New World Notes

Top Five New World Notes Posts from Last Week!

• Play Humani: Jessie's Story, New Game from Rod Humble Where You Advise a Lively, High Drama Chatbot
• Metaverse ProTips: How to Create a Great SL Brand
• How High Fidelity is Creating a Virtual World for VR Hand Controllers & Multi-User Sims
• Wired's Magic Leap Cover Story Dredges Up Unproven "Virtual Presence is VR's Killer App" Assertion
• SL Image Artist Whiskey Monday is Back on Flickr!

Play Humani: Jessie's Story, New Game from Rod Humble Where You Advise a Lively, High Drama Chatbot

Humani: Jessie's Story is a fun new game lead designed by former Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble, who's now Chief Creative Officer of Pullstring, a company that specializes in AI-powered chatbots. You play Jessie's Story entirely through Facebook Messenger, communicating with Jessie, a high-drama twentysomething, as if she's one of your Facebook friends, giving her advice throughout the day and learning about her wild life. (That's me above, telling her how to meet a hot dude at a coffee shop.) The company tells me the entire game story takes about 25-30 hours to play, so this is something you can enjoy for many weeks while multitasking on your PC or wandering around with your phone.

"[E]ven though the game has only been available on Messenger for less than one week," Rod tells me, "player numbers are in the thousands - which we are very happy with so far. Because Humani: Jessie’s Story is the first PullString game aimed at a broader audience, the goal is not as much about high player numbers as it is to see what game play elements resonate within this kind of text-based conversational experience."

More from Rod on Jessie, and what the technology behind the game suggests for the future of AI-based conversations in games:

Win a Special Fawns SL Breedable Four-Pack (Partner News)

Click here to enter your SL name in a drawing to win a pre-order four-pack of Fawns, the popular SL breedable game that's a proud partner of New World Notes. Fawns developers are giving away ten free copies of this four-pack, and to enter, you just need to follow the instructions here and enter your SL name. 

What's a four-pack? Glad you asked:

• Four Unbirthed Fawns
• A Fawns home
• One Week of Ether
• One LE Unbirthed Fawn

Also to be delivered after the contest has selected its winners:

Alice Taylor Weighs Pros & Cons of VR Hype

My friend and longtime game developer Alice Taylor has a really good analysis on Boing Boing of VR hype as it stands now, fairly weighing the pros and cons. Here's a particularly good passage:

OK, some traditional signs of possible near-future mini-doom: a growing lurch of VC investments into VR & AR (over $1.1bn already in 2016) which will pile on the pressure to succeed, as big and as fast as possible. Then there’s the issue that VR isn’t something you can easily do on the bus, or at work when the boss isn’t looking. VR isn’t very sociable yet, either - and if we’ve learned any lessons from the growth of Facebook games and then Mobile games, it’s that social, bus-time and sneaky-work-play are killer use cases.

But there are so many pros. VR’s potential could easily stretch to defense (urgh), tourism, communication, leisure - as you may be reading in all the headlines. We heard all that before with Second Life, or more recently too even with 3D Printing, but there’s a difference with VR: this time we have a phalanx of huge companies visibly on board, very publicly "long play" invested: Facebook, Samsung, Google, Valve, Sony.

I could hair split the second paragraph -- Second Life did have some major tech companies getting visibly on board (beyond one-off marketing experiments), including Amazon and IBM, which built a whole corporate campus in SL. (Which was so prominent, a labor union held a protest there.) For that matter, Sony Home was a direct response to Second Life, as was Google's Lively. (Anyone still remember Lively?) But like I said, that's niggling, because Google, Sony, etc. are putting way more money and effort into VR now than they ever even considered with Second Life. So Alice's point still stands.

Alice's point about investment into VR is a really good one too:

SL Flickr of the Day: VeRaCruZa's "Purple Tears"

"Honey, I know, I know, I know times are changing. It's time we all reach out for something new, that means you too."

More from VeRaCruZa here. More from Prince any time great pop music is played, because he pretty much influenced it all.

Attend Now: Prince Memorial & Celebration in Second Life

Click here to attend an SL memorial and celebration of Prince, who unexpectedly died today though his music remains immortal. Hosted by Harlow Heslop, she's opened up access to her beautiful private island named Blithe. Happening from now until 6pm SLT, the emphasis is where it should be: On his songs. "Just a gathering and I put his greatest hits album on repeat so those trickling in and out of Blithe can stop in and enjoy some of his best work," Harlow tells me. When I stopped by, the place was already at capacity, but hopefully you get a chance to share some memories of the master with those who also loved him, and maybe even dance to "Nothing Compares to U". (U being him.)

Or just stand there silently on the dance floor, in melancholy quiet:

Metaverse ProTips: How to Create a Great SL Brand

Pictured: Damien Fate in front of one of his many successful Second Life brands

Brookston Holiday has been building in Second Life for 10 years. You can view his work on the SL Marketplace here and his ProMaterials brand.

Creating things in Second Life is a fun and rewarding experience. At the same time, marketing those creations can be tedious and frustrating. Unfortunately, you have to be good at both in order to have a successful business. I’d like to share with you some tips, from practical steps to take before your first sale, to ways of thinking about running a small business, that will make starting out easier and pain-free.

Creating Your Brand - the Nitty Gritty Guide

Branding is important. Which of these stores below would you feel more confident buying from?

It may be completely wrong, but my gut is telling me one of these stores is selling quality products. (The other makes me feel, oh, so very sad.)

Graphic design is hard. No seriously, it’s really hard. My job was once getting small businesses’ crappy marketing material ready to be printed professionally. (I realize you’ve been “in the business” for 20 years sir, I’m just wondering if we could re-think 8 of your 9 fonts. Also, why does literally everything have a drop shadow?) Nothing will make you appreciate good design like bad design, and though I am far from being a graphic designer, I do have a few tips: 

How High Fidelity is Creating a Virtual World for VR Hand Controllers & Multi-User Sims

I'm so impressed with the High Fidelity "gardening" demo using HTC Vive hand controllers, that I had to ask HF Director of Content Caitlyn Meeks much more about it -- and so I did:

How many High Fidelity users would be able to "garden" in this scene at the same time?

Easily 25 without lag. A lot of this depends on the system that is running the High Fidelity Sandbox software which hosts it, the equivalent of an Second Life sim. However, unlike an SL sim, you run Sandbox on your own hardware. It can be locally hosted on your own laptop (and accessible by an automatic NAT punchthrough service), hosted on your own servers, or running on the cloud. So the biggest limit is the resources you provide to Sandbox and the bandwidth you provide. There isn't a fixed cap.

How far away are we from a full garden sim, with plants which respond to virtual watering, weeding, sunlight, etc?

There's no reason it can't be done today, although if we wanted wholly procedural plants which would grow organically in the truest most realistic sense, that's a bit away. But with the reasonable technical constraints, it can be done right now. For my own domain, I intend to create something like my old Lemondrop's Forest sim from Second Life, with glowing and magical mushrooms, plants of every kinds, creeping vines, etc!

Virtual Reality Used to Help Treat Children's Real Life Pain

As a counterpoint to my last post, this is really great:

I've said this in different contexts, but it bears saying again: One of the best real life applications of VR is helping people whose real life circumstances are physically constrained, either due to illness or infirmity. Because then, the biggest adoption hurdle to VR (being cut off from the outside world) becomes less a hurdle, than a downward ramp.

Via /oculus.

Wired's Magic Leap Cover Story Dredges Up Unproven "Virtual Presence is VR's Killer App" Assertion

Wired magazine founding editor Kevin Kelly has a pretty interesting cover story on the secretive Magic Leap mixed reality startup and virtual reality in general which is worth a read, even if it covers familiar territory for most NWN readers.

And then when I got to this part, I of course sighed:

VR does two important things: One, it generates an intense and convincing sense of what is generally called presence. Virtual landscapes, virtual objects, and virtual characters seem to be there — a perception that is not so much a visual illusion as a gut feeling. That’s magical. But the second thing it does is more important. The technology forces you to be present — in a way flatscreens do not — so that you gain authentic experiences, as authentic as in real life. People remember VR experiences not as a memory of something they saw but as something that happened to them.

In other words, a sense of presence is VR's killer app. I could note here that Philip Rosedale and other VR enthusiasts always said the same thing about Second Life (but I've said that already). So I'll just say this: There's no proof whatsoever that virtual presence per se is an appealing feature beyond hardcore gamers and assorted 3D graphics enthusiasts.

Just to tick off eight supporting points from the top of my head: