New World Notes

"AmazeCraft": Amazing Minecraft Machinima

Created by "Vareide", this is a lush and jaw-dropping new Minecraft-based machinima, which shows just how much the subgenre has improved over the last few months:

Vareide achieved the Avatar-worthy helicopter shots with a special mod, and captured the video with FRAPS, with post-production in Sony Vegas Pro 9 and Adobe After Effects. Hat tip: Brett, who's no slouch at Minecraft machinima himself.

Speaking of Minecraft, new Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble also liked the Minecraft review by Zero Punctuation I blogged a few weeks ago, Tweeting thus: "[A]greeing with Zero's summary of Minecraft's strengths (IE: easy to use.)" Update: Actually Humble was responding to Ron "@Zero" Blechner, who Tweeted: "Ask yourselves why MineCraft is more popular than SL. It's the UI, not the content."

Major Second Life Content Theft Lawsuit Against Linden Settled With Promise of Better Protection, Says Ex-Plaintiff

A major lawsuit against Linden Lab filed by its own users in late 2009 has been settled. That news was recently announced by one of the plaintiffs, virtual adult entertainment impresario Stroker Serpentine, during the taping of Metaverse TV's "Grumpy Old Avatars" show. The lawsuit alleged that the company was allowing and enabling content theft of the plaintiff's material by other Residents. Last week, however, Mr. Serpentine (Kevin Alderman IRL) said the dispute had been resolved out of court:

"We settled the lawsuit with Linden Lab," he told the "Grumpy" hosts, "we settled amicably, and reasonably, and we're anticipating a concerted effort on Linden's behalf going forward towards content protection and the rights of content creators and at least being aware of the fact that there is a lot of content theft going on out there."

That's quite a turn of events: For a year and a half, Mr. Serpentine's lawsuit (filed with fashion designer Munchflower Zaius) was championed and followed by many SL content creators, especially those who felt they'd been cheated by content theft, or complained against what they saw as the company's lax enforcement of creator rights. On the other side, Linden Lab in its defense argued that the plaintiffs' suit was null in part from the doctrine of "unclean hands", where it's argued that the plaintiff is acting unethically or in bad faith. All that, however, is now moot.

You can watch the video after the break - Stroker Serpentine makes his announcement at around 6:50, then proceeds to rant on various topics in a way that only Stroker can. Question for content creators: Now that this lawsuit has been settled, does it change your opinion of how Linden Lab enforces content theft allegations?

Top 8 New World Notes Posts Last Week

Sander's Villa: The Man Who Gave His Father a Second Life: "Last year, Dutch illustrator Peter Vos was suffering the last stages of pancreatic cancer, and opted not to treat it...

"And as death approached, the artist’s son did an extraordinary thing: He began to build a place that would live on after his father, made with particles of light. That is to say, Sander Vos logged into Second Life, and made a gallery of his father’s work in digital 3D..."

New World Style

• Ophelia's Gaze: My Top Three Favorite Avatar Skins from Vanity Universe's Skin Fair

Second Life

• Kinect Integrated Into Snowstorm Second Life Viewer by Merov Linden (Who Also Worked on a Kinect Predecessor)!
• Linden Lab's Current Position a Little Like AOL's -- Profitable, But From Unsustainable Revenue
• Meet New World Notes Readers' Favorite Second Life Live Music Performers: Chouchou!

Marvelous Machinima

• "Fusion": Beautiful SL Machinima Inspired by Resnais & Second Life Steampunk Art Installations of Bryn Oh
• "Urban Royale": Pretty Cool Example of Second Life Gamer Machinima (Yes, It's Really Second Life)

New World Gaming

• Real Time Human-to-Avatar Motion Capture with Kinect -- Has Linden Lab Missed the Boat (And Does That Matter)?

Meet New World Notes Readers' Favorite Second Life Live Music Performers: Chouchou!

After months of reader nominations and semi-final rounds and an especially fierce final selection process that garnered almost 900 votes, I'm pleased to announce the winner of New World Notes' first Reader Poll for favorite Second Life live music performer: Chouchou, the Japanese ambient combo. Here's a look at a recent Chouchou music machinima video:

Thanks to everyone who participated in the poll, and the hundred-plus musicians who were nominated. I'll be profiling Chouchou in greater detail soon, and reaching out to the other nine finalists: Winston Ackland, Von Johin, Komuso Tokugawa, JueL Resistance, Grace McDunnough, Cypress Rosewood, Cosmic Haystack, The Black Stripes, and of course, finishing a very strong second, pop star Skye Galaxy.

How Widespread is the Redzone IP Tracking Controversy in Second Life? (UPDATED)

2/28: Important update at bottom of post.

There's a low boil Second Life imbroglio over Redzone, a popular detection device that's designed to block users of Copybot content theft software, including any alternate avatar accounts they might use. (So for example, if you ban a Resident suspected of using Cobybot from your store, he can't come back minutes later with an alt account.) The controversy stems over how Redzone determines who has an alt account: By using a feature in Second Life's media streaming service to track a user's IP address. Some in Second Life consider Redzone a violation of their privacy, and consequently, there is a painfully long comment thread in a JIRA technical support request, created by Residents demanding the Lindens deem Redzone a violation of the company's Terms of Service. You can also get an anti-Redzone perspective from a blog post by Avril Korman, "Second Life Erupts In a War Over Privacy". As many

However, it's unclear how much of a "war" this controversy actually amounts to: The JIRA thread has less than 1500 "votes" from Residents who consider the request valid and important... which amounts to less than .002% of the active SL population.

In any case, the Lindens have deemed the complaint not worth any more consideration from the company:

Take This Fascinating Academic Survey on Avatars & Real Life Identity

Which avatars above are closest to the modesty level you generally choose for your own avatar? That's among the questions you'll answer in this intriguing survey on avatar and real life identity, for a study by University of Missouri-Columbia media professor Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz, PhD, who's also an active Second Life user herself. "I am interested in understanding how people represent themselves in virtual worlds, interact with others, and the influence of virtual worlds on offline life," she tells me. She'll be sharing the results with New World Notes, and up to 10 participants will get L$5000 each from a lottery drawing. So go here to take it!

Female Artists of Second Life: Stanford Libraries and Lynn Hershman Want Your Art!

If you're a female artist working in Second Life, you'll want to click this link, which takes you to Revolution Art Women, an interactive, community-curated media archive of art by women, an outgrowth of a documentary by noted artist Lynn Hershman Leeson. Working with Stanford University Libraries, the project is specifically reaching out to women whose medium is Second Life. Why? Well, Hershman has featured her own work in SL, and also, founding Linden Robin Harper is helping promote the project: "I'm especially eager to see some SL artists involved," she tells me. "It seems perfect, given the innovative aspect of SL creativity, and how many of the artists are women." Go here to submit your work (images and YouTube video links accepted right now.)

"Fusion": Beautiful SL Machinima Inspired by Resnais & Second Life Steampunk Art Installations of Bryn Oh

"Fusion", a Second Life machinima by Iono Allen, has utterly gorgeous visuals complemented by a rich soundtrack, a dreamlike story-within-a-story partly inspired by French film master Alan Resnais (Last Year in Marienbad). Watch:

It was also inspired by 3D art installations of Second Life art master Bryn Oh, in particular her sci-fi steampunk-flavored story The Rabbicon, summarized here and also here. "In Bryn's Rabbicorn story," Mr. Allen explains, "at the very beginning, the robot girl was human, she was a little girl very sick, and her soul has been transferred to a robot girl." This was the source of inspiration for his own story:

Ophelia's Gaze: My Top Three Favorite Avatar Skins from Vanity Universe's Skin Fair

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of virtual world and MMO fashion

The 3rd Vanity Universe Skin Fair [SLurl] is running from February 20th to March 6th, featuring new and old releases from dozens of amazing skin designers. I love a well put-together fair because it's an ideal way to get caught up on what both established designers and emerging ones have been up to, without the hassle of scouring blogs and teleporting all over the place. I'm definitely not the only one who feels this way, since the sim has been consistently filled since opening day. If you haven't been able to get there yet (or if you're wondering if it's worth the trouble), here are my favorite new skins from this year's lineup.

I can't say that I've been a devotée of Monyka Benelli and Monicuzza Babenco's brand, YS & YS, in the past. However their latest skin, Liu, caught my eye at the fair and has turned me on to the brand a little more. Normally I wear the palest skin tones, but the paler version of this skin, named Susan, didn't quite wow me as much as Liu. I think that there's just something about the face itself that seems to "pop" more in tan– Susan can seem almost sallow in comparison. The real signature of the skin is the shading on the lips, which give them the appearance of curving and dipping down in the middle in a way that is impossible to achieve without using image editing software. I've seen other skinmakers try to achieve this effect before, but with far less success than Liu.

Keep reading for two more drop dead gorgeous finds from the Vanity Universe Skin Fair!

Real Time Human-to-Avatar Motion Capture with Kinect -- Has Linden Lab Missed the Boat (And Does That Matter)?

Using Unity3D, a studio called Esimple recently figured out how to create a Kinect hack that captures human movement and translates it in real time to an avatar. Watch, and be sure stay around for :45, when we also see some (rudimentary) human-avatar interaction with dynamic 3D objects:

Unity3D And Microsoft Kinect? Hell Yeah! from Esimple on Vimeo

Pretty impressive. There have been a number of hacks connecting Second Life to Kinect, but none work like this -- instead, as with this USC version, a human gesture merely triggers a pre-existing avatar animation. The developer of the Linden Lab version that I blogged about yesterday argues this is the better way to go. With dynamic one-to-one motion capture, Philippe Bossut argued, "[o]ne can fall into the Uncanny Valley in no time".  More than that, however, there's the technical difficulty of even making this possible in Second Life; for starters, that would require reviving the avatar pupeteering project the company abandoned a couple years ago. Meantime, this Unity 3D version is already (relatively) operational.

But is dynamic motion capture that desirable?