New World Notes

Sander's Villa: The Man Who Gave His Father a Second Life

While the artist lay dying, his son made a museum for his father’s work, as a way to stay sane.

Last year, Dutch illustrator Peter Vos was suffering the last stages of pancreatic cancer, and opted not to treat it. Considered one of the best contemporary draughtsmen in the Netherlands, Vos instead decided that he’d spend his final days home, with his wife and family. “[He] did not want to be treated,” his son Sander Vos explains to me, “and did not want any strangers around.” All he asked doctors for was medication to take against the pain.

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. Because the son, as it happens, is an artist too: A filmmaker, in particular, editor of RU There, a feature film set in great part in SL. Which is partly why Sander (whose avatar is called RL Karkassus) could build in Second Life with such facility:

“I started building a 3D version of one of his drawings, ‘Villa Insight’ in Second Life, while he was ill, because building makes me calm in a way,” Sander tells me. “I had to think practical all the time, like: How on earth am I going to make this little ink bottle with prims? And I was busy with him at the same time, ‘cause it was all about him of course."

Sometime during that process, Peter Vos passed away, last November. And in between the burial and the mourning and all death’s necessities, RL Karkassus kept building:

48 Hours Left to Select Your Favorite Second Life Musician -- Chouchou and Skye Galaxy Are Now Neck and Neck!

Click here to select your all-time favorite Second Life performer -- you have 48 hours left to help decide who is New World Notes' top reader favorite! At the moment, supporters of Japanese ambient duo Chouchou and supporters of US pop singer Skye Galaxy are in fierce competition for the top position. The final selection will be announced next Friday morning. Go here to make your choice now!

Kinect Integrated Into Snowstorm Second Life Viewer by Merov Linden (Who Also Worked on a Kinect Predecessor)!

Another metaverse milestone: Kinect interactivity has been integrated into Snowstorm, Linden Lab's open source Second Life viewer, by engineer Philippe Bossut, known in SL as Merov Linden. Watch:

As it happens, this is actually Kinect returning to its roots, so to speak. Back in 2008, Bossut was working with Linden board member Mitch Kapor to create a hands-free 3D camera interace for Second Life. "It compares pretty well since it's the same code really," as Bossut explains to me. "The Kinect hardware is provided by Primesense, and Mitch and me did work with a Primesense camera at the time." As Kapor told me then, this was part of his plan to help make Second Life mass market, but the project was discontinued due to the difficulty of mass producing the 3D camera hardware. With Kinect very much mass market, however, it may be that Microsoft has solved that problem for them. And us.

More from Bossut after the break, on making this code open source, and the fascinating challenges of integrating it into Second Life usage:

Star-Studded San Diego Second Life Meetup This Week!

This February 25-27 there's going to be a real world Second Life meet-up in San Diego, with live music performances from real life Broadway star/avatar chanteuse Tamra Hayden, and another metaverse Mankind Tracer, better known in Southern California as indie rocker Seth Regan. Local journalist Mitch Wagner, author of this widely-discussed analysis of Second Life (follow-up here), should be there too. Fish tacos will also most definitely be there, so if you haven't had San Diego's signature cuisine, for God's sake get one of the locals to take you to their favorite joint. (Here's mine: South Beach Bar & Grille.) Anyway, this event comes to us via San Diego's Ayesha Lytton (Karin Willison IRL). Go here for all the details.

Kinect to Get Official SDK from Microsoft Soon!

Sending a hug into Second Life with Kinect

This is big news: Microsoft will soon release an official software developer kit for Kinect, its 3D camera/motion capture system. This makes it more likely that we'll see more Kinect-to-Second Life projects like the one above, by USC's Thai Pan... or another one, that I'm going to blog soon. Update, 3:10PM: Right here!

Want to Help Fund a Full-Length Minecraft Documentary?

A team of filmmakers are using Kickstarter to raise enough money to make a feature-length documentary on Minecraft, the beloved indie sandbox game, and its gnomishly charming creator, Markus "Notch" Persson. Here's an impressive short based on the footage the crew has already shot -- I appreciate the props to my interview with Notch at around 4:30 minutes in. Launched only a few days ago, the project has already raised $34,152 in pledges, testament to the passion around the game, and to be sure, all the user-generated content devoted around it. I bet you could also use Kickstarter to finance a movie about or shot in Second Life, he subtly hinted.

Got a Great Upcoming Second Life Event You Want to Promote? Post the Blog/Twitter/Plurk/Facebook Link Here!

This is an open forum to promote fun and interesting upcoming Second Life events, but instead of putting all the information in Comments, please try this format: First, put all the pertinent event info in a blog post, Tweet, Plurk, or Facebook listing, then post the link to that info with a short summary in Comments below. The link should should have these details on top:

• DATE, DAY, and TIME of Event (in SLT)
• Event title (10 words or less)
• 50 words or less description of Event, explaining why it's fun and/or interesting
• SLurl to Event

In theory, this will make it easier for me to link to events, while also bringing extra traffic to your blog, or Twitter/Plurk/Facebook account.

Linden Lab's Current Position a Little Like AOL's -- Profitable, But From Unsustainable Revenue

If you follow tech business news, you probably noticed that AOL has been on a buying spree recently, snatching up huge sites like TechCrunch and The Huffington Post, in an effort to transform itself from an Internet service provider to a content hub. That raises two questions: Why is AOL changing its business strategy, and where the hell did they get all that money to make so many pricey acquisitions? As The New Yorker explains in a recent article (subs. req.):

[AOL] still gets eighty per cent of its profits from subscribers, many of whom are older people who have cable or DSL service but don't realize that they need not pay an additional twenty-five dollars a month to get online and check their e-mail. "The dirty little secret," a former AOL executive says, "is that seventy-five per cent of the people who subscribe to AOL's dial-up service don't need it."[emph. mine]

With that in mind, it's easy to see why AOL is spending lots of money to become a content portal: The profits the company is earning from subscriptions will not last, and cannot be replenished. There's no untapped market for ISP subscriptions, because in an era of wireless broadband, the value proposition of a dial-up service is entirely outdated. Instead, this revenue is destined to continue waning, as these existing subscribers realize they no longer need it, or in the next few years, quite literally begin passing away. And while the analogy is not exact, this is very much like the position Linden Lab finds itself now:

"Urban Royale": Pretty Cool Example of Second Life Gamer Machinima (Yes, It's Really Second Life)

When I first saw this machinima, called "Urban Royale", I seriously thought it was shot in a Battlefield map, or another high-end FPS game -- but no, this is Second Life, showing itself fairly capable of capturing some visually tricked out, rock 'em sock 'em gamer action at a decent frame rate:

Directed by Eric Boccara, it's not necessarily meant to a linear narrative (I'm largely oblivious on who the hell's supposed to be gunning for who), but it's full of striking visuals I rarely see in SL machinima. (Watch 1:15, 2:50, 3:20, 3:45, and 4:40 for some samples.)

"The idea to do an action over-the-top, weird, but funny type machinima came to my head when my friend Shakeno Tomsen showed me this awesome Animation Override which had all sorts of features for tactical combat," Mr. Boccara explains. (Links to the AOs and props are in the YouTube description.) The actors are friends of his, many from Natural Selection Studios, an SL machinima group founded by Bebop Vox.

Getting such high quality visual footage from Second Life took some extra effort, which Boccara explains after the break:

When Presidential Candidates Campaigned in Second Life

Happy Presidents Day, fellow US readers. Here's a look back five years ago, when Second Life was once considered such a central Internet destination, a leading Presidential candidate made a campaign appearance in-world: Virginia Governor Mark Warner in Second Life, when he was preparing for a 2008 Presidential bid (which he ultimately dropped.) Instead, Warner gave the keynote address at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, and is now a Senator. Not to be outdone, Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska authorized an official Second Life HQ for his 2008 Presidential run, made by a gentleman named Astrophysicist McCallister.  (Oh yes.) Speaking of Alaska, while numerous SL versions of Sarah Palin have been seen in avatar form, none are known to authorized by the former Vice Presidential candidate.