New World Notes

Nylon Pinkney Is Online: How to Change Your Second Life Name

Despite $2.6 Billion in Funding, Magic Leap Sold Less AR Headsets Than Jeri Ellsworth's Tilt 5 Kickstarter

I've heard rumors to this effect for months, but when The Information reports on it, you can pretty much take it to the bank -- even if it's not much of a deposit:

Magic Leap managed to sell just 6,000 units of its $2,300 Magic Leap One headset in its first six months on sale, a figure made worse by CEO Rony Abovitz’s internal claims that he wanted the startup to sell at least one million units of the device in the first year, a goal the report states he was later convinced to rethink — Abovitz later projected the company would sell 100,000 units in the first year... The company has now raised around $2.6 billion in venture funding from firms like Google, Alibaba and a slew of other investors. 

To put that 6,000 in perspective, Jeri Ellsworth's Tilt 5 Kickstarter recently sold over 6,000 Augmented Reality HMDs in 30 days.

Obviously that's not a completely fair comparison, since Magic Leap's headset is selling for $2,300, as opposed to Tilt 5's $299 entry level price. Then again, you can also say the comparison is unfair in the other direction, since Jeri and her team made these sales as a bootstrapped startup working with a tiny six figure budget, versus Magic Leap working with $2.6 billion dollars from some of the world's top tech companies.

In any case, the repercussions in both directions should be pretty significant:

Watch: How to Use the Black Dragon for taking Great SL Screenshots

Here's a fun and informative Black Dragon tutorial video from SL YouTube star (and occasional New World Notes videographer) Cassie Middles. Undaunted by an occasional barking dog down the hall, Cassie shows you how to use the third party viewer with a cult following among SL artists to take screenshots.

Black Dragon is significantly different from Firestorm, the most popular SL viewer, but Cassie tells me she likes both for different reasons:

Interest in Half-Life: Alyx Trails Far Behind Other Anticipated 2020 Games

In case you missed it (and I'm sure you haven't), the Half-Life franchise is finally back with a VR-exclusive title featuring Alyx Vance, by far the most appealing character in the games. (Admit it, no one really likes that nerd Gordon.) The trailer has racked up nearly 9 million views, along with many industry stories asking variations of this question: Will Half-Life: Alyx be the game that finally makes VR a killer app? (As here, as here, as here, ad infinitum.)

I mean maybe? But if you compare interest in Half-Life: Alyx with other anticipated games for 2020 on the collective hive mind that is Google Trends, you get another story:

VRChat Looking for New, Oculus Quest-Friendly Featured Avatars

Great chance for avatar creators to build their brand:

 We’ve got good news for you — we’re opening up submissions for new Featured Avatars! If you’re an avatar creator, this is the perfect opportunity to get your work seen and worn by the larger VRChat community!

... This time, we’re looking for unique and interesting styles that are different from what you usually see in VRChat and in our current Featured Avatars. If you want the best chance to get your avatar in, try breaking away from the usual styles you see in VRChat.

In other words (and maybe they should have just spelled this out): No. More. Goddamn. Anime girl. Avatars.

Also notable: Avatars must be fully Oculus Quest compatible, suggesting the company is pushing harder to emphasize Quest (versus other VR headsets).

Perhaps even more notable: No word of any kind of prize award. Which I might understand if VRChat's in-game marketplace was open, but because it isn't, seems sort of odd?

Cajsa's SL Flickr Pick: The Amazingly Posed Screenshots of Shoko Tachikawa

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

Shoko.Tachikawa is a pose-maker who creates photos to illustrate the poses. They are full of action and movement. I like the “blue period” aesthetic in this photo. Poses are such an integral part of the best SL photography, and I love photos that show them off to their best advantage.

Blind, Popular Anonymous Messaging App for Tech Workers, Adds Chat Group for Linden Lab Employees

Blind, an anonymous, Reddit-like messaging app for employees, especially in the tech world, has become extremely popular in recent years, a go-to way for staff to discuss company politics, policies, and gossip among each other while remaining anonymous. Companies have their own exclusive chat rooms on Blind, which you can only join if you have an active e-mail address with that firm. Quite a lot of them have -- for instance, about 30% of Facebook and Twitter's entire staff use Blind.

Someone on the Blind development team just let me know that Linden Lab also has a Blind chatroom of its own, with a small but active membership. In fact, a Blind user from Google recently posted this public-facing conversation thread, where the replies can only come from Linden Lab staff using the app: 

Culture at Linden Lab: What is the culture like at Linden Lab? Do employees get a lot of ownership and autonomy?

So far, however, the only answer is this intriguing one, from a Linden engineer:

Cajsa’s SL Flickr Pick: The Song-Inspired Screenshots of Cecilia Nansen

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

I love “Leaving New York” by Cecilia Nansen. The light leak overlaid over the black and white photo adds so much light and ambiance to this winter photo. With the trees, the sidewalk, and the buildings, we have three leading lines converging on a point in the distance. I love how the snowflakes are so much like the tree lights, it seems as though light is falling from the sky.

SLer Survey: Over 1 in 4 Willing to Pay Extra to Change Their Avatar Name

Here's the results of that pre-Thanksgiving survey on Linden Lab's new name change payment option, set to launch early next year. With 373 SLers responding -- a very large sample, relative to surveys like this! --  over 1 in 4 (i.e. 27%) say they will pay extra to change their avatar name. That includes 14.4% who are already paying for a monthly Premium subscriptions (a pre-requisite for the name change option), and are still willing to pay a bit more.

Of course there's alternate, prim-is-half-empty way to read these results:

Watch, Listen: Teaser to Chouchou's New Concept Album "Hello, Astronauts”

This is a new teaser for "Hello Astronauts", the next concept album from Chouchou, the Japanese duo which launched its music career over a decade ago by performing live in Second Life. Since then they've gone on to gather a pretty large following, but if you're most familiar with Chouchou through its dreamy, otherworldly SL sim, this latest project will evoke similar feelings of dreamy otherworldliness. As Chouchou's spokesperson tells me: 

Cajsa's SL Flickr Pick: Nath Baxton Brings Pop Art Sensibility to Virtual Fashion Photos

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

Nath Baxton brings Pop Art to fashion blogging and it’s pure genius. His “125” cracks me up. After all, how do people put those pants on? You get a clear photo of the avatar combined with Pop Art sensibility and even a big can of laughter. Note, too, how each panel reflects the other, with the same colors and circles, but presented differently.

The New Yorker Takes Wry Trip Through World of VR, Including Visit to High Fidelity Hosted by "Danish Movie Star"-Like Philip Rosedale

The latest New Yorker takes a fun trip through the world of VR as documented by longtime staff writer and humorist Patricia Marx, who not being a hardcore, wide-eyed technologist, takes some detours others might not choose. (For instance, into AltSpace VR, one of the lesser used social VR platforms, while only briefly mentioning the far larger and probably more interesting VRChat.) Fellow virtual world blogger Ryan Schultz gets a good if candid shout-out ("'Describing himself in the realm outside his Oculus, he wrote, 'To be honest, I kinda suck at this whole reality business.'”), while Philip Rosedale and High Fidelity gets a whole section devoted to him:

Educator: Second Life as a Teaching Tool Would Never Work on "Woke" College Campuses of Today (Comment of the Week)

Pictured: Gorean roleplay, one of Second Life's most popular roleplay subcultures

There's a very interesting reader thread on the recent Electronic Gaming Monthly article on Second Life as told through its old guidebooks. including this thought from "Iggy", who some ten years go, when SL had hundreds of "virtual campuses" owned by real life colleges and universities (up to and including Harvard!) was once among the most passionate educators advocating for the use of Second Life as a teaching tool in colleges:

Cajsa's SL Flickr Pick: Loegan Magic Makes Marvelous Experimental Images

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

“Graze” by Loegan Magic is a kind of magical photo. I love how the house almost disappears into the rocks, nearly hidden. I love the light on the water. The overlay gives it the feeling of an Impressionist painting, reminding me a bit of Seurat’s brush strokes.

Top 3 Posts Last Week, Including: SLers Debate Paying for Name Changes, Seed Fans Discuss Their RL Politics, and Electronic Gaming Monthly Covers The Hype & Reality of Past Second Life Guidebooks

• SLers Furiously Debate Whether They Should Pay To Change Their SL Names
• Will Real World Politics Influence Players Of SEED, The Exoplanet Colonization MMO? Majority Of Fans Surveyed Say Yes
• Electronic Gaming Monthly Explores The Rise & Fall (& Semi-Rise) Of Second Life Through Its Ancient Wiley Guidebooks

Special Sinespace Black Friday Offer: Get 1 Month Free Premium With 150 Gold Per Week + Other Benefits!

Just in time for the holiday season, NWN partner Sinespace has a special offer for anyone reading New World Notes: One month free Premium benefits, which include:

• 512 megabytes of space for customizing your free home region. (Up from 128mb for basic account holders.)
• 25 maximum concurrent users in your home region. (Up from 10 maximum for basic accounts.)
• 150 Gold per week for shopping in Sinespace’s massive in-game store!

Plus all the benefits listed here.

Read below for how to redeem this offer:

Cajsa's Flickr Pick: The Stunning SL Action Scenes of Marino Sandalwood

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

Marino Sandalwood loves the action shot and does them well. In “Death Target” she got together with two friends. It is always fun to see how two people shoot the same scene. Here is the same scene taken by Eripom Moonwall. By shooting from below, she increases the power and menace of the women charging forward. 

Electronic Gaming Monthly Explores the Rise & Fall (& Semi-Rise) of Second Life Through Its Ancient Wiley Guidebooks

Interesting long read on Electronic Gaming Monthly covers the perennial "Whatever happened to Second Life?" story through a fresh angle: The five official guidebooks to Second Life published by Wiley, and the mass of contributors for wrote it. The author Mark Hill compares and contrasts the glowing words wrote or said back then, with Second Life as it is now. That includes SL co-founders Philip Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka, though Hill mixes up Philip's real name with his avatar handle:

[T]he final two chapters of The Official Guide, “A Cultural Timeline” and “The Future and Impact of Second Life,” further highlight Linden’s own divided focus between SL’s core users and its media darling status. The timeline is introduced with overwrought claims like “‘I’m not building a game,’ Philip Linden once said, ‘I’m building a new country.’ And in many ways, the history of Second Life thus far resembles the first centuries of America itself.”

... Linden’s own hype reaches its loftiest with comments like “Imagine being able to access from SL from literally anywhere [with wearable computing], holding conversations across worlds, or overlaying your friend’s SL avatar on them when you see them in your first life,” and “What excites me the most about the future of Second Life is its potential to fundamentally improve the human condition.” Second Life may not have improved the human condition, but it certainly highlighted certain aspects of it. Terdiman referenced an infamous 2006 interview that was invaded by a horde of trolls wielding flying penises. 

... In an interview for The Entrepreneur’s Guide, Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka went further in painting a picture of Second Life as a corporate utopia. “Even with video conferencing, you can’t really get up, move around, pace. … And Second Life helps with [that]. You have place, embodiment, and a method for having real-world style conversations a la a cocktail party (i.e., multiple, parallel conversations). I think the first new opportunity is going to be helping companies that have dispersed work forces save money on recruiting, on-boarding, training, and collaboration. This is a lot like what IBM has said they are working on. But they are just scratching the surface.”

The article misses the chance to mention that both both Philip and Cory, while no longer working on Second Life, are still actively involved in virtual worlds and virtual world technology, Philip with his new startup High Fidelity and Cory (up until a few years ago), driving Facebook's acquisition of Oculus (for good and ill). But then again, the story of all those who started at Linden Lab and Second Life back in the earliest days and continue to work on reviving the old magic -- even if that means developing other virtual world platforms -- could be a whole other article in itself.

As for what Second Life still is now, DJ Nexeus Fatale and myself reflect on that, also for good and ill:

Cajsa's SL Flickr Pick: Portilly Takes Dramatically Dark Screenshots

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

Portilly is not afraid of the dark. This untitled photo shows an embrace of the darkness. Notice that even with the dim lighting, we can see details, the shades in the shadows. I love her willingness to demand something of viewers, to look deeply into the picture to see the window frame, the posts, and other details are there, hidden in the shadows. Good photos are ones that make us stop and look more closely. She is demanding we work at it.

Will Real World Politics Influence Players of SEED, the Exoplanet Colonization MMO? Majority of Fans Surveyed Say Yes

In my latest essay for SEED, the exoplanet colonization, world-building MMO with a political system designed by Larry Lessig, I surveyed the game's most passionate fanbase on Discord, asking them how SEED might related to their real life political outlook. The results were pretty surprising, at least to me:

Regardless of national origin, most respondents [49.6%] are decidedly unhappy with the current state of their real-world government. Despite (or because of?) this dissatisfaction, a majority of respondents say that their real world politics will guide how they play SEED, with 44% saying it will have “some” influence on their behavior, while 1 in 4 answering that their politics will shape their gameplay on Avesta “quite a bit”.

But what are the real world politics of SEED’s first wave of settlers? We asked respondents to indicate their ideology along the traditional left-right axis. A plurality (36%) put themselves on the center-left, with 1 in 5 indicating that they are either left wing or center-right. Just as notable: Nearly 1 in 10 place themselves on the far left, while just a sliver of respondents (3.4%) place themselves on the far right.

As to the crux question, and a key reason why Larry Lessig is involved in this MMO: Will we learn anything about real politics and organization from this game? A strong majority of 56% say Yes, reflecting this opinion from one survey taker:

SLers Furiously Debate Whether They Should Pay to Change Their SL Names

Last chance to take this survey on whether you want to pay for the chance to change your SL name; I'll post the results tomorrow. In any case, it's definitely provoked a passionate conversation among readers. Here's some highlights:

I love having the limited selection as long as it's long enough, like in the old days. I can hardly wait to see the list of names and to see avatars that aren't stuck with "Resident." Currently I'm happy with my avatar names, so there's no reason to pay for new ones. I just wish that all those stuck with "Resident" could, without charge, add a last name from the list. So much nicer.

-- Acacia Merlin

Please do not make us choose from a list of names. I doubt we will get what we want that way! Custom name is worth a fee, otherwise. Unless you have my last name I want, I'll keep the old one!

-- kedvenc ivanovic 

Sorry we took all those profits we collected from your $300.00 imaginary lands and used them to make a gigantic VR bonfire and dissed you in the process.

Luckily, in the ashes, we finally hear your pleas. Our little elves are working like mad to make a doohickey that will take us back in time to the days when we knew how to give people names. You'll need to pay a fee to pay a fee to get this amazing regifted fruitcake. Happy Holidays!

"Names" was on my 2011 Christmas List. In 2019, I want justice.

-- Jenny8675309 Resident

Several more after the break!

Top 5 Posts Last Week, Including: Why Wales Wants Pseudonyms on WT:Social, Why Stadia Should Shift to Virtual Worlds, and the New Sign Language Invented for VRChat

• Nylon Pinkney Is Online: The Rift Between Rifters
• Jimmy Wales On WT Social, His New Social Network: Pseudonyms Allowed On The Platform's "Real Names Culture"
• Why VR/AR Devs Should Stop Referencing Minority Report-Ish Gesture Control
• Struggling Stadia Should Shift Away From Twitch Games To Virtual Worlds
• VRChat Attracts Community Of Deaf Users & Supporters Who Communicate With Unique, VR-Based Signs

Nylon Pinkney is Online: The Rift Between Rifters

Jimmy Wales on WT Social, His New Social Network: Pseudonyms Allowed on the Platform's "Real Names Culture"

WT:Social is a new and much-needed social network led by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, which unlike Facebook, Twitter, and the other market leaders, won't make money on targeted (often intrusive or dishonest). Instead, like Wikipedia, it'll be run on donations. It's not however affiliated with the online encyclopedia. As Wales puts it to me: "This is just me having fun trying to invent something new." 

You can go here to sign-up  as Wales and his team scale up the system to take on more new users.  "[We have] only 2 developers who are mainly scrambling to keep the site running," Wales explains. "I am hopeful that the waiting time will end in a few weeks time as we beef up our infrastructure (again!)"

While Facebook in particular has ongoing controversies with real name identities, and the company's insistence on them, Wales tells me WT:Social will have a more nuanced approach to that question. When I ask him, "What's WT Social's policy around anonymous/pseudonymous user identities, such as game handles?", here is his take in full:

Watch: Fantastic Tribute to Avatar Artist Tralala Loordes

Simon Sonnenblume created this dazzling montage video tribute to the SL images of the avatar artist known as Tralala Loordes, every single one of them jaw-dropping. As it happens, Cajsa profiled Tralala for New World Notes a couple years ago, and her SL/RL background is just as fascinating: