New World Notes

Machinima Masterpieces: "Pipedream" Featuring SL's Petrovsky Flux

Shot in 2008 by Mescaline Tammas, a real life film editor, "Pipedream @ Hambone Flux" is a masterpiece for several reasons: Beautifully shot and cut, it was among the first to go viral outside the SL community, with Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow writing, "Man, this is the first SL machinima I've seen that crosses the line from 'extremely promising' to 'Holy crap!'" Just as key, it's a tribute to Second Life's self-assembling, self-destructing, steampunk city known as the Bogon Flux back then, a masterpiece in itself. And good news, it's still in Second Life: Now called the Petrovsky Flux, click here to visit.

A fourth reason? It was among the first SL machinimas to use a customized WindLight filter, an eerie, smokey, Max Max-y sort of atmosphere. (WindLight had only recently launched.) Created by Mescaline himself, it's called "London 2026" -- here's the code below:

New Social VR App Brings Vive & Mobile Users Together in Same Virtual Space

DabKick VR is a new app for Vive I'm helping launch, so I'm massively biased when I say this, but I think it's a unique twist to "social VR", in which the virtual world space is accessible not only to people wearing headsets, but also people accessing the same app from their smartphones:

[W]e think social VR can’t succeed unless the vast majority of non-HMD owners can also participate in the experience. This is why we’ve created an immersive, virtual theater, where Vive users can enjoy both video and images together with DabKick app users connected via their iOS and Android phones — all represented as avatars in the same virtual space, together... Maximum concurrency per session: Technically up to 100,000, but feasibly, up to 200 avatars in the entire theaters watching together.

Lead developer Balaji Krishnan wrote a post explaining why this cross-platform approach may work where pure VR experiences may not:

SL Places Web Pages for Land Owners Goes Live

Now available to all SL landowners; the FAQ is here. However, the FAQ doesn't mention the problem with Mature-rated parcels I raised in January, so not sure if average visitors are still blocked from seeing those, even if they're not specifically full of graphic sex and violence. Also, Lindens: Where is the web embed code for these web pages? You know that's how YouTube became so huge, right? I would probably blog an SL place every week or even every day if an embed code option existed.

Tried Virtual Reality At Least 2-3 Times? Please Take My One Question Survey!

CLICK HERE TO TAKE.. It'll seriously take some 15 seconds tops. And the results when I publish them next week will be oh so worth it, promise.

Cajsa Compiles the Very Best Second Life Images on Flickr

Available here, every single screenshot a painting. Here's another from Cajsa Lilliehook's latest collection, a unique angle on a fashion footwear photo:

Second Life Vet Searches for Community in Much-Changed Virtual World

Interesting /SecondLife thread from a young woman who left SL only 3 years ago, and now returns to a wasteland of WTF:

As a young woman (was 16-20 at the time), I made a lot of friends my age and had hours of large groups hanging out all the time. It was great! Now though? Everyone has left. Most of the sims we used to hang out on have completely shut down. The others are barren. I went on SL recently to see if I could find anything. All of the places that are populated are literally dance clubs, sex roleplay places, and Korea1. It seems as though all the younger players just don't exist anymore and it's all older people who are just into roleplay.

Some veterans who haven't left offer good advice -- like this from "DaemonBlackflag":

As Palmer Luckey Leaves Oculus, Here's NWN's History With the VR Pioneer

Palmer Luckey's successful Oculus Rift Kickstarter in 2012 basically launched this new wave of VR hype we're currently in, but now he's leaving/being forced out of Oculus the company that Facebook now owns:

According to Oculus, this will be Palmer’s last week with Friday marking his official last day as an employee of Facebook. In an official statement, the company said that: “Palmer will be dearly missed. Palmer’s legacy extends far beyond Oculus. His inventive spirit helped kickstart the modern VR revolution and helped build an industry. We’re thankful for everything he did for Oculus and VR, and we wish him all the best.” When asked if Luckey’s departure was voluntary, Facebook representatives declined to comment, citing a policy of not discussing internal personnel matters.”

This is almost certainly due to Luckey becoming PR poison due to his troll-ish Trump support last year. I've met and spoke with Palmer several times since 2014, and always found him a enthusiastic, friendly dude, albeit with a sometimes dismissive arrogance typical to very young men who get a glimmer of Silicon Valley success so early on. For instance, he got into a bit of a hair-splitting debate with Philip Rosedale on my Facebook page. And when I profiled him for Wired last year, this is how he painted the social benefits of VR:

“It's easy for us to say, living in the great state of California, that VR is not as good as the real world,” Luckey went on, “but a lot of people in the world don't have as good an experience in real life as we do here.” In fact, as Luckey suggests to me in a follow-up conversation, it may be people from developing nations who’ll be among the first to embrace virtual reality. While the technology must become extremely compelling to attract well-off Californians away from their enviable real lives, he argues, “[i]f you’re talking about Chinese workers or people who are living in Africa, I think the threshold is a lot lower… it could be a lot of the early adopters are the people who have a greater incentive to escape the real world.”

After Oculus, I wonder if he'll take that vision to another VR company. Anyway, here's some more Luckey highlights from New World Notes:

Sansar Seriously Starting to Seem like Blue Mars to Me

Interesting conversation in the Sansar Reddit group titled, appropriately enough, "Share Your Experience", which like anything on Reddit, deserves a grain of salt. But from my quick read, the basic gist is Sansar seriously seems like Blue Mars, a virtual world with extremely high-end graphics launched 6-8 years ago which I did some consulting for back around 2010. For instance, someone in the /Sansar group writes: 

"Just like the SL client, if you want access to Sansar you'll use the Sansar client. The difference is there is no 'mainland'. Regions aren't connected. Going from one place to the other means you exit and load up a new 'experience'."

Which seems a lot like the Blue Mars client (see above, and here), which first launched as PC-only and wasn't a contiguous world. Like I said, grain of salt in all this before anything's announced, but Linden Lab staff have suggested this very kind of interface and experience during Sansar previews. (Sansar is also first launching as a PC-only product, with Mac and mobile said to come later.) 

The comparison isn't necessarily a bad one, by the way -- Blue Mars had a lot of great ideas and ambition, especially for third party developers, which was why I wanted to help launch them:

Philip Rosedale: Architecture & Historical Recreations May Be a Bigger Killer App for Social VR Than Even Games

This is a virtual recreation of Frank Lloyd Wright's Banff Pavilion, which was demolished in 1939, but now exists in exact scale in High Fidelity, so people can explore Wright's classic building as avatars. (In this case, HiFi founder Philip Rosedale and many others, including a knowledgable guide.) It's made possible by a partnership between High Fidelity and Archilogic, a company which converts 2D blueprints into 3D models.

Philip's first virtual world, Second Life, was once promoted by some top architects as a visualization tool; however, the unrealistic proportions of buildings versus avatars in Second Life, not to mention the difficulty of moving around in SL buildings while in first-person on a flat PC screen, mostly made that unfeasible.

In full VR, Philip Rosedale tells me, it's much better:

"Obviously," as Philip puts it, "the correct perception of physical space and distance granted by the HMD is a big difference.  You can certainly judge whether you would have wanted to live in such a place, for example." But he thinks the fact that this is now possible in social VR makes architecture as a use case for virtual reality even more powerful:  

"[The] more nuanced improvement is the ability to walk around in the space with other people," says Philip. "There is something inexplicably different and fun about using VR to stroll around in a real place with other real people.  In a manner similar to how we first spoke of 'presence' as fooling the mind into believing that from a single-person perspective you really were somewhere else, the backdrop of a real place as the subject of discussion somehow deepens the sense of social 'presence'.  I have little doubt that architects will put headsets in their office to allow clients to explore spaces together."

Philip makes the interesting argument that this means architecture simulation in VR is even a better use case than gaming:

 

Just So You Know, There's a Buddhist-Inspired Game Where You Literally Play Everything

You know how the teaser video to Sansar, the new social VR world named after the Sansrkit word for "World", has only gotten 30,000 views? Here's a new gameplay video for Everything (that's the name of the game), featuring the lectures of American Buddhist Alan Watts, where you literally play everything. Who would be interested in something like that?

Nearly 200,000 people at least, that's who. It's from artist/game designer David OReilly, whose last game, Mountain, where you literally play a mountain, was an unexpected hit: