New World Notes

Styles of Edo Wedding Fashion Show (Sponsor Love)

Tomorrow (Saturday) March 27 at 2pm SLT, Styles of Edo (a lovely sponsor to this blog) is holding a three year anniversary wedding fashion show, featuring top models like Mui Mukerji, Sabine Blackburn and Miaa Rebane, and styles like Bliss Couture, Azul, and of course, Styles of Edo. More details here. Direct SLurl at this link.

In Praise of Chrome Underwood, RL and SL Artist

Rowan Derryth of Prim Perfect has a long and interesting profile of the motorcycle-riding, silver-haired Chrome Underwood, a Second Life artist with a considerable background in real life arts. Here he is talking about the challenge of getting digital/virtual work recognized by the larger art world:

I was pretty much dismissed by colleagues in the art community, except for a few other brave souls, when I went digital. They said it was not real painting, that it was ‘push button art’. So I set out to prove that you could actually squeeze your soul through the keyboard and come out with something as passionate, poetic, and profound as any physical work.

Still seems like an ongoing challenge for SL artists. More on Mr. Underwood here, including samples of some impressive art works.

Image from Chrome Underwood's really cool Second Life-based comic series.

Avatars United Adds Official Verification System -- Will You Use It More Now?

Daniel Voyager notes that the Lindens recently added an official verification system to Avatars United, the virtual world social network the company acquired a few months ago. Now you click a "Verify This Identity" button on your profile, which takes you to an official Second Life log-in page, and if you enter in the correct avatar name/password, you get a nice Verified badge. This was a badly needed feature when the network became part of Second Life, and many Residents have resisted using Avatars United precisely because of that lack. Now that it's there, it'll be interesting to see if usage rates go up. Anecdotally, I've noticed an activity dropoff, though that might just reflect my own personal network.

Second Life Featured in *Hot Tub Time Machine*!

Hot Tub Time Machine, the wacky John Cusack comedy opening tomorrow, has a lead character who's a Second Life aficionado named Jacob (played by Clark Duke). Or as reviews describe him, "a basement-dwelling Second Life aficionado", or less charitably, "a kid who would rather play hours of Second Life than talk to actual humans." And only last week, I was talking about the ingrained nature of the "guy in a basement playing Second Life" meme, though at least here he's also not notably fat or naked. (Then again, you never know.) Ironically, I'm writing this post next door to a Second Life aficionado who doesn't log in from a basement, but near Albert Einstein's old office in Princeton, and given that he's an acclaimed astrophysicist, could probably help John Cusack and friends with the time travel troubles which send them back to the 80s. (But if that's the case, shouldn't the Second Life kid wind up back in Habitat?)

Anyway, it actually looks like a pretty good movie if you're into that kind of thing (and I often am) -- if you catch it in the next few days, report back here. Photo: UA/MGM.

Play as Being: Can 9 Seconds of Communal Focus in Second Life Change Your Real Life?

Today I'm at Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study, an interdisciplinary research center which once counted Einstein himself as a faculty member, to give a brief lecture on Second Life. My talk was put together by Piet Hut, an IAS astrophysicist who has an asteroid named after him, and also has a Second Life avatar: Pema Pera. (As I've written before, Piet conducts some of his work in SL, simulating Newtonian physics in Second Life, and running MICA, a scientific and educational non-profit based in SL.) Yesterday he told me about another Second Life-based project he initiated, which has already developed a fairly large and diverse community around it:

Play as Being, a meditation/communal focus group that meets several times a day to share their practice. The practice itself is very novel: Nine seconds of meditation or focus, every 15 minutes. In those nine seconds, the idea is to pause all your daily activity, focus on your breathing, and write down anything that comes up during this mental pause. "Instead of spending half an hour a day on tai chi or yoga or something, you can spend nine seconds every 15 minutes," Piet tells me. "Even if you do it throughout the whole day it'll be less than 10 minutes [total]. The idea is to give a very persistent and penetrating way of dropping everything you do and... letting more air into your life, so to speak." (Personally I like it. I joked to Piet that whenever I do go to yoga, I end up rushing to the gym, fighting through traffic while screaming I HAVE GOT TO GET TO FRICKING YOGA!)

Chestnut's Choices 3/25 - 3/31: Avatar Orchestra Metaverse Performs at Music Island, UWA Presents M Linden Art Exhibit, Tyrehl Byk's Particle Phantasmagoria and More

Chestnut Rau’s weekly round-up of upcoming SL events…

In November 09, a series of doodles showed up on M Linden's Flickr stream.  Hamlet talked with M about his art background and you can read more here.  It is only natural that his art make its way into Second Life and beginning Saturday, 3/27 at 3pm The University of Western Australia (UWA) will host M Linden's first solo art exhibition. This special event will showcase virtual editions of 16 drawings selected from M's collection of doodles as well as two sculptures created specifically for this show.  White Lebed is the Curator of this exhibit which is produced by UWA Owner & Co-Host JayJay Zifanwe.

In addition to the SL event, there will be a real life showing of M Linden's work at the UWA campus on Friday, March 26th. The RL event will be hosted by award winning West Australian artist Len Zuks.  Len has collaborated with Miso Susanowa to breathe a fresh second life into his sculptures, 'Megabyte' and 'Lil Eizenstein', in a RL/SL collaboration between American and West Australian artists. His RL sculptures will stand alongside M Linden's work.

Also after the break:  Mixed Reality Modern Dance Performance, Burlesque at New Champagne Rooms, MoShang Zhao Performs 'Chinese Chill' Electronica and much, much more

New NWN Partner Welcome: Japan's Metabirds, Owner of Massive Second Blog Portal, Metaverse.JP

I'm pleased and proud to welcome Japanese metaverse development company Metabirds as a sponsoring partner to New World Notes. A company that's doing genuinely innovative projects with Second Life and OpenSimulator in Japan, such as their OpenSim-based hospital navigation system, the company also owns what is probably the most popular Second Life blog portals on the entire Internet: Metaverse.JP, which according to Metabirds' Naoyoshi Shimaya, currently earns 12,000,000 page views per month. Connecting Japan's amazingly creative Second Life users with the broader SL community has been a big passion of mine, and I believe this portal is a great move in that direction. For starters, it has a channel for Japanese Second Life blogs which are written in English: Go here to check those out.

Lyric Lundquist's Machinima is "Boundless" -- Notes on the Latest From a Master of Expressionist Second Life Machinima

Lyric and her real life owner

Every time Ms. Lyric Lundquist makes a machinima, I stop what I'm doing and watch. Not just because her expressionist montages are so visually original and arresting, but because of the creative process she brings to her projects. Her latest, "boundless", is sexy, strange, primitive, inspired by her wanderings through two worlds -- in the surreal rural dreamscapes created by the SL artist known as AM Radio, and Lyric's own walks through Brooklyn snow.

Dim the lights, blast the sound, and watch:

"Making 'Boundless' was very visceral for me," says Lyric. "It happened during a time when I was habitually hibernating in AM Radio's 'The Quiet'. Every time I had the chance to log into SL, I always found myself feeling strangely attached to the sim. I never wanted to leave to wander and explore other places, which is what I typically do when I'm in-world. Instead, I TP'd in friends to sit with me between the trees on the hill and stare out across the pixel snow. The simplicity was calming and refreshing, a sweet detour from what I usually gravitate toward in Second Life. It reminded me of where I grew up in upstate New York."

The Quiet gave her a location, but in yet another example of Second Life's bebop creativity, it was a new fashion line, Le Letuka's "Ultra" collection, that raised her imagination another level.

"After not spending a DIME on SL fashion in months, I went on a wild shopping spree and basically bought the entire collection. I can not get enough of mixing and matching the corsets, armor, gowns, and headgear. One night, I was tromping around The Quiet in a particularly striking Ultra combo and thought I would try to make a more simple, beautiful, high fashion type of video to highlight the collection in one of the most beautiful sim's SL has ever seen."

More notes on how Lyric Lunquist made "Boundless" and some of its most striking visuals-- with great advice for other machnimators:

Nemo Rises: Awe-Inspiring Underwater Steampunk City Inspired By Jules Verne Opens Today!

Today there is a place underneath Second Life seas that is not quite like anything you've seen: Click this SLurl link to visit Nemo, which as the name suggests, is a steampunk city inspired by that most original of steampunk novelists, Jules Verne himself. It's the work of Sextan Shepherd, who tells me he is a reporter in France's financial and economical press. In his off hours, however, he has been below the waves of Second Life, working over a course of nearly two months to make his vision of Nemo come alive. It is one of the most magnificent installations ever made in SL, full of rich details.

Take this clock in Nemo's exhibition room, for example, pictured after the break:

Jesse Schell, Get Real: Accessibility, Not Reality, Is the Big Force Driving Games and Virtual Worlds Today

In a widely-discussed DICE talk last month, Carnegie Mellon University professor Jesse Schell argued that reality and gaming (including virtual worlds) are converging to a point where MMO-type game systems will shape our everyday lives. (As I told Jane McGonigal, the dystopian future he envisions is best described as "Brave New World of Warcraft".) If you haven't seen it yet, make the time this week: It's a fascinating and provocative talk. However, I believe Schell's analysis is ultimately wrong. And because he's wrong in a way that connects to where Second Life is in relation to the rest of the interactive digital market, and where it needs to go in the near future, I want to explain my thinking here.

Anyway, here's the video:

PS3 Games - E3 2010 - Guitar Hero 5

To make the case that our modern lives are becoming more game-like, Schell cites the unexpected phenomenal popularity of several recent game products, chief among them the Nintendo Wii, music games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, and social games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars. Their success surprised the interactive industry, but Schell sees them as part of a broader trend: an overwhelming desire for real experiences. "We live in a bubble of fake bullshit," as he puts it, "and we'll do anything to get to what is real." Social games, music games, and Wii games are designed to be played with our real friends, and often incorporate real physical activity into the gaming experience. Which is what makes Schell think everyday real world activities like practicing the piano and eating will soon come embedded with game-like leveling systems.

But while that might be the case, there's a small problem with this prognostication. There's not much evidence consumers are moving in the direction Schell thinks they are.