New World Notes

John Carmack: "Crass Commercialization", Not High-Mindedness, Will Lead to the Metaverse

Joyce Bettencourt is a longtime metaverse developer (and Rhiannon Chatnoir in Second Life), and she got a chance to grab OculusVR CTO John Carmack at the company's recent developer conference to talk Second Life, Minecraft, and the Metaverse in general-- so let's watch:

"[H]e leans more towards platforms like Minecraft, which is coming to Oculus and GearVR as having potential to lead towards a metaverse than say Second Life." Joyce summarizes. "He mentions that the lack of implicit 'what do I do and gameplay' as downsides to SL."

That's a very valid point, something I've discussed at length here and with Second Life's co-founders -- both Philip Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka, who expressed a desire to see Second Life add a gaming system after leaving Linden Lab, and then went on to lead Facebook's acquisition of Oculus VR.

Anyway, more from Rhiannon, who provokes a good point from Carmack on how the metaverse will come about:

Project Sansar Causing Significant Minority of SLers to Spend Less Money in Second Life

Project Sansar is causing a significant minority of Second Life users to decrease their spending in SL, according to my survey of over 225 NWN readers.  Over 1 in 4 say they're spending less in SL since Sansar was announced, many perhaps sharing this opinion left in the survey comment thread:

I use about 40% of my current inventory because I'm an interior decorator and landscaper on sl. Will I move to Sansar? No. After having invested literally thousands of dollars US on the current platform, I will not be making the same mistake twice. AND I will say one more thing, I personally am sick and tired of LL's income on SL being spent on projects that won't benifit SL in any way.

Lemon Panda 

All is not bad news for Linden Lab, however, because my survey also asked if people had changed their usage of Second Life because of Sansar, and a much smaller percent said they were now using SL less:

Veteran Linden Exec Cyn Skyberg Co-Launches User Identity & Access Management Technology

Anvil Research is a startup now crowd-funding Anvil Connect, an open source authorization server built to authenticate your users and protect your APIs, and one of the team leads is Cyn Skyberg, Linden Lab's former VP of Community, who also had a similar position with Cloud Party. Developers can use Anvil Connect for any number of use cases, including identity and shared data management within an MMO. Cyn tells me the project is definitely influenced by her work with community-oriented companies up to now:

"Working with the SL community, and others like Wikipedia, eBay and Cloud Party, has been fundamental to the shaping of how I think about and work with communities in general, whether they are internal or external to the organization I am working with," Cyn tells me. "I have come to believe, and put into practice, that when you are engaging with a community to build a product or service, that influence and input has to be at the foundation of what you are doing. In other words:

Flickr Stream of the Day: Jun sagittaire's Artful Wanderings Through Second Life

Literally every Second Life image on the Flickr stream of Jun sagittaire looks like a lush and luminous painting - generally featuring a thoughtful young dude and his wandering dog (or sometimes a cat). I'm not exactly sure what WindLight/Photoshop witchcraft is at work, but I'm utterly impressed. Go here and see for yourself.

Hat tip: Ms. Alicia Chenaux, who's got some SL photo skills of her own.

Does Second Life Really Have a "Community"?

In the very chatty conversation over Friday's post, "The Second Life Community Should Lead the New Virtual Reality Wave, Not Follow It" sirhc deSantis makes an interesting and provocative point:

These continual references to the 'Second Life Community' rankle me. With my 9th rez day at the end of this year I have yet to stumble over this mythical beast. Been involved in communities (plural) over the years made up of people with shared interests (of many kinds) but never met this all encompassing one.

As the word is mostly used as marketing speak to mean 'people who buy/use our stuff we want to make feel involved in a more or less touchy feely way so they buy/use more stuff and act as an unpaid evangelical force' I may be a trifle jaded.

The only thing users of SL have in common is that they use SL. Does that make it a 'community'? In the same way as a FaceBook 'community'?

Fair couple of closing questions. As I've noted before, less than 30,000 people typically attend Second Life's annual birthday celebration, which leads me to conclude that there are few SLers who have a deep affinity with SL as a unified virtual community, and more who are just interested in going to their favorite nightclub or roleplaying sim or whatever sub-community they're affiliated with.

In a follow-up comment to his post that started my Friday post, Maxwell Graf makes a good defense of the community concept:

Explore Second Life With New Website & YouTube Channel

Explore SL is a new-ish website which as the title suggests, features great Second Life sites, illustrated both by a blog post and a YouTube video, the latest being the utterly beautiful and dreamy Chouchou sim:

With so many great SL sites disappearing seemingly every week, it's a relief to realize Chouchou is still around after all these years:

Last Day to Take NWN's Second Life/Sansar Survey

I'm still collecting answers around the question, "Has Project Sansar changed your Second Life usage or spending patterns?", but by the end of today, I'm locking the survey down. We already have over 200+ responses, but the larger the data sample, the better. So if you'd like to see your own opinions factored into the summary (published tomorrow, hopefully), take a few seconds to answer two questions.

Microsoft Quietly Developing Low-Cost VR Headset

We know about Microsoft's upcoming augmented reality HoloLens glasses, but now we also know about Microsoft's upcoming VR kit, with a decidedly low cost Google Cardboard-ish vibe:

Spotted on a website to promote a hackathon in Russia, Microsoft is trying to attract developers to an upcoming hackathon that will use the company’s VR-Kits. As you can see in the image at the top of this post, the kit works by inserting your Lumia into a cardboard box and then holding it to your face. The event is being held on October 17th and Microsoft is promoting the event by saying that ideas that are “successful”, according to the translation, the team will be given a VR-Kit so they can keep building their application.

So that also means 3 of the 5 top tech supergiants are confirmed to have a VR product: Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. I'm not surprised Apple has avoided the VR game altogether, but somewhat curious Amazon hasn't jumped in with a VR-powered shopping tool.

Top Five New World Notes Posts from Last Week!

• The Second Life Community Should Lead the New Virtual Reality Wave, Not Follow It
• Will Oculus Medium Become VR's Default 3D Building Tool?
• Retail Stores Suffer as People Prefer Experiences -- Real & Virtual -- Over Things
• Second Life's Beloved Recreation of Mont Saint Michel Soon Leaving SL for "Economical" Reasons
• Survey: Has Project Sansar Changed Your Second Life Usage or Spending Patterns?

This Weekend in Second Life: Attend a Virtual Fundraiser to Build Real Schools in Kenya

This is a man from Kenya with the Live and Learn in Kenya NGO, thanking the Second Life virtual community for helping raise funds to build real schools in his country:

This is the fundraiser he's talking about, a seriously awesome, 3 day event in SL with live music, DJs, and auctions, all virtual Linden Dollar proceeds converted into cash, then sent across the world to become actual schools for actual children. The extravaganza is here in Stargazer Bay.