New World Notes

Second Life First-Hour User Experience by Returning SLer

This is a really interesting walkthrough of Second Life's current first-time user experience by someone who hasn't played SL for about 10 years:

I created an alt account 2-3 years ago, as I recall, and the on-boarding process has become even more polished and robust since then. A couple other points that emerge from watching this video:

The UI is still extremely challenging for anyone who isn't deeply familiar with MMOs, and the first-time user experience doesn't even come close to doing enough to address that. But friendly, chatty videos like this (by Beau Hindman) are in themselves a good way of introducing people to the UI and all its irksome eccentricities.

which takes me to the next thought:

Second Life Content Creators Cashed Out $60M Last Year, Says Linden CEO - Including Someone Making "Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars" Selling Avatar Feet. Yes, Feet.

Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg let out a couple fascinating facts about the Second Life economy during his SVVR talk yesterday (video below): Content creators cashed out over $60 million last year by selling their Linden Dollars for good old USD. That might not seem like a lot, but there's about 600,000 regular active users in Second Life, so applying the 80-20 rule, it's safe to estimate 120,000 SLers creating and selling SL content on some level, which comes out to an average of $500 per creator (on a very very rough guess). However, there's probably a lot less than that 120K creating content on a highly active, professional basis. And one of them, Altberg says, is doing extremely well:

"There's a woman in New Zealand who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars making hands and feets for avatars and feeds her family by doing that."

Yes, hands and feets. That's how valuable avatar enhancements can be. Notably, Linden Lab also once reported that a maker of Second Life avatar shoes makes close to $1 million a year

Ebbe's full talk after the break, starting at 39 minutes in:

Oculus & USC Developing RL Expression-to-VR Avatar Tech - Solution for Ridiculous "VR Gawk" Still Pending

Notwithstanding the big head-mounted display slapped to your face, the bright kids at Oculus VR and USC researchers are coming up with a way to translate your real life expressions to your VR avatar - and Philip's a fan:

The system tracks the motion of a person’s mouth using a 3-D camera attached to the headset with a short boom. Movements of the upper part of the face are measured using strain gauges added to the foam padding that fits the headset to the face. After the two data sources are combined, an accurate 3-D representation of the user’s facial movements can be used to animate a virtual character, whether that’s an ersatz person or something other than human...

“This is really cool,” says Philip Rosedale, who previously founded Second Life and is now CEO of a virtual worlds startup called High Fidelity. The company is working on enabling realistic virtual social interaction by using webcams and other sensor technology to track facial expressions and arm and hand gestures (see “The Quest to Put More Reality in Virtual Reality”).

More here, including video. The real problem I see here is what NWN reader Issa Heckworth notably termed "The Gawk": That gape-mouthed, dumbass expression you make when wearing a VR headset. ("Everyone I see with these headsets on looks terrible," as she put it.) So if this technology is introduced to the Oculus, expect millions and millions of avatars wandering the metaverse, gawking.

First Look at New SL Streaming Service Bright Canopy

Bright Canopy, the Second Life streaming service aiming to become SL Go's much-needed successor, had a pre-launch event today, and thanks to founder Bill Glover, I got to join the sneak peek. It's still very early days for the service, with all the kinks still being worked out, so read my brief review with that in mind.

TL;DR version: Pretty impressive and relatively economical - if you have really good wi-fi/broadband and you're close to San Francisco and/or a Canopy-connected server.

First the best points: It's optimized to run best on Google Chrome, which for my money, is the best browser on the market. Loading and launch times were pretty fast for me - under a minute. As with SL Go, you get to choose between Firestorm (the most popular 3rd party SL viewer) or the official viewer, another big plus. And the first time I launched, I loaded quickly into a great high-res view of my office (which frankly, I have hardly visited since, well, since SL Go went defunct).

Potential downsides? The $0.79/hr price is probably a bit on the high side for power SL users (and a lot costlier than SL Go's "all you can eat" pricing plans). But I'd expect that price to go down if the company started gaining more subscribers and scaling well. Also, and this might just reflect unique problems with my own system, but it seems like you need a really powerful broadband connection to pull this off:

Linden Lab Planning to "Deal With Sub-Optimal" User-Generated Content in Second Life Successor (Updated)

Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg didn't reveal much about Project Sansar, its successor to Second Life, at yesterday's SVVR conference presentation, but as HyperGrid Business reports, he did offer a strong hint at how it'll treat user-generated content in Sansar:

Additionally the Lab is working on how to “deal with sub-optimal” content. “Users don’t necessarily know how to create extremely optimized content like a gaming studio would,” Altberg said.

This suggests some kind of filtering system (automatic or human-curated) against some user-generated content -- likely content that causes lag or other performance issues, or is just not up to a professional gaming studio's standard. [Note: Linden Lab disputes this interpretation -- see update below. - WJA, 5/20]

At first glance, I'm of two minds: It's definitely good to give new users an extremely curated, high quality experience, so some level of UGC filtering in a user's early stages is totally understandably.

At the same time, "extremely optimized content like a gaming studio" really concerns me:

Iris Wants to Know: Do You Spend More Time Tweaking Your Virtual Home or Your Virtual Self?

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

For as long as I've been in Second Life, I've always changed my avatar's outfit almost as often as I changed my own in reality. This isn't always limited to SL, either. In both Skyrim and Dragon Age Inquisition I'm the kind of player who keeps a few different outfits on hand for a few different situations. An outfit for fighting dragons, an outfit for fighting demons, an outfit for hanging out in the fancy town with the fancy people. You know, practical considerations.

For as often as I change my avatar's clothes, however, I almost never spend too much time changing my avatar's surroundings. I'm the kind of person who updates my land or skybox once a year, if that, but at the same time I'm a big fan of some of the SL photographers on Flickr who capture their decor with as much originality and detail as avatars. Folks like pokute Burt, who created the pic embedded above, who can build a room with more character than ten avatars tied together. 

That's why I want to know, do you put more time into tweaking the look of your land, your virtual home, your skybox or whatever it is you have, or your avatar? What leads you to favor one over the other? As ever, leave your responses in the comments below.

Second Life Bloggers: Follow Canary Beck's SEO Advice and I'll Feature Your Blog on New World Notes!

Here's essential advice for Second Life bloggers from marketing guru and Renaissance woman Canary Beck, explaining in copious details how to optimize your content so potential readers can more easily find it via Google. (What geeks call SEO, search engine optimization.)

This advice couldn't come more soon: Besides SL fashion blogs (many of which are great, albeit for a single sub-vertical of SL content), the Second Life blogging ecosystem has definitely weakened in recent years. So let me make this offer:

Watch the Future of VR Discussed at a Conference with a Speaker Gender Balance from the Mad Men Era

This year's Silicon Valley VR conference is happening today and tomorrow, and you can watch the stream of speakers live here:

Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab, was just on discussing Sansar and Second Life, but unless I missed it, no huge revelations were revealed. But keep watching to hear more from the men running the VR industry today.

And I do mean men: Out of the 61 speakers I'm counting here, only 6 are women: Layla Mah, Jody Medich, Evelyn Miralles, Denise Quesnel, Mary Spio, and Nonny de la Peña. The work of de la Peña, by the way, was praised by VR pioneer Jacki Morie in my interview with her last week, in which we discussed how male heavy the VR industry has become, even though, during VR's first wave, a majority of the VR experience developers were women. Now, however, as you can see for yourself from the live video stream, that gender balance has entirely changed.

I should note that I discussed the gender imbalance with the SVVR coordinators last year, and can confirm they're aware of the issue. If I recall who spoke last year, there's actually a few more women speaking than last year. But the breakdown is still pretty bad.

I can already hear someone mansplaining a reason: "That's only because the tech industry in general has such a poor gender balance. That answer only raises more questions, but putting those to one side, a key question remains:

I Just Can't Stop Staring at this Stunning Watercolorized Second Life Snapshot

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

I'm head over heels for this avatar snapshot Kala Bijoux posted on her Flickr recently. Dubbed "Madeline of Pleasure" this picture is vibrantly colored and incredibly distinctive. I especially like the edges of the image, which fade from dappled color to white like an unfinished watercolor painting. The end result is ridiculously harmonious, what else can I say?

Kala Bijoux's name is a little more familiar for her wing designs than her work on Flickr. She's the designer behind Material Squirrel, a Second Life shop that specializing in meticulously painted avatar wings. Material Squirrel has been around for quite a while now, and takes particular pride in their array of flexible prim wings, rather than using rigid mesh to do the job. This allows her wings to move and bend, meaning that they've retained a popularity that few other flexiprim-based items can claim in SL these days.

if you want to see more of Kala's work, you can check out "Madeline of Pleasure" in all its glory on Flickr, or visit Material Squirrel Wings for yourself on the Second Life Marketplace.

Fury Road Has the Wasteland World Inspiration We Want

If you want to watch a movie that inspires your next round of post-apocalyptic world building (hello, Wasteland denizens!), you'll really want to watch Mad Max: Fury Road. The movie itself is a masterpiece (more on that below), but fans of alternate worlds will also love how Miller and his art team convey so many details about this post-nuclear future through visual and audio cues - the complex tattoos on the War Boys' bodies, for instance, or signs of mutation and nuclear sickness everywhere on most characters' bodies, or the intricate armor/face mask worn by the villain, Immortan Joe. (And for audio, don't forget the war drums, the religious chants, not to mention the electric guitar flamethrower, yes.) So much history and backstory conveyed in these elements without any long passages of dialog or text needed -- that's how to convey a post-literary society, both in film and virtual worlds.

As for Mad Max as a film? I'm still astounded: