New World Notes

Artist Compiles Hot Male Avatars for Feminist Art Show -- But Ladies, Are They Hot to You?

Hello ladies: Look at your man, now back at these male avatars, now back at your man... well, you get the idea. What you're actually looking at is detail from a set of 25 Second Life avatars compiled by Los Angeles artist Kris Schomaker (Gracie Kendal in SL), who selected them from her latest Second Life-themed art project, 1000 Avatars. She's submitting these gentlemen to an upcoming feminist art show at Rutgers, "Man as Object - Reversing the Gaze". In most traditional art, she explains, "women have been painted and created to support the male gaze. For their pleasure. This show is a feminist take on that. A reversal in which the male is used for female viewing pleasure."

Of course, because her men are avatars, another layer of meaning gets added:

"Are they really women [in real life]? Are they gay? Does this change the idea of the female gaze? The title is actually '25 most beautiful men?' So the question mark is very important. Are we really looking at men? Who are they? And of course, I love the ideas of the backs again, symbolizing anonymity but also in this case, I believe a form of objectification."

It's a topic we've covered on New World Notes, largely via Iris' yearly Hot Male Avatars column. My curiosity is how hot they actually are, from a woman's perspective, notwithstanding several layers of mediation there are in a screenshot of a male avatar, and an actual male. What say you, my female readers?

As for Gracie, she chose her 25 males from hundreds of candidates because "Each has a real character to him. Whether more sexy or hip, artsy or beautiful." And no, she insists, the sole criterion wasn't a smashing ass.

"When you have seen 1500 butts," as she tells me, "they all look the same after a while."

Oh yes, you wanted to see all 25? Courtesy Kristine Schomaker, see them all after the break. Possibly not safe for work viewing, what with the farrago of dude buttocks about to fly your way:

Coley's World: Visit Merlino Mayo's Profound New Second Life Art Installation "Naturae"

A new sim-wide artwork, Merlino Mayo's "Naturae", is a surreal and metaphysical installation which draws much inspiration from the theme of Man losing touch with an integral part of himself, blinded by his own technological advancements. In the beginning of this video, for example -- a large figure's feet seem to erode into a pile of bodies, suggesting a loss of control, just as our technology seems stable, but below the surface teems a variety of technology we cannot comprehend:

But the visitor is encouraged to interpret the various dream levels of Naturae in their own personal way. I highly recommend people explore this lovely, eloquent, and profound build:

[Click here to teleport to Naturae in MiC]

ColeMarie Soleil covers the Second Life arts scene for New World Notes when inspiration strikes.

Soleil, her first album, is now available on iTunes here and also available on Soleil's Band Camp page, created in collaboration with fellow Second Life musician Tasuku Ghost. Before joining SL, she was a studio musician, a wandering gypsy, a graphic designer, and a solo artist who's performed at Whiskey a Go Go in Los Angeles and the Apollo in Manhattan. See more of her machinima here.

How Many Second Life Residents Are in Their 20s? In 2008, They Were Roughly 40% of the Userbase

Last week when I mentioned that Second Life was popular with some twentysomethings (contrary to the common assumption that SL is a Gen X-only phenomenon), metaverse consultant and ex-Linden John Lester very reasonably asked for demographic data. I checked with Linden Lab, but for whatever reason, they declined to release current info. However, back in 2008 they did, and I happen to have those reports in archive:

In 2008 (as shown here) 25% of the userbase was 24 or under, and 35% were between 25-34. Assuming half of that age band were then 25-29, that's another 17% in their 20s, give or take. So in total, in 2008, roughly 43% of Second Life's user base was in their 20s or younger. (To estimate conservatively, let's round that down to 40%.) Assuming a 10% or even 20% dropoff in the last 3 years, the twentysomething population of SL now would still be significant. Given Linden Lab's recent advertising campaigns emphasizing vampire roleplaying games in Second Life, it's even possible the number of young Residents has actually increased from 40% since then, or at least remained relatively stable.

In Second Life's New Basic Viewer, User Profiles Come With Leveling System That Encourages Adding Real Life Details

The new "Basic" Second Life viewer is now the official default viewer for SL, Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble announced yesterday, and along with point-and-click movement and instant avatar selection, it comes with a couple interesting features: Resident user profiles now have a "Profile Completeness" progress bar, a kind of leveling system popular in gamification. (Yes, I hate that term too.) The more information you put in your user profile, the closer the Profile Completeness reaches 100%. It's a subtle addition, but when a job network added a similar feature to its user profiles, the CE0 of a gamification company recently told me for a report I wrote on the topic, "conversion skyrocketed." I tend to think we'll now see many more complete Resident profiles too.

To reach 100% completion in your Second Life profile, you have to add some interesting details: Specially, your Real Life Biography. While doing this isn't mandatory in the least, the subtle nudge of making it a perquisite for a "Complete" Second Life profile means more people will add some information there. And again, there's no obligation to add specific real world identifying details to that Biography. (Far as I can tell, putting any info in there will bump your progress meter upward.) But again, the nudge remains. And with this move, Linden Lab under Rod Humble's management takes another small but significant step away from Second Life as many understood it for years, as fostering identities that were separate from users' real selves. But this is probably another necessary nudge to make Second Life mass market. Because to the best of our knowledge, avatar-only identities have likely made Second Life niche.

Kitely CEO Answers Your Questions About His Cloud-Driven OpenSim Service Kitely

Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner is participating in the Comment thread of my post on Kitely, his much-discussed cloud-based OpenSim delivery service. So if you have questions about Kitely, go here and pose them, in the hopes he answers those as well. Samples so far:

• [O]ur business, operations and development are not ready for prime time yet. We’re just 2 guys working from home who had just made their public website available and were swept by some very welcome traction waaaay sooner than they had expected.
• I appreciate your privacy concerns [around Kitely's Facebook Connect requirement] but more than 600 million people share the Facebook information you mentioned with the millions of websites that use Facebook Connect without ever installing anything from us.
• We are currently subsidizing everybody’s usage, if our free service isn’t appealing enough for you to use then continue using what does suit your needs and, hopefully, you’ll be willing to give us a try once we’ve taken care of everything your cautious about.

You can also follow Kitely on Twitter here. Looks like they just upgraded virtual world storage capacity from 10 gigs to one damn terrabyte!

4 Second Life-Based AI Projects With Education, Training, & Research Applications Win Federal Awards

Four Second Life-based artificial intelligence projects won last weekend's Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge, led by the U.S. Army's Research Laboratory, a contest to develop and award virtual world-based applications of AI with real world use cases. (Here's the whole list.) While the awards were relatively small (several thousand dollars in most cases), the projects themselves were pretty impressive. Here's a look at the four SL-based winners, spanning applications as various as education, disaster preparedness, defense, and science research:

"Curiosity AI", by Shannon Bohle, is a prototype artificial intelligence that communicates R&D concepts to be used in our future exploration of Mars:

The Second Life Checkpoint Exercise was developed by USC's Institute for Creative technologies, and uses AIs to simulate Iraqis civilians for training soldiers to handle peacekeeping duties. (Click screenshot for video and more info):

Two more after the break:

Watch the Psychedelic Winner of Giana Factory's Second Life Machinima Video Contest for "Pixelated Truth"

As announced in-world last weekend at Pop Art Lab, this is the winner of the fiercely competitive contest to create an official Second Life machinima video for the song song "Pixelated Truth", by hit Danish indie group Giana Factory's.  The winning version was created by FuzOnAcid and Fuschia Nightfire, watch:

Giana Factory's singer, Loui Foo, explained the band's choice by cellphone in between the whirlwind of her rock and roll lifestyle:

"The winning video is amazingly abstract! It pictures an absurdity and a parallel universe, we could not even imagine existed. We find the colors and the playfulness and creativity in the universe very attractive. It's unpredictable and avant garde and still pure eye candy, and has an almost burlesque feel to it. Besides that, we think it goes well with the tune and keeps the story untold, and it's up to the viewer to create their own."

Ms. Foo was also impressed by Second Life as a medium: "[I]n general it was very interesting to see so many different machinima videos for the same song," she said. "It really made the song appear different each time, and we laughed a lot and were really amazed with Second Life. It would be great to be playing a show inside Second Life and maybe work directly with some of the designers!" So look for more metaverse-based collaborations with these rising pop indie stars.

My personal favorite entry in the contest, by Arbit Delacroix, was a close second. Watch his take after the break:

Ask Miss Metaverse Manners About the Etiquette of Avatar Abandonment and Dealing With Crappy Content

Go here to ask Iris Ophelia anonymous questions for her upcoming Miss Metaverse Manners columns. She's preparing posts with two themes, so she's particularly interested in questions of this variety:

• Dealing with avatar abandonment: It's not uncommon for an avatar close to you to suddenly cut off all contact with you and the rest of the virtual world. Ask Iris specific questions around the subject, either as the abandoning avatar, or the avatars abandoned.
• Dealing with crappy virtual content: In a world with an intense social media ecosystem, is there a tactful way to tell someone their Second Life content is, well, sorta sucky? Tell Iris your dilemma here!

Go to her Formspring page and anonymously ask Iris your question, and be sure to use a pseudonym. (Feel free to pose them in Comments below, as well.) Next week she'll address several of her favorite queries!

Cat Meets Second Life Cat (UPDATED)

... in which a cat named Bender spots a fellow feline behind the glass, though it happens to be a virtual neko, and makes a heroic attempt to free her:

The dancing neko is actually Bender's owner, Aallotar Takaaki. So come to think of it, this is a novel new way of cat-to-owner interaction, via avatar.

Update, 8:10PM: Ms. Takaaki remembers Bender here. Shortly after this video, she had to give up Bender to a new home: "I miss his cute bum infront of my screen every time I logged into Second Life and how he always was walking all over my keyboard making strange messages in local chat."

The Kitely Revolution: An Easy, Cheap, Cloud-Powered Virtual World Hosting Service the "WordPress of OpenSim"

Kitely, a new OpenSim-based virtual world hosting service, is now available in Beta, and it's impressive and potentially transformative for a number of reasons:

• It's extremely quick and easy to use. Facebook Connect creates your account in seconds. A small plug-in downloads in a few more seconds, then when you want to enter a Kitely-hosted world, one button launches a Second Life-compatible viewer (or in my case, an official SL viewer.) I was able to create and enter the mini-world pictured above in under 3 minutes.
• It's very cheap. Kitely hosts and deploys OpenSim-based virtual worlds on Amazon's cloud service, which means for most use cases, it's many times cheaper than buying and running a Second Life sim. As a cloud-based service, you pay only for use, now billed at 20 cents an hour per user. So, for example, if you ran an in-world event for 50 people for an hour, that'd cost you just $10.
• It's easily shareable: You can share worlds as easily as you would a URL. So for instance, you can click this Kitely link and go directly to Andrek Lowell's world. (Where he has already figured out how to upload meshes.) Essentially, it's now as easy to share and enter an OpenSim-compatible world as it is with Second Life SLurl links.
• It's compatible with OpenSim files. When you create a world on Kitely, you can upload an OpenSim Archive (or OAR) file and instantly make that your world.    "[I] uploaded an OAR and was standing on my own sim in under 2 minutes," architect Jon Brouchoud tells me.   "I'm not aware of any other service quite so fast and easy for setting up a new sim... It's like being able to turn to a fresh page in a sketchbook any time you want to start brainstorming a new idea or project, with no waiting period or technical know-how required."

Brouchoud, who is a leading innovator in using virtual worlds for architecture, tells me he thinks Kitely is a big deal indeed: