New World Notes

Second Life-Based Chat Bots Help Drive Evolution of Web & Mobile-Based Chat Bots

Hey, so you know all those chat bot projects in Second Life, some pretty wacky and crippled, some which are well-built enough to mess around with? Writing for Wired, Clive Thompson notes that they helped drive research in the new generation of chat bots:

“Chitchat is a basic human need,” says Harry Shum, head of Microsoft Technology and Research. It greases the wheels of the workplace. When you ask a colleague to do something, you don’t just bark out an order; you banter for a while. Shum thinks these pleasantries—what linguists call “phatic” communications, like “How ya doin’?”—will help bots integrate into the flow of daily life.

Some research backs this up. When Doron Friedman, head of the Advanced Reality Lab at IDC Herzliya, looked at how users in Second Life interacted with a bot, he found that phatic communications were the second-most-common parts of the conversation (after facts). Another study found that people prefer bots with “personality.” The “junk” DNA is more important, as it were.

Messaging apps like Slack, What's App, and Facebook Messenger have become massive in recent years, which has built up a demand for more intelligent, more human-seeming chat bots:

Is VR Mass or Niche? Goldman Sachs Forecasts About 40-300M Virtual/Augmented Reality Units Ship by 2025

Someone in Reddit's Oculus group was nice enough to upload Goldman Sach's widely cited forecast of the VR and AR market released earlier this month. Which is nice, because while many outlets have cited its prediction that VR/AR might become a $80 billion market ($45 billion in hardware and $35 billion in software) by 2025, no outlet I know has reported the most important figure of all: How many people should we expect to actually own a VR/AR device in the next decade?

So taken straight from the report, here's the range, which Goldman divides into three tiers of adoption:

So if adoption is slow (i.e. "Delayed"), only about 40-50 million units ship by 2025. If adoption is massive (i.e. "Accelerated"), we get more like 300 million units in the same time frame. Like most readers of this virtual world blog, I think the bearish estimate sounds about right. 40-50 million would make the addressable VR/AR market equivalent to a niche gamer device like the Nintendo 3DS. 300 million units in a decade is what VR would need to have any chance at reaching the "billions" of users Mark Zuckerberg predicted when he announced his company's acquisition of Oculus. In either case, as the chart shows, Goldman expects adoption to be significantly slower than smartphones, which is very on point.

Flickr of the Day: Virtual World, Virtual Bird's Eye View

I love this latest virtual world photo by Melusina Parkin, a rare glimpse of Second Life's landscape from a bird's eye view (or for that matter, a flying avatar). You also should see Ms. Parkin makes the metaverse look like an Andrew Wyeth painting, for that matter.

Top Six New World Notes Posts from Last Week!

• Linden Lab OK With Second Life Being Categorized as a Game So Let's All Be OK With That Too
• IRS Drops Second Life Content Creators' Tax Bill from $66,005... to $0.00
• Here’s Why Linden Lab Needs to Market Second Life to Smartass, Garry's Mod-Style Gamers
• Anita Sarkeesian's Analysis of Male & Female Player Avatar Butts Needs an MMO Sequel
• Bitcoin's Libertarian Dream Ironically Strangled by the Chinese Communist Party's Firewall
• Five Posts About Real Racism in Virtual Worlds

Learn Image Composition With Virtual World Photography

Deoridhe of Primdolls has a really interesting and useful tutorial on Second Life photography composition which is probably valuable for RL photographers too. (For that matter, practicing composition with virtual world screenshots is probably a great, cost effective way to improve your photography chops.) Take her analysis of this photo above, by Lyndzay Meili:

In sharp contrast, Meili creates a sense of balance using extreme depth. In reality, the van would be much larger than the figure. In the image, it's smaller. Telephone poles are back as a visual element, this time at an angle to draw your eyes back and to reinforce the distance between figure and vehicle. The placement of both is also striking, in terms of balance. The vehicle is at the bottom third point of the image, coming into screen and bringing your eye up along the telephone lines to the taller figure, which is closer to the edge. A bit of grass hints at ground without actually showing it.

Hat tip: Cajsa, who artfully composes pics on It's Only Fashion.

Take a Prom Photo With Bernie Sanders & Your Avatar

I love this new Second Life image from Strawberry Singh, jumping off on a meme started by Stephen Colbert:

Stephen Colbert set out a challenge asking people to photoshop themselves into this photo beside Bernie and ask him to the Prom since Bernie claims that he has never worn a tuxedo. When I first saw the video, I immediately laughed my ass off but I thought, wouldn’t it be hilarious if I did this with my Second Life avatar? So yeah, here’s my avatar, asking Bernie to Prom.

Anyone else want to shoot their own version, and Tweet it at Colbert with the hashtag #BerniePromposal? Bonus points if you customize your avatar as, I dunno, Donald Trump or Sarah Palin, or failing that a well-dressed furry vampire robot, because you know, Second Life. I can already picture a very old man looking at Colbert's Twitter stream and saying "WTF?" And then immediately going back to rant about America's wealth gap and such.

Linden Lab OK With Second Life Being Categorized as a Game So Let's All Be OK With That Too

PC Gamer just listed Second Life among its 50 most important PC games, which I first noticed because Linden Lab shared the link on LinkedIn. Used to be the company steadfastly resisted being put in the game category by the media (back during the hype days when SL didn't lack for media coverage), but if Linden Lab isn't worried about being categorized as a game anymore, I guess that settles that ambiguity. And anticipating the usual angry response, "But Second Life doesn't have set goals or points!"... neither do Minecraft or The Sims, which are also listed among PC Gamers most important games.

Anyway, excerpt of the review below -- featuring a nice mention of Iris Ophelia and a link to this blog!

Update: IRS Drops Second Life Content Creators' Tax Bill from $66,005... to $0.00

Last November, I told you about the tax problems of US-based SL entrepreneurs Washu Zebrastripe and Damien Fate, who got a freakout-inducing letter from the Internal Revenue Service, double-billing them $65K for their earnings from Second Life. But now there's good news on that front: Their IRS bill is now, well, nothing. (See photo.)

"After all the documentation I sent in," Erika tells me, "they say I now owe $0.00! Yay!!" 

To be sure, she sent the government a lot of damn documentation:

"A list of all received payments to Paypal, a list of payments to Paypal from Linden Lab, a letter explaining how to match the sent payments from Linden Lab to the exact time/day/amount received in Paypal, some documents related to a support ticket we sent to Linden Lab regarding the tax documents, and a list of my email addresses I use for Paypal so they know that it is in fact me that we sent the money to." (Whew.) "I cannot say that this was all needed, but I wanted to cover my bases."

This is a pretty time-consuming task, because just look at the Paypal payments they received in a single month:

Stewart Butterfield's MMO Memorialized as 404 Page in Stewart Butterfield's Messaging App

I was recently using Slack, the team-based messaging app, when a bad link sent me to this wryly amusing 404 page:

This is an in-joke within an in-joke, because this is art from (and a reference to) Glitch, the web-based MMO founded by Stewart Butterfield a few years ago. Thing is, Glitch suffered an untimely death at the end of 2012, but something else emerged in the process of creating and managing it*:

Then in 2009, Butterfield founded Tiny Speck, pulling in game vets like Journey’s Robin Hunicke and Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahasi, to launch a browser-based online game called Glitch. Beloved by many—but ultimately not enough—fans, Glitch shuttered in 2012. But again a seed grew. Butterfield transitioned some of Tiny Speck’s staff, alongside some hard-learned lessons about onboarding new users to build a commercial communication tool that Tiny Speck had used to build Glitch. Last August, Slack was launched as an “email killer” and a way to transform how businesses talk and do work together.

"E-mail killer" is a bold statement, but it's definitely true that at this point, if you work in tech, you are almost certainly using Slack. Countless tech companies large and small utterly depend on Slack now. So while Glitch's small but passionate userbase (many of whom jumped over from Second Life) mourned the passing of the world they'd come to love, there's an ironic but sweet coda to that passing:

Here’s Why Linden Lab Needs to Market Second Life to Smartass, Garry's Mod-Style Gamers

Hey did you see the new Second Life advertising campaign? Uploaded just two days ago, it's already been seen over 1 million times:

Slight hitch (which you probably noticed if you watched this for over 10 seconds): It was not created by Linden Lab, but by Videogamedunkey, a YouTuber with over 2 million subscribers. Which makes him and this video vastly more popular and influential than the official Second Life channel on YouTube. Unfortunately, most of his video is a lot of juvenile jackassery, but I have to give him credit for cleverly juxtaposing official, overly optimistic Second Life ads with the actual, often disturbing reality many or most SL users have. 

So assuming 1% of Dunkey's followers decide they're going to follow in his footsteps (and that's a safe bet), SLers should expect about 20,000 new potential trolls hitting Second Life over the next few weeks. I say "potential", because not all of them are trolls, just like not all of Dunkey's activity is mean-spirited: More like a young gamer being a smartass in response to fairly random and crazy content.

I mean, what true gamer can possibly be against Kermit the Frog armed with samurai swords while smoking a blunt? There's a place in Second Life for gamers like this, but the problem is, they often get mixed up with the fashionistas and the social/nightclubbers in Second Life, not to mention the porn players, and chaos inevitably ensues. Those SLers get offended and ragequit, and most of the gamers eventually get bored and move on.

The problem? Linden Lab is doing a bad/non-existent job of marketing to this audience of gamers on YouTube, so they're not even sure there's a place for them. Or to put it in two words: Garry's Mod. I mean, watch: