New World Notes

High Fidelity Massively Updates Website, Adds Renowned Futurist Think Tank & NATO to Domain Registry

High Fidelity, Philip Rosedale's new virtual reality metaverse (i.e., Second Life, second edition) recently got a huge update to its website, transforming what has been for years a pokey, super-geeky thing into a sleek, consumer-facing site. (Very early adopter developer/consumers, at least.) Among them are two renowned organizations which already have domains listed on High Fidelity's metaverse network: The Institute for the Future, a Silicon Valley-based think tank founded by people who literally helped found the Internet, and a research arm of NATO, i.e. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, i.e. with the jets and the tanks and the explodey things. I guess that could just be an early High Fidelity user who named his or her domain NATO for the laughs, but then Googling that specific sub-group brings up this:

SL Flickr Stream of the Day: Cyberpunk Fashion Shots That Are Also a Post-Apocalyptic Graphic Novel

Flit Ulrik not only takes great sci-fi action shots in SL (as I said last week), but she's also created contiguous series' of them and turned them into what's basically a graphic novel called Agent Orange. This image above is frame one in a series -- click here to read the rest, and be sure to read the accompanying text:

Does Valve Want to Turn Steam Into a Gaming Metaverse?

Very interesting post from Redditor /godelbrot, citing this talk above by Valve CEO Gabe Newell (among other references), arguing that Valve is aiming to turn Steam into a kind of unifying metaverse for all the games within it, with a unified economy as well:

Gabe himself has said that where he sees the future of Steam is that every game on Steam is just an "instance dungeon" of the entire content economy that is the Steam Store. They are pushing to make it possible to transfer or trade value that you generate in one game to ANY game or to ANY player. So you spend 15 hours questing to get the Spear of Whatever, the value of your time spent on that is not boxed in to just one game, you could trade that Spear to another player for 10 Taunt Animations in another game or even just trade it for real currency. But it wouldn't just be limited to items, like I just mentioned: animations, skins, props, maps, badges, 'signed' items (THE ONLY weapon that Dendi used to win the International or something), essentially anything that represents value intrinsically or simply as a representation of time spent in a game ought to be transferable to any other game or tradeable. They want to turn the entire Steam Store into an actual economy. And this is why they have been hiring economists.

Notably, this would represent an ultimate triumph of user-generated content (i.e. modding) which has made Valve what it is today:

Over-Immersion & Virtual Reality's Uncanny Valley Problem

In last week's discussion on the dearth of interest in actually buying a VR headset, Pussycat Catnap makes a really good point on a huge potential problem for ultra-realistic VR worlds like Project Sansar:

VR enthusiasts presume that if you vanished into the inside of an MMO, using it would be as easy and comfortable as real life, or maybe even more comfortable. But the Uncanny Valley theory points to a major problem, as does Scott McCloud's books on Understanding Comics: Over-immersion is alienating. When something is too real, every flaw stands out starkly.

That sounds exactly right, and as a perfect proof point of that, consider the MMOs that have done extremely well:

Reality Editor: Internet of Things Meets Augmented Reality

Reality Editor is a new app-powered version of augmented reality from MIT Media lab, and this video above shows it in action: an app that connects to everyday devices to help give you greater control of the world around you. More from the site:

Watch Futurists & Philosophers Discuss Moral & Legal Issues of Sentient AI in Second Life

Here's video from that Thursday metaverse event which provoked a lot of debate: well-known philosophers like Susan Schneider and futurists like Zoltan Istvan (also a Presidential candidate) visiting Second Life to discuss moral and ethical issues around sentient artificial intelligence. Video quality isn't super fantastic but it does the job. Highlight include:

• Zoltan's talk starts at around 46 minutes in.
• Professor Schneider's talk begins at about 1 hour 41 minutes in.

Top Seven New World Notes Posts from Last Week!

• Why Second Life's Prim-Based Era Was Its Golden Age of Creation
• The Making of Nethack, the Legendary Game That's Still Being Improved Three Decades After Launch
• Top Futurists & Philosophers Debate Moral & Legal Issues of Sentient AI in SL
• The Second Life of Fallout 4 & Rise of Solo Virtual Worlds
• Most Second Life Users Self-Identify as Roleplayers & Other MMO Game Types -- Very Few as Educators
• Read Reconfigure, a New Cyberpunk Novel by Metaverse Pioneer Ian "Epredator" Hughes
• In Survey of Virtual World Consumers, 60% Express Skepticism or Indifference to Buying VR Headset

Uncanny Valley Depicts Our Exciting Virtual Reality Future

UNCANNY VALLEY (2015) from 3DAR on Vimeo.

Perfect (if freaky!) viewing for the weekend, "Uncanny Valley" is a beautiful and disturbing look at a future when virtual reality has become mass market. You may think "Oh I get where they're going with this" in the first few minutes, but I bet you don't.

Linden Vet Featured in Steven Levy's Story on Deep Dreams

I told you about ex-Linden inventor Karl Stiefvater's art experiments with Deep Dreams, Google's neural network, and now acclaimed technology journalist Steven Levy is writing about them too, in an epic story about the gobsmacking technology:

It came from a trio of researchers based at University of Tubingen in Germany. Leon Gatys, a German doctoral candidate at the Bethge Lab at University of Tubingen, had been working with a team schooled in computation and neuroscience, trying to understand biological and computer visual systems. They had been using neural nets to identify and ultimately output textures as opposed to objects, when their experiments took a weird turn — was it possible to get a neural net to transform images creatively, in the same way an iconic artist would? Could a neural net understand a painting with the analytical skills of an art historian? Could it act as a master forger, rendering a vanilla scene from a photograph into something that appeared to be from the brush of a famous painter? ... The paper hit the internet in early September. When an open-source version of the software appeared not long afterwards, a graphics community already intoxicated from Deep Dreams experienced another woozy orgy of creation.

Here comes Karl:

In Survey of Virtual World Consumers, 60% Express Skepticism or Indifference to Buying VR Headset

Here's the results of our survey of New World Notes readers, in which we asked them to express their interest in buying a virtual reality headset, and which brand they prefer -- and the results, as you can see, are pretty worrying for the VR industry:

Oculus Rift leads the pack with 20%, but the real leader is wait-and-see skepticism or outright disinterest: over 60% of you fall in that category. This is striking, because notwithstanding what Palmer Luckey thinks about Second Life users, New World Notes' readership, as I've explained, has a lot of VR enthusiasts. But even most basic Second Life users or users interested in Project Sansar -- Second Life's follow-up, very much promoted as being a VR-based virtual world -- aren't notably interested in actually buying a VR headset.

To be fair, a significant minority of NWN readers are very interested in VR -- like longtime reader Adeon Writer: