New World Notes

Top Five New World Notes Posts from Last Week!

• Future of VR Games Probably More Like "Follow the White Rabbit"-Type Adventure Games Than "Doom"
• Second Life Users Raise Nearly $2500 in Donations to Help Orlando Pulse Victims
• Slow Bento: New SL Avatar Development Likely Delayed by Multi-Disciplinary Nature
• I Painted Whirling Virtual Fire & My Face Felt the Flames
• In Academic Study of Sex in Second Life, 60% Enjoy Virtual Version Over Real Life Thing

Today at 2pm Pacific, Meet Philip Rosedale in High Fidelity for Vive/Oculus Building Demo

Have an Oculus or Vive? Join me in High Fidelity today at 2pm to talk about building with hand controllers. Download beta, go to 'playa'

— Philip Rosedale (@philiprosedale) June 17, 2016

Get the download here and get your Vive/Oculus hand controllers ready. Somewhere in San Francisco's SOMA district, Philip with his awesome hair will be all:

That Time a Rock Legend Retweeted My Story About Donald Trump's Virtual Troll Army in Second Life

Probably only interesting to me and definitely a humblebrag, but this retweet of my Vice story on Trump demons trolling Bernie fans in SL tickled me:

Yes, this guy. (Thanks to a Tweet by Riven Homewood.) So an already strange story about real world politics in a surreal virtual world now comes with a classic rock soundtrack. To wit:

Future of VR Games Probably More Like "Follow the White Rabbit"-Type Adventure Games Than "Doom"

So I was standing in line at a VR party the other night when the woman in front of me pulled a world from her bag. I was still recovering from playing a spoogey, eyeball-punching demo of the new Doom on Vive, but the world she strapped to my face was decidedly more serene -- a magic apartment in Paris full of mystery, clues, and surprises.

"Follow the White Rabbit" is an upcoming VR game designed by Nicole Lazzaro, who as it happens, also designed the iPhone's first accelerometer-driven game back in 2007. And if VR games have any chance of reaching a mainstream audience, I think "White Rabbit" and games like it stand the best chance of doing so:

Second Life Users Raise Nearly $2500 in Donations to Help Orlando Pulse Victims

As of this hour, the total in donations that will be converted from Linden Dollars to US$ is L$586,767 -- about $2300. If daily donation rates keep pace, that total should easily go over $2500 in value by today. Casper Warden, a well-known SL content creator, is converting all donations into real US dollars and sending them to the official GoFundMe Pulse Victims Fund page for Equality Florida (which as of today, has nearly reached $5 million total). I'd love to see the L$ total exceed $5,000 or even pass $10,000, and I know the community can do it. The annual Relay for Life campaign in Second Life for the American Cancer Society consistently collects Linden Dollar donations worth six figures in US dollars. 

Click here to make your own donation on the land of Casper, or get a copy of the donation box for your own land here.

Slow Bento: New SL Avatar Development Likely Delayed by Multi-Disciplinary Nature

Why are we still waiting for Project Bento-based Second Life avatars? After two weeks on the main grid, little two none have shown up in SL social circles or media. (Besides those already developed by early beta developers, like Aki's wyvern above.) One very good reason, as SL veteran Patchouli Woollahra puts out, is developing a Bento avatar tends to require more than just one skill set:

"The main barrier here," as he puts it, "is that unlike the legacy SL avatar skeleton, the extra bones in a Bento-ified avatar need extra animations playing in order to properly animate them. So this is not a simple model/texture/rig job, but also requires help from a good animator as well. And frankly, this is stretching across multiple disciplines:

I Painted Whirling Virtual Fire & My Face Felt the Flames

Tilt Brush, which lets you paint in brushstrokes of glowing solid light, is by far the best non-game VR application I've tried out so far -- and thanks to fellow Linden alum Reuben Steiger, whose new company co-sponsored a huge virtual reality party/demo show last night, I got to leap into quite a few.

Rather, the effect was impressive. Developed by Google, the user interface for Tilt Brush is pretty counter-intuitive and kludgy. (Instead of selecting different brushes and paints which actually look like brushes or paints, the more intuitive choice, you have to page through a 3D menu which seems more suitable to 2D.) Once you more or less get it going, however, it is pretty magical: Using Vive's hand controls, you're able to draw in the space in front of you, and to a striking degree, actually feel what you're creating as solid, reactive entities. Specific example: There's a seriously cool fire font in Tilt Brush which paints rivulets of spinning flame wherever you wave -- and if you paint these strokes close to you, you can actually feel the warmth against your cheeks, more or less as you would whenever you blow out a candle.

I mean, if you're asking me if this is the killer app of VR, that's a totally different question:

SL Sim Pic Inspired by Wyeth Reminds Me of John Ford

This moody and richly textured SL Flickr pic of the day by "Shelly70" is taken from her new sim inspired by Wyeth's "Christina's World". But because I'm a film geek, it reminds me more of John Ford's closing from The Searchers:

Second Life Users Raise Over L$430,000 to Benefit Victims of Pulse Terror/Hate Shooting - Get a Free Donation Box

Since Sunday night, Second Life users have raised over $L430,000 in donations that will be converted into cash donations that will be sent to the victims of last weekend's horrific terrorist/homophobic attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. L$430K is about $1,700 in real dollars, which is a great start, but surely we can donate far more: Click here to make your own donation on the land of Casper Warden, who's running the drive.

You can go even farther than that: Click here to get a free copy of this donation collector, so you can help increase donations:

Yes I Know E3 in LA Here Now Inundated With VR News

... I'm actually right now as you read this arranging to on do some live-blogging and/or Tweeting from VR-related events at E3, and will do a round-up of the biggest announcements later in the week. Meantime, what's the most exciting VR/E3-related news you've seen so far?