New World Notes

Yes You Can Dance Like Wednesday from Netflix in Second Life This Weekend

In keeping with Second Life's famous tradition of instantly riffing on the latest pop culture hotness, Phia Sims created an SL dance inspired by the one Jenna Ortega as Wednesday does in Netflix's Wednesday -- watch above, compare and contrast with the original below. (Cajsa was ahead of the curve on this one.)

Get it here from the Marketplace. 

Looks like Phia's version is just a short section of the whole zany 82 second thing, but that might be tough to pull off. 

Fashion Friday: Chic Shopping Looks by SL Style Blogger Laylah Lecker

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

Laylah Lecker’s most recent post is Let the Christmas Shopping Begin on her blog Fashion Collecker (nice pun) has a fun little quote, “Shopping is my boyfriend.” I love the black and white color block shift and the hat, it reminds me of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, even though Audrey’s dress was all black. The hat is slightly different but the spirit is similar. [See Audrey’s picture here.]

• Sascha’s Designs Synergy Black Dress with hat
• Shoes: Garbaggio // Mary Jane
• Jewelry: Dark Mouse Square Bangle Bracelet 
• Location: RAMA – #selfie_RAMA TF Showroom by Tracey Faullon @Backdrop City

For more, click here:

Throwback Thursday: There's an Official Iron Man Suit in Second Life & It's Fully User-Modifiable -- Case Study for Current Metaverse Marketers

Above: Standard Iron Man with Watermelon-Flavored Iron Man and Duck Head Iron Man (via Torley)

I had forgotten about this until Linden Lab veteran-turned-guru VC Hunter Walk reminded me when we chatted for my upcoming book: There's free copies of an official Iron Man outfit in Second Life, part of the promotion for the very first movie in the Marvel Comic Universe in 2008, even before Disney owned Marvel.

And notably, the outfit is fully customizable by Second Life users, as a way of encouraging fan-made content and creativity. This was quite a progressive leap for Marvel at the time, but a good one that understands how metaverse platforms work.

"The challenge for lots of corporations and established companies," as Hunter put it to me, "is whether they end up defaulting to the controllable level of where the user can modify the outfits but can't really create [with them]".

Compare and contrast, for instance, with official Fortnite skins from the MCU and other major IP, which far as I know, are not modifiable. Which is probably one reason why we don't see many videos of MCU characters in Fortnite doing anything besides participating in standard battle royale matches. (And my guess is the long tail for actual purchases of these Marvel skins are not as good as they could have been, too.)

By contrast, as I wrote back then:

LOOK: This Artist Is Creating an Entire Graphic Novel With Midjourney Credited as Co-Creator

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

Zoe Jimenez is primarily a Second Life creator and photographer with an obsession with graphic novels and magazine covers. Her Second Life photos are full of covers and character cards, most not safe for Google. However, with the advent of Midjourney, she took a departure from the virtual world and went into a creative frenzy, refining her skill with the AI until she created “Proof of Concept”, her Midjourney-illustrated graphic novel. You will note at the bottom of the page, she explicitly lists Midjourney as a co-creator, the kind of transparency that AI creation demands. This is page three of her story and it’s hilarious. I love when he says she is too much and she replies, “I will be.” 

For a peek behind the scenes, click here:

Lensa Scraping Artists' Work Without Their Consent Into Its "AI" Images -- Even the Artists' Signatures!

The Lensa app has gone viral in recent weeks, with much excitement over its new AI-driven “magic avatars” feature.

Small problem: It's not exactly magic nor purely artificial intelligence. Instead, to create these avatars, the app is apparently scraping up artists' images without their consent. The image appropriation is so blatant in many cases, the Lensa-generated images even include the original artist's signature. (See example above.)

I learned this via professional illustrator Lauryn Ipusm, who's been posting examples of this on her Twitter in recent days.

 "I think they didn’t think artists would stand up for themselves because we don’t [have] industry labels the way the music industry does," Lauren tells me. She says that, because Stable Diffusion, the AI company which provides Lensa's neural network, is very careful about how the platform samples and trains from recorded music.

"The fact that they do so with their music model shows they are well aware of copyright (I mean it’s a basic concept, anyone who isn’t a little kid is aware of copyright), and that it’s not something that was too complicated to implement."

Lauryn's findings were noted yesterday by NBC News, but so far, Lensa's corporate owner has only offered an incomplete reply:

For Wednesday, Here's Amazing Second Life Cosplay Inspired by Netflix's Wednesday

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

I have been watching Wednesday, the new Netflix series, slowly because I am savoring it. I am only on the third episode, the one with the fantastic dance scene and Wednesday all dressed up for the ball in a confection similar to this picture by Camilla Mel Smel Auroline.. I like that she gives us a look that is more true to the character. One of the things Wednesday in the show would not wear is a very short dress with exposed garters. She has no interest in being the subject of the male gaze in Western patriarchy.

Here’s the outfit in the show’s dance clip. Enjoy!

For more Wednesday pics, click here:

Artist Uses ChatGPT AI to Create Text-Based Adventure Game -- Then Feeds That Text Into Midjourney AI to Create Images for Game

Game industry artist Martin Nebelong recently started experimenting with ChatGPT, and discovered he was able to quickly create an entire "choose your adventure"-style adventure game through the AI text generator. Taking that a step further, he then took the ChatGPT text and fed it into Midjourney, the AI image generator, which then created illustrations to accompany the game.  (Watch above.)

"I was very surprised by how quickly the chat bot was in on the idea," Martin tells me. "To begin with, it wanted to write the whole story including all branches in one reply. But when I asked it to serve them to me as a story bit with a few branching options, to wait for my selection and only then to move on in the story, it got that an started over with the correct format. When it wanted to wrap up the story faster than I wanted, I just asked it to do a more detailed story and it did so.

"I guess the most impressive part to me was when I asked it to describe the characters in high detail for the prompts I wanted to use in Midjourney. It gave very detailed descriptions of all the characters including their clothing, their look, personality, names etc." (See an example below.)

But he was also impressed at how ChatGPT added descriptive flourishes he wasn't expecting:

Second Life's Source Code Is Finally on Github!

In case you missed it (and I sure did during the Thanksgiving run-up) Second Life's source code is finally and officially on GitHub here.

I'm surprised this wasn't the case before, but hopefully it gives the viewer codebase much more visibility to GitHub's huge and highly creative developer community. Who knows, maybe someone will finally make a stable mobile TPV client. (Pour one out for Lumiya.)

Background from Signal Linden on the SL blog:

Today's Flickr Pick: Wackily Exploring Second Life With a Surf Board in Tow

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

“Have surfboard, will travel” could be Kian Ericsson’s motto for a recent photo project he is working on. He’s touring the many sims of Second Life and taking a pic of himself and his board, even when they are incongruous. This pic looks plausible until you notice the snow on the ground. Brrrr. It was taken at EchoRidge. [To teleport, click here]

For more surf’s up pics, click here:

Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2022年11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.

 

 

Monday Memory: Metaverse Artist, Grieving For Her Dead Husband, Recreates Him as an Avatar

First published in 2008, "The Husband That Eshi Made" is an essential New World Notes story of how the virtual world can connect us with people in the material realm, even long after they're gone: 

[M]emories of her late husband] wracked her in the grocery store, on the second anniversary of Glenn’s passing.  Since then, Eshi had become a metaverse artist of some acclaim, creating a concert hall made of light, and an evening gown made of fire, among other wonders.  Which is probably why her next stop after the store was her computer. 

“I felt so powerless and alone,” as she recalls, “that I told myself, ‘You know, it might be a sick thing to do, a pathetic thing to do, whatever-- but if I cannot have this guy in real life, I will MAKE him in Second Life.'”

His widow re-created him as best she could-- rather, Eshi Otawara remade herself, transforming her avatar to look like her husband.  And when she was done remaking him, she took Glenn on a tour through Second Life.

She took him skydiving in Straylight. She took him to Ruta Maya for a butterfly ride. “I get to do things with his pixel body that he'd be doing if he were alive,” as she puts it.  She even gave him a flat belly, something she’d known he’d wanted for some time. “I am sure he was cracking up in whatever form he exists now,” she says. 

I ask Eshi what it’s like to become the avatar version of Glenn.

“Like he is hugging me,” she says. “I miss his face most. I used to stare at him all the time.”

Read the rest here.

Top 6 Posts Including Major VRChat Moves, Avatars Meet AI, GTA Roleplay, and an Artist Meets Her Younger Self Through an AI Chatbot

• LOOK: Artist Blends Real Life Photos Of Herself With Her Second Life Avatar In Midjourney To Amazing Effect
• GTA Online Roleplay Tips From Top Second Life YouTuber Meela Vanderbuilt!
• VRChat Groups Launches In Open Beta; IBM/SL Vet Andrew Sempere Helping With System Design!
• There's A Community Of Virtual Photographers Inspired By The Famous Haystack Of Walsh County, A Second Life Sim Inspired By Walsh County, ND
• Artist Feeds Her Childhood Diary Into An AI Chatbot -- And Has A Moving Conversation With Her Younger Self
• Watch: VRChat Partners With Sony On New Mobile-Based Motion Capture Product

LOOK: Artist Blends Real Life Photos of Herself With Her Second Life Avatar in Midjourney to Amazing Effect

Five faces of Whiskey Monday and her IRL owner -- via her Flickr

You can create an avatar based on yourself in Midjourney, but famed Second Life artist Whiskey Monday went a step further, combining multiple images of her SL avatar with photos of herself in real life to create an incredible new persona. 

"I put my RL pics first, and then it generated a Midjourney version of me," Whiskey explains. "Then I added SL pics, and did the same thing, and then I blended them all in several steps. I found that Midjourney doesn't do well with glasses, so I tried an older pic without glasses." (See above.)

In the process, she learned something about Whiskey in SL and Whiskey IRL:

"I used to try hard to make my avatar look like RL me. But over the past couple of years, I’ve stopped caring so much and have just played with new faces for Whiskey. I think it would be interesting to try this again with an older Whiskey face. But what I learned this round is that I still have a certain look, even though Whiskey is less like Jenn." (I.E. Whiskey's offline owner.)

Here's some other variations courtesy Ms. Day:

Fashion Friday: Bridgerton / Historic Second Life Cosplay Ideas

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

LK is a Flickr microblogger. This picture is Waiting for Bridgerton which is a great title since fans do not know when Season Three will begin. I love the dress and the dogs which are so perfect for the scene and marvel that she manages to take a regency dress and make it seem kawaii while she does it. The exciting thing about LK is she shows how to do more than just credits in a Flickr microblog.

• Dress: [Nobel Creations] Antoinette Dress This stunning dress is made 4 Maitreya and Legacy and comes in Cream, Floral and Gray, all with a pink or gold choice. Here's shown Floreal in the pink and gold option.

For another pastel confection, click here:

GTA Online Roleplay Tips from Top Second Life YouTuber Meela Vanderbuilt!

Meela Vanderbuilt is one of Second Life's top YouTubers and she recently expanded her fun, chatty, seriously glamorous brand of videos into the world of GTA Online roleplay. (Watch above.) Here's her expert take on the similarities and differences between roleplay in GTA versus SL:

"The general concept is the same. GTA is more focused on voice role play and the majority of Second Life role play is text based. Over the years, SL role play has evolved from strict guidelines and paragraph-emoting roleplay to various types existing, including just playing out different lifestyles and not focusing much on the delivery, just the overall story.

"The later is closest to Grand Theft Auto roleplay. In GTA, people create a character, have a general background story and then navigate through cities as that character. Story progression will depend on their interactions with other characters and the features of the role play server.

"Servers are comparable to Second Life sims. They’re independently owned and will have different features or stories even though they share the same general framework of GTA’s Los Santos. A lot are centered around crime because of the nature of GTA, so gangs, police, general civilians may be a large part. Some cities may focus on the university, some on commerce and business ownership, etc."

As with Second Life, you can customize your avatar quite a bit in GTA Online, but options vary from server to server -- and unfortunately, are still somewhat limited for women and non-white avatars:

VRChat Groups Launches in Open Beta; IBM/SL Vet Andrew Sempere Helping With System Design!

This is actually more of a milestone for VRChat than the Sony body trackers I mentioned earlier this week, and that was also huge -- VRChat just launched a group function in open beta:

Groups is a huge system that we think is going to change VRChat forever. Most of the features we’ve mentioned today will be released in the first, groundwork stage of Groups. Others will be released – along with polishing dictated by your feedback – in the weeks following the launch of Groups. We want to push these updates out relatively quickly, as we’d like to get Groups up and running as fast as possible.

While this group feature has long been in development by the startup, it's notable that a Second Life veteran is helping with its progress: Andrew Sempere, recently hired as VRChat's Senior Systems Designer, who was a key member of IBM's Second Life team back in the day.

While VRC and SL's group systems are very different (watch the video above), they share some commonalities with the thought of Nobel-winning economist Elinor Ostrom and her theory of collective action:

Gorgeous SL Landscape Photos & Teleport Links from Mr. Badass (Yes)

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

Since Mr. Badass’ hay bale sent me off on a hay bale tangent yesterday, I jumped back to his stream today to give it the attention it deserves. I love his stream, a mix of gorgeous landscapes and candid pics of him having fun. “Morning Haze’ is at Endless Birdlings Flat [To teleport, click here] and shows that even though we think of industrial sites as blights on the landscape, they have their own sort of stark beauty. 

For more of Mr. Badass’ gorgeous landscapes, click here:

Watch: This Sexy Platform Game is Actually an Ad for a Steampunk Brand in Second Life

In the platform game of Love, you only win when the final boss gets hugged. And while this looks like a fun iPhone game, it's actually an ad for Sky Pirates steampunk decor by D-LAB. Though come to think of it, this also shows how Second Life machinima is a great tool for pre-visualizing games and movies. 

It's by Teal Aurelia, who also created the acclaimed tribute to SL artists we watched recently. (More on her process here.) There was some debate on documentary versus green screen SL machinima (Teal's technique), and this is another demonstration of how green screen creates the opportunity to showcase great Second Life content in a new, high quality context.

There's a Community of Virtual Photographers Inspired by the Famous Haystack of Walsh County, a Second Life Sim Inspired by Walsh County, ND

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

After seeing Pedro’s haystack in “Walsh County” and recognizing it as THE HAYSTACK [See stories One, Two, and Three] I thought it might be fun to collect some more pictures of the famous haystack of Walsh County. I looked for the Flickr group devoted to it, with hundreds of haystack photos, and noticed that the sim was inspired by Walsh County, ND.

I know Walsh County. I lived there for four months when my sister was paralyzed by a spider bite from a brown recluse. I left fifth grade about a month early to go to their farm and take care of her, the kids, and the housekeeping. No wonder these images speak to me. I love Pedro’s picture because it catches the field when flax is in bloom. It’s such a beautiful sight to see these pale blue blankets of flowers extending for acres in all directions. 

For more haystacks, click here:

Artist Feeds Her Childhood Diary Into an AI Chatbot -- And Has a Moving Conversation With Her Younger Self

What you're looking at above is an excerpt from a moving conversation between tech artist Michelle Huang, and Michelle Huang as a young girl.

"I trained an AI chatbot on my childhood journal entries - so that I could engage in real-time dialogue with my 'inner child'," as she recently explained on Twitter:

I kept diaries for about 10+ years of my life, writing almost everyday — about my dreams, fears, secrets... I used GPT-3 as my playground, and ended up taking samples of text from a bunch of different entries that I felt were representative of my personality and values during that time... this way, i could accurately simulate what it would be like to talk to my childhood self, based on real data sources during that time period.

Michelle tells me she learned something crucial about herself by engaging with this simulation of her younger self:

"I would say, for me personally - the kindness and understanding I felt from my 'past self' helped me untangle some knots and stuckness that I felt," as she puts it. "It illuminated to me how hard I was on myself, but how much I extended understanding to others. It felt really rewarding to receive this kindness as well, from a younger version of myself.

"From a broader learnings [perspective], what stood out to me was the ability for technology to be used for mental health and wonder."

I also see amazing potential in this for NPCs and avatars. Imagine entire digital personae you can engage with that are directly based on yourself. Or for that matter, NPCs directly based on novelists, poets, and public speakers from history and fiction.

Michelle agrees on that front:

"This is the stuff I think that has the most interesting ramifications: more broadly, more immersive human / computer interface loops, from conversation with virtual therapists to in-game interactions for virtual worlds, given there is user input, AI could be used to train highly customizable responses or generate unique storylines per use."

It could even become the seed of a new virtual world product:

Watch: VRChat Partners With Sony On New Mobile-Based Motion Capture Product

This announcement from VRChat is impressive for many reasons:

Mocopi is supported in VRChat! We teamed up with Sony to integrate their mobile motion capture solution, on both PCVR and Quest!

Watch Mocopi in action above. It's a much more user-friendly way of doing motion capture, and relatively affordable at $358:

Today's Second Life Flickr Pick: Stunning Avatar Portraits by Yoli

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

Yoli’s “Follow me down where the waters run deep. I’ll let you drown in the worst of me” is beautiful to look at, but the title suggests some malice that we can’t quite see. Still, just looking at the picture, we know there is a story there. Perhaps this is a female Narcissus, so drawn to her own reflection she drowns. However, there is a bit too much movement in the water, the reflection must be distorted or is that the “worst bof me.” The picture is inspired by Joy Oladukun’s “Breathe Again.” Click here to listen.

For more stories that combine beauty and story, click here:

Monday Memory: How the Metaverse Illustrates the Limits of Libertarianism

With a certain tech billionaire currently railing against companies including Apple withdrawing their ads from Twitter, it's a good time to remember a fairly related story from 2007-2008 -- when Linden Lab began to pivot away from its libertarian approach to governing Second Life content:

In 2006, for example, Philip Rosedale refused to intercede against Ginko, the SL bank with a high rate of return, which many Residents accused of being a Ponzi scheme.  That same year, in response to Residents protests against age play (i.e. simulated avatar-based pedophilia), Robin Linden said it would be forbidden "[i]f this activity were in public areas"-- implying that it was still permissible in private.  Casinos and other gambling institutions, of course, were rampant over the land.

The reversals started last year, continuing into this one: 

Top 3 Posts Celebrating SL's Avatar-Based Drag Community, Smart Metaverse Marketing & a New New World Video!

• New World Video: We Chat By A Roaring Fire About Midjourney Avatars, Metaverse Predictions, SL’s New VAT-Free Offer & Much More!
• Celebrating The Drag Queen Community In Second Life
• Monday Memory: Greenies Showed How To Do Metaverse Marketing Right -- With Community Creator Participation & Genuine Delight

Dutchie Black Friday Weekend Sale: 30% Off the Entire Adult Store! (Partner News)

From today until next Monday, everything in the Adult store of Dutchie (a proud New World Notes sponsoring partner), is 30% off. And who knows, you may get to meet Dutchie's elegant owner herself! [Click here to teleport]