New World Notes

Sansar News Bits: 10K Developers Requested Early Access, Linden Lab Promoting It for Enterprise Use

Couple points worth noting from that demo of Sansar that Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg gave last week:

Conducted at a Wall Street Journal conference, Linden Lab also created Sansar avatars to look like WSJ reporters (see above), with the subsequent story highlighting Sansar's use for enterprise: "Get ready for virtual reality meetings. And yes, you can stay in your pajamas." Pretty noteworthy that Linden Lab seems intent on pushing Sansar for business use at least as much as for consumers.

Another point from Variety, which reported from the WSJ demo:

Sansar’s early beta testers have not just been Second Life creators, but also some that don’t have any experience with Second Life at all, and are able to start with a clean slate. Linden Lab opened up Sansar to a small group of creators in August. More than 10,000 creators had signed up for access.

Depending on how you look at it, 10,000 people so interested in Sansar that they want early access as developers is pretty impressive... or not too impressive at all.

Top Game Reviewer Rants at VR's "Privilege Goggles"

Happy Monday, everyone! Let's start off with salty and influential game reviewer Jim Sterling hilariously ranting and swearing like a sailor about all the problems inherent in VR -- or as he aptly calls them, "Privilege Goggles". He makes a really good point that virtual reality developers all too often design games and experiences for the "gimmick" of VR that aren't very entertaining in themselves -- rather than making interactive content that's inherently great and becomes even better in VR.

As I said, Sterling is one of the most popular hardcore game reviewers on YouTube, which again points to a deep skepticism coming from what's supposed to be virtual reality's primary target market. If anything, gamers have been burnt on new technology over and over again, and are an even more skeptical about hyperbole than the average consumer. They've already been convinced (as Sterling notes) that Wii-style motion controllers or the Kinect or 3D TV or whatever is The Future of Interactive Technology. But after you get excited and blow a couple thousand dollars on those promises, you tend to get cynical.

Or as Clara Seller put it on this virtual world/MMO blog:

Top Seven New World Notes Posts from Last Week!

• Why I Told Wired That Linden Lab & High Fidelity Are Gambling Their Companies on VR's Highly Unknown Future
• Bento Breakthrough: Fully Articulated Avatar Fingers
• WATCH: New Sansar Demo With User-Made Content
• Fact Check: Yes, Second Life Stopped Growing Around 2006
• Virtual Sex Assault is a 20 Year+ Problem That Probably Won't Improve Until Devs Deal With Their Own Bias
• Gods & Devils: Wired UK's Rowland Manthorpe on What He Learned by Writing About Sansar, High Fidelity... and Palmer Luckey's Trump Support

Why I Told Wired That Linden Lab & High Fidelity Are Gambling Their Companies on VR's Highly Unknown Future

UPDATE, 10/28: Bumped up for weekend discussion!

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I talked with Rowland Manthorpe for his Wired article on Sansar and High Fidelity for over an hour, but he wound up quoting me on just this one point:

"Both Sansar and High Fidelity are operating under a very shaky premise," says Wagner James Au, author of The Making of Second Life. "They're gambling their whole companies' futures on the premise that there's going to be a large market consisting of tens of millions of VR owners.

But that's fine, because if there was one point I wanted to come across in that article, it was that one. Both companies (not to mention Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Sony, and all the other major tech companies creating VR headsets) are now careening toward a very unknown future based on unchecked premises and shaky assumptions. We still don't know how many people in the world actually want to buy and use virtual reality on a regular basis, and so far, signs are not encouraging.

I know what I don't know on this topic -- but I don't know if Philip Rosedale and Ebbe Altberg know what they don't know. A couple years ago, Philip suggested to me that VR adoption would be as rapid as smartphone adoption. Two years later, we're nowhere near that rate. In presentations about Sansar, Altberg has cited Goldman Sachs' forecast that VR has a big and bright future. I'm not sure if Ebbe actually read Goldman's forecast, but I did, and it is rife with questionable assumptions. Both High Fidelity and Sansar are being developed to run with Oculus Rift and HTC-Vive, and as it stands right now, their install base is tiny:

Bento Breakthrough: Fully Articulated Avatar Fingers

Mesmerizing new demo video from Ms. Strawberry Singh demonstrates how Linden Lab's new Bento skeleton technology makes avatar fingers fully articulated. Maybe I'm missing a counter-example, but I can't think of another MMO which enables this level of avatar expression. Read more about it on Strawberry's blog: 

SL Tutorial: How to Take Subtle & Softly Lit Virtual Photos

Love this tutorial on diffuse/soft lighting in Second Life from Beev Beev, the same SLer who created this great tutorial on environmental reflection. It's an immersive demo in which the person behind Beev doesn't talk, just posts instructions through SL chat, so you'll probably want to click full screen to read those.

RL work warning: Contains non-sexual nudity, though the nuclear pasties are kinda kinky.

VR Devs Add Shield to Protect Against Virtual Harassment

When I wrote about reports of virtual harassment of women in VR last Tuesday, it garnered snarky responses from some male readers as below, eerily similar to comments which swarmed social media when the original blog post went up:

[I]t is actually ludicrous. Of course she hung around like the big attention whore she is thinking, wow I'm going to blog about this for sure!!!

Which is not a surprising reaction, because many men have been socialized to disregard a woman's perspective, especially on this subject. (See: This year's Presidential election.) Fortunately, as Kotaku's Cecilia D'Anastasio reports, the actual (and male) developers are not disregarding these reports, and adding virtual barriers to protect users from future harassment:

WATCH: New Sansar Demo With User-Made Content

Here's Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg at a Wall Street Journal conference this week, showing off how we move content around in a Sansar living room with a VR rig. We've seen similar demos before, but perhaps new here is that he's doing this, he says, with user-generated content he "bought" in the Sansar market from one of the several hundred early users in there now. (I can see why one of them compares Sansar to Disneyland.)

My biggest concern isn't that, though, it's this: 

Linden Lab Offers Exclusive Sandboxes to Premium SLers

With even famed sites like Insilico leaving Second Life while other private sims leave the grid at a rapid pace, Linden Lab needs new ways to shore up its revenue base and convert people to becoming monthly Premium subscribers. The latest benefit is a smart one -- more exclusive sandboxes:

First up, we’re proud to introduce 5 new Premium Sandboxes! Like other Premium sandboxes, these are only available to Premium members. We have allocated 4 new regions for cross server code testing, perfect for those multi-region experiences; the Blue Steel, Magnum, LeTigre and Second Life Main regions are each Premium sandboxes arranged directly adjacent to each other in a square... The fifth new region is called: Sandbox Premium Weapons Testing which, as the name suggests, is dedicated to testing your SL munitions! In the past, weapons testing was done in general sandboxes where it was prone to overcrowding, griefing and instability. It was very difficult to get testing done. Now we’ve opened up more space for Premium members to test their combat gear in a less disruptive environment.

Second Life's sandboxes have always been the best part of Second Life -- when they're not overrun with resource hogs and douchenozzles, that is. Adding more premium sandboxes to Premium accounts are a great way to create exclusive social spaces for established users.

High Fidelity's Day of the Dead Looks Damn Delightful

Join our #VR Day of the Dead festival on Nov. 1! Festival space open for exploration on Oct. 28, more info here: https://t.co/7Kev7v9mXN pic.twitter.com/LelUr1OCzj

— High Fidelity (@highfidelityinc) October 20, 2016

High Fidelity may be difficult to use and not very appealing if you don't have a VR headset and it may inspire you to ask, as Linden Lab's own CEO put it, "You install a server. Who the fuck installs servers?", but all that to one side, this upcoming Day of the Dead event they're planning looks pretty damn delightful. Oldschool gamers may even be thinking to themselves: "Multiplayer VR Grim Fandango!"