New World Notes

SL Image Artist Whiskey Monday is Back on Flickr!

Here's the Flickr stream of Ms. Whiskey Monday, which after a year-long hiatus, is blossoming with powerful and surreal SL-based images that she's long been famous for.

"I've been gone from SL for a year, enjoying a far happier and healthier real life," Whiskey tells me, "but I'd missed working in SL and creating. I finally got some time to come back and play around. It's a far different place I'm in now, and I like it. This work comes from a more playful and happy place than my previous work."

That applies to the image above, "Raucous", which can be read as pretty grim, but is actually a fun visual twist on a couple common expressions:

That Time George R.R. Martin Appeared in Second Life as Tyrion Lannister

Ciaran Laval found a fascinating old machinima clip I had forgotten about -- George R.R. Martin making a guest appearance in Second Life cosplaying as Tyrion Lannister to briefly do a reading and answer some questions about writing Game of Thrones. (Martin even wrote about the appearance on his own blog.) "Appearance" is probably not exactly accurate -- sounds more like he called into the producing studio's office, and they piped in the audio while someone else controlled his avatar. (Typical set-up between 2006-2008, when RL celebrity appearances in Second Life were the rage.)

Martin's appearance was in 2007, back when Thrones was still just a series of novels -- since then, of course, the HBO show has turned the franchise into a mainstream property, and Game of Thrones avatar cosplay has become incredibly popular in Second Life. There's even a whole virtual island devoted to GoT roleplay.

Video is below via the publisher's YouTube channel, which is heavily edited, so it doesn't include the appearance by the producers of the HBO adoption of Game of Thrones just mentioned in the Wall Street Journal:

Virtual Donald Trump Trolling Second Life Still Somehow Less Juvenile than Real Life Donald Trump

Now that Trump's virtual mansion in Second Life has become big news, the inevitable has happened:

Like I said last year, trolling videos in Second Life is quite literally a cottage industry on YouTube, so it was inevitable this would happen. And while I generally don't blog trolling videos, this one is actually on the relative low end of offensiveness. (I'm more offended this dude's Trump avatar doesn't look anything like actual Trump.) Even more notable:

The Graphics Features That Make SL's Black Dragon Special

My post last week on the third party Black Dragon viewer generated a pretty interesting (occasionally over-snarky) comment thread, culminating in a long comment by the Dragon's creator himself, NiranV Dean, who gets into the nuts and bolts of publishing a pretty popular viewer coded by a single person (namely, NiranV Dean). He details, for example, the rendering features that make Black Dragon unique, and more like a next gen graphics engine:

Top Six New World Notes Posts from Last Week!

• Watch This Seriously Impressive High Fidelity Demo Moving Virtual Objects Around With HTC Vive Hand Controls
• Palmer Luckey Foresaw Rapid Adoption of VR in China Last Year; Predicts Chinese VR Gold Farms & VR Dissent
• Second Life as Seen Through the Black Dragon Viewer
• 10 Million VR Headsets Already Sold in China -- Chinese Fleeing Real World Ecological Catastrophe?
• High Fidelity Literally Brings Vive & Rift Users Together

Watch This Seriously Impressive High Fidelity Demo Moving Virtual Objects Around With HTC Vive Hand Controls

Everything about this High Fidelity demo is pretty damn impressive:

It's mainly meant to demonstrate the use of HTC Vive Hand Controls and High Fidelity physics, and that's impressive enough, but I was also taken at how expressive and relatively fluid the avatar's gestures and mouth animations have become. Presented by HF Director of Content Caitlyn Meeks, it occurred to me that all this waving around might have gotten tiring. Caitlyn tells me not so:

Allegations of Ripping in Insilico Illustrate Challenges of IP Rights in a Mesh-Enabled User-Created World

Longtime SL builder Ifrit Skytower has a controversial but important post alleging that many buildings in Second Life's renowned Insilico sim -- back in SL after the fraught departure of Skills Hak, the original owner-- are rips of 3D models from well-known games. Skytower's post has a host of comparison images, such as this one here, of a portal in Insilico that looks suspiciously like one from XCOM: Enemy Unknown. (One of my favorite games of all time, goddammit.)

I've twice contacted the person alleged to have made these rips, and will post their reply if I receive any. (And in the meantime, any mention of the person's name in Comments will be auto-deleted.) In any case, emphasis on "alleged", because many of the models may not be direct rips, but inspirational reference points. 

Speaking more broadly, mesh rips are fairly common in Second Life, so specific instances are generally not worth reporting. In this case, however, Insilico is one of Second Life's most well-known and admired sims, often featured in Linden Lab marketing materials of SL (including business cards.) Perhaps even more relevant, the allegations illustrate a challenge that's existed since Second Life enabled mesh-based objects. As Skytower notes:

Flickr of the Day: Ms. Arbenlow's Stream of Sexy Badassery

This is the Flickr feed of Daeberethwen Arbenlow, she who shot this much-watched tutorial on photographing mesh, and as you'd expect, her own virtual photographs shine, full of crisply shot sexy fashion, an occasional tutorial, and intermittent flights of badassery, as above. (Full credits of all items on view on her blog.)

Palmer Luckey Foresaw Rapid Adoption of VR in China Last Year; Predicts Chinese VR Gold Farms & VR Dissent

MMO cafe in Bejing I visited in 2013

News that China already has an install base of 10 million virtual reality headsets reminded me of a conversation I had with Palmer Luckey last year, when I was starting to write my article on VR for Wired. Because as it happens, back then he sort of saw this news coming:

While VR is among the most hyped technologies among affluent tech enthusiasts in the West, Luckey told me last Summer, we may find that people in developing nations will embrace it the fastest.

"If you’re talking about Chinese workers or people who are living in Africa, I think the threshold is a lot lower," he said. "It could be a lot of the early adopters are the people who have a greater incentive to escape the real world."

We talked about how 3-D fantasy games are tremendously popular in China, with hundreds of millions fervently playing many hours a day in tiny apartments or cavernous Internet/MMO cafes (as above). When VR goggles reach the cost of a mid-priced smartphone, it’s easy to picture them strapped to tens of millions of Chinese faces, displaying the pixelated semblance of beautiful locales while blocking out any view of the smog-choked sky.

Palmer Luckey even speculated that as virtual reality grows in popularity, some Chinese will have jobs in technical support centers for VR companies, partly to subsidize their own virtual reality use after work:

Second Life as Seen Through the Black Dragon Viewer

I literally just used the official Second Life viewer to try and take a screenshot of something, and within five minutes, wanted to throw my Mac through the window. And then I stumbled on this video from a few months ago, and went "Whoa":

This is Black Dragon, an authorized third party viewer which aims, as lead creator NiranV Dean explains, "to enhance and refine the visuals of Second Life as well as having unique design approaches and features... starting by changing defaults, declining all sorts of bells and whistles no one needs, re-designing the User Interface and trying things other Viewers are too scared of."

Windows only, alas, but the recommended specs seem pretty doable for most gamer PCs: