New World Notes

Second Life Still Struggling With a Crisis of Poorly-Optimized User-Made Mesh Items -- But a Pro Game Artist Has Some Solutions

Above: A single Second Life fashion item with nearly 50,000 triangles (Courtesy Penny Patton)

Longtime SLer and professional game artist Penny Patton recently bought a Second Life shirt and then saw something that shocked her. That one mesh item (see above) had nearly 50,000 triangles.

As a point of comparison, characters in AAA console games with high end graphics rarely have this many triangle. The ultrarealistic lead character in God of War, for instance, has on the PlayStation 4 version only has 32,000 total triangles. For the entire character and their clothing items, while looking even more detailed than that one Second Life shirt. (Click Kratos at right to see.) 

But when Penny contacted the creator of this shirt in Second Life, she got an interesting response: 

"They informed me that they could not reduce this because it results in a 'decrease in quality'.

"The [shirt has] 11 faces. Each face has three maps. Diffuse, Specular, and Normal. It's even worse because the specular actually only uses one map, a black 1024x1024 texture that was uploaded 11 times instead of reusing the one.

"It's absurd. It's also, sadly, common in SL these days.

"This is why SL needs hard caps on avatar resource use."

It's not only common, it's an ongoing problem, and hasn't really been sufficiently addressed. As a former Linden Lab staffer told me about poorly optimized mesh, "These items are effectively DDOS attacks on everyone around them." 

Five years ago, we pointed out that most of the top-selling mesh bodies in SL are poorly optimized, and have even more triangles -- 200,000 or more. (Penny has also been writing about the issue on her own blog for years,)

Fortunately there are ways Linden Lab can address the issue head-on. 

"I really want to stress there is not one thing Linden Lab should do to fix a problem like this," Penny tells me. "There's no 'silver bullet' solution that will fix the problem and make everyone happy."

That said, here's the solutions she recommends:

Here's Why March 2023 is the Month Which Launched Metaverse 2.0

In my personal narrative for the evolution of the Metaverse, I'd arrange the historical timeline roughly (and very simply) this way:

Metaverse zero point, 1992-1996: Snow Crash published; VRML and several very early metaverse platforms launched, including Active Worlds and Cybertown.

Metaverse 1.0, 2003-2008: Second Life launched, along with a number of other metaverse-aspirational virtual worlds including Roblox in 2006.

Metaverse 1.5, 2014-2022: Facebook purchases Oculus and its "Path to the Metaverse"; VRChat, Rec Room, and other next gen metaverse platforms launched; Fortnite's crossover success and Roblox's huge IPO and Matt Ball's essays help catalyze excitement and awareness around the concept within the mainstream business world, culminating in Facebook changing its name to Meta.

Skepticism over Meta's approach to the Metaverse, not to mention crypto, started toward the end of 2022, echoed by Meta itself, when its roadmap to the future failed to mention "the Metaverse" even once. Unsurprisingly, an internal survey of Meta staff last January showed waning confidence in the Metaverse, while a leaked presentation last February also showed Meta execs deigning to mention the Metaverse behind closed doors. 

With Meta effectively out of the picture, it's fair to say Metaverse 2.0 started this month:

Today's Flickr Pick: Kat Verde-Dillingham Creates Complex Images Using Second Life & Midjourney as Her Base

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

Kat Verde-Dillingham has been creating a lot of AI images lately, but I love to see her Second Life pictures where she is far more experimental. For example, Television Nation. The pop art aesthetic, the repetition, the frenetic energy really captures the over-stimulus of the 24-hour constant news cycle of reporting without thought or context. You can listen to the picture's soundtrack here. 

For more of Kat’s Second Life pop art, click here:

Tim Sweeney: Set Aside NFT & VR Hype, Metaverse Platforms Already Have 600 Million Users Now, "Billions" by This Decade

In case you missed it, Tim Sweeney laid out his vision for the Metaverse last week after his company Epic unleashed a number of metaverse platform-related announcements -- watch above at around 1 hour in: 

Let's take a long term look at what we see here. And the core of it is some very real growth. Starting with Fortnite's 70 million monthly active users, Roblox's 250 million monthly active users, Minecraft's 100 million, and PubG mobile and Apex Legends, and numerous other metaverse-inspired games, is leading to an identifiable audience today of over 600 million active users in these virtual worlds. And it's on a growth trajectory that'll put it at billions of users by the end of this decade.

So we can set aside the crazy hype cycle around NFTs and VR goggles. These technologies may play a role in the future but they are not required. This revolution is happening right now. And the core of it is something every gamer already understands. It's you and your friends, getting together online and going around as a group on voice chat, having a fun time and social entertainment experiences. And some of these experiences are serious games like Battle Royale. Some of them are going to a concert and dancing or chatting with friends and just having a good time. We see this as the next big change in gaming and then Epic's evolution as a company.

Hard agree on the hype around NFTs and VR goggles (looking at you, Meta), while I'd quibble around the "billions" target -- 1 billion is more realistic. Fortnite, for example, has seen some slippage in its monthly active user numbers (though of course remains quite large).

Sweeney also got into his vision for the open metaverse:

Today's Flickr Pick: Surreally Hilarious Adventures of a Second Life Chicken

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

Imaozgrl Tucker is one of those SL/Flickr denizens who rewards those who not only enjoy the pictures, but also read the titles and descriptions. She loves wordplay and puns and you could hurt yourself laughing at some of them. This is one of her Chicken Adventures, the Second Life antics of a chicken avatar she has collected in an album.

For more chicken adventures, click here:

Apple Staff Unsure About Apple's XR Goggles: I've Heard Internal Dissent Too

There was a good if unsurprising story from the New York Times last weekend which helps explain why Apple is constantly rumored to be putting out an XR headset soon... only for us to then get subsequent reports that the release has once again been delayed.

As it turns out, there's quite a lot of internal dissent within Apple about whether the company should be involved in XR at all:

[As] the company prepares to introduce the headset in June, enthusiasm at Apple has given way to skepticism, said eight current and former employees, who requested anonymity because of Apple’s policies against speaking about future products. There are concerns about the device’s roughly $3,000 price [emph mine!], doubts about its utility and worries about its unproven market.

That dissension has been a surprising change inside a company where employees have built devices — from the iPod to the Apple Watch — with the single-mindedness of a moon mission.

Some employees have defected from the project because of their doubts about its potential, three people with knowledge of the moves said. Others have been fired over the lack of progress with some aspects of the headset, including its use of Apple’s Siri voice assistant, one person said.

I say "unsurprising" partly because we've been tracking Meta Quest headset sales for the last few years, and its sub-20 million install base is really a bad sign for a larger XR market. If Meta can only move 20M units on headsets selling under $500, why would Apple think they could do well selling an HMD that is 6x that price?

I'm also unsurprised there's reported dissent at Apple, because I've heard implicit objections around XR myself while preparing my book.

For instance, an insider at Apple I spoke to echoed dana boyd's concern that VR may be inherently biased to be difficult for females to use:

Top 5 Posts Including: Epic's Metaverse 2.0 Bid, Reasons to Be Semi-Bearish About Generative AI & a Linden CEO's New Second Life XXL Game

• Fortnite Becomes Much More Of A Metaverse Platform With Unreal Editor Integration, Asset Store, Better Monetization For User Creators
• First Look At Life By You From Sims/Second Life Dev Rod Humble -- A Simulation/Sandbox Game Of Head-Spinning Ambition
• Top Metaverse Creators Lobby Linden Lab To Update Second Life's "Horribly Dated" Terrain Textures
• New Second Life Sim Inspired By China's "Red Beach" Is So Amazing, There's A Large Flickr Group Devoted To Photographing It
• 4 Reasons To Doubt Generative AI Will Be As Transformative As All Of Silicon Valley Apparently Thinks

Friday Fashion Ideas: Adorable KPop & Cyberpunk Styles from Sparkly Fly

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

 

Sparkly Fly is a kawaii blog by Andyylee. Sing with Me is adorable. Who doesn’t sometimes dream of being a singer?  I love this look, especially the tie tucked into the belt. Such a fun little detail. It’s from Niniplanet at The Arcade. 

 

• / NINIPLANET / UNNATURAL RARE @The Arcade

For more kawaii sweetness, click here:

Fortnite Becomes Much More of a Metaverse Platform with Unreal Editor Integration, Asset Store, Better Monetization for User Creators

Fortnite in recent years has been the least metaverse-ish of the leading metaverse platforms. While interviewing insiders for my book, my strong sense is that Epic hadn't originally anticipated outside brands considering the platform as a real world application platform, and assumed it would be more akin to a standard modding mode for gamers. And that as a publisher from the traditional AAA game industry, Epic was still holding a tight rein on the platform to protect its brand, even if that meant falling short of the Stephenson ideal.

"It's insane,” as one frustrated community creator puts it to me. “They want to be a part of this Metaverse, but they are limiting what can actually be done. If you're really wanting a true Metaverse, then more brands should be able to be in a space whether [Epic] wants to support it or not."

That all changed this week.

Epic made a series of announcements and updates during GDC 2023 that I'm still combing through, somewhat distracted by Rod Humble's Second Life-but-XXL mic drop.

For one, there's the integration of Unreal with Fortnite (watch above), enabling multi-user, multi-platform live editing. (Question: I wonder if live editing can some day be incorporated into published maps, enabling a creator to alter an experience around its user in real time.)  

And then as mentioned in the video, Epic is launching the Epic equivalent of the Unity Asset Store, called Fab:

 

See in SL This Month: "“Transcend Struggle”, a Powerful Art Gallery Show

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

There is an exhibit at Dido Haas’ Nitroglobus Gallery that might intrigue and fascinate many of you. It’s called “Transcend Struggle”. You want to go soon as it is only for the month of March. [To teleport to the gallery, click here] 

The show features the work of Yann Gyro, who does most of his work for in-world exhibitions rather than Flickr. The exhibition is about illness, struggle, and transcendence. The artist wrote a poem, which you can read by clicking through to the picture on his Flickr. 

Here is the first verse for the above image: 

You faced the fear, when you heard the news

But I was here, and I saw you rise and choose

To find your power, and stand tall with grace

And embrace the challenge, with courage in your face

For more by Yann Gyro, click here:

First Look at Life by You from Sims/Second Life Dev Rod Humble -- a Simulation/Sandbox Game of Head-Spinning Ambition

Here's the first in-depth preview of Life by You, the new life simulation game by ex-Linden Lab CEO / former EA/Sims lead Rod Humble (who pops up at around 8:35 in this video above).

While an early teaser somewhat suggested it would be a Sims clone, that superficial appearance is deceiving: By the team's description at least, Life by You is vastly more ambitious: It's a head-spinningly deep and vast life simulator, as if Second Life and The Sims and a Peter Molyneux "God game" were wrapped together with today's technology and social media to become a completely new genre of its own.

In other words, an elevator pitch for Life by Me might be:

"The Sims, but where you control the whole world."

Or, "Single-player Second Life where you can also roleplay as Linden Lab, if you like." 

Here's what I mean, highlighting some features that jumped out at me in the video:

Stunning Second Life Landscape Photos Blending Virtual Nature & Civilization

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

Is it life or is it Second Life? More and more I wonder. Denny Cioc’s picture “Junction” makes it impossible to tell. Doesn’t it feel like a place you have seen sometimes in your life? Denny has a great eye for landscapes. 

For more unique perspectives on landscapes, click here:

Top Metaverse Creators Lobby Linden Lab to Update Second Life's "Horribly Dated" Terrain Textures

While the coming of physically-based rendering in Second Life (think reflective surfaces) is causing much buzz among SL's creative community, some well-known metaverse content creators are pushing for Linden Lab to improve the virtual world in another key area: Terrain textures.

"The textures are blurry and flat on their own," as veteran 3D artist Max Graf explains in this Plurk thread, "But up against all the newer visual quality they just look out of place, requiring extra effort to hide the ugly. The texturing method itself, for 'blending' the four textures via corner low and highs was fine in 2009, but it is so horribly dated now when there are so many additional ways it could be done better and produce a better visual on par with everything else that has evolved."

This JIRA submission (SL account log-in required to "Watch This Issue"), submitted by fellow 3D artist NeoBokrug Elytis is a bid to encourage Linden Lab to update the system.

As an example for what they're hoping to achieve, Max sent me the mountain image above.

"This is a simple multi-color terrain for viewing from far off, done using a 'splatmap' to define the areas for each color or texture. Even as plain and smooth as this is, it could not be done with the current SL system, the blending would not be possible.

"However," he goes on, "you add a normal map and some parallax occlusion to that same smooth texture and you get this instead:

New Second Life Sim Inspired by China's "Red Beach" is So Amazing, There's a Large Flickr Group Devoted to Photographing It

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

Panjin is the first picture in a new Flickr group devoted to pictures taken at a brand new sim of the same name by Jade Koltai, a name familiar to sim connoisseurs. She is a long-time sim designer, working on her own and in collaboration with the late Serene Footman. Panjin has the same spare restraint that makes her work so appealing to Second Life photographers. I love how she uses the foreground to frame the piers in the background.

I love that there are so few colors, yet it is vibrating with color. It is based on the real life Panjin ("Red Beach") in China. The red flower is Suaeda salsa, a member of the Amaranth family.

For more Panjin, click here:

4 Reasons to Doubt Generative AI Will Be as Transformative as All of Silicon Valley Apparently Thinks

Interesting Axios story illustrates just how much Silicon Valley has shifted its interest and investment into Generative AI startups like OpenAI and Midjourney, away from metaverse platforms and related technology:

According to PitchBook data compiled by Axios Media Deals' Tim Baysinger, through March 16, 2022, companies that played in the metaverse or web3 space had raised nearly $2 billion in funding.

So far this year, metaverse and web3 companies have raised $586.7 million, a bit more than a quarter of last year's total. The totals for generative AI companies are the inverse: Through March 16, 2022, the generative AI space saw $612.8 million in funding. This year, it's up to $2.3 billion.

Driving the news: In a note Tuesday announcing Meta would lay off 10,000 more employees, Zuckerberg spotlighted AI work and reduced the metaverse to an "also." “Our single largest investment is in advancing AI and building it into every one of our products,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Our leading work building the metaverse and shaping the next generation of computing platforms also remains central to defining the future of social connection.”

As I've explained before, conflating web3 with the Metaverse is a huge mistake, as is assuming Meta leads the metaverse industry. That aside, it's clearly the case that the Valley has shifted its buzz toward generative AI.

Is that smart? Obviously I'm biased when I say this, but there's already 520 million+ active users across many metaverse platforms, while the Metaverse's addressable market is at minimum everyone who regularly enjoys muti-user immersive experiences (i.e. 3D games online), roughly 1-2 billion people.

On the other side, there's several reasons to believe Generative AI is not as transformative as its most bullish boosters assume. For instance:

Top 6 Posts Including: Amazing Author Avatar Cosplay, The Challenge of AAA-Quality Games on Roblox, and Second Life Enters the Unity Age

Above: Screenshot from Crystal Frost's latest version

• Backstory On Frontlines: Roblox's Viral, AAA-Quality FPS Not A Huge Hit (Yet)
• Amazing Flickr Group Devoted To Taking Screenshots Looking Up From Second Life's Virtual Water Bodies!
• Crystal Frost, Second Life On Unity Project, Focuses On PC/VR Viewer While Linden Lab Works On Mobile Version
• Want To Advertise On New World Notes? Email/IM My New Marketing Consultant!
• Awesome Second Life Avatar Cosplay Tributes To Legendary Authors Sylvia Plath, Karen Blixen, And Virginia Woolf
• Why ChatGPT Goes "Wrong" & People Misinterpret It

Fashion Friday Finds from SL Style Blog Yurin's Happy Sigh

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

Yurin has a lovely blog called Happy Sigh. Her most recent post 230313 features the ubiquitous fashion passion for mesh. If you checked out the Oscar and Vanity Fair After Party fashions, mesh and illusion was everywhere with over ever shrinking strategic coverage. This is downright modest by comparison. 

• TOP + *COCO*_FishnetTopWithBra(Black) @FaMESHed which closes March 27th

For more Happy Sighing, click here:

Backstory on Frontlines: Roblox's Viral, AAA-Quality FPS Not a Huge Hit (Yet)

Above: Frontlines' Daily Active User rate via RoMonitor Stats

Last week I described Frontlines, a Roblox game experience with newly updated AAA-level graphics and gameplay, as an amazing breakthrough in metaverse platform technology; I even said it showed how Roblox could be a competitor against Steam itself. That's still true, but here's a somewhat important qualifier to that:

Frontlines doesn't seem to be making much money, and it's definitely not a hit by Roblox standards. Not yet, at least.

According to RoMonitor stats, Frontlines is regularly attracting Daily Active Users in the mid-six figures, with concurrency levels in the low-to-mid four figures. If we're comparing it to a Steam game, that's quite good! Easily placing it among the Top 200 most popular games on Steam out of thousands of available titles.

By Roblox standards, however, Frontlines is not a huge hit; on Roblox, the top games have concurrency levels in the mid-five figures to the mid-six figures. Brookhaven, a mini-MMO that's usually the #1 Roblox experience, has DAU rates between 30-60 million.

Frontlines' monetization rates have not yet been officially reported, but the developer is selling IAPs -- mostly weapon expansions, ranging from 50 cents to $5.00.

But how many players are actually buying those?

I talked on background with a Roblox creator who's behind some of the top experiences on the platform, and they made some rough estimates' of Frontlines' revenue:

Amazing Flickr Group Devoted to Taking Screenshots Looking Up from Second Life's Virtual Water Bodies! Here's Some Beautifully Abstract Examples

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

I am a fan of Second Life-themed Flickr groups. They reveal obsessions and nothing gets the creative juices flowing like an obsession. 

One particularly surprising and beautifully maintained group collects underwater pictures, not pictures of folks swimming around underwater, but pictures shot upward toward the non-watery world, the dry world filtered through the lens of the water. Could there be a more intriguing obsession? 

Check it out: Second Life - Underwater Looking Up. This picture above from Cat Mistwalker is extraordinary. The water makes everything abstract,  but this allows us to see the abstraction and imagine what it is, though. 

For more pics shot from underwater, click here:

Crystal Frost, Second Life on Unity Project, Focuses on PC/VR Viewer While Linden Lab Works on Mobile Version

In case you missed it amid last week's hoopla over Linden Lab's announcement that they are (finally) developing a native mobile for Second Life built on Unity, there already is a user-run project to bring Second Life to Unity.

It's called Crystal Frost, and it's still going full-guns. 

pai

"It's not going to change," as lead dev Berry Bunny (Kallisti#2038 on Discord) tells me today. "Linden Lab is taking it in a different direction, and they're unlikely to use it for their desktop viewer. If anything it just means I won't have to worry about making a mobile version."

In other words, the era of Second Life on Unity is here.

Berry's original idea is to create a version of Second Life that's optimized to run in PCs and VR, and that remains the goal. Yes, Second Life in VR, with hands-on prim-based creation, a version of SL that can compete with VRChat.

"I'll have the 2D user interface pop up as a holographic display in front of you and can be pulled up with a customizable gesture," Berry explains. "If possible I will be tapping in to the puppetry system that Linden Lab is developing, and barring that I'll be using an LSL bridge to transmit IK targets for hand and full body tracking."

As for Linden Lab's SL on Unity/mobile project, Berry tells me from painful personal experience that they are going to hit some huge challenges:

Want to Advertise on New World Notes? Email/IM My New Marketing Consultant!

Thrilled to finally announce New World Notes has an advertising executive with many years of experience in both Second Life and the wider immersive/gaming industry.

To get in touch with “Demonica” and request a rate card and start a conversation, send an e-mail to ads at new-world-notes dot com.

Here's the top-line details on NWN:

Founded in 2006, New World Notes (nwn.blogs.com) is the longest-running, most-read blog devoted to Second Life news & culture and the Metaverse. Featured by New York Times, WSJ, BBC, The Atlantic, LA Times, Kotaku, Polygon, and many other major news and gaming outlets. Averages 120,000-192,000 visits per month, with regular readership highly focused on virtual worlds (especially SL), games, technology, and tech hardware. Source: SimilarWeb

You can also contact Demonica in-world -- details below. We are especially interested in SL/metaverse brands which delight and benefit our readership of virtual world/metaverse platform early adopters.

Awesome Second Life Avatar Cosplay Tributes to Legendary Authors Sylvia Plath, Karen Blixen, and Virginia Woolf

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

Cecilia Nansen has created a special photo album offering her photographic tributes to her favorite authors and a favorite photographer. I didn’t need her description to recognize the iconic features of Virginia Woolf. She even captures how Woolf seemed to be looking inward, interrogating herself as well as the world around her. Click here to compare with the IRL photo.

For more amazing avatar author tributes, click here:

Since TikTok Can Turn Users Into Avatarized Versions of Themselves, Will the Proteus Effect Kick In?

, 

As a general rule, when people create a virtual world avatar for themselves, most tend to opt for a conventionally idealized version of their offline selves  -- younger, more symmetrical, in better shape, and so on. Basically, hotter.

TikTok, everyone's favorite social media app controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, has taken that to the next inevitable stage with Bold Glamour, a new machine language-driven augmented reality filter which basically avatarizes a person's real appearance in real time: 

The Bold Glamour filter, now used over 16 million times since its release last month, contours your cheekbone and jawline in a sharp but subtle line. It also highlights the tip of your nose, the area under your eyebrows, and the apples of your cheeks. In addition, it lifts your eyebrows, applies a shimmer to your eyelids, and gives you thick, long, black eyelashes. It has, as the name implies, a glamorous effect. The aesthetic itself is impressive. However, the really amazing thing is how well it functions. The filter doesn’t glitch when your face moves or if something like a waving hand interrupts the visual field, as filters usually do. 

There's obvious concerns that this is yet another social media app that will only worsen users' self-esteem, especially for vulnerable young women and girls.

At the same time, I'm also curious how Bold Glamour might relate to the Proteus Effect. That's the phenomena discovered by Stanford researchers who found that when people embody an attractive avatar in a virtual world, they themselves exhibit more confidence in real life:

Artist Beautifully Photographs The Virtual Tunnels & Corridors of Second Life

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

TitanticLynn Ayres is drawn to tunnels, not just in this very obvious and mind-bending picture, but also in how she photographs streets, the grass between buildings, and water leading out to sea. It’s how she finds lines in the world she looks at. She sees the pattern, the repetition, and captures it so we can glimpse those patterns and discover there is always a trajectory. This picture, though, is hypnotic. There is not just the solid tunnel of concrete triangles, there is also a tunnel made of shadows and one made of light. Yet, there is nothing claustrophobic about this tunnel as it is open every few feet to the water and the open air. It’s simply stunning. 

For more tunnels, click here:

 

Why ChatGPT Goes "Wrong" & People Misinterpret It (Comment of the Week)

A reader named "Nade" came along and posted a pretty interesting comment to Hilary Mason's brilliant explanation of ChatGPT and how it's often misunderstood:

Most of the key ML/AI papers come from Google Brain and DeepMind. The 2017 paper on transformers "Attention is all you need" came from them too. OpenAI based their GPT models on that (GPT = Generative Pre-trained Transformer).

Since OpenAI couldn't have an edge on research, what could they do to be competitive? Release earlier.

That's pretty easy [to do] as Google and DeepMind are super cautious. Microsoft then joined and invested on OpenAI, of course they want to compete against Google and now you have Bing powered by a language model.

I've got the early access to it since a while and it looks more capable than ChatGPT. However, as you could see, there have been issues immediately. Mostly because of Reddit users trolling the model, then journalists went there and took the sensationalist route. Then Microsoft had to take action by regulating and restricting the usage of the model and now it's harder to investigate its capabilities.

This helps explain how a NYT journalist had a "scary encounter" with ChatGPT; Nade argues he made the same mistake as Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who believes that LaMDA, the company's experimental chatbot, achieved sentience: