New World Notes

SL Flickr of the Day: Gorba McMahon's Scary Pursuit

Just in time for Halloween, here's a great slasher flick-style SL pic:

From Gorba Mcmahon, who excels in moody lighting and stylish compositions. Thanks to Alicia for the tip!

Scary Second Life Destinations for Halloween Weekend

Eddi Haskell has a travelogue of 12 sites for you to see - just click through each for more pics and a SLurl to the place itself. No, don't be afraid about the Adult content warning, there's nothing to fear, at least in the NSFW sense.

What SL Blogs & Flickr Streams Should NWN Blog?

Something new, something spectacular, something thought provoking. Please post links and a little description in Comments. And yes, self-promotion is fine.

Update, 10/30: Open forum bumped up for more suggestions!

Philip Rosedale Unveils High Fidelity's Version of Collaborative Online Creation in Virtual Reality

At SEA VR, a virtual reality conference in Seattle, as reported by Dean Takahashi:

Rosedale showed an alpha version of a “virtual toy room,” where two people collaborated, long distance, from inside a 3D, cartoon-animated world where they could pick things up and talk to each other.

Definitely looks more fun and appealing than Oculus' own version of a similar concept. At the same conference, Philip made a revealing point about High Fidelity, versus Second Life:

Meet Moira, A New Free Shape from Ample Avi (NWN Partner News)

Halloween is the perfect time of year to experiment a little with your look, in Second Life and elsewhere. So far as you avatar is concerned NWN sponsoring partner Ample Avi is making that experimentation a little easier with Moira, a free shape available at their main store location [Teleport link] until Sunday, November 1st.

As designer Xme Xue tells me, Moira is her take on the "Glamazon" look that's so popular among female avatars in Second Life. While most of Xme's shapes strive to imitate more realistic proportions, height included, Moira's got all the curves you would expect from an Ample Avi shape wrapped up in a 7'5" package.

That might sound a little extreme, but in a virtual world full of leggy aspiring models it means you'll fit right in while still standing out just enough.

You can snag Moira for free at Ample Avi's main store in Pryeri [Teleport link], and after November 1st she'll be available for purchase in a copyable and modifiable format at the main store as well as on Ample Avi's Second Life marketplace storefront.

Facebook Ironically Blocks Internet Pioneer for Using Long-Established Pseudonym "R.U. Sirius" on Facebook

We already know Facebook's policy on pseudonyms is maddeningly inconsistent, but this news, just shared by tech veteran Jon Lebkowsky on Facebook, takes that policy to a new height of ridiculous irony:

"R.U. Sirius" is not a pseudonym known only to Ken Goffman's friends and family -- it's on Wikipedia, and for good reason: Founder of the incredibly influential Mondo 2000 (a predecessor to Wired magazine), Ken was talking about the Internet as a community a full decade before Facebook even existed. This is pretty much tantamount to prohibiting Neal Stephenson from actually using the metaverse. And it makes this quote from Ken doubly ironic:

Will VR Avatars of RL People Make Us Feel Less Lonely?

From a company called 8i, here's an impressive video showcasing technology that converts real people into digitized avatars which you can then interact with in virtual reality:

Super-cool! Also (on first glance): Super creepy! As you'll see in the demo video, one of the VR experts excited about this tech is our friend Jacki Morie of All These Worlds (a virtual reality pioneer) so I wanted to ask her about the creep factor:

"I'm getting an uncanny valley feel from the 3D avatars," I asked her, "especially in the eyes. What's your take?"

Should Linden Lab Allow a Second Life Viewer for WebGL?

The real story behind Monday's post, "Logging Into Second Life to Log Into Second Life", as my friend Damien Fate pointed out, is not that someone figured out how to log into Second Life from the web via a Second Life viewer. The real story is this: Someone created a Second Life viewer for the web -- specifically, for WebGL.

I decided not to make that the headline, however, because the creator, a coder called Dahlia (dtCodez on Reddit), isn't sure if her experimental project is even permissible according to Linden Lab's current Terms of Service: "I'm not yet sure if/how SL allows logins via a third party proxy," she tells me, "It may become available once I work out some of those details."

Once upon time, as SL veterans remember, there was an unofficial web-based client for Second Life, called AjaxLife, created by a teenage girl in 2007, but the company shut it down. (While also profusely praising her and even inviting her to Linden Lab's HQ in San Francisco, as I recall.) But that was 8 years and three CEOs ago, and things seem to be different now:

SL Flickr: Tiany's Terrifyingly Sexy Halloween Fashion

Tiany's SL Flickr stream is a terrifying cornucopia of beautiful but creepy Second Life Halloween fashion, full of blood-spattered (but stylish!) zombie supermodels and the like.

Analyst Predicts Smartphone-Based Headsets & Sony Will Lead VR Industry; Predicts 38M Total Install Base by 2021

What if all our excitement over Oculus Rift and HTV-Vive's headsets was a bit misplaced, because that hardware is not destined to lead the industry? That's the top takeaway of a new forecast from IHS Technology, which forecasts that Sony's Morpheus system will lead both Oculus and Vive, with the real lead taken by Google Cardboard and Samsung Gear, capturing half the market next year.

Now that they mention it, that sounds right: Sony has been in entertainment electronics longer than any of the other competitors, and its Morpheus is compatible with its Playstation 4 system, with its 37 million unit install base. I am, however, skeptical that Samsung Gear and Google Cardboard will command such a strong lead: