New World Notes

Great New Business Advice for Second Life & Beyond

April Looming of Wildstyle Fashion has a long blog post of excellent advice for people launching businesses, and while it's written for new SL entrepreneurs, it's about as applicable to other realms, including IRL.

Take, for example, this collection of logos on the right:

Think about these logos. Without even seeing the merchandise... which brand do you think will have the highest quality merchandise? Which brand would you choose to shop at first?

Make your guess and read on:

Are People Really More Civil in Virtual Worlds?

Philip Rosedale is featured on the latest episode of NPR's "Ted Radio Hour" (September 18, "Screen Time - Part II"):

He covers most of the territory from his original TED talk (embedded below), with new emphasis on an idea I've heard him discuss in person, but not sure he's spelled out in public before -- that access to virtual worlds will soon become a civil right:

Our very access to virtual worlds will become a kind of civil right... maybe even 10 years from now, we’ll regard taking away your access to virtual worlds as completely inappropriate.

That's an appealing idea, I guess, though the consumer Internet is about 20 years old, and so far only a few countries have even made basic access to the Internet a civil right. (Not the US or most of the EU.) One reason Philip proposes this is because Philip believes that people in Second Life (or virtual worlds in general) are much more civil to each other.

On this point, there's considerable evidence that this is not the case. Indeed, Philip literally paid me for awhile to explore Second Life as an embedded journalist, and even back in the earliest years, incivility was a fairly regular occurrence -- and became even moreso, as the world grew. But hearing Philip's interview on NPR, it suddenly occurred to me why he maintains this conviction:

HTC Vive Community Hit By Anti-Corporate Drama

There's a huge community blow-up going on in Reddit's /Vive, the hangout for enthusiasts and early developers of Valve's highly anticipated VR platform produced with Taiwanese handset giant HTC. Very briefly summarized, someone from HTC was made part of the /Vive moderator team, and accusations of influence-peddling and corporate control soon followed. This again reflects yet more growing pains as virtual reality tries to go from a hobbyist technology to a mainstream consumer product, with early adopters likely to resist the transition, or outright jump ship to the competing platform seen as most pro-developer and non-corporate.

Oculus VR, as you may remember, got the same kind of hate from that community when it sold to (or sold out to) Facebook. But in that case, Palmer Luckey, a heavy Redditor, was able to directly address the outrage and entirely tamp it down. With Vive, a product of Valve, I'm not sure that's as possible:

Will "Created Reality" Be Project Sansar's Official Name - Or Is It Just Another Discarded Linden Lab Product?

An anonymous tipster dropped enough hints to send me to this US trademark filing by Linden Lab for something called Created Reality, described as being "virtual reality game software; computer graphics software; software that is used for providing multi-user access to an online 3D virtual environment", and such like. My tipster seems to think this suggests the final, official name for Project Sansar will be Created Reality. Linden Lab fan blog Modem World, which also just came across the registration, avidly speculates Created Reality could very well be the name for Sansar... but may have missed the fact that a Linden contractor registered the CreatedReality.com domain in June 2013 -- during the tenure of Rod Humble, who drove a number of projects besides Second Life, but to my knowledge (and that of an insider I talked to), not anything like Sansar. (What we now know as Project Sansar was confirmed to me a full year later, months after Rod had been replaced by Ebbe Altberg.*)

So if Creative Reality isn't Project Sansar's official name, WTF is it?

Neural Network Taught to Paint Presidents Like Picasso

Hey, what's widely admired ex-Linden inventor Karl Stiefvater doing lately? Glad you asked: Teaching a neural network how to paint US Presidents like Picasso, and that from all Picasso's periods (blue, cubistic, and so on). Specifically, via Google's neural network, an algorithm, and code from Kai Sheng Tai, which Karl's all powering with the Amazon cloud.

See the full roster of POTUS by Picasso here, with Cubistic Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson my personal favorites. (President Obama is painted alarmingly white, which I guess means the neural network is totally racist.)

Linden Lab Giving Free Hands-on Preview of Project Sansar This Friday at Linden Lab's San Francisco Headquarters - UPDATE: Event Already Sold-Out, Says Linden PR Rep

Linden Lab is giving a free hands-on preview of Project Sansar this coming Friday at Linden Lab's San Francisco headquarters, according to an SF events calendar site:

This interactive virtual reality workshop will provide a hands-on preview of the new 3D virtual experience platform, code-named Project Sansar, being developed by Linden Lab, the makers of the popular virtual world Second Life. This new platform will enable people to virtually walk through 3D …

Pretty strange to see this apparently open-to-the-public event promoted on a popular general interest SF event site when Project Sansar is supposed to be in closed Alpha with early users under heavy NDA. But there it is. So if you happen to be in San Francisco this Friday and can attend, please report your reactions back here!

UPDATE, 4:05pm: Bad news if you haven't RSVPed already from Linden Lab's Peter Gray:

Yes, This Luxe Scene is Actually a Second Life Skybox

Via the irreplaceable metaverse tastemaster Indigo Mertel comes this breathtaking view of a Second Life interior by Wendz Tempest, one of the most beautiful examples of virtual interior design in quite awhile. Seriously, go here to get all the details and a much larger image.

To be more impressed, consider the fact that Ms. Tempest started this scene with a bare skybox, which comes out of the box looking like this:

Sansar Competitor AltspaceVR Announces Samsung Gear VR Partnership with SL-Style Virtual Press Conference

First comes the press conference hype about VR, then comes press conference hype about VR within VR. Yes: 

In A Virtual Press Event, AltspaceVR Announces Its Chat Room Coming To Samsung Gear VR

VR chat platform AltspaceVR today announced that it is opening support for the Samsung Gear VR, making it the first social chat experience on a mobile VR platform. But rather than gather reporters in person, AltspaceVR CEO Eric Romo presented to a room full of hovering robots representing journalists inside AltspaceVR itself.

As a social place for VR, Altspace is probably a close competitor to Project Sansar from Linden Lab. Which is somewhat ironic, because during the media hype over Second Life, tech companies would host "virtual press conferences" in SL all the time. (To little or no effect)

The World Isn't Ready for Virtual Reality Simulations of Horrific Realities Like 9/11 (Yet)

Provoking a heated conversation even among Reddit's Oculus VR fans, here's the virtual reality simulation we should have expected:

If you're worried about clicking, don't fret -- it's actually not a great simulation, which ironically, means it doesn't come anywhere close to capturing the full horror people in the World Trade Center must have felt that day. (The bad graphics and the stilted, European-accented dialog are pretty immersion-killing in themselves.) You can actually see far more immersive (and disturbing) simulations of terrorism in the solo campaigns of Call of Duty and other modern conflict games. Which means while this particular demo isn't all that immersive, we should soon expect them to improve, and become truly compelling. And terrifying.

So the question becomes, is the wider world ready to watch simulations like this?

Awesome 3D Mural of Noah's Ark Created in Second Life

User-created creatures in Second Life are literally hobbled by the existing platform, and therefore don't move around very convincingly. They do, however, make for some great 3D murals and screenshots. Check out this tribute to the Noah's Ark fable by Sandrika Broono (click here to embiggenate) as an uniquely impressive example of that. This is actually submission in Canary Beck's "Paradise Lost" photo contest, a social promo for Ms. Beck's upcoming feature machinima based on the Milton masterpiece.