New World Notes

AR/VR Glove Project Uses Arduino Kit for Inertial Tracking

This is a pretty impressive virtual/augmented reality glove project that uses an Arduino kit for inertial tracking -- i.e., though the glove wearer's actual finger movements:

It's the brainchild of Mirek Burkon, who tells me he'd like to release a commercial addition. More details from the Reddit thread where he announced this demo:

Second Life at Least More Diverse Than Its Inspiration, Burning Man

Second Life was partly inspired by Burning Man, the annual temporary utopian community in Nevada's Black Rock desert, so I was sadly amused to read this UK Guardian interview with Burning Man founder Larry Harvey, which reveals just how non-diverse and non-inclusive Burning Man's "utopia" actually is:

According to the most recent Black Rock city census, complied yearly by a team of academic demographers and anthropologists to determine the makeup of the festival, 87% of burners identified as white; 6% identified as Hispanic, 6% as Asian, and 2% as Native Americans (figures rounded) – on the latter of whose ancestral lands the event occurs. The smallest demographic of burners – 1.3% – identified as black. According to the census, which also measures income, this means that the temporary city is home to twice as many people who earn $300,000 a year as it is to black people.

At Second Life's peak in media awareness, the world actually had more Brazilian and Japanese users, than users from Europe. So it's likely SL at least has more diversity among Asians and Hispanics, than Burning Man does. From that perspective, Philip Rosedale's goal of creating a virtual world that was a more accessible and diverse variation of Burning Man seems to have been realized. (Notwithstanding the real racism that still exists in SL.)

Harvey actually visited Second Life to talk about its parallels to Burning Man with Philip a few years ago:

Top Eight Posts from New World Notes Last Week!

• Five Second Life Steampunk Sims Closing Soon
• Compare Minecraft Player Personality With Players of SL, Europa Universalis IV, Candy Crush & Crash Bandicoot
• 80% of Outside CEOs Fail - Lesson Learned by Linden Lab?
• Survey: Women in Second Life Less Private About Their RL Than Men - and Harassed Much More
• Second Life User Demographics & Personality: Older, More Gender-Balanced & Focused on Design Than Other MMOs
• YouTube Gaming Could Just About Be the Best Thing to Ever Happen to Second Life, And I'll Tell You Why
• Space: New Unity-Powered Virtual World Federation from SL Pioneer Launches
• How Sansar Solves Second Life's Setbacks -- So Subsequently Won't Suit Typical SLers

Bright Canopy Holding Update in SL Tomorrow at 11am SLT

Bright Canopy, the service for streaming Second Life on the web, is holding an open community meeting for SLers tomorrow at 11am SLT.

As I blogged earlier this week, the service is having some scaling issues, and Bright Canopy founder Bill Glover (Chaos Priestman in SL, above) is going to address the future on the company sim, also called Bright Canopy:

Five Second Life Steampunk Sims Closing Soon

Well this sucks: Steelhead City, a cluster of five beautifully designed steampunk-themed sims, are closing at the end of this month, with the owner citing some pretty harsh real life difficulties that make it difficult to support such an expensive sim tier:

It's been a financial burden of over $400/month. I have thought of downsizing but I have been... well been a bit told that if I do that people would leave, people will be upset over it... Like I said, I spend a lot of my own money to keep it maintained. My car is dead and I am looking to purchase a house. It's not an easy choice. Sincerely this is not. But I can't maintain it, my health, my family's health, my finances, and for myself.

This despite the fact that Steelhead tier was helped supported by over two dozen renters:

Compare Minecraft Player Personality With Players of SL, Europa Universalis IV, Candy Crush & Crash Bandicoot

Here's Quantic Foundry's latest blog post summarizing the gaming personality of over 100,000 people. On Wedesday, I shared the results related to Second Life, now you compare that profile to players of not just Minecraft, but Europa Universalis IV, Candy Crush & Crash Bandicoot. Notably, Minecraft players put significantly less value on Design (i.e. generated content) than SLers: 53% versus 77%.

"We had about 1600 gamers who wrote down Minecraft as one of their favorite games," Nick Yee tells me. "We actually weren't planning to analyze the data like this. We included the 'favorite games' question as a way to potentially debug problems with the Gamer Motivation Profile.... But as we started to poke around with favorite games for each motivation and dug deeper, we realized how clear the profiles were. And that we had enough data not just for all the popular games, but for many niche/less well-known games as well."

Another notable finding with Minecraft: The survey respondents are actually more male than Google data suggests:

80% of Outside CEOs Fail - Lesson Learned by Linden Lab?

Heard this very interesting data point on PRI Marketplace story yesterday (embedded above):

“Studies would say that 80 percent of CEOs who come from the outside, it ends up being a failure,” Kraemer says. “Because they don’t have the knowledge of the company, they don’t have the knowledge of the culture. Very, very difficult.”

Former Linden Lab CEOs Mark Kingdon and Rod Humble are very talented executives and they both brought some interesting, ambitious ideas to the company, but I think it's fair to say they both had difficulty working with the existing culture of Linden. Hearing about that 80% average failure rate does make me wonder why Linden Lab's board hasn't tried to appoint a longtime Linden executive as CEO, instead of an outside hire.

As for recently appointed CEO Ebbe Altberg?

Survey: Women in Second Life Less Private About Their RL Than Men - and Harassed Much More

"Adam harassing Eve", scene from the upcoming SL movie Paradise Lost

Canary Beck queries the Second Life user community on a variety of topics 

Second Life users often raise concerns about maintaining a separation between their avatar and their real life identity, but an extensive survey of SLers paints a more complex picture. Only a minority of users surveyed take proactive measures to keep their SL and RL separate. And remarkably, while women are much likelier to be harassed or stalked in Second Life (a common trend for online communities), they are also less reticent about sharing some of their real life details in SL.

Here’s some of the key findings from this survey:

• Only 1 in 4 Second Life users take active steps to protect their real life privacy

• Women report being harassed and stalked far more than men do in Second Life: 60% versus 44%.

• Nearly twice as many men 36% reported not being harassed or stalked - only 16% of women reported the same.

• Young women (between 18-29) are far more likely to be harassed/stalked than any other demographic.

• For both genders, Second Life-based stalking/harassment has led to phone calls (5% of the time) and even real life confrontations (2% of the time).

Below is a summary report of my Second Life / Real Life identity and privacy survey from August, with nearly 800 respondents completing the online survey.* I’ll publish a full report and commentary on these findings on www.canarybeck.com next week. 

Second Life User Demographics & Personality: Older, More Gender-Balanced & Focused on Design Than Other MMOs

Here's the Second Life-related results* of that survey of gaming personalities I mentioned last month, a kind of Myers-Briggs test for gamers created by Quantic Foundry, a game behavior analytics consultancy co-founded by my colleague Nick Yee. Nick was kind enough to share the data for all the respondents who listed "Second Life" among their favorites, and here's the fascinating results:

(Click image to embiggen)

Most striking is how much older (on average) and more female the SLers are, compared to other games/MMOs, which typically skew toward the 20s/early 30s and much more male. This might be an aytpical sample*, because according to Linden Lab's last publicly reported demographic data (in 2008), 40% of SLers were in their 20s.

Also striking:

YouTube Gaming Could Just About Be the Best Thing to Ever Happen to Second Life, And I'll Tell You Why

Last week as I watched Jessica Pixel on her live YouTube Gaming channel (right here), it occurred to me it's just about the coolest way to use Second Life I've seen in quite awhile. In fact, I annotated a screengrab to try and help explain why:

A key problem with Second Life is that it's a walled garden, with all the great content within it difficult and time-consuming to find -- especially for people who've never used or even installed the client, let alone existing users. YouTube Gaming gets around that problem in all the ways you see above: