New World Notes

Three Fundamental Flaws in Meta’s Vision for the Metaverse

There’s a new long essay on Meta’s vision for the Metaverse from Nick Clegg, formerly a UK politician and now President of Global Affairs at Meta. (He was the company’s point person when Facebook and Instagram’s many failings were brought under harsh public scrutiny.) Given his position at the social media giant, Clegg’s essay has deep insights into Meta’s vision and strategy for the Metaverse. Give it a read, we’ll be here when you come back.

There’s actually much about it that I agree with, but with Meta putting the most money into Metaverse development of any company by far, it’s more important to point out key flaws which suggest a fundamental misunderstanding of how metaverse platforms work (and don’t work).

For starters:

Assuming that immersive 3D interaction is a “logical” evolution of text, voice, and video:

Clegg writes:

We don’t communicate through written words alone, so text-based internet services would never suffice. Static images are an important part of how we communicate, as are sounds and moving images. But we interact in three dimensions. We use multiple senses, body language, spatial awareness. We signify our intention to trust one another by looking each other in the eye, smiling, or warmly shaking hands. We express our feelings towards loved ones not only by saying what we feel but by expressing it physically. We show joy, sadness or anger through nonverbal cues that are embodied and experienced rather than written down.

Advances in speed and availability of connectivity have now reached a point that begins to make many of these three-dimensional interactions possible virtually. It is therefore logical that the next step in the evolution of the internet is one that reflects this.

Note the jazz hands employed to cover that last non sequitur. While it’s true that immersive 3D interaction is now much more feasible and affordable, it does not follow that it’s by and large more desirable than video or even text. Facetime was launched for the iPhone in 2013, but 75% of Gen Z and Millennials still prefer to text. And despite its affordable price point, the slow sales of Meta’s own Quest 2 headset should undermine any confidence that immersive communication is the next inevitable step. (As opposed to a successful niche.)

More questionable assumptions:

Star Atlas Sure Seems Less Like a Metaverse Platform & More Like an MMO

Star Atlas occasionally appears on my Metaverse Radar as a virtual world to potentially follow, but this report from CoinDesk leaves me wondering if it actually is a metaverse platform at all:

... Star Atlas has two tokens that drive all game operations: POLIS and ATLAS. POLIS is the governance token with a market cap of $14 million and ATLAS is the payment token with a market cap of $18 million, according to data from CoinGecko. Players buy ships, NFT-based space vehicles used to explore deep space, from the in-house marketplace to start the game. These spaceships with different details, crews and components are critical in a player’s capability to fight rival factions and discover assets scattered across the Star Atlas metaverse...

And so on. Little or nothing is said about powerful content creation tools, which is a core feature to the Metaverse.  Star Atlas's design document also says little about that, beyond a single vague reference to "optionality to incorporate player-created content". Compare and contrast Star Atlas with Dual Universe, and the former comes up short:

Watch: What Social VR / Metaverse Platforms Can Learn About User Safety from 2D Virtual Worlds

Here's the latest talk from Linden Lab veteran Jim "Babbage" Purbrick, who applied what he learned from Second Life and other pioneering virtual worlds in his work for Eve Online and Meta, with the focus here on user safety, i.e. keeping annoyances from trolls and other bad actors in the virtual world down to a dull roar.  

These are lessons, as he tells me, "from older, 2D and text-based virtual worlds [that] are often ignored by VR developers. This talk shows how we applied those lessons to Oculus Venues.

"Technologies change, people stay the same."

This is true. One key lesson Jim and his team applied was real time responses to active harassment. (Starting at around 29 minutes in.) If a troll is scurrying about causing problems during a live event, they need to be dealt with in real time, not after abuse reports have been filed by users and processed the next day: 

Today's Flickr Pick: Wow-Worthy Virtual World Landscape Photos

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

Some pictures are just so striking all I can do is say “Wow!” and sit back and enjoy them. This is a Wow! picture. I love the layers of mountains in the background giving the picture depth and texture. I love that we can see the knots in the rope webbing. Joanna Kitten has mastered the art of Second Life landscape photography. I was wondering if this was really SL or some video game when I saw the teleport link. Yes, she makes SL look this good. [Teleport link here.]

For more stunning landscapes, click here:

Top 5 Posts Last Week: What VRChat Gets About the Metaverse That Meta Does Not -- Plus When to Say "The Metaverse" vs. "A Metaverse Platform"

• Launching In Second Life: A Massive Education Campus Bringing Together Many Projects Into A Shared Serendipitous Space
• Metaverse: "The" Or "A", Capital Or Lower Case: A Naming Convention Proposal
• Watch: Improbable Demos Hundreds Of Concurrent VOIP-Enabled Players In Close Proximity
• Watch: What VRChat Gets About The Metaverse That Meta Does Not
• SL Fashion Blog Tip: How To Export Your Avatar Outfit Details To Text

Watch: Seracast's Fun Live Stream from The Seraphim Sim

Streaming live now from the Seraphim sim (click here to teleport), here's Del and Kess bringing their inimitable zaniness to your Monday. As a bonus, they're offering a couple of fatpacks full of various Outlet items to folks who show up!

Launching This Saturday in Second Life: A Massive Education Campus Bringing Together Many Projects Into a Shared Serendipitous Space -- UPDATE: Added Teleport Links for This Weekend's Opening

UPDATE, May 20: Bumped up post for the weekend launch. Teleport to the welcome sim here. SLurls to the Eduverse sims up now are:

• Science Circle: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The%20Science%20Circle/72/129/30
• Virtech: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Virtech/127/126/31
• Community Virtual Library: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Cookie/201/212/21 
• Mayo Clinic:  http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Mayo%20Clinic/121/170/34
• Whole Brain Health:  http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Inspiration%20Island/82/100/23
• University of New Mexico (at Rockcliffe): http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Rockcliffe%20Village/48/42/23

In the first flush of general interest in the Metaverse, literally hundreds of colleges and universities opened up a virtual campus in Second Life -- up to and including Harvard -- but most of that enthusiasm has drifted away in recent years.

Starting this Saturday at 11am PT, however, a group of dedicated educators are soft launching a new Second Life-based project with the help of Linden Lab: The Virtual Worlds Education Consortium: Click here to teleport. 

Unlike that previous era, where universities each had their own isolated (and usually empty) SL campus, these educators are creating an expansive, shared campus:

"[S]o that there is always something going around, green dots on the map, people come to check something out, see something else nearby, etc.," as VWEC member George Djorgovski (a professor at Caltech), explains it to me. "This alone can help the groups already in SL, increase the collaboration and resource sharing, etc. "

 

And they have strong buy-in from Linden Lab:

Cajsa's Choices: Friday Fashion Finds for Furries of Second Life

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

Rainbow Pixelfarts’s [Hyzura Resident] blog is called “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and Twirl a Whirl caught my eye with the sheer joy it depicts. Do you remember how much fun a hula hoop is? If you forgot, this pic captures it. 

•  |Hazy Doll| (by Cynful Ghost) Blu's Neon Hooping Pose Set @ Abnormality (ends May 28th) 

For more furry fashion, click here:

Discuss: Hilarious UGC Platforms-as-Dungeons & Dragons Alignments

For group chat, peep this hilarious D&D alignment chart by Redditor u/TheTrickyDoctor. Personally I'd put Second Life into the Chaotic Neutral category, but that's just me. It was posted in Reddit's VRChat group, so assume a bias there.

And if you want the creator's summary, read on:

Nadej Dae Turns Second Life Screenshots Into Otherworldly Imagery

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

Nadej Dae’s photostream is otherworldly. “Even trees have wings” is an excellent example. It’s a shot of a tree, a magnificent tree, but still just a tree. However by making this a duotone with bold light and shadow it seems foreboding and spooky, an alien tree from another planet perhaps. 

For more eerie pics, click here:

Metaverse: "The" or "A", Capital or Lower Case: A Naming Convention Proposal

I wrote out a definition of the Metaverse recently taken directly from Snow Crash citations -- my futile attempt to address the slew of "No one knows what the Metaverse is or when it will exist!" media coverage. Now here's another abuse worth addressing that sets my avatar's teeth on edge, as recently seen in a tweet from Gartner*, a highly reputed analyst firm:

It is expected that a Metaverse will provide persistent, decentralized, collaborative and interoperable opportunities and business models that will enable organizations to extend digital business

There. Is. No. Such. Thing. As. "A" Metaverse.

Here's my own naming convention, based again on Snow Crash, and on whatever expertise on this topic I can claim:

Watch: Improbable Demos Hundreds of Concurrent VOIP-Enabled Players in Close Proximity

As promised: company Town Hall for ⁦@Improbableio⁩ with m2 tech, same as we are using for otherside. All art placeholder. Everyone can speak in game. pic.twitter.com/FX5W9XBJrB

— Herman Narula (@HermanNarula) May 12, 2022

I haven't really written about Improbable in a couple years, when the single-shard MMO infrastructure startup/developer was struggling with heavy losses. This new local concurrency demo video is impressive, especially if (as CEO Herman Narula claims), the hundreds of people in-world everyone can also use VOIP.

Last month, by the way, Improbable spun out a (wait for it!) metaverse technology network called M2:

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Foxi McCalister's Cleverly Composed Avatar Portraits

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

Foxi McCalister has a way of presenting something completely incongruous as though it is the most ordinary thing and why did no one think of it before. Take “Numb….” for example. Of course someone can walk across the keys while the piano floats in the air, where else could it float? Her skin is dirty and scratched, as though she were still three and playing in mud puddles. Combine the roughhousing dirt and scratches with the genteel elegance of the ballet shoes and you get an illustration of the athleticism behind the dancer.

For more great pics, click here:

Watch: What VRChat Gets About the Metaverse That Meta Does Not

While VRChat does not actually describe itself as a metaverse platform (yet?), it is by far the leading contender in that space. I feel like I've been writing about that little appreciated theme for at least the last couple years, but this new video from Quintin Smith (Wired, Edge, Eurogamer) of People Make Games makes that case with copious interviews and examples (several of which I've also featured here, see below) and in a far more charming accent.

His video is a great and golden respite from the deluge of putative "metaverse" stories which generally turn out to be NFT-flavored cash grabs, or just as questionable, the latest bland announcement from Meta or another corporate giants. But as Quint tells me, they are missing something key about platforms like these:

SL Fashion Blog Tip: How to Export Your Avatar Outfit Details to Text

I just remembered there is a way to save your outfit details in the Outfits menu in the viewer. I made a quick video to show. pic.twitter.com/yGzxeXvqSi

— Strawberry (@strawberrysingh) May 11, 2022

In case you missed the update from last week's post, here's Strawberry Singh's walkthrough for exporting your avatar outfit details. As she shows in the above video, there's an option for doing just that in the viewer's Outfits menu. (She's using the official viewer, but this should also work with third party viewers.)  It's a partial solution to an ongoing problem in the SL social media ecosystem: Giving proper credit to the creators of all the items in a screenshot in a way that's not tedious and time consuming.  As she mentioned in our chat, it's what almost caused Strawberry herself to give up blogging and YouTubing:

Today's Flickr Pick: Intensely Colorful Avatar Portraits by Anastazja B

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

Anastazja B. shoots gorgeous photos such as “Just me” that are instantly recognizable for their unique style. Her pictures have intense color with deep shadows and bold bright colors. And flowers, nearly every picture is abloom in flowers. Browsing her stream makes me smile because who can feel grumpy looking at such a beautiful version of the world. 

For more blooming pics, click here:

Comparing the BTC Apple to the L$ Orange (Comment of the Week)

Reader Joey1058 has a fair point about my comparing the oranges of Linden Dollars to the apples of Bitcoin:

The US designated crypto as a commodity. So asking to use BTC as a currency is like asking to use gold and silver as an everyday currency again. The L$ is an inworld currency, and has been planned that way from the outset. Broadly speaking, Second Life holds it's own sovereignty, so exchanging Lindens for USD is like exchanging GBP for USD.

Both BTC and L$ require an exchange to convert to USD. Once converted, they get taxed. The difference in exchanges is that LindeX/Tilia do a full transaction disclosure to the Feds. Crypto exchanges do not. Which is why the Feds are attempting to regulate crypto. If you are not reporting your crypto cash-outs to the Feds, you are in violation of whatever rules the IRS deems to slap you with.

This is roughly right. Though overall, I'd still say L$ and BTC is a comparison of tangerines and oranges, i.e. citrus fruit with more overlap than apples:

Top 6 Posts Last Week, Including ROI for a ROBLOX Campaign & Second Life's Continued Robustness in Comparison to Crypto/Web3

• Throwback Thursday: That Time We Noticed Bitcoin Was Being Used Less Than Linden Dollars... In 2013
• Chipotle's Burrito Giveaway In ROBLOX Attracts 5 Million+ Extra Visits -- RoMonitor Stats
• As She Celebrates 15 Years In Second Life, Avatar Influencer Strawberry Singh Discusses The Tedium Of Creator Credits & Ways To Bring Back The Fun
• The Sandbox's Terms Of Service Says You Don't Actually Own NFTs Associated With The Sandbox
• Shock Web3 Stat: Way More People Still Buy Virtual Items In Second Life Than Buy NFTs On Coinbase & OpenSea -- Combined!
• Metaverse Content Creators In Developing Nations Can Do Quite Well -- Once They Break Into The Market

Watch: Seracast's Season 1 Finale, Bravely Recorded Live from the Seraphim Sim With a Highly Active Drinking Game

Streaming live and unedited this week, here's the latest fun and chatty episode of Seracast, broadcast from the Seraphim sim. Details from the blog:

As well as all the usual features and information we will be giving away 2 full makeovers to 2 lucky winners including head and body of their choice plus spending money for hair, accessories, clothes and skins. One winner will be chosen from the live audience and one from YouTube after a week. Catch up with the cast for how to enter on YouTube.

For this season finale, the ladies bravely and hilariously do a drinking game during the episode, hitting their cocktails whenever "SL", "metaverse", or Second Life" is said. Which they do a lot! They also chat about Strawberry's 15 years in the virtual world, which is fitting, as their video seems like the very kind of thing she was hoping to see more in the SL social media ecosystem.

Friday Fashion Finds from SL Style Maven Gidge Uirza

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

The “Asian Pacific Heritage Festival” is a post from Gidge Uirza. If you didn’t know it by now, Gidge is my best and oldest friend in Second Life. We met when I got stuck underneath a stairway and couldn’t get out. She blogs at It’s Only Fashion, the blog we started back in 2008. She is still blogging strong. Old Guard, indeed. She went to the Asian-Pacific Heritage Festival today and wrote about. That’s what is so great about her blogging style. She does things and then writes about. It’s not just fashion, it’s lifestyle, SL lifestyle and it akes her blog great. 

Featured at the Asian Pacific Heritage Festival [teleport here]

• Snack: So Silly Japanese Dango Decor by Kiki Chaika
• Headpiece: =Zenith=Flower Headpiece by Miffyhoi Rosca

For more Gidgery, click here:

Throwback Thursday: That Time We Noticed Bitcoin Was Being Used Less Than Linden Dollars... in 2013

With Bitcoin's experiencing an utter bloodbath today, this may come across as "I told ya so", but hopefully not. For nearly 10 years, Bitcoin promoters and major investors have never been able to answer a question I started asking in 2013, and kept asking over the years: If Bitcoin is such an important virtual currency, why does it have less daily transactions than Linden Dollars in Second Life?

This isn't to say Linden Dollars are superior to Bitcoin -- which after all, are a virtual currency intrinsically tied to a social game MMO platform. However, after all that hype, you'd think Silicon Valley would be quick to have the same skepticism for Bitcoin as they did for Second Life after it failed to deliver on its promises in 2006-2008.

Daily BTC transactions have grown somewhat since then, but remain below 300,000 per day, as compared to Second Life's 400,000+.

Why? Short answer: Because the value of any money -- even and especially virtual money -- is created by a community which agrees to value it. Even and especially a virtual community. Linden Dollars have that. Bitcoin never really did.

Again, this isn't said with any triumph, because thousands if not millions of people have bought into the Bitcoin hype, and are now suffering. But the thing is, another blockchain-based speculation bubble is still happening, and the same principles still apply:

Chipotle's Burrito Giveaway in ROBLOX Attracts 5 Million+ Extra Visits -- RoMonitor Stats

Remember Chipotle's ROBLOX giveaway last month, offering free real burritos for the first people to play Chipotle's virtual burrito builder game? This one:

Chipotle Burrito Builder on Roblox, a new simulation experience that will challenge players to roll burritos in the metaverse to earn Burrito Bucks, the brand's in-experience currency on Roblox1, starting on April 7, National Burrito Day. The first 100,000 Roblox players to successfully roll a burrito will earn enough Burrito Bucks to exchange them for an entrée code that can be used on the Chipotle app, Chipotle.com, or Chipotle.ca

While the announcement attracted much coverage, few to no reporters followed up about its actual ROI.

So I did! By contacting the folks at RoMonitor Stats, which tracks experience metrics on the metaverse platform for kids. 

While I was skeptical at first, the results they sent me seem pretty impressive:

Tab Tatham Takes Interior Design Photos of Second Life Homes More Sumptuous & Detailed Than Real Life Photos in Dwell Magazine

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

Tab Tatham is a Flickr microblogger whose style is maximally appealing. Whiskey Monday pointed me her way with this comment, “I LOVE it so much. I'm a maximalist and this just makes me want to move in.”  

I’m not a maximalist and this makes me nervous, but that does not mean I don’t think it’s gorgeous. I admire the exuberance, the abundance of color, texture, and layers of elements to catch my eyes, but every item on the floor makes me think of Dorothy McHugh calling that she’s fallen and can’t get up. [Click here for hilarious compilation.] Thankfully, trips and falls in Second Life never leave a bruise. 

For more maximalist designs click here:

As She Celebrates 15 Years in Second Life, Avatar Influencer Strawberry Singh Discusses the Tedium of Creator Credits & Ways to Bring Back the Fun

Strawberry Singh, who became the SL community's top social media influencer and then went on to work for Linden Lab in 2019, has a new post celebrating her 15 years in the virtual world. It includes a surprising confession -- she almost quit SL entirely, mainly due to the tedium of posting credits to her avatar fashion reviews:

I had been feeling like the creative light Second Life had always been for me was diminishing because I was getting bogged down with doing mesh head reviews. I have to be honest with you, I absolutely hated doing those videos. I had come to a point where I loathed all the time I was putting into reviewing things and sharing style credits and not being able to just be more creative and have the time to do fun things in Second Life.

"Writing out style credits for every single item I was wearing in each post was a lot of work back then," she tells me. "I had so many blogs just saved as drafts at a time and I couldn't publish them until I took at least 30 minutes to sit there and write out all the style credits. It was time-consuming, exhausting, and not fun at all." (She hastens to add that she's still glad she made those reviews: "[A]s much as I was tired of it at the end, I know how important those videos were and many people have reached out to me and said that they learned a lot from [them].")

This is actually a common theme in SL social media, and a recurring complaint that comes up when Cajsa writes about Second Life fashion blogs -- either the creator credits are non-existent, incomplete, or not informative enough for readers to know where they might buy those listen items. It's the blessing and curse of a virtual world where everything is user-generated: If you're really trying to give credits to every creator whose work is depicted in a screenshot, it's a painstaking process where you will need to credit the creator of everything in view, up to and including the literal sky.

That to one side, Strawberry has ideas for how the community could inject more fun into the social media ecosystem of SL:

Study: Online Video Meetings Impair Creativity -- Opportunity for Virtual World-Based Conferencing?

The title of the study published in Nature is "Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation", but it's specifically referring to Zoom-style online video calls:

 In a laboratory study and a field experiment across five countries (in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia), we show that videoconferencing inhibits the production of creative ideas... Specifically, using eye-gaze and recall measures, as well as latent semantic analysis, we demonstrate that videoconferencing hampers idea generation because it focuses communicators on a screen, which prompts a narrower cognitive focus. 

This tracks with my personal experience. I do countless editorial/brainstorming calls on Zoom and Skype video, and to make real substantial creative progress, find myself putting a browser window in front of the video feed, so I don't get distracted by people looking at me (looking at them). Or only having my camera on for the Hello and Goodbye portions of the call.

This strikes me as an opportunity for virtual world/metaverse platform-based meetings where typically, there is no direct eye contact, and the visual cues are immersive 3D graphics: