New World Notes

Top Three Posts Including a Deep Look at the Second Life Economy, a Wayward AI-Meets-Nethack Contest, and Three New-ish/Small-ish SL Brands to Check Out

• Second Life Shopping Ideas: Neon Sign, Swinging Earring & Meme Tattoo from New-ish, Small-ish Reader-Recommended Brands
• Meta Challenged Top Devs to Build an AI That Could Beat the Classic Roguelike RPG NetHack. No One Came Close.
• Second Life Merchants Speak On the State of the Virtual World Economy in 2025 (Patreon)

Second Life Shopping Ideas: Neon Sign, Swinging Earring & Meme Tattoo from New-ish, Small-ish Reader-Recommended Brands

We're getting some good reader recommendations for new-ish, small-ish SL brands that deserve more coverage. So let's start now with some shopping ideas for the weekend! Beginning with this steampunk-esque, customizable neon sign from SIGNA*. 

"Two of the main artists built roleplay and art sims for over 10 years without doing anything commercial," says reader "Raincoat". "I've seen what they can do and some of the stuff that's in the pipeline, this marketplace is just the tip of the iceberg and a space to be watched for sure."

Two more recommendations below!

Meta Challenged Top Devs to Build an AI That Could Beat the Classic Roguelike RPG NetHack. No One Came Close.

Above: Most successful AI runs, character type (Wizard-Elf-Chaotic-Male, etc.) the level at which they died, and what killed them

Back in 2021, Meta (still Facebook at the time), sponsored an innovative challenge in AI programming: Create a bot which could win NetHack on its own. If you know the classic roguelike RPG, first created in the 80s, you know how hard that is. I know that from personal experience, because it was one of the very first games I obsessed over as a kid, and first inspired my interest in virtual worlds.

Though it was limited to ASCII graphics, the complexity and depth of the world made it seem real. Unlike say, a chess game, where each individual move is limited to a few dozen options, the moves in NetHack seem unlimited. I wrote about that complexity in one of my very first articles:

With every object, tool, weapon and creature imbued with a wealth of attributes, every situation has endless potential. The cockatrice, for example, could turn you into stone, but that is only the beginning. If you kill one, then pick it up with gloves, you can wield its body like a flail, instantly turning monsters to stone when you bash them with it. (Usenet wags dubbed this maneuver “wielding the rubber chicken.”) If you have a wand of Polymorph and also wear a Ring of Polymorph Control, you can actually turn yourself into a cockatrice, and explore the dungeon in that deadly form. You can even lay cockatrice eggs, too — usable as hand grenades of instant paralysis.

In NetHack, at any point, anything seems possible. Jean-Christophe Collet, a DevTeam member who discovered the game while working for a Parisian Unix company, says he was enthralled by “the sheer complexity of the situations you could get into, and the way that there was no ‘right way’ to get out of them.” Surrounded by Orcs, for example, you could incinerate most of them with your Wand of Lightning, but the blast would likely ricochet off the opposite wall and crisp you, too. You could wear your Ring of Conflict, which would magically compel the Orcs to start attacking each other instead — but then again, wearing it would probably also compel your pet Large Dog to attack you. You’d often get the eerie sense the game was anticipating you and all these uniquely intricate conundrums that no one could have possibly foreseen. Or could they? 

AI developers at Oxford, NYU, and other top universities participated. So how'd they do? One of the participants recently shared the academic summaries with me, but the non-academic answer would be:

Cajsa's Choices: Sari Makes the Second Landscape Look Like Paintings -- And Provides Teleport Links to See These Places Yourself!

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

Sari takes amazing landscapes as well as personal pictures of her avatar out and about enjoying herself in Second Life. “Path to Beauty” is a gorgeous picture with a sky worthy of an oil painting in the Louvre. It looks like she road a bike to explore along the coast and just had to stop and take a snapshot with the glorious sunrise making the sky almost as lavender as the flowers. 

For more of Sari’s fabulous landscapes, click here:

SL Merchants Speak on the State of the Virtual World Economy in Its 22nd Year - New on My Patreon

Image courtesy Razor Cure -- view larger version here

Second Life Merchants Speak On the State of the Virtual World Economy in 2025 is my new, in-depth report, available now only to Patreon subscribers, covering a variety of topics, including:

• How many SL merchants are making $100,000/year through their virtual content?
• What L$ price point generates the most sales? How about Marketplace vs. Mainstore?
• How many merchants use Gen AI in their products -- or want it regulated/banned?
• Has Second Life's mobile app or Project Zero helped drive sales at all?
• What is merchants' overall confidence in the leadership of Brad Oberwager and Philip Rosedale?

All that and much more, including detailed advice from Brett Linden on submitting proposals to Linden Lab's new Creator Partnership Program, and branding/marketing advice from me. Get it all here and join the conversation.

Cajsa's Choices: Completely Charming Second Life Photos by Azaria

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

Azaria posted this adorable picture of a cat cleaning its paws right next to a burger that ready to serve while other burgers continue cooking on the grill. It’s called “Chef’s Kiss” which may imply the cat cooked the burger or the burgers are just that good. It’s a cute picture, one that makes a person say “awww” unless they’re from Minnesota where they say “Ohfercu-ute.” The fun thing about Azaria is that she is a photographer in her first and second lives and, sure enough, she has a cat picture from real life, too. Awww. 

For more of Azaria’s gorgeous pics, click here:

Open Forum: What Smaller / New-ish / Lesser-Known Second Life Brands Deserve More Publicity?

One of the very top requests in my survey of Second Life merchants was this one:

Start promoting and supporting smaller/newer/lesser-known brands - not just "top" designers.

The suggestion was directed at Linden Lab, but that's also something that I'd love to do on this blog as well. But I need reader's help with recommendations!

Specifically:

What new-ish, smaller, lesser known SL merchants/brands deserve more attention and publicity?

To set some rough/flexible criteria: by "new-ish", I mean founded in 2020 or later, by "smaller" I mean less than 50 total ratings of items in their Marketplace, and by "lesser known", I mean "main social media channel has less than 500 followers". 

To nominate your favorites in that criterion, please go to Comments and post:

Connect With Me IRL at Augmented World Expo Tomorrow & Possibly Thursday

If you're attending Augmented World Expo in Long Beach this week, definitely let me know! I'll be there to sign books tomorrow afternoon (Wednesday) and possibly Thursday.* If you're reading this, I'd love to meet/chat in person. Connect with me on these various social media platforms and let's coordinate:

• Bluesky
• Twitter/X
• LinkedIn
• On Discord, I'm wja_hamlet

*I had to skip today due to various logistical cock-ups, one of which being I'm currently on the other side of Los Angeles.

Cajsa's Choices: Pensively Posed Avatar Photos by Mollie

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

Mollie posted “I Never Learned to Read Your Mind,” a fitting title for a picture of a woman sitting on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean while she thinks. The way she holds her head in her hands doesn’t seem sorrowful so much as puzzled, even a bit irked. There’s a bit of “What were they thinking?” about her pose that is so much more interesting than simply looking sad. As to reading minds, let’s all be glad we can’t. Seriously, do you want your every stray thought to be known by someone else? 

For more from Mollie, click here:

Vision Pro's Problems for Mainstream Adoption May Be Based in Neurology & Human Evolution -- Amber Case

While Apple Vision Pro is impressive technology, sales have been slow, and I've grown skeptical that it'll ever gain mass market adoption for various reasons. For one thing, sales remain slow, and for another, even most early adopters who have bought one aren't using it on a daily basis.

But my longtime friend and colleague Amber Case, design consultant and former fellow at MIT and Harvard, delves deeper than that, raising some fascinating points that never occurred to me before, citing a neurologist:

I asked my colleague Dr. David Sisson, a neurophysiologist, why XR adoption hasn’t matched media hype. He reminded me that audio and visual inputs—the primary senses XR taps into—aren’t the full picture.

Then there’s the matter of touch in XR. “Without touch, there’s no ‘intimacy.’ You’re not really interacting with what’s going on,” David told me. “You can hit a ball—and hear the ‘crack’ in VR—but you’re not feeling anything other than a little jerk in the controller that makes you feel like there’s some inertia happening.”

In short, headsets deprive us of the tactile and physical context that supports memory formation. 

In other words, XR devices like the Vision Pro may impede how we learn and remember, even on a neurological level. As Case puts its:

Top 5 Posts Including VRChat's Official Avatar Marketplace Launches, an Linden Lab Addresses Top Merchant Requests for the Second Life Marketplace

• Linden Lab Replies to Merchant Survey on Top Five Improvements to the Second Life Economy -- Company Already "Very Focused" on the Top Two!
• Watch: Thief VR Teases Return of Garrett in Reboot of Immersive Classic
• Cajsa's Choices: Joyous Pride Photos From Across Second Life's Massive LGBTQIA Communities
• VRChat Officially Announces In-Platform Avatar Marketplace is Live
• Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2025年5月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan

Deadpool & Wolverine Opening Dance Available in Second Life from Hollywood MoCap Studio & Ryan Reynolds' Stand-In Performer

The gloriously dorky Deadpool dance from the opening of Deadpool & Wolverine (SL version above, original from the movie below) is officially available in a Second Life store*. I say "official", because the SL animation is a motion capture of dancer Nick Pauley AKA Dancepool, who actually performed the opening scene of the movie. (No, that wasn't Ryan Reynolds doing those seriously sweet moves.)**

Click here to get it from the Mount Paragon sim, mainstore of Paragon, the Los Angeles-based mocap studio which has been creating and selling these RL mocap dances in Second Life for over five years. Which even if you're not a Deadpool fan, is an important takeaway: The Second Life economy is large enough to support sales of Hollywood-grade mocap animations.

Linden Lab Replies to Merchant Survey on Top Five Improvements to the Second Life Economy -- Company Already "Very Focused" on the Top Two!

Originally posted on my Patreon

Just heard back from Linden Lab on your top five most requested improvements to the Second Life economy! Company spokesperson Brett Linden sent this reply:

Thanks for sharing!! Love that you are going to the community and getting these suggestions. Brad is very focused on the top two items. 

We've also passed on your results to the development and product teams and we encourage the community to continue sharing their feedback, feature requests and suggestions in our Feedback Portal and/or they can directly speak to our product and development members by attending one of our many inworld community user group meetups. We also encourage creators who want to potentially partner with us to submit their proposals to the Creator Partnership Program.

There's much more to come and we appreciate hearing this feedback!

By "top two items", Linden Lab head Brad Oberwager means these:

Cajsa's Choices: Three Unique Pictures of the Same Shifuku Lace Dress, Which Just Went Mini-Viral in Second Life

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

ᴅɪᴀ posted this gorgeous pic showing off an outfit for the event Pride at Home. I love the picture and I love the look. I like that it’s in pastels rather than the usual saturated colors of the rainbow flag. After all, when you see a rainbow in the sky, it’s usually pastel. Now, when making a flag, check out Pantone’s Color Guide to the Pride flag. But for clothing, why not pastel? 

As I was adding pictures to my gallery celebrating Pride yesterday, I noticed this outfit showing up over and over and over again. Sometimes something really catches on. People see it on Flickr and rush to buy it. It just captures the zeitgeist somehow. That must be what happened with Shifuku’s lace dress. So many people were wearing it, I decided to highlight some. 

For more folks wearing this outfit, click here:

Watch: Thief VR Teases Return of Garrett in Reboot of Immersive Classic

The cult classic Thief franchise is going VR! Courtesy Eidos (its original publisher) and Vertigo Games, creator of the award-winning creators of VR hits Metro Awakening and Arizona Sunshine, Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow is set for release on Quest, PSVR, and on Steam this year.

I'm only surprised a VR reboot has taken this long, because the original games from the early 2000s were all about 3D immersion (both graphically and aurally). By putting the player in the role of a stealthy cat burglar in a steampunk city, Thief made you so keenly aware of the virtual environment (light/shadow, the ambient noisemaking potential of different materials, bored/agitated guards), you felt truly part of the 3D world around you. Done well, it could be a masterpiece of the medium.

And yes, it sounds like Garrett, the franchise's grizzled but lovable anti-hero, is back in some form, and voiced by the original actor, Stephen Russell:

Cajsa's Choices: Joyous Pride Photos From Across Second Life's Massive LGBTQIA Communities

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

K4RIIM gives us “Happy Pride Month” in this joyful picture with his friend or partner. I love the joy of Pride but I know it’s a hard-won joy. It’s easy to forget how much it means 55 years after the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, the first Pride event. I’ve worked the booth at non-profit organizations at a dozen or more IRL Pride events and the joy is infectious. But LGBTQIA people are always reminded that their rights remain contingent, subject to the whims of a Supreme Court that is flirting with rescinding the right to marry and who knows what else. 

But while many cowardly corporations are showing their true colors and backing away from Pride rainbows, Second Life owner Linden Lab steps forward and not just with user-organized events like Pride at Home but also focusing their monthly Spotlight feature on Tinker Hax (pictured at right) who, with his partner Coral Lacey, founded Pride at Home to compensate for the loss of Pride events during COVID. 

SL embraces the LGBTIQA community and is so important to many people around the world for whom it is their only safe space. (Read my post on Second Life's large trans community here.) I decided to take a look at the first few days of pictures of folks enjoying Pride and created a gallery I will post at the end of this article.

Don’t worry, I will come back to Pride through the month so if you want to join my gallery, take a picture and tag me on Flickr!

For more from SL Pride, click here:

Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2025年5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.

 

 

 

What Merchants Want: Top Five Most Requested Improvements to the Second Life Economy

Thanks to everybody who participated in my Patreon survey based on suggestions from Second Life merchants on the key improvements to the virtual world economy that would most benefit them. 251 people participated, which is roughly 1 in 4 of my total membership list.

With 40 votes, this is the improvement most requested by far:

Standardize the SL avatar body/head/optimize mesh and provide a FREE development kit to all.

The runners-up received 29 to 22 votes, in this order:

VRChat Officially Announces In-Platform Avatar Marketplace is Live

After an initial tease last month, VRChat just announced that its long-awaited in-platform avatar marketplace is live, and that the company has already received (and is now processing) 1000 applications from creators to bring their avies to it.

This is already a crazy number of avatar options to choose from, but company community leader Strasz notes that they're planning to add options to search by category and tag. Most VRC users will probably go window shopping for avatars in social experiences, since it's easy enough to inspect a cool-looking avie to find out what brand they're wearing.

I expect this roll-out will greatly increase VRChat the company's revenue, as avatars are key to expression among its estimated 10 million monthly active users. As noted recently, creators who've already joined the platform's creator economy in its early phase are already making way more money, even after the company takes a 50% revenue cut. As Charles Tupper, Community Manager at VRChat, put it:

Cajsa's Choices: Rileigh Reed Shows Off in Shadowy Fashion Shots

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

Rileigh Reed’s most recent picture “Watching in the Shadows” epitomizes her aesthetic perfectly. She likes the dark and, as you can see, the dark likes her. 

I have mentioned before how a person who has since left SL long ago inspired my original “What I Like” posts on my own blog that eventually led to this column. She once dinged me for a fashion post, saying “Never wear clothes the same color as the background.” 

Well, they were wrong then and are wrong to this day and you can see how wrong they are in Rileigh’s picture. She seems to be stepping out of the background, emerging if you will. And the details of her clothing are not lost. It’s a wonderful fashion pic. 

For more of Rileigh’s power pics , click here:

Top 5 Posts Including Stories on VRChat's Creator, Second Life Overall Usage down While User Innovation is Up -- And a Hilariously Infuriating Use Case of Gen AI

• VRChat Company Rep Addresses Breaking of CyanTrigger Script Compiler During Recent Update
• Amazing Aperture Photos: Look at These Raw Screenshots Taken in Second Life's Hot New Third Party Viewer
• VRChat Creators Making 4-5x More Money from In-Platform Sales vs. Patreon / Ko-Fi Etc. Says Company Rep -- Even After 50% Revenue Cut!
• Despite Mobile, Streaming, Etc., Second Life Peak Concurrency in 2025 Down Somewhat From 2024 Levels
• Gen AI Impressively Improves the Quality... of My Blog Comment SPAM

In SL Merchant Survey, 67% Want Gen AI Content Regulated or Banned Outright from Second Life -- Sneak Preview of My Patreon Report on the Virtual Economy

I'm almost finished with my massive report on the state of the Second Life economy, which I'm planning to publish on my Patreon soon, but here's a striking sneak peek: In my survey of SL merchants, a massive majority of 67% want 3D content with Gen AI element regulated or banned outright from Second Life. (With nearly 1 in 3 choosing the strictest option of banning.)

This a very interesting contrast to my April survey of all SL users (not just merchants), in which, for example, 54% chose the option, REQUIRE merchants tag their content as having "No AI" or "Contains AI" -- only 27% of merchants in the new survey went with that one.

Join my Patreon to be first to read the whole thing.

VRChat Company Rep Addresses Breaking of CyanTrigger Script Compiler During Recent Update

Just as the the VRChat creator economy is expanding, VRChat's creative community is roiling over a recent update with which broke CyanTrigger, a compiler for the platform's Udon scripting system which helps make in-scene editing fairly easy.

The creator, CyanLaser, is publicly outraged, while at least one top VRChat creator, Lakuza -- of Bullet Time Agent fame -- has angrily announced an indefinite break from world creation on the platform.

I reached out to Strasz, Senior Community Manager at VRChat, about the topic. What does the company recommend to VRC creators who are still using CyanTrigger?

"They can keep using it, if they'd like," Strasz tells me, "but at their own risk! You probably shouldn't rely on tools that aren't open source and that can be controlled by a single party. There are other tools out there that offer up easy ways of doing basic things in SDK3. For creators looking for more advanced tools, learning Udon is probably the smart move. One of the best things about the VRChat community is that there's always someone willing to share their knowledge or even team up!"

In any case, this is yet another application of my general rule for metaverse platforms, that any user-created feature/tool/content that becomes popular effectively becomes part of the platform itself. (At least until it's no longer usable.)

Amazing Aperture Photos: Look at These Raw Screenshots Taken in Second Life's Hot New Third Party Viewer

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

Silivren Atheria shot this amazing picture using the new Aperture viewer recently added to the approved third-party viewers for Second Life. (Read Hamlet’s write-up and interview with lead developer William Weaver here.) It is a viewer created for photography and folks are having great fun with it. Sillivren wrote “I actually love the post processing / photoshop when doing any pics, RL or SL. But having a viewer that can start that process when actually taking the pic? My inspiration may have found it's way back again.”

I did a scan for some of the best Aperture pics on Flickr, check them out here:

VRChat Creators Making 4-5x More Money from In-Platform Sales vs. Patreon / Ko-Fi Etc. Says Company Rep -- Even After 50% Revenue Cut!

VRChat recently (if belatedly) unveiled its in-world avatar marketplace, so here's an interesting stat from Charles Tupper, Community Manager at VRChat. Speaking during a recent Twitch forum for VRC creators, one of them offered a succinct comment about VRChat the company taking 50% from each avatar sale: "WTF?"

Tupper's reply: