New World Notes

Ever, Jane MMO from Linden Alum Inspired by Austen Novels Goes Open Beta With Special Offer for NWN Readers!

Ever, Jane, an MMO inspired by the works of Jane Austen, is now in open Beta. Lead created by Judy Tyrer, who was a senior engineering manager at Linden Lab back in the day, Ever, Jane development started after a successful Kickstarter in 2013, a labor of love to innovate the genre with a game far from the dungeon crawling and leveling up that MMOs have retreaded for literally decades. "Instead of raids," as Ever, Jane's homepage proclaims, "we will have grand balls. Instead of dungeons, we will have dinner parties."

And thanks to fellow Linden alum Judy, there's a special offer for NWN readers to go with this open beta: Create an Ever, Jane account, post your account name in Comments here, and get 100 Pounds Sterling Regency extra to spend in the game.

Also, here's a special message Judy sent along, with a welcome and request for new players:

Longtime Second Life Musicians' Debut Album Hits Bandcamp's Top 10 Alternative List

Last week the bestseller charts of Bandcamp, the top Internet site for rising indie musicians, included a major metaverse milestone: They Stole My Crayon, a trio of LA musicians with a long history in Second Life, hit the top ten in the Alternative category. Crayon includes Zak Claxton, who's been performing live in Second Life for the last ten years: 

"Anywhere between 3-5 times a month on average," he tells me. "I've been doing songs from the album for several years." (The other band members are Bunny Racecourse and Kat Claxton in SL, Bunny Knutson and Christina Lee IRL, but Zak mostly performs solo in-world.) Their music, which you can give me a listen to above, is moody and hypnotic and to me, sort of evokes some early Arcade Fire. ("Adjectives like ethereal, dissonant, and atmospheric also apply," Zak suggests.)

What's striking is how supportive his Second Life-based fan community has been for them Bandcamp, enough to make them an overall top group there:

SL Flickr of the Day: Amona Savira's "Going Home"

From the Flickr stream of NWN favorite Amona Savira, a dreamy journey on oceans uncharted which somehow take her home. And if you're wondering if the wake in her wake is SL made, not quite:

"[S]adly no ripples like this in SL," she tells me. "It is from a stock photo and added on in Photoshop. Rest is all from SL."

How Many Premium VR Devices Will Sell by 2020? Bloomberg/Gartner's Forecast Suggests 42 Million

I was just reading this Bloomberg story on Google's investments in the VR space, which included this intriguing "Virtual Insanity" chart:

So Bloomberg Intelligence and Gartner forecast VR equipment sales (not counting smartphone-based VR equipment*) to hit $21 billion by 2020. I really wish analysts would break down estimates like this more clearly, because the average reader just goes "Whoa, that's a lot of money", without really knowing what it means. So let me try and clarify:

According to this Bloomberg Intelligence/Gartner forecast, by 2020, people will buy less than 42 million units of Vive, Oculus, Playstation VR, and other high-end VR devices.

Divide $21 billion by an average device price of $500 (Oculus and Vive are currently more, but assume their prices go down every year), and 42 million is what you get. That might seem like a lot, but really, that just makes premium VR devices a subset of the overall videogame console/PC gamer market:

Watch: HAL vs. Her In Male/Female Argument Between AIs

Reflections of HAL and Samantha from Tillmann Ohm on Vimeo.

Watch this, it's pretty damn brilliant:

Composed of original lines from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Her (2013), the mashup creates a new context to the words of the electronic protagonists. The two operating systems are in conflict; while Samantha is convinced that the overwhelming and sometimes hurtful process of her learning algorithm improves the complexity of her emotions, HAL is consequentially interpreting them as errors in human programming and analyses the estimated malfunction.

Via Kottke, who points out another hook with the contrast in artificial genders:

"Serendipity": Social Story Told With SL Images on Flickr

"Serendipity" is a fun and clever use of Flickr, inviting SL photographers to contribute to a series of images which tell an evolving story. Brainchild of Goodie McCross, it already has a dozen roughly-connected scenes, which you can see here. (None of them are NSFW, but due to Flickr's unreliable moderation system, some are not viewable unless you're logged in.) So far, the story is taking a decided neo-noir tone -- for instance, this personal favorite above, by Kimmy Littleboots -- but it's still unfolding.

Binary VR: Mouth-Tracking for Oculus & Vive, Compatible With High Fidelity

"BinaryVR develops facial expression tracking technology for virtual reality, enabling users to track and retarget their facial animations in real-time in any transformed CG character or avatar mode." Notwithstanding the company's description, I'm saying "mouth-tracking" in the title because in the demo above, I'm not seeing any significant tracking on other parts of the face. But maybe updates will update more full facial expressions.

Via Philip Rosedale, who says this works for both Oculus and Vive, and more relevant to him, his new virtual world High Fidelity:

Will Pokémon GO's Sharp Usage Decline Hurt the Augmented Reality Game Market? (Spoiler: Yes)

It was an awesome two month run, Pokémon GO, but as people go back to school and work or just get tired of walking around for the sake of a game, usage is steeply declining:

It had almost 45 million daily users in July, but this figure appears to have sunk by more than 12 million since the start of August, to just over 30 million said to be playing Pokémon Go. Further decline is expected, as downloads, engagement, and the time users spend on the app have all also visibly flopped, according to data provided by Sensor Tower, SurveyMonkey, and Apptopia.

30 million daily users is still a very impressive figure, but based on current downward momentum, we should probably expect that to decline and settle to around 5-15 million. Even that range would be a massive figure, enough to make GO a regular reference point of contemporary pop culture, but it's doubtful the game will be further touted as the next central social/marketing platform. As Raph Koster has suggested, it will simply maintain its user base of dedicated Pokémon-ers: "Pokémon fans are hardcore, memorize giant piles of data, optimize collections, gather rates, hack and cheat, and so on. That's the core audience here and who will monetize over time."

And with such a sharp decline happening so quickly, it's difficult to imagine Pokémon GO growing the market for augmented reality apps in general:

Second Life Marketplace Swamped by Full-Perm Scams

Linden Lab was just touting improvements to its web-based Second Life Marketplace last week, but veteran SL blogger Strawberry Singh has an irksome report of Markeplace problems that mere technical issues won't solve -- namely, unauthorized resell of avatar enhancements:

Apparently there are many accounts on the marketplace reselling full perm creations that they do not have permission to resell. They purchase full perm items from valid full perm creators such as: Underground, Creative Studio, Deadpool,Meli Imako, CBB and many more, then they illegally resell those items, with full perms, at a lower price than the creators themselves... The valid full perm creators have contacted Linden Lab by chat, phone calls and emails but unfortunately nothing has been done about this issue. All they are being told to do is file DMCA’s. A DMCA take down usually takes a week to be taken down, but the next day, that account puts it right back on that same Marketplace as a new listing.

Strawberry has some suggestions for avoiding these scams, which ironically enough, include not using the online Markeplace at all: "Purchase the items from the in-world store of the full perm creator instead of the Marketplace, to ensure that you are not purchasing from an illegal seller." Ironic, because a key point of the Marketplace existing at all is it makes online shopping for virtual content much more convenient than having to go rooting around for items in the full 3D client.

What's worse, Strawberry thinks there's no easy way for Linden Lab to lock down these kinds of scams:

Relax, Elon Musk, We're Not in a Virtual Simulation -- Watch This Video to Understand Why

Elon Musk raised eyebrows last June when he suggested reality itself is almost certainly a virtual simulation created by a powerful alien species and that "the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions". This video above, from Elliotte Lee's Click Philosophy channel, provides a helpful and reassuring argument for why this notion doesn't make much sense. Based on the writings of the great, recently deceased Hillary Putnam, who had the advantage of being both a philosopher and a computer scientist -- so he'd probably be less impressed by Elon's "we can already simulate a World of Warcraft in computers, so super-smart aliens could simulate an entire universe" argument -- Putnam's argument boils down to something like this: