Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Charlotta Jackman aka Handdrawn posted this intriguing picture she called “Keep playing with fire…You’ll never be able to handle the heat.” I love this picture. For one, it’s so different from the usual pictures of body or headshots or landscapes. She zoomed in close and is sending a message, a warning to all who would trifle with her.
I found this picture in the group Second Life's Edgy -Different. So what is edgy or different? I spent some time browsing through the group to find out. This is an adults-only group, but don’t worry, if you’re okay with occasional explicitness here or there, it’s a lovely group of photos.
For more edgy and/or different pictures, click here:
New on my Patreon: We've tried for decades to make a physics-enabled game involving a ball that people can play together from around the world in real time. Most attempts end up being comically, unplayably laggy. But a new team-based volleyball game in VRChat, has been good enough to generate not only a large returning audience, but also player leagues, even live sport casters on YouTube. Join for free to read about it first here.
Visitors can interact with immersive, browser-accessible exhibits and experience WebXR and interoperable worlds from their devices. Paid tours will provide in-depth insights into milestones, from early web experiments to immersive environments.
You’ll also join MetaTr@versal portal crawls, where avatars explore interconnected worlds through portals. These unique events redefine what it means to travel across digital realms.
Much more here. The top supporter tier, for $9999, is actually quite a bargain for companies and brands to consider:
Collaborate with the Virtual Worlds Museum™ team to create a customizable 3D world in Arrival. Space featuring your product or service. Work closely with our expert 3D artists and receive pro-level consulting throughout the process.
I've been involved in projects like this in multiple virtual worlds, and the cost is usually more like $20,000-50,000.
Here's some examples of branded experiences in Arrival.Space, via VWM founder Julian Reyes:
Casja's column on the great SL photographers on Flickr is being moved to tomorrow, so it's a perfect time to feature some creative accounts on Primfeed, the new Second Life-centric social network. After we put out a call in search of Primfeed talent last week, Graeme Fairelander gave us a glorious list. Here's four of my favorites from that group of twenty-one.
To start, I can't resist a subversive send-up of the famous motorcycle skid from Akira, and Lying Cat (aka @blarn.boo) does one marvelously above. Much more on her feed in this vein, teeming with badass ladies of cyberpunk though she notes, images contain "No AI". (An increasingly frequent artists' note we're seeing on social media images and also machinima video.)
Speaking of VRChat hiring, I kinda feel like the company should go ahead and hire community creator/merchant "lackofbindings" to make default avatars. Because, I mean, watch above. (Starts slow but shit gets real around 20 seconds in.)
I watch this somewhat whimsically, because amazing avatars like this once seemed pervasive in Second Life as well (as here, in 2007) but are much less prevalent. They're still around, to be sure, but you have to look in earnest, and they're definitely in less abundance on the active marketplace. My working theory, as I wrote in the book, is the launch of avatar-based mesh for ultrarealistic humans too quickly dominated the market after 2010:
Meta is now laying off thousands of employees while all but announcing that staff working on Meta's Horizon Worlds is next on the chopping block this year. So it's important to note that Rec Room and VRChat -- two metaverse platforms which have ironically thrived on Meta's own Quest platform -- are currently hiring:
All remote roles, too! That they're hiring is not a surprise, since VRChat has (by their own reporting) 10 million active users, while Rec Room (by my estimate) has well over 20 million users. What is somewhat surprising is that neither company was acquired by Meta, seeing that much or most of that user base -- nearly 70%, in VRChat's case -- use a Meta Quest headset. But oh well.
In VRChat's case, by the way, I know several staffers were deeply involved in Second Life back in the day, while the founders are very much aware of the platform. Also, I recently chatted with a VRC staffer who got their start as a community developer, and shared some about the VRChat corporate culture and advice on getting hired:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Lally O’Leary is a fun account to follow, in part because you never know what she will do next. I said something similar four years ago when I wrote about her back when she called herself Lally Starsparkle. Whatever her last name, Lally is sure to please. I love “The Photographer” where she makes the intriguing decision to leave a lot of space bin the field before the subject. It creates a sense of vastness that would be lost if her subject were up close in the foreground.
Last week's post on Second Life's huge geographic size as a unique selling point brought up some interesting points. Technically SL is probably not the "largest" if we're only talking about geographic size, but I think the apples to apples comparison question is precisely this:
What is the Geographically Largest, Contiguous, Multi-User, Fully Explorable, Online Virtual World?
By "contiguous", I mean there are no load screens in between areas, and by "fully explorable" I mean just that: Some online worlds like Eve Online, MS Flight Simulator, or even single-player worlds like Starfield are extremely large, yes, if judged only by map size. But the actual user explorable part of the map size is much less than that. I.E., MSFS basically models the entire world, but you can't, say, land your plane and walk into a nearby diner.
Video (also) via @brainthink.bsky.social, who has also happened to explore Second Life, and found it technically wanting: "The SL mainland is geographically large," they explain, "but the rendering times of structures and objects is absurdly slow. As a real life sailor, I tried sailing in SL once on a rezzed sailboat and quickly gave up. It wasn’t enjoyable at all, sadly."
That has at least somewhat improved since the SL grid moved to the Amazon Cloud in 2020. And while there are thousands of private sims that are not generally accessible, or require a load screen when teleporting there, the major mainland areas, as reader Kaylee West argues, makes for some sprawling, serendipitous adventures -- notwithstanding property owner ban lines:
Since Quest headsets and Horizon Worlds cannot succeed on the scale of Meta's ambitions (and certainly not in 2025), I'm reading [Meta CTO's internal memo] as a preparation for a major shift of focus away from mixed reality and Horizon Worlds towards augmented reality +AI glasses (at the end of this year or in 2026). (And I'm sure that Meta will find a way to describe this new focus as an evolution of their vision of the Metaverse. Maybe the new/true/real Metaverse or whatever. They'll come up with something.)
If this shift of focus towards AR glasses and AI is already planned, why not just announce it? I assume the purpose of this whole exercise (and its predictable outcome) is to rationalize the scaling down of the MR and Horizon Worlds teams, prevent or shut down internal discussions about this change, and give some employees a chance to leave or switch teams before they are fired.
But I'm biased because Meta's VR strategy never made much sense to me. Thus, I guess, I'll just wait, watch, and limit my engagement with the Quest platform.
"Despite the reductions," MSN reports, "Meta still has around 1,000 job openings in California, with hiring efforts focused on AI and other business-critical roles." So, yes, I agree with Martin that limiting engagement with the Quest is probably a good idea.
As for my original rant about Bosworth's memo, there's a pretty good conversation on it on LinkedIn, where it went mini-viral.
I joined Wagner James Au’s Patreon at the “Metaverse partner” level in October 2024, when I started work on my book about Second Life, since James’s New World Notes blog and Patreon user posts seemed the perfect place to publicize my project.
In the four months since, I’ve been both impressed and delighted by the results...
The most fascinating story about next gen AI in technology may not be about DeepSeek or whatever OpenAI is announcing, but reside in a 21 year old metaverse platform which has something no LLM can boast about: A simulated virtual world with terabytes of meta-tagged data constantly evolving.
That's my take, at least, talking with Linden Lab heads Brad Oberwager and Philip Rosedale recently. And while the company has added its own official AI-powered characters last year, the user community has been creating them for many years, even long before OpenAI existed. They recently got a demo from an SL community creator who connected LLMs to an upcoming RPG that blew their minds:
"The whole experience that he had built using AI was really very strong," Philip tells me. "And I think that's one of those cases where, if we can just get people to him, the ones that want to [play his role playing game] it was just awesome." (More on that game later.)
They also thought, he added: "Okay, let's modernize this and make it easily expand upon this stuff."
But doing that means taking incredible caution: "We're running a lot of tests on characters that are infused with AI personalities," Oberwager explains. "They're sort of next gen NPCs. We ran a test, we got feedback, we took the test down. It's not like it went sideways, but some people didn't like some things, but that's the point of the test."
"Using Runway ML is actually straightforward," he tells me, explaining the platform/technical process and artistic approach. "You start by uploading an image and describing what you want to see happen in the video. Then you wait to see how the output aligns with your vision. Personally, I’d estimate my success rate is about 25%. I define success as the output effectively conveying the emotion or sensation I’m trying to communicate.
"To make the process more efficient, I take notes on the wording and syntax that lead to favorable results for my specific goals. I’m mindful of the carbon footprint of this technology, so I prioritize producing meaningful, impactful results. If the outputs don’t show promise quickly, I end the session and reconsider the prompts or the source image. It’s easy to approach the tool like a hammer and just keep hitting anything and everything, relying on it to generate something interesting without much progress towards the original vision.
"With my paintings, for example, I was inspired by one of the more thrilling sensations in Second Life: the feeling of hopping just off the ground, hovering, and zooming closely over the landscape. I wanted to capture that same energy in my real-life paintings, so I tailored my prompts in that direction.
"Once the painting is adjusted in Photoshop, I upload it to Runway, add a text prompt I think will work, and wait for the render. It’s a bit like baking a soufflé—you hope it rises but prepare for the possibility of collapse."
"The resulting output was exciting enough to explore further. It sparked a realization about AI’s potential in art. The experience reminded me of when I first started building with prims in Second Life: the thrill of exploring a new medium of expression with an incredibly low barrier to entry.
"For me it’s a precision thing. Creating felt more precise in Second Life than painting on a canvas. Creating with AI feels more vague than painting, blurry in a way that’s difficult to focus. But this is temporary. We’re in the Daguerreotype era of AI."
All of this, of course, brings up numerous thorny topics about the clash between traditional art and gen AI. Berg is one of the few people highly qualified in both fields to discuss it with nuance. (Along with his SL art, he's an academically trained painter; on the tech side, he was a designer at IBM and more recently, worked on a visualization project for NASA, among other coolness.)
So Berg has some solid back to consider, for instance, the future of traditional art in the AI era, especially as it evolves:
"Although we might view the introduction of AI media through the lens of anti-AI sentiment as many do, that very sentiment could instead be viewed as a renewed appreciation of handcrafted works," he argues. "Regardless of one’s opinion of AI art, it has people talking about art and human agency in ways we haven’t in a very long time.
"The shaman who told stories by the community fire as the shadows dances on the cave walls may have taken exception to written glyphs, wondering how the human experience would be retained on cold stones. Despite the spectacle of AI, these themes and concerns are ancient. I’d be more worried if we looked at AI and rejected it wholesale than having the courage to see what it means to be human in a world in constant tension with the technology we invent."
Does that imply he plans to use gen AI in his own "official" works of art? In other words, works he'd show to the general public in a gallery setting, or even a platform like SL?
Background: Historically we mostly only feature images from SL's Flickr community for various reasons (longevity, embed features, etc.), but we also want to highlight the Primfeed's fairly large virtual world community as much as possible.
In any case, please tag your favorites Primfeed artists in comments so we can follow and/or feature them!
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Cursiichella recently posted this delightful picture and I immediately thought she’s Pippi Longstocking all grown up. I love the mischievous spirit she portrays. Definitely, she would lead an expedition to a circus.
For more of Cursichella’s spirited pictures, click here:
I keep being shown a viral Instagram post about someone tagging major real world logos that are showing up unauthorized in Second Life. So let's talk about it.
Will anything happen because of this one post tagging RL brands? Debatable. However, if someone were to professionally write to the legal teams at Chanel, Balenciaga, Kellogg's, McDonald's, etc., yes. Something could happen.
Only not in the way they think.
When you sign into Second Life for the first time, or whenever Linden Lab updates the Terms of Service, you have to agree before proceeding. Does anyone really sit and read the whole ToS? Probably not. But let me hit you with a couple of lines from section 6:
Linden Lab encourages the creation of original content in Second Life. You should not use copyrighted, trademarked, or celebrity material in Second Life.
So those items I showed you the past couple of months with Versace and Vuitton on them? You guessed it. They're breaking ToS.
"But, Ali. Fashion can't be copyrighted!"
No, it can't, for the most part. You can absolutely recreate a pair of Alice+Olivia jeans in the cut, style, and shape. What you can't do is take one of their embellished jeans and recreate them down to the EXACT graphic design down the legs. You could recreate them and put flowers down the legs, just not the exact ones that are designed specifically for Alice+Olivia.
You can recreate a Juicy tracksuit. You cannot put the exact Juicy logo on the butt.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting.
Langstrath Valley shot “Windmills, Sancho? I see Giants!” which portrays the most famous scene from Don Quixote... I loved the book when I read it in high school Spanish and dragged my friend to see the statue at Plaza de España. I love the book far more than “Man of La Mancha,” the musical.
Why did I decide to hunt for Don Quixote in Second Life? Chatting on the phone with a friend, I characterized a mutual friend’s action as quixotic. I then wondered why we pronounced quixotic so differently from Quixote. I had my stream choosing music for me based on a Ben Webster tune and, rudely, The Impossible Dream began to play. I have never liked that song. The algorithmic overlords should have chosen Dulcinea. Anyway, it made me wonder about Don Quixote in Second Life. There were some lovely surprises such as Langstrath’s picture that is so true to the story.
For more of Don Quixote in the Metaverse, click here:
Or I should say, adding next gen AI-powered NPCs, because as Brad notes, "the horse has been out of the barn" for years. But the promise and peril is far greater, now they can be more powerful than ever before:
"What we're trying to figure out is," he tells, "how do we give people the opportunity to have these NPCs, to build these characters, without all of a sudden, you know -- the classic one that everyone says is, 'Without a bunch of Nazis running around.'"
Read it all here, and don't miss the fascinating (if a little creepy!) story of the LLM-powered surfer NPC that Brad once met -- it's totally gnarly.
... We need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR. And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance. If you don't feel the weight of history on you then you aren't paying attention. This year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure...
You don't need big teams to do great work. In fact, it may make it harder. One trend I've observed the last couple of years is that our smaller teams often go faster and achieve better results than our more generously funded teams. Not only that, they are much happier! In small teams there is no risk of falling into bad habits like design by committee.
Start strongly boosting our metaverse KPIs or get fired this year.
... because the only time the leaders of a large company talk about the value of small teams is when a huge staff is about to become a tinier one. Also, I've personally heard multiple insiders talk about a coming cut, recently -- and have been hearing about Reality Labs' "design by committee" problem since roughly 2019.
It's tragic that Meta's staff is now bearing the brunt of the very fundamental mistakes that Zuckerberg and Bosworth themselves made over the last 10 years -- especially when these were foreseeable errors at the time.
To highlight just a few I've followed closely:
Zuckerberg/Bosworth spent billions to mass market VR, without researching (or knowing) why VR tends to make females literally vomit:
[Microsoft's] danah boyd is not an obscure researcher, but frequently cited in mainstream media and tech news sites. So when she ended her 2014 essay with a call for researchers across Silicon Valley to follow up on her initial findings, I assumed this would immediately happen.
It did not.
Reached while writing Making a Metaverse That Matters, she told me that few if any VR industry members contacted her after the essay was published. Neither did they even follow up with her in 2017, when a study published in Experimental Brain Research found that when women volunteers played a game in an Oculus VR headset, 78 percent of them experienced nausea. “To my knowledge,” she told me, “[Oculus and Meta] did not pursue any of those research questions.”
Over the years, I’ve asked several senior Meta staffers about this, [including Zuckerberg/Bosworth's PR team] and have received no adequate reply.
Zuckerberg/Bosworth did not follow the advice of former Facebook VP / Second Life co-founder Cory Ondrejka, Jim Purbrick, and other virtual world veterans they hired.
If you've been following the news about Facebook/Meta's metaverse project lately, you'll recall the slew of bad press when a female user was sexually assaulted in Horizon Worlds, leading the company to hastily add an avatar "boundary" system...
"I was literally banging the drum at Oculus Connect two years in a row," Jim Purbrick tells me, with evident frustration, even sending along the talk he gave on the subject at Facebook's own conference back in 2016. "I also told every new Oculus employee I met to read My Tiny Life in addition to Ready Player One, but the message didn't reach every part of the organization, sadly."
To the statement, "I believe Meta will successfully build the metaverse" (above), only 50% of employees answered yes. In November 2021, 77% of staff answered in the affirmative... 56% say their own CEO has not explained the metaverse clearly.
In a funny irony, Bosworth pinged me on Twitter when I pointed out that Meta seemed to be walking away from the Metaverse... in a statement he wrote that actually shows little knowledge about the concept. The painful irony is his own employees will now have to labor under the gun of that misapprehension.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Maloe Vansant has been a favorite artist of mine for years, something I said the last time I wrote about her. It’s as true now as then. Pictures like this are the reason why. The woman’s face is so beautiful, but in the texture of the skin we see the breakdown and deterioration. There are scratches and breaks in the surface and there is a growth of gold daubs of paint, flecks that fleck off, a kind of beautiful decay. The title is “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This” and it immediately reminds me of that video that frequently zoomed in on Annie Lennox and her castmates’ faces, but most often on her face. Even without the Eurythmics connection, though, this picture is extraordinary.
For more of the breathtaking imagery from Maloe Vansant, click here:
The new test ad for Second Life attracted quite a bit of opinions from longtime SL users, including some on-brand snark -- and this smart suggest from longtime virtual world explorer Kaylee West:
As a regular user of both SL (17 years) and VRChat (6 years), one of the big things that keeps me in SL and frustrates me with VRC is how much easier it is the change up my avis look and wardrobe in SL than VRC.
I also feel, strangely, that the continents are a big selling point. Many AAA games boast about how big their maps are, how you can endlessly explore every corner of their maps. [Emphasis mine! -WJA]
VRC has some biggish worlds, but nothing like SL's continents and Blake Sea. Only in SL can you buy a luxury yacht and sail for hours on end, stopping at different port and explore the surrounds, or jump in a car of your choice and drive around an extensive road network.
From another perspective, there appears to be a growing number of people looking for AI companions. I have made one for myself so that I have "intelligent" company when I travel around SL (not all of us are good at the socialising thing). Maybe making the creation of AI companions (actual avatars not animesh which can't be rezzed) easier and highlighting this as a feature of SL (as against Replika or Kindred) might draw these users in?
I believe something like those AI companions are coming soon, so set that aside. The map size point is a very good one, especially since SL is a single-shard virtual world with truly massive areas that are contiguous by land, air, or sea. (Yes, region crossings usually involve hiccups, but still.) It's a key differentiating feature of Second Life!
Consider: Currently Second Life's size is roughly that of Los Angeles (as Philip Rosedale recently noted in an interview), i.e. 1300 square kilometers.
Contrast that with some leading AAA online game worlds:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Damien Father (Father Daddy) has an exciting photostream. Regular readers will know I am a huge fan of pop art. I cannot resist pictures like this. Really, all they did was create a duotone in red with their snap and make a few repeats. But the idea is always what makes pop art special. I mean, most anyone could paint a Campbell’s Tomato Soup Can, but no one thought of doing that until Andy Warhol in 1961. I’ve seen the soup cans arrayed in a long line from one room to another and they are overwhelming and far more interesting and imposing than you might think.
I also have to point out the subtle cleverness of choosing that shade so that the face seems also a repeat of the background. I love everything about this pic. This is titled “Super Villain” which is also kind of clever as there is no outward manifestation of villainy, but that is the point, villainy comes from within not without.
For more SL-becomes-pop art perfection, click here:
Meta's CTO Memo Was an Early Signal of Company Shifting Away from VR/Quest Toward AR & AI (Comment of the Week)
With news breaking that Meta is now laying off thousands of employees to focus on its AI products, this comment from reader Martin K last Thursday sure seem sadly prophetic:
"Despite the reductions," MSN reports, "Meta still has around 1,000 job openings in California, with hiring efforts focused on AI and other business-critical roles." So, yes, I agree with Martin that limiting engagement with the Quest is probably a good idea.
As for my original rant about Bosworth's memo, there's a pretty good conversation on it on LinkedIn, where it went mini-viral.
Posted on Monday, February 10, 2025 at 03:08 PM in AI, Augmented Reality, Comment of the Week, Making the Metaverse, Virtual Reality, Virtual World Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0)
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