New World Notes

Mesmerizing Bento Hand Demo from Russian SLer Lumen Wing

This is a beautiful and dreamlike Bento avatar hand demo from Russian Second Life user Lumen Wing, whose voice has seriously dulcet ASMR potential. It's all Russian language, of course, but she helpfully added a teleport link where you can buy these Bento hands: Click here to visit Vista Animations.

Google Translate, by the way, has quite improved, at least when it comes to Russian:

High Fidelity User Information Potentially Exposed After E-Mail Breach, CEO Philip Rosedale Announces

High Fidelity users just got an e-mail from Philip Rosedale, CEO and founder of the new social VR world, announcing this unwelcome news:

Recently, we determined that a High Fidelity staff email account was compromised. Based on an audit of our logs, it appears that the account was accessed by an unauthorized user in late December and again in early January. I’m contacting you today because this compromise may have exposed your email address and High Fidelity account username. Your password was not decodable from this information, and no payment or credit card information or history was accessed.

Full text of e-mail below, including steps the company is taking to protect their users. One of the key takeaways, Philip tells me, is "it underscores the importance of a correct long-term design for secure identity - something that I think we can lead the discussion on." As he points out in the e-mail:

Looking forward, this is an opportunity to touch on how important we think identity and the security of your identity will be in virtual worlds... It is our belief that as High Fidelity becomes widely used as a platform, we must design and implement identity systems which are decentralized, under the control of you (not us), and ideally impossible to breach through any single point of attack.

That's decentralized versus the centralized services like Facebook and Twitter that most of us use mostly every day -- and are seemingly breached every day. Anyway, full announcement below:

Four Reasons Why Apocalypse Now the Videogame/VR Experience Kickstarter is the Dumbest Kickstarter in the History of Kickstarter

News every day makes it feel like we're in apocalypse now, so why not play Apocalypse Now, now:

Apocalypse Now - the Game. Game adaptation of the legendary film from key team members of titles such as Fallout: New Vegas, Wasteland 2, Far Cry, & a dozen RPGs

With $3,000,000 in pledges, they turn the game into a full VR experience too! I'm sort of sad Coppola is giving out the IP rights to Kickstart a videogame based on his masterpiece, but maybe his spaghetti sales are slow? I mean, really:

The movie is perfect in ways a videogame/VR experience can never be:

Every single shot and line of dialog is deliberately and perfectly timed, so the audience experiences precisely what they are meant to absorb, when and how they are meant to -- something an interactive experience can never replicate.

The game's proposed mechanics totally contradict the entire point of the movie:

I can hardly begin o process how dumb the following gameplay description is in relation to the film:

Epic SL Avatar Actually Just Slapped Together Armor & Drones

Bento-based avatars are still not always the be-all, end-all of Second Life avatars. Behold this robot from /SecondLife reader "adidragan", who announces, "When the avatar market is so dry, you end up making an avatar out of armors and follower drones." Reader challenge: Identify in Comments the bits and pieces /user/adidragan used to build his/her/its avatar.

How to Import Avatar Outfits Hand-Made in Tilt Brush to Wear in High Fidelity

I told you about that nifty hack for importing basic 3D objects created in Vive's Tilt Brush into the social VR world of High Fidelity, and now HiFi user XaosPrincess has gone the next step up: Creating a costume in Tilt Brush, then importing that to actually wear on her High Fidelity avatar. (And a pretty smashing ballroom gown at that.)

"I imported an object-file of my avatar's body into Tilt Brush and painted the dress onto it using the mirror mode," she tells me. "Then I exported the finished dress as an FBX and imported it to the Blender session I exported the avatar's body from. In Blender I adjusted the dress to the avatar making sure it's measurements, rotation and pivot point had the same specifications as the avatar. After a bit of cosmetic tweaking (deleting some vertices and bending others) I transferred the weights from my avatar's body to the dress. Then I exported the whole avatar including the dress as an FBX again and imported it into High Fidelity."

Whew. You can read her even more detailed and illustrated tutorial here. As with the 3D model created in VR and then printed in real life, this is another example of virtual reality technology reviving talents associated with old school, non-digital arts:

Hamlet is Hungry for Bento So Please Bring Him More

Fully-articulated snakes or angels with riffling wings, this about blogging Bento-borne avatars is you just want to blog some more. Please post links in Comments!

Trump-Appointed FCC Head Poses Direct Threat to Second Life & Other Virtual Worlds/Online Games

In case you missed it, Trump's appointment to head the FCC, Ajit Pai, was confirmed yesterday. He's a notorious opponent to net neutrality, a policy enshrined by the Obama administration which he's promised to quickly overturn:

Shortly after Trump’s election, Pai indicated that a top priority under the new administration would be dismantling net neutrality... Pai has long been critical of net neutrality, saying that the problem it’s trying to solve — big internet providers acting as gatekeepers to what we see and do online — doesn’t exist. He recently reiterated a prediction that the commission’s Open Internet Order, which established net neutrality, would be reversed or overturned in one way or another. He’ll now have the chance to play a role in that.

This is a direct threat to online gaming as an industry and a community, since the medium depends on heavy broadband use. If Pai gets his way, gamers should expect their Internet bills to go up precipitously. (Or have their access blocked altogether, or even experience artificial lag.) This is particularly true of an online world like Second Life, which utterly depends on heavy and constant streaming of 3D content.

Kazicle is a Cool Dude With a Fantastic SL Flickr Feed

I mean, here he is in Second Life on a train going nowhere or possibly into the abyss. You know, like us in real life.

Kazicle is that rare dude avatar with dude-like tastes with a great Flickr feed amid a sea of great lady avatar Flickrs, so he's that much more of a gem to follow. I could literally blog pretty much every photo he's posted there and feel like looking at it while drinking whiskey straight. Here's one inspired (sorta?) by the Wolverine:

Surprising Stat: Majority of Second Life Users Surveyed Not Interested in Joining High Fidelity

Here's the results of last week's survey of Second Life users regarding High Fidelity, the new virtual world from Second Life/Linden Lab founder Philip Rosedale. A majority (54%) believe it will attract less than 10,000 users, which isn't surprising, given that it's very focused on working with Oculus and Vive VR rigs, which have a very small install base. What's much more surprising is this: A majority of 55% surveyed are just not interested in joining. This is a mirror opposite reaction of our survey about Linden Lab's Sansar, in which 55% of SLers surveyed are interested in joining.

To judge by reader comments, much of the disinterest in High Fidelity is the time and cost required to set up a VR rig. "I plan on visiting," as Raven Walls put it, "but I won't spend the $$$ to buy VR equipment to use on a daily basis. I will stay in Second Life." That's understandable to a certain extent, but doesn't come close to explaining the reaction:

If I Haven't Blogged Your Virtual World Flickr Yet You Should Tell Me Right Now

Comments are open for endless links. Second Life-centric Flickrs are the classic stand-by, but I'm also looking for High Fidelity and Sansar and beyond. (Yes I know Sansar is still under NDA, but if you're planning to post Sansar pics the moment the NDA lifts, let me know in Comments so I can keep an eye out for them.)