Recently saw a Reddit rant about a VRChat avatar with a hilariously ridiculous number of triangles (above), and had to laugh in recognition at the title: "Friends joining with these half a million polygon avies are literally ruining the experience (not only for me)! This is outrageously stupid and unnecessary!"
Maybe unnecessary, but also inevitable, on metaverse platforms: When you give novice grassroots creators UGC tools for enhancing their avatars, many will add so many enhancements, they often end up making avies with quite a lot of polygon junk in their trunk.
This also has been a challenge in Second Life for many years. Many of the top-selling mesh bodies in SL are extremely resource heavy, and tend to degrade performance of everyone around them, including the users wearing these bodies. (They're so resource heavy, a former Linden Lab engineer once compared them to a local DDOS attack!) Some SL shopping events have even taken to setting up a "viewing sim" near the actual kiosks, so shoppers can view the wares at a safe, less laggy distance.
As for VRChat, there's some guidance in place which makes this less of a social problem:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
With this unseasonably warm winter, back in my hometown they are measuring how thick the ice is trying to determine if it’s safe to put their ice houses out on the lake. (See photo at the end of this post!) That made me think how lucky we are in Second Life where the ice is always thick enough, even in July.
Angelus van Engelen captures some of the delight of an ice-covered canal where folks gather just as in a city park, to enjoy the frost in the air and under their feet. There were generally 300 or more houses on our lake, though since there were multiple islands and coves you only saw about a quarter of them at a time. If you want to go to the canal and skate, here is a ticket. [Teleport link here: Canal City]
It's been a few months since we checked in on the Virtual Worlds Museum™, the largest online info/community resource for virtual worlds, past and present -- so I just had a chat with founder/CEO Julian Reyes, to get the latest updates. Turns out, there's quite a lot! For one, it's now officially trademarked (a milestone in itself), and the project just earned its first contest recognition:
The Museum is a finalist for the prestigious AUREA Award, hosted by Germany's Europa-Park, one of the biggest theme parks in Europe. (Replete with a roller coaster ride integrated with VR headsets.)
"I'm thrilled to be nominated along with some other innovative projects alongside XR community friends," Julian tells me. "I'm looking forward to presenting our project January 22nd at Europa Park in Germany. A big shout-out to our team for helping us create our first exhibit which is one of six." (The one that's nominated is hosted in Arrival.Space, with the next exhibit expected to launch in Meta's Horizon Worlds next month.) Fellow AUREA finalists, by the way, include GroKit Core by 3lbXR, pioneering ways to build in VR, and Blockade Labs, innovating AI prompt-based VR experiences.
The Museum also expanded its Spotlight Videos tour page, with the latest video (above) featuring In Kenzo and AI archivist SEHU teleporting into Spatial, a new-ish web based virtual world:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Tamarind Silverfall sure knows how to focus our eyes. There is a path leading our eyes into the fairy cave and if that were not enough, the bright frost-covered roses and the bright butterfly frame the cave and keep our focus on it. It’s a beautifully composed picture.
For more of Tamarind’s lovely pictures, click here:
In case you missed it over the Thanksgiving holiday rush last week, Roblox is now actively promoting sales of its virtual currency Robux via its website as opposed to making the same purchase on mobile or console.
This is highly significant, because up until recently, companies like Apple and Google would delist Roblox for doing something like this, since it deprives their app stores of the usual 30% in-app purchase cut. But with a court ruling against Google in favor of Epic last October, Roblox is joining Epic in what's effectively a game of chicken against the major platform publishers. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney is ebullient at this, of course, praising Roblox for "finally fighting the Apple tax".
So now Epic's Fortnite and Roblox, the world's most popular metaverse platforms, are openly challenging the major app publishers. How will the largest, Apple, react?
"I think Apple has been browbeaten into this position by regulators," a veteran virtual world exec tells me. "There's a lot of attention on Apple at the moment looking at whether they're anticompetitive or not. A few years ago, this would be a fast track to having your app updates denied -- or worse, be removed from the store. Today, Apple is allowing it; but I would surmise they're not happy about it."
One way of making this move a fait accompli is if the other metaverse platforms in the app stores follow suit -- specifically, Rec Room, ZEPETTO, VRChat, IMVU... and, of course, Second Life. Should they join forces with Roblox and Fortnite?
Via the VRChat metrics site and a highly helpful VRC source, here's the latest concurrency trends for our favorite next gen metaverse platform. If you click to embiggenate, you'll see that peak concurrency has been trending toward 120,000 in recent weeks, hitting just shy of that over the Thanksgiving weekend holiday.
That's decent growth from last New Year's Eve -- that holiday is typically the platform's biggest day, usage wise -- when it reached the 100,000 CCU milestone. (105,991, to be exact.) This concurrency has been steadily, slowly creeping up every weekend, with most of the usage from Quest users.
Given these trends, I think there's a pretty decent chance VRChat reaches another milestone soon: 150,000 CCU for this New Year's Eve.
Because historically there's been a spike of user growth every holiday season:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Isla Nebula is a marvelous landscape photographer who has been sharing her art on Flickr for four years and I failed to discover her before today. I am remiss!
Speaking of which, here’s a tip on how I find new SL artists on Flickr to cover: By searching for a word and “secondlife.” Today the word was “winter” and look what came up (above)! This is a magnificently retro scene with the wood-panelled station wagon carrying a tree from the Christmas Tree farm. That looks like an old-fashioned VW bug as well. I love how she used the trees and bushes to foreground the picture and the story it tells. If Currier & Ives were alive today, they would be taking pictures like this in Second Life.
AI bots are assigned to each new user. Read the IP address; if the new user is using it for the first time, they cannot disconnect the AI bot until it finishes. If the IP is a repeat user, allow disconnect.
The AI bot takes the new user through most processes, including how to rez, change clothes in a sandbox, tour important SL sites, and click a dance ball and dance. How to Add or Wear, how voice and text work, just a great list of things to know.
It takes 30 minutes, maybe longer if it's fun, entertaining, and you're getting a great intro to SL.
He contrast that with the current first-time user experience, which involves reading many in-world signs:
Reading signs on a walkway has never worked. I've tried for 16 years to help Day 1 people. Almost none of them know how to rez, that free clothes are on the SL Market, what a rez zone or sandbox is, how to change clothes, or what a dance ball is where you can join a group dancing.
You guys at SL have to overcome this. Lead them by the hand and see if concurrency increases.
This all sounds right. I think the key thing is differentiating the AI bot from a human-controlled avatar. I would actually recommend making the bot part of the viewer, a disembodied voice which can also enable relevant controls in the user experience to light up, when giving tutorials.
I've even recommend making the bot a character in a Second Life world narrative.
For an idea of what I mean, check out this first-time experience from Scavengers, a recent multiplayer game with a lead designer who once worked at Linden Lab:
SECOND LIFE: The First, Best Metaverse in Words and Pictures is a new book from metaverse media partner Hari Sutherland, a professional author IRL with several published books, both fiction and nonfiction. His new book, as the title suggests, is devoted to Second Life, and I’m thrilled to recommend it, both for longtime SL veterans and the uninitiated wondering why this unique and quirky virtual world has thrived for so long.
It's also the very first paper and ink coffee table book fully focused on Second Life -- that I can recall, at least! -- and it’s sumptuously illustrated and narrated by Hari. A beautiful tribute to the virtual world, both the platform and the global community who've come together to build it, it also features moving stories of the many people who've transform themselves for the better through their avatars.
"As is often the case, a number of things — thoughts, ideas — collided," Hari tells me, explaining the source of its inspiration. "Serendipity, really, or perhaps an honest-to-goodness zeitgeist. A lot of exciting things seem to be happening around Second Life right now."
Join my Patreon for free for some fun holiday shopping specials! Starting with a Patreon-only special from Aardvark, home of hilariously charming SL items like his legendary rideable unicorn balloon and mini-pig unicorn (pictured, adorably).
55% off all items in the Aardvark mainstore until December 3.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Pan Aeon is a wonderful storyteller with his pictures. I interviewed him back in 2018 and, oddly enough, that article began with a motorcycle, too. I thought revisiting his work might be a fun chance to try out AI writing.
So as an experiment, I gave Claude the text of that 2018 interview and described Pan’s pictures to Claude. (The LLM does not access links or pictures, so it relies on my description.)
Let’s see what Claude has to say about this picture:
In Pan's evocative photograph "Badlands", we witness a profound meditation on movement, solitude, and the liminal spaces between reality and imagination. The image captures a moment of existential freedom - a lone rider against a sepia-toned landscape, where the motorcycle becomes both a vehicle of physical transportation and metaphorical transformation.
The duotone palette speaks to a deliberate artistic choice, stripping away chromatic distractions to focus on texture, light, and emotional resonance. The sun's harsh glare over the rider's shoulder creates a stark contrast, symbolizing both illumination and potential blinding - a visual metaphor for the complex journey of self-discovery through digital landscapes.
This photograph emerges as another example of Pan's philosophy of allowing images to "evolve unto themselves" - a spontaneous capture that transcends mere documentation to become a nuanced exploration of identity and transition. The cityscape in the background suggests the tension between structured urban existence and the wild, uncharted territories of personal exploration.
Wow, profound. For more from Pan (and Claude), click here:
I'm also giving away my autograph plate to anyone who buys a copy of Making of Second Life or Making a Metaverse That Matters. I'll even write a special (short!) dedication message to you or a special someone.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Kat Verde-Dillingham transformed her screenshot from Bryn Oh’s most recent exhibition into something so brilliantly different that it tells a completely different story. For reference, I popped in and took a WYSIWYG snapshot using Bryn Oh’s experience. There is such exuberant joy in Kat’s version. The way she filled the elements with patterns reminds me of Gustav Klimpt -- a very merry Gustav Klimpt. I love this picture. It’s one I would happily hang on my walls.
Here's the original:
For more of Kat’s wonderfully unique art, click here:
Interesting comment thread on Second Life's nooby-booting problem. (I.E., that many of the best Second Life hangouts and locations have orbiters banning new users with accounts under 30 days old.) My suggestion is to add a VRChat-style trust system, which is just one (imperfect) way to help address this challenge; I also like this one from longtime reader Martin K:
What about putting new users in their own private instance of a world instead of banning them? In this way, new users could at least visit and explore a world on their own. Visiting private instances of a world has the added benefit of protecting new users from the toxicity of other users in many worlds.
Their own private Second Life! I imagine you'd want select veteran SLers to also be able to access the private instance, as greeters, tutors, and event staff. But something like this has promise.
I started writing this post as a fun casual guide for exploring Second Life sims I’ve admired and written about in recent years. But as I quickly discovered, many of my favorite, popular places featured in my long-running New World SLurl series have since changed hands. A surfing spot had been converted into castles; a seaside cyberpunk city had been turned into an island vacation home, and so on.
But Second Life goes on. After a furious round of teleporting in August to make sure these places were still in-world, here’s seven sims to see, explore, and photograph now -- while you still can!
A rolling rural scene with hills and meadows that could evoke paintings like Wyeth’s “Christina’s World”, a note on the sim info window notes that it might be going away soon!
This video above could be gameplay footage from an upcoming PS4 game by a professional studio, but it's actually only available in VRChat. Bullet Time Agent is a one person labor of love by a longtime VRC community creator known only as "Lakuza", who I've been following since at least early 2020.
Yes, he's been developing this game in his spare time for almost 4 years, mostly working on his own.
Available to play in VRChat today at 4pm PT, you'll be able to find it in the Quest store and in-world search under "Bullet Time Agent 1-1", "Bullet Time Agent 1-2", and "Bullet Time Agent 1-3".
"I'd easily be putting in at least 6 hours per day, and then on weekends, most of the day would be spent on the project," Lakuza tells me.
As the game name suggests, it turns Matrix-style bullet time into a major gameplay mechanic, in a story where you're a reformed thief with a world to save. Somewhat surprisingly, the game will be completely free-to-play, Lakuza's only reward being peer recognition by the VRChat community. Then again, you know a metaverse platform is successful when people create amazing things for their community as an end in itself.
New World Notes columnist Cajsa Lilliehook just locked up her fairly large X/Twitter account (with nearly 20,000 followers) and opened up shop in Bluesky here.
I wasn't surprised when she told me this last night (for reasons I'll explain below), but it's actually part of a larger trend:
In the last couple weeks, my mostly dormant Bluesky account suddenly exploded with hundreds of new followers, most of them SL/virtual world-themed. (OK, maybe "exploded" is a bit hyperbolic, but certainly a fierce fucking puff of activity.) And there's more:
Also other metaverse platforms including Rec Room and VRChat are active on Bluesky.
This is part of an even larger trend, as Bluesky recently hit 20 million active users, in great part in an exile move from Twitter/X in the wake of the US election. That was the thing which pushed Cajsa herself over the blue edge:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Kia Monae Kil shoots fashion pictures, showing herself, her clothes, and her life, often resembling photos from Instagram influencers. It’s fun to watch her having fun as documented by her many pics. In “Jet Setters” you can see that she creates scenarios that suit what she is wearing and also projects the fun of Second Life. She looks like I feel while traveling. So realistic.
This video of filmmaker Ben Affleck discussing generative AI in a nuanced way has been going viral recently, partly because he has a sharp understanding of the technology -- but mostly, I suspect, because he's one of the few well-known, artistically acclaimed Hollywood figures who isn't actively in Freaking the Fuck Out mode about the coming of AI. (And living in Los Angeles, I can say FTFO seems to be the general tenor among most people in the industry.)
However, I think he's being both too bearish and too bullish about generative AI. While he's definitely right that generative AI will help lower the barriers for low budget indie filmmakers -- it's already doing that -- some of the other applications he mentions are highly questionable. To take two:
"We'll use AI to create personalized versions of our favorite TV shows/movies"
Having written about user-generated content across many platforms for over 15 years, including machinima, I can definitely say this: There's only niche interest in unofficial remixes of well-known IP -- even or especially among hardcore fans. Even the best fan-made movies based on, say, Star Wars will usually generate just a few million views at most (but usually far less).
That's even true of user-generated platforms. To take a local favorite, there's been hundreds of truly impressive Second Life-based machinima videos, but very, very few have attracted over 50,000 views (i.e. 10% of the total SL user base right now).
Why? I doubt it's because of low quality. The best like this Star Wars fan movie are quite well-made. I'd argue that it's the very fact that fan-made projects are not made by the official creators make them seem decidedly not "real" and therefore not worth their time. (Which is a keen irony for the talented fans who made them!)
Or to put it another way: A good test of a true fan is if they know the key people who created their favorite IP.
Try it! Ask hardcore fans of, say, the TV show The Sopranos, the movie Oppenheimer, or the video game Skyrim who lead created the IP. (Or for that matter, Good Will Hunting.) I guarantee they'll cite the writer(s)/director by name, or at least know the key creative studio behind the project. With such close affinity of the creator to the work, the idea that we'll all want remixed AI versions of our favorite movies/TV shows/games seems highly unlikely (beyond a brief fad).
Affeck's other claim that I doubt, though I'm a bit less certain of my skepticism:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Fallen is doing something interesting here, with two identical pictures except for the light treatment. The one above is “Light”, and “Dark” is below. The pose and setting are the same but the angle of the light and its intensity differ. Look at the shadows on the door in “Light” that are absent in “Dark” or see how her shadow is so much longer in “Light.”
In “Dark”, the shadows from the window muntins are bold lines going down the hall:
Each picture alone is interesting, together they are fascinating.
Last week's media event with Linden Lab was mainly about the Second Life mobile app officially launching, and the company's strategy to bring back lapsed SLers with it, and grow the overall user base. But before those details were announced, another challenge to growing the Second Life user base came up:
To entice new users, they need to see great content and communities in Second Life.
But many of the best Second Life hangouts and locations have orbiters banning new users (to prevent trolling, non-members, etc), i.e. typically accounts under 30 days old.
So not only can new users not access these areas, they're unceremoniously booted for even trying.
"My experience is having to explain this to new residents that get sent back to the welcome hub, completely clueless as to why, what they did, or the punishment being so harsh," as longtime blogger/event manager Sasy Scarborough explains. "Some have even thought it will mean they are banned for life, that is also a really bad outcome... one guy I was helping at the hub the other day left and got ejected from three places in a row within minutes."
Sasy brought this up during the media event, but it's really an ongoing paradox of metaverse platforms: User-generated content is what makes them so powerful and unique, but that doesn't necessarily mean specific users want to make their content available to anyone who shows up.
"More people are joining Second Life now with money to spend, because they have come from YouTube etc, and know where they are guided to go, to only be ejected from those locations." Of course, location owners are well within their right to ban anyone for any reason, even if that ultimately hurts overall user growth. "If a person with no real connection in-world is repeatedly ejected from experiences, they will be frustrated, and could just log out permanently."
On the Zoom call, Linden Lab CTO Philip Rosedale acknowledged the problem, but also pointed out how difficult it is to solve on the software/UX side. Saying: "If someone has a precise and complete change order to address the problem, we could address that." In other words, it's a complex fix with no easy solution that'll satisfy everyone.
I do see one solution which turns the 30 day/nooby limit into an aspirational goal: Implement a system similar to that of VRChat's trust ranking system. I.E:
Here's my LinkedIn if you're on that platform and want to connect there, especially if you work in the game/virtual world industry, VR, and related fields. While I post New World Notes updates there fairly often, you'll also see posts related to my marketing clients in AI, product design, MMOs, VR, and assorted other verticals.
I actually also recommend LinkedIn for discussions around virtual worlds, the Metaverse, and so on. Since it's primarily a job search network, you usually come across way less toxicity and bot flimflam than Other Social Networks. (In post comments, at least, the messaging system attracts a steady amount of Spam bots, in my experience.)
Here's How AI Bots Could Help Improve Second Life's New User Experience (Comment of the Week)
In our latest post about improving Second Life's first-time user experience, longtime reader/retired tech exec Luther Weymann details how AI might help with that:
He contrast that with the current first-time user experience, which involves reading many in-world signs:
This all sounds right. I think the key thing is differentiating the AI bot from a human-controlled avatar. I would actually recommend making the bot part of the viewer, a disembodied voice which can also enable relevant controls in the user experience to light up, when giving tutorials.
I've even recommend making the bot a character in a Second Life world narrative.
For an idea of what I mean, check out this first-time experience from Scavengers, a recent multiplayer game with a lead designer who once worked at Linden Lab:
Continue reading "Here's How AI Bots Could Help Improve Second Life's New User Experience (Comment of the Week)" »
Posted on Monday, December 02, 2024 at 02:50 PM in AI, Comment of the Week | Permalink | Comments (4)
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