 PM in Making the Metaverse, Oculus Rift, Rec Room | Permalink | Comments (0)
Above: Steam's VRChat ratings bombarded by protesters
A Metaverse platform is nothing without a thriving community, but the flipside is portions of that community can seem to endanger the platform. VRChat is experiencing that now, due to an announcement that seems benign on its face:
“Modified clients” are a large problem for VRChat in a variety of ways. Malicious modified clients allow users to attack and harass others, causing a huge amount of moderation issues. Even seemingly non-malicious modifications complicate the support and development of VRChat, and make it impossible for VRChat creators to work within the expected, documented bounds of VRChat.
In order to prevent that, we’ve implemented Easy Anti Cheat (EAC) into VRChat. If you’ve played Apex Legends, Fortnite, Gears of War, Elden Ring, or many more, you’ve seen Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC)... The integration of EAC means that all modified clients are blocked...
Every month, thousands of users have their accounts stolen, often due to running a modified client that is silently logging their keystrokes as well as other information. These users – often without even realizing it! – run the risk of losing their account, or having their computers become part of a larger botnet.
Excuse me while I recover over flashbacks around various modified third party-made Second Life viewers which were banned for having dubious features. As with Second Life, a highly vocal number of VRC players have been protesting VRChat's move since it was made, include bombarding its Steam listing with bad reviews. Which as you can see above, is also an indicator of how small the protest is: Less than 10,000 users have recently posted a negative review. (Based on various figures, I'd estimate VRChat has about 5 million monthly active users, give or take.)
Do the protestors have any legitimate points? Somewhat, in the sense that some mods include some features that provide text captions for deaf users, contrast for colorblind users, and so on. But then again, from VRChat the company's point of view, thousands of users are reportedly having their accounts actively stolen by modded viewers every month.
Which side is right? Rather than weigh in, I'll quote a famed and highly respected member of the VRChat creator community, who requested I quote them anonymously, "due to the toxicity online" (their words), and provided great context on the situation:
Continue reading "VRChat Community Wracked by Protest Over Ban on Modified Clients" »
Posted on Tuesday, July 26, 2022 at 02:52 PM in VRChat | Permalink | Comments (7)
Shelf under Could Be Coincidence, Could Be Something Else: Vice News has a fascinating in-depth look at Roblox's attempt to launch in China, including plans to accommodate the Chinese government's expectations around censoring content that suggests, for instance, that Taiwan is independent from China. Last December, however, Roblox abandoned China for mysterious reasons:
[I]n July 2021, Roblox launched LuoBuLeSi, the Chinese version of its platform. Other documents show some of the mechanisms it had in place for complying with Chinese regulations, including a game “whitelist” and moderation features for display names in the country.
Roblox’s time in China was exceptionally short lived. In December 2021, the company closed down LuoBuLeSi without going into detail about why. Soon after it shut down, the company said that it was working to relaunch after making “necessary investments” to its “data architecture” but did not provide any additional information about closing.
The Chinese market for online games is extremely large (as I saw first-hand a decade ago), so it's strange that Roblox would give up on it so quickly.
As it happens, exactly a month before that (November 2021), a notorious Roblox user and popular YouTuber did pull this pretty cyberpunk stunt off:
Posted on Tuesday, July 26, 2022 at 01:21 PM in ROBLOX | Permalink | Comments (0)
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Can I love a Second Life photographer simply because her pictures make me giggle and sometimes even laugh out loud? Yes, yes I can.
Ambre Singh’s picture is cute but when you add the title “Sitting on the Duck of the Bay” it goes from cute to hilarious and memorable. It made me want to do a deeper dive into her photostream. She’s not that fond of clothing, particular bras and shirts, and beach living gives her the freedom to live comfortably au naturel. However, being humorous does not take away from her artistry.
For a fabulous SL homage to a classic painting and more, click here:
Posted on Tuesday, July 26, 2022 at 12:34 PM in Art projects in SL, Cajsa's Choices, Flickr SL | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted on Monday, July 25, 2022 at 12:11 PM in Weekly Recap | Permalink | Comments (0)
Responding to our question on how many active users on the Quest VR headset there are, a reader points us to a recent market survey which suggests that use is quite tiny, especially among Gen Z:
Piper Sandler completes 43rd semi-annual Generation Z survey of 7,100 U.S. teens...
While 26% of teens own a VR device, just 5% use it daily. 48% of teens are either unsure or not interested in the Metaverse
This prompts reader "lieisacake" (LOL) to observe: