New World Notes

VR Pioneer Explains Why Virtual Reality is Making the Same Mistakes That Hurt VR in the 90s - And How to Avoid Them

"Don't let VR go wrong again!" is a blog post you should read right now, because it's by Jacquelyn "Jacki" Morie, a VR pioneer who sees the same mistakes being made by Oculus Rift and other leaders of the VR industry that caused the technology to hit a trough of disillusionment in the early 90s. Part of the problem is a resurgence of breathless headlines like "Could Oculus Rift bring people back from the dead?" (yes, really) which inevitably lead to disaster:

"What sensational headlines like these do is create extremely unreasonable expectations for VR - the same thing that happened towards the end of the 1990s in VR's first popularization," she writes. "When those promises don't pan out, then people are disappointed and things start to falter."

Another part of the problem is a generation gap, because many of today's VR industry leaders were barely around for VR's first wave. (Oculus Rift founder Palmer Luckey was born in 1992.)

"That's a big part of it," Jacki tells me, "but the other part is people with a long history in film and related media who want to take what they know and ride the VR wave. That is why we have Cinematic VR - which is not really interactive, immersive VR as VR can really be experienced."

Another problem is that the tech press is focused too much on covering venture funding of VR, as opposed to VR innovators: "I'd like to see more people really pushing the envelope on what VR could be," she says. "And I'd like the press to follow those people and their work, rather than just reporting on who got the latest big round of VC financing. VCs are not really investing in the full potential of VR - but on what today's media consumers know and feel comfortable with - just put into a sexy HMD. I don't have high hopes for the press doing that though."

As it happens, Jacki was a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Creative Technologies (at USC) while Palmer Luckey was a student engineer there, but didn't interact much with him directly. She does have advice that Oculus Rift and other VR companies could follow:

Iris Wants to Know: What Was the First Second Life Sim You Remember Visiting?

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

A couple nights ago I was living my glamorous adult life, watching documentaries and playing Pokemon Rumble World, when the crotchety narrator murmured a name that caught my attention: Tortuga. He was of course talking about the famous hub of Atlantic piracy, but that's not what piqued me. The mention of then name brought back a flood of memories about one of the first places I ever went in Second Life, an island based around the oft-romanticized real world Tortuga.

I'd gone there for one of those "How to be a Second Life model" classes that were as pervasive then as they are now. This one had turned up while I was browsing the event listings for something to do that evening. It was not a particularly impressive experience, and it may explain why I have such a low opinion of these kinds of courses now. It was an hour or so spent standing and watching someone walk their avatar back and forth, then walking our own avatars back and forth, then a Q&A that I recall being quite uneventful because we'd learned too little to even begin to have questions about it. This doesn't sound like a fond memory, I'm sure, but Tortuga (the sim's exact name still escapes me, just that 'Tortuga' was in there somewhere) was also one of the first sims I stuck around on, loitering and checking things out. I bought some accessories from a nearby store after the class was over, and took in the sights since themed sims still seemed very novel and unique to me at the time. Later I'd stumble into the world of virtual mermaid tails and Tortuga would be my first stop, lurking in the water with my shiny new fins and matching animation override and greeting anyone who passed by.

It's a wealth of (admittedly awkward) nostalgia, and I'd completely forgotten about all of it. That's why I want to know: What's the absolute earliest Second Life location (not including Infohubs or Welcome Areas or any of that nonsense) that you remember visiting? As always, share your stories in the comments below!

Where in Second Life Should You Go on SL Go's Last Day?

SL Go is going away today, and while another Second Life streaming service is starting to come online, chances are it'll be many months before we're able to enjoy similar high resolution across many devices that everyone loved about SL Go.

With some 12 hours left to enjoy SL Go, where should you go? Here's five places to get you started:

Watch This Gorgeous Machinima Tour Through Second Life's Fantasy Faire 2015

Fantasy Faire 2015 is open now, and veteran SL artist/musician ColeMarie Soleil created this beautifully shot tour through the Faire's 13 sims, which are now showcasing some of the very best creativity in Second Life right now -- watch:

As great as they are, Colemarie says the sim themselves are not the best part of the Faire:

I'm Disappointed That Steam's Paid Mods Are Off the Table (for Now), and Here's Why

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

Steam's nascent paid mod system has been scrapped (at least for the time being) in a shockingly quick reversal after its launch late last week. Naturally the Skyrim community, the test group for the system's initial roll-out, has been celebrating enthusiastically and oh wait, I'm lying. People are still very upset, myself included. 

I'm actually more disappointed than I am upset, for two very specific reasons.

Kickstarter to Avatarize Yourself for 3D Worlds, Printing

Via Robert Thomas, here's an ambitious Kickstarter which brings high-end 3D motion capture to the masses, enabling anyone with $159 or more to avatarize themselves for 3D worlds or 3D printing, watch:

Slight catch: You need to be available and on-hand in various US cities during the project's tour to do the 3D capture process, but if you can do that, you're working with technology currently being used in VR:

We've already used the xxArray to develop a number of groundbreaking commercial projects, including the first-ever interactive 3D campaign for Amazon's Kindle Fire HDX to promote Relativity Media's "Earth to Echo," and Nurulize’s "RISE" demo, a 4K VR experience created for the Oculus Rift's DK2.

Pretty cool, if you really want to see yourself in full digitized 3D, though I sort of suspect the market self-avatarization is pretty limited. Also, to judge by the above video, this technology can capture the physical body, but not the soul -- i.e. facial expressions, emotions, etc. (At least at the asking price point.)

Real Life Becomes Blade Runner: Cool Instagram Feed

 

"I'm going home." "You could learn from this guy Gaff. He's a god damn one man slaughter house. That's what he is. Four more to go. Come on Gaff, let's go." "Three. There's three to go" ---------- #BladeRunner #scifi #futuristic #nyc #manhattan #timesquare #instanyc

A photo posted by Blade Runner Reality (@bladerunnerreality) on Apr 19, 2015 at 7:48am PDT

Real life is becoming a Philip Dick-inflected cyberpunk retro-futuristic pan-Asian megapolis, didn't you know that? Bladerrunerreality is an Instagram feed devoted to documenting that evolution. Here's an interview with the creators. (Via Boingboing.)

Second Life Shape Shop Ample Avi Debuts a New Look for Their Classic Freebie (NWN Partner News)

As regular readers know, every month we feature a shape or a piece of news from Ample Avi, one of New World Notes' sponsoring partners. This month Ample Avi designer Xme Xue reached out to me about highlighting one of her classic shapes which has recently undergone a bit of a facelift, and I was glad to oblige.

Rita has been one of the brand's free samples for some time now, and she's a fairly standard representation of what Ample Avi has to offer. They specialize in selling curvy, petite, and plus-sized avatar shapes in Second Life, designed to offer a realistic but still stylish alternative to the stickbug-like glamazon shape shops that pepper the virtual fashion world. Xme tells me that she makes a habit of trying to update her shapes every year or so, and that in Rita's case those updates were substantial enough to warrant a full re-release. Rita v2 (like her previous incarnation) is Ample Avi in a nutshell: Dangerous curves, elegant features, and proportions grounded more in reality than most.

You can get Rita v2 for free on the Second Life Marketplace. While the free version of Rita V2 is copyable, if you're looking to tweak and modify her at all you'll need to buy the full version on the Marketplace or in-world [Teleport link] instead. In case you're curious, I'll say that she fits quite comfortably into the medium size of R2's mesh dress from the April round of Collabor88, no modifications required.

Yes, You Can Convert Your SL Avatar Into Huanshi's MyIdol

How Hamlet looks in Huanshi's MyIdol

MyIdol (listed by its Chinese name in Apple's App Store: 小偶 - 我的3D萌偶), a free app from a developer called Huanshi, has gone incredibly viral. (As Iris reported last week, in a post that's been read by thousands of new readers, presumably people trying to Google information about MyIdol.) The app's designed to convert real world photos onto a 3D cartoon avatar, but as you can see above, MyIdol can also convert a straight-on image of your Second Life avatar. (Probably works with other MMO/RPGs, I suspect.) I think the conversion actually work even better than using RL photos (for obvious reasons). Give it a try, NWNers, and the post results in Comments!

So far, the app itself is pretty simple, with some cute/stupid animations and a large wardrobe of costumes you can play with. However, I actually suspect Huanshi has something even more ambitious in mind:

This is the Single Worst Sentence in Bethseda's Announcement Defending Paid Skyrim Mods

Today Bethesda posted a weak defense of its highly controversial (and much discussed) new policy to sell user-made Skyrim mods, which the company then hastily reversed in an update to the same post. Even with the reversal, however, the whole ridiculous imbroglio sets a horrible precedent for user-made content in open world games from major publishers, because this single line from the company is now part of that precedent. It is so misguided, so ignorant, so greedy in the short term at the expense of long-term benefit, it needs to be laid out and shot full of arrows to the knee.

It came out in regard to Bethesda and Valve taking 75% of user-made mod sales to the mod developer's pitiful 25% cut:

The percentage conversation is about assigning value in a business relationship. How do we value an open IP license? The active player base and built in audience? The extra years making the game open and developing tools? The original game that gets modded? Even now, at 25% and early sales data, we’re looking at some modders making more money than the studio members whose content is being edited.

Emphasis mine, because the utter WTF-nesss of this line bears emphasis. Because it suggests that Bethesda looked at its sales data, noticed the runaway financial success of its most talented, dedicated grassroots developer fans... and decided that was a bad thing.

I'm not even finished with how bad this is: