New World Notes

New* SL Avatar Physics Layer is So Realistic, This Video Tutorial for it May Be NSFW

For weekend viewing, here's Strawberry Singh demoing her avatar physics layer, which makes one's avatar extremities more susceptible to the laws of virtual gravity and Newtownian inertia. Which is a fancy ways of saying there's a lot of bodacious bouncing going on (which is why I'm posting this toward the end of the workday). Read more about it on Ms. Berry's blog:

Spring Into a New Look for Your Second Life Avatar, Courtesy of Ample Avi (NWN Partner News)

Spring's all about renewal. Sometimes that renewal comes in the form of new flowers budding, sometimes it comes in the form of vigorous housecleaning, and sometimes it comes in the form of experimenting with new fashions and refreshing your look -- both online and offline. If spring's giving you the itch to try something new on your Second Life avatar, then Ample Avi's latest shape might be worth looking into. 

NWN sponsoring partner Ample Avi recently released Lola Longlegs, a curvy hourglass figure shape with long legs made for original Second Life avatars. Like all of Ample Avi's full price shapes, Lola comes Copy and Modify enabled, which means that you can make whatever tweaks and iterations you need to make to her. Whether you want to replace her face with your current shape's face or just make versions better suited to your mesh avatar enhancements and the like, Copy+Mod enabled shapes are a must.

You can see Lola Longlegs in greater detail, purchase her for yourself or a friend, or check out Ample Avi's entire product line at their in-world main store location in Pryeri [teleport link] or over on the Second Life Marketplace.

SL Flickr of the Day: Brandon Taselian Brings the Badassery

Brandon Taselian has a Flickr stream that's a gamer's delight, full of high-res post-apocalyptic action beneath darkened death metal skies. (Above: "in an instant... i'm alive".)

Taselian comes me via Strawberry Singh, whose own Flickr is his polar opposite (but just as cool).

Gamer Sexism Made VR Pioneer Jaron Lanier Less Utopian About Virtual Reality

Jaron Lanier is among the most influential pioneers in the VR industry -- indeed, he's widely credited with first popularizing "virtual reality" as a term in the first place. However, in my article for Wired, he comes off as much less utopian about the technology than the other industry figures I talked to there -- especially compared to Oculus founder Palmer Luckey. He even ascribes Luckey’s vision of the planet’s poor uplifted by VR to youthful naiveté: “I’m going to make a guess that once he’s a little older and has been around other parts of the world, he’s going to have a different opinion than that.”

Lanier himself (now 55) had a different vision when he was closer to Palmer's age: “I do think that there will be a new emergent social consciousness that can only exist through the medium of Virtual Reality," Lanier said back in a 1988 interview with the Whole Earth Review. “Virtual Reality is the first medium that's large enough not to limit human nature. It's the first medium that's broad enough to express us as natural beings. It's the first medium within which we can express our nature and the whole of nature to each other.”

Lanier is still dedicated to VR technology (he is currently working with Microsoft on Comradre, a multi-person virtual reality platform), but when I interviewed him for the WIRED story, his enthusiasm was notably less evangelical. Lanier told me he’s thrilled to see a new generation embracing and finding delight in VR, but at the same time, admits disappointment that virtual reality has not always succeeded in ways he had predicted decades ago.

Why? One reason he brought up relates to the popularity of 3D games, which have become more and more immersive in the last three decades:

SL Flickr of the Day: Kate Bergdorf Visist the Trace

Yes, this is a virtual beach, not a real one:

Shot by Kate Bergdorf, who has a Flickr stream of lushly muted beauty, this is The Trace, an island in Second Life. (Click here to visit.) Kate writes about it on her blog:

Hardly Anyone's Using KCRW's Virtual Reality App

KCRW's "Morning Becomes Eclectic" is generally considered the most influential music show on America's most influential radio station, heard by millions here in the Los Angeles area where it's based and millions more online, and it regularly promotes the station's virtual reality app, which offers to make you "a part of KCRW's intimate in-studio performances, virtually just steps away from the cutting edge musicians that matter!"

So after all that promotion, is anyone actually using KCRW's VR app?

No, no they are not:

Someone Recreates Virtual Version of Donald Trump's Mansion in Second Life, Complete With Virtual Wall

A Scottish political activist and feminist has been exploring Second Life in search of virtual headquarters for real US political candidates, so when Ysabelle Stewart found a recreation of Donald Trump's Florida mansion, naturally I had to see it for my (avatar) self:

There it stood in all its garish glory, on a region fittingly named Lionheart, festooned with "Make America Great Again" signs, and a big beautiful welcome entrance. (Click here to visit yourself.)

I went through that entrance to explore the grounds myself, but as with real world Trump, virtual Trump doesn't exactly like journalists. (A really disgusting group of people, folks.) So within seconds after starting to stroll through Trump's mansion, a security robot booted me, depositing me back at my office, blinking in confusion. And when I returned to try again, here's what was waiting for me:

How to Simulate Environmental Reflections in Second Life

I've been writing about cool, creative uses for in-world projectors lately, now here's a tutorial from someone (OK, he's named Beev Beev) showing you how to use such a projector to simulate reflections in Second Life:

High Fidelity Holding a VR Hackathon Next Month

The VR industry might not know how to categorize High Fidelity, but High Fidelity does -- an open source platform capable of accommodating hackathons. In fact, the company's holding a hackathon this April 29 - May 1st in San Francisco:

The focus of the hackathon will be the creation of innovative, socially interactive VR spaces using the High Fidelity software. We expect this hackathon to be the first in a series of events introducing the High Fidelity software to the VR developer community.

That landing page even comes with a boilerplate description of what High Fidelity is, and it's very much not a social VR experience first and foremost:

VR Industry Unsure Where to Place Sansar & High Fidelity

Via The VR Fund's Tipatat Chennavasin, here's a pretty handy infographic of the virtual reality industry/ecosystem as it exists today:

Notable is the placement of High Fidelity and Project Sansar (which presumably is what Tipatat meant he used the Second Life logo): Square in the "Social" category. However, from what we know of High Fidelity and Sansar, they're not only aiming for the Social market, but also the Distribution market and also the 3D Tools/Engines market. But it's an understandable confusion on Tipatat's part, because thirteen years after launch, the general market still isn't sure what Second Life is supposed to be. And it points to the problem these two would-be successors to Second Life both face: