New World Notes

Need More New World Tableaus!

I'm looking for more submissions to my New World Tableau, this blog's ongoing album of SL imagery depicting emotions, stories, and entire cultures in a single screenshot.  Here's the submission guidelines, and here's the full collection thus far, for inspiration.  Want more inspiring?  Here's a pic of me in Romenna, a beautifully sprawling, gloriously intricate ancient city created by Nick Lassard.  (Direct SLURL teleport at this link.)  Surely more talented image-makers out there can evoke the ancient empire of Romenna better than me?

Tweet Type: Send Out Twitter Messages Via A Giant Second Life Typewriter

This is genius: SL artist Angrybeth Shortbread created a giant typewriter that sends out tweets when you click (or hop) out a 140 character message on the keys, then hit the carriage return.  (Click the screenshot to see my "Hamlet wuz here" message appearing on the "SLtypewriter" Twitter feed.)  Ms. Shortbread actually created the typewriter last year for a major real world publisher, but I only discovered it today via her blog.  (Then again, as I often say, there's a frightening wealth of amazing content I only learn about months after the fact, if at all.)

In any case, it's still available for random tweeting by passersby, upstairs in The Pencil Factory, Angrybeth's SL office which contains many other marvels.  Direct SLURL teleport to the location at this link.

The Crystal Palace Reborn (And Seeking Exhibitors)

This should thrill the heart of steampunks across the metaverse:  Mako Magellan has recreated the legendary Crystal Palace of 19th century London, and is offering space to content creators who'll be able to exhibit their wares for free until July 1st.  "In other words," he explains, "until that point they get free marketing, shop space, etc. Thereafter we may introduce very low charges, simply to cover tier costs. We figure that if designers make sales form the exhibition they will be able to contribute towards tier." (Direct SLURL teleport to the Crystal Palace at this link.) To give you a sense of its two hundred meter long grandeur, that's a scale Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton you see there at the entrance.  To apply for a space, send Mako a notecard, or e-mail him at "makomagellan at gmail dot com". He's also looking for curators.

Written On The Body: Anatomy Of A Second Life Skin

What's makes for a high quality avatar skin?  Ryker Beck has an extensive and besmitten appraisal of a new skin by Sita Loire, and she lovingly focuses on its every detail: not just face and torso, but the more difficult regions to believably simulate: fingers, feet, knees, ears, nipples, naval, and genitals, every part depicted with a close-up screenshot.  (Needless to say, not necessarily worksafe viewing, unless you work in a live model drawing studio.) It's undeniably a great state-of-the-art example of a human avatar, but you can also see where the talents of someone like Ms. Loire begin hitting the limitations of the system.  Namely, Second Life avatars don't have fully articulated skeletons (for obvious technical considerations), so fingers, feet and other particularly complex parts of the body are going to fall short.  Realizing our full humanity will require a lot more bandwidth.

The View From Virtual World Alltop

Here's a cool new site that aggregates the top blogs about virtual worlds, a branch of a much larger best-of-blogs site (hence the title.)  Blogs are editorially selected, and unsurprisingly, it boasts a heavy presence of Second Life blogs.  Among them, of course, is Torley, who explains the project's stellar background here.

Survey Suggests New Second Life Trademark Policies Still Provoke Wide Concerns

On April 18th, the Lindens provided a detailed update to the company's new trademark and brand use policies.  In my first survey, 75% of respondents said it still provoked concerns; after the 4/18 follow-up (disregard the 4/8 date typo above), I took another survey. This time, 63% of respondents report lingering questions.  A significant leap in clarity, but a large majority remains unsatisfied by the  Lindens' explanations.  Why?

The Second Life Of Star Wars: In Fan-Made Mini-MMORPG, Metaverse Meets Lucas-verse

Game developers haven't catered very well to Star Wars fans who want to live in George Lucas' world.  While there's innumerable action and strategy titles based on the franchise, and the single-player RPG Knights of the Old Republic series is beloved, fans who joined Sony Online's Star Wars Galaxies hoping to roleplay together were soon disappointed.  Though lead designer Raph Koster originally envisioned a  complex society where players could live and work in the Star Wars milieu, Sony eventually revamped it as an action game-- provoking player mutiny.  (Among the disgruntled roleplayers, by the way, was the leader of a large Galaxies players association, who left for Second Life, re-dubbed herself Suzanne Soyinka, and founded a popular mini-MMO of her own: City of Lost Angels.)

Which brings us to this tightly edited trailer by Atticus Jetaime, introducing SWRP, the latest fan-made Star Wars roleplaying community in SL (there are many groups, past and present.) 

New World Newsfeed: Régine Admires SL Artist Gazira Babeli

Recent dispatches from the outside world...

The day i saw Gazira - we make money not art

The Audrey Hepburn of the blogosphere, Régine DeBatty of We Make Money Not Art is indisputably among the most influential writers covering the intersection of high technology and the arts.  And while she's always been a generous supporter of my SL writing (for which I'm vastly grateful) she hasn't quite bought the notion of Second Life itself as a new medium.  "There's something about Second Life," as she puts it, "that totally repels me: its aesthetics."  Until, that is, she traveled to Brescia, Italy to see the work of Gazira Babeli-- whose name is actually that of the Italian artist's SL avatar.  ("i can't believe i took the train to see the work of an artist who was born only two years ago.")  Rég has a marvelous, epiphany-spiked write-up of Ms. Babeli's work, including "Gaz of the Desert" (above), the haunting machinima I wrote about last October.  (And note the tips from metaverse aesthetes from Bettina Tizzy and Christopher Dodds in Rég's Comments.)

Success Metrics: Metaverse Advertiser Claims 34,000 Engagements In Three Months For L’Oréal Paris Campaign

The virtual copies of L'Oreal products which appeared last year in Rezzable's popular giant living room/kitchen play space were actually part of a larger advertising campaign in Second Life for the cosmetics giant orchestrated by UK-based metaverse agency KZero.  Last week, Nic Miltham published the firm's final results, in Rezzable's Greenies (above), and four SL fashion boutiques.  (There, KZero distributed several L’Oréal-branded "skins" which simulated make-up styles associated with the company's products.)  Over the campaign's three months, 34,000 of the four branded items were picked up by Residents; as a percentage of the 550,000 monthly active user base, that's a 1.6-6.2% virtual item clickthrough rate.  (The spread based on how many of the four L’Oréal skins each Resident took.) Quite impressive, compared to traditional web ads, which are lucky to get even half of one percent. (Even as a percentage of the 1.1 million 60 day user base, that's somewhere on either side of 3%.)

Those are top numbers for Second Life-based advertising, but The Electric Sheep's Giff Constable wonders how good they are, when compared to other virtual worlds:

Linden Lab To Replace "Popular Places" Listings With Selected Showcase In Two Months

In recent months, the company behind Second Life has gone through several epochal changes-- the defenestration of their CTO, the managerial retirement of its founding CEO, the selection of his replacement.  But none of those moves, in my opinion, are as immediately crucial to the world's development as the news being announced today: within the next two months, the Lindens will supplant its increasingly ill-named "Popular Places" tab with a "Showcase" listing of SL sites recommended by Residents and editorially approved by Linden staff.  (See above for an early version.)  The official announcement should be up on the official blog this afternoon; earlier, Jeska Linden (the company's Community and Product Development lead, and a pal) gave me an advance look at what they planned, and the thinking behind it.  This comes after years of camping chairs, bots, and other dubious means of artificially boosting the avatar foot traffic by which Popular Places are listed.

Longtime Residents will remember a time in 2004 when the Lindens did offer editorial recommendations in their SL search listings; they were quickly ended amid accusations of favoritism and concerns over scalability.  ("You could say we're moving backwards," says Jeska, "but not really.")