New World Notes

Sansar's Name Suggests a Place But Its Description Suggests a Platform

Tuesday musing about Linden Lab's upcoming social VR world: "Sansar" is Sanskrit for "world" (as Strawberry Singh notes), which makes it a better name for a virtual world than, well, Second Life. (More on that below.) At the same time, everything that Linden Lab has said about Sansar strongly suggests it's not a world, in the sense of being a unified, seamless simulation with a sunrise and sunset, flora and fauna, and so on. Rather, the CEO compares Sansar to WordPress -- i.e. a content creation platform. The challenge Linden Lab will soon face is the need to present Sansar as a world to consumers, but a platform to content creators.

Compare this to why Second Life, which was once called Linden Lab, was named Second Life. In fact, it was almost called something like Sansar. From my book:

Woman Hired by Magic Leap to Make Virtual Reality More Appealing to Women Now Suing Magic Leap for Discrimination Against Women

Virtual reality won't succeed as a mass market product unless it can be made appealing to women, and the VR/AR industry deals with its internal culture that tends to push women away -- it's a recurring theme for this blog (as here, and here, and also here). So I have to note this story from some 10 days ago about Magic Leap, the now embattled augmented reality company:

In a lawsuit filed in the southern district court of Florida, [former VP Tannen Campbell alleges company CEO Rony Abovitz brought her in to solve the company’s “pink/blue problem,” referring to the disproportionate ratio of men to women in leadership positions at Magic Leap... According to the complaint, Campbell tried for seven months to get Abovitz to attend a presentation on gender diversity that included proposed changes to make the startup a more friendly environment. But, says the suit, the CEO walked out halfway through the meeting after finally listening to the presentation... Campbell was later fired for what she alleges was a challenge to Abovitz to “acknowledge the depths of misogyny in Magic Leap’s culture and take steps to correct a gender imbalance that negatively affects the company’s core culture and renders it so dysfunctional it continues to delay the launch of a product that attracted billions of investment dollars,” according to the suit.

Obviously Magic Leap deserves its day in court to plead its case, but the preponderance of details in the suit are pretty damning, such as:

The Wacky, Helium-Pitched Second Life Adventures of Soda Gnome

OK this is pretty hilarious:

Who is Soda Gnome? Where did he come from? When did he try to defeat Supergirl in a sandbox building context only to be bested by Mr. Spock and his whales? These answers remain unclear, but this video just popped up on my feed, and I can say it's one of the funnier "Let's play Second Life" videos I've seen in a long time. And it's just one in a sprawling series of Soda Gnome videos! Start with Episode One:

I Can't Stop Staring at the Eerie Marionette Avatars of High Fidelity

Here's Philip Rosedale co-hosting a public chat/salon about blockchain technology in High Fidelity, and while the conversation is interesting in itself -- spinning off on themes touched on in Philip's recent blog post -- I'm also pretty mesmerized by the avatars who have it: Photorealistic, with beautifully fluid animations which successfully cross the Uncanny Valley for a few seconds... followed by herky jerky motions which convey the human puppeteer pulling the digital puppet by its VR-controlled strings.

Top 3rd Party Second Life-Oriented Websites, According to SimilarWeb

According to site analytics service SimilarWeb, visits to SecondLife.com have dropped from 15 million a month in August 2016 to 13.6 million in January 2017. That's consistent with Linden Lab's recent report that "the total number of monthly actives has come down" in recent years. Another notable data point from SimilarWeb is that 28% of traffic to SecondLife.com comes from hundreds of third party sites, the top five of which are these below:

Outselling Oculus & Vive Combined, Playstation VR Sales Near 1 Million

Turns out the company's less enthusiastic reports last month were not quite accurate at all:

In an interview at his Silicon Valley office on Friday, Mr. House revealed PlayStation VR’s sales for the first time, saying consumers had purchased 915,000 of the headsets as of Feb. 19, roughly four months after it went on sale... Sony’s internal goal was to sell one million of the headsets in its first six months, by mid-April. The company will almost certainly surpass that forecast... Sony’s primary competitors, Oculus from Facebook and HTC, have not disclosed sales of their premium headsets. One research firm, SuperData Research, estimates there were 243,000 Oculus Rift headsets and 420,000 HTC Vive headsets sold by the end of last year. In contrast, during the iPhone’s first three months on the market in 2007, nearly 1.4 million units were sold, and it is considered to be among the most successful technology products of all time.

This strongly suggests several market trends for VR:

Top Five New World Notes Posts from Last Week!

• Avatars With Darker Skins Seem To Get Less Likes Than Whiter Ones
• Philip Rosedale Building Better Virtual World From Beautiful Real World Home
• SL Photography Master Amona Savira Reportedly Passed On
• Second Life & Sansar Users Overwhelmingly More Positive About Linden Lab For Taking Stand Against Trump's Muslim Refugee Ban - Survey
• Just 3% Of All VR Apps On Steam Earn Over $250,000 In Revenue

Behold a Bento-Based Horse (But Still in Beta)

Aemeth is on a horse. A Bento-based horse. Vastly improving articulation for Second Life horses, already a popular commodity -- so popular, in fact, they have led to real life lawsuits -- but when built in Bento, still with some kinks:

Avatars Against Trump: Anti-Transgender Edition

Tizzy Canucci created this rather brilliant protest pic against Trump's rolling back of guidelines to protect transgender students, breaking his promise to do the exact opposite.

Submit your own Avatars Against Trump pic here.

Avatars With Darker Skins Seem to Get Less Likes Than Whiter Ones

Daeberethwen Arbenlow is one of Second Life's most popular fashion bloggers, and she recently noticed a curious but disturbing thing: Her fashion photos with darker skinned avatars consistently get much less Favorites on Flickr than her photo shoots with lighter skinned avatars. This recent spread, for instance, got nearly ninety favorites:

This one below, however, got nearly two hundred:

She started thinking about this contrast after a fellow avatar fashion blogger brought it up to her:

"[She] is a woman of color and she was telling me that it is really hard for women of color to get picked up as bloggers and that the darker her skin is in pictures, the less faves they get," Ms. Arbenlow remembers.