New World Notes

SL Bloggers: Who Wants to Read Presence, a VR Novel by ReadWrite Founder Richard MacManus?

Presence is a new sci-fi novel from Richard MacManus, founder of the huge ReadWrite tech blog, and it's also inspired by Second Life and other virtual worlds:

"The book is set in 2051," he tells me, "when the dominant social network of the era is a virtual world called Doppel. I wanted to explore what a Facebook 35 years into the future would look like. My bet is that it'll be a virtual world, kind of like what Second Life is these days for socializing and doing business. Except in Doppel, your avatar is an exact match of your physical body. The technology is so good in 2051, that you can easily jump between the physical and virtual worlds without noticing much difference."

I'm hoping to read it when I get the chance, and if you're an SL blogger interested in reading it too, Richard has a generous offer:

Manager of US Army's OpenSimulator Project Proposes Oversight Be Transitioned to Civilian-Run Foundation

Interesting proposal from Douglas Maxwell, manager of the U.S. Army’s MOSES OpenSimulator project, which recently got an open source, web-based viewer, for an independent, civilian-run foundation to manage development and evolution of the codebase:

This organization would not be controlled by MOSES in any way, but a parallel civilian entity that shares our work ethic and philosophy for the application of virtual world technology to civilian educational and training uses. Ideally, this foundation would be supported through membership fees, research grants, and service contracts. The foundation should support a staff of code and content maintainers. This foundation would be responsible for the maintenance of a source code repository that would serve as an official residence for a safe and secure open source simulator.

On the surface this looks like a great idea and boon to the future of open source-based virtual worlds:  

Palmer Luckey’s Mexican-American Virtual Reality Mentor “Dismayed” by His Support for Pro-Trump Group

Last weekend, virtual reality pioneer Nonny de la Peña posted a strongly-worded public statement saying how “dismayed” she was to learn that Palmer Luckey has been secretly supporting a pro-Trump advocacy group. This was not surprising, given that Nonny is Mexican-American and has personally experienced the kind of anti-Latina racism Trump regularly trades in. What is surprising but less well-known is this irony: Palmer Luckey may well owe some of his very success in VR to Nonny de la Peña.

Consider:

• Palmer Luckey was de la Peña’s intern at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies, learning and honing much of his VR abilities under her guidance.
• Working with de la Peña in 2012, Palmer Luckey originally built what would become a prototype for the Oculus Rift (nearly a year before his famous Kickstarter) for her acclaimed “Hunger LA” VR experience at the Sundance Film Festival.
• Due to their history together, it's safe to say Nonny de la Peña will probably end up testifying in Zenimax’s lawsuit against Oculus VR, which asserts that Luckey “lacked the training, expertise, resources” to actually build the Rift prototype. Since Nonny de la Peña gave Palmer Luckey much of that very training, expertise, and resources, she is likely the very best witness to protect Palmer Luckey’s credit for creating the Rift.

I just got a chance to talk with Nonny (I’ve known her since she was developing VR projects in Second Life) and she tells me she stands by her Facebook statement. What’s more, she added, she’s hardly the only Latinx offended by the Luckey/Trump revelation:

Where Other MMO Players Give Dungeon Walkthroughs, Second Life Users Give Inventory Management Tutorials

Here's a fun tutorial video by Cassie Middles, explaining how she manages her Second Life inventory, which like every other power user, is massive, bloated, and scattered. Without traditional RPG elements, lots of Second Life users explore their scary inventory pretty much the same way WoW players might explore the latest dungeon instance. Which is a lesson I hope developers of Sansar and High Fidelity are learning right now:

Open Source Version of TiltBrush VR App for the Web

A-Painter is basically an open source, web-based version of TiltBrush, still the best VR app I've ever experience, running on the open source A-Frame I wrote about last year.

Boy of Couple Who First Met in Virtual World Now Explores New Virtual Worlds With Father

This is a fun video of a father and son exploring a spaceship they built together in Minecraft, which is a pretty common thing nowadays, but perhaps this video comes with an extra backstory: The dad, Damien Fate, is a well-known content creator for Second Life, and the son, named Linden, likely would not even exist let alone have that name, if it wasn't for that MMO:

Facebook 360 Photos Make Virtual World Photos Come Alive in Your Smartphone

This is lots of fun -- click this link from your smartphone, and assuming you have the Facebook app pre-installed, it should take you to a 360 panoramic pic shot in Second Life by Erythro Asimov. The cool part is when you rotate your phone around you, so does the image -- making a virtual world screenshot seem even more like a window into another reality.

How's this work?

Survey: Have You Signed Linden Lab's Sansar NDA?

Since asking SL brand owners about their plans (if any) to move to Sansar has turned up scant feedback, here's a new survey that gets us down to virtual brass tacks -- finding out how many people reading this blog or seeing it in my social media channels have even signed the Sansar NDA.

Kickstart This: Dual Universe, Single-Shard MMO With Voxel-Based User-Generated Content

Dual Universe is an intriguing MMO on Kickstarter which has everything to fit my gold standard of a next gen MMO: It's single-sharded, it enables voxel-based user-generated content, and it puts the focus on emergent gameplay in which player behavior impacts the world in unpredictable ways.

Palmer Luckey's Plan to Give Poor Virtual Reality Gets Trump-Powered Viral Boost

That's just....wow @jomc @slhamlet pic.twitter.com/UJlAMCo5gh

— Tim Maughan (@timmaughan) September 24, 2016

Thanks to author Joanne McNeil and journalist Tim Maughan, my Wired article excerpt highlighting Palmer Luckey's plan to give the world's poor a better (simulated) life through VR was shared last weekend by William Gibson, Clay Shirky, and a bunch of other heavy hitters. The funny (in a sadly ironic way) thing is, when it was actually published by Wired last February, it provoked scarce a murmur. Like everything nowadays, it only garnered interest when Trump got involved.

Some favorite Tweets on the topic below: