New World Notes

SL Flickr of the Day: It's Walter White Wednesday!

Moos Hultcrantz created this spectacular virtual cosplay tribute to Breaking Bad that's so obsessively detailed it even comes with a Los Pollos Hermanos sign. And then, of course, there's Walter White/Heisenberg himself, which may bring up a principled uncertainty: There's really a Walter White avatar in Second Life?

Why yes, yes there is:

"Strange Beasts": Great Short About Our Exciting Future in Augmented Reality

Strange Beasts from Magali Barbé on Vimeo

Here's a lovely little film about a very likely and oh so magical future we'll soon to live thanks to augmented reality technology. Best I say no more than that up top --just watch and discuss below:

Sansar Social VR Teaser Video Gets Less Than 30,000 Views

How many people are actually interested in "social VR"? There's about 7 million VR headset owners, so presumably, at least a large fraction of them. So if I were Linden Lab, I'd be a bit worried looking at this view count:

That's the official teaser to Sansar released about 20 days ago, which was featured on several top tech media outlets including VentureBeat, Tom's Hardware, PC Gamer, and Upload VR,  with a combined readership in the many millions. (VentureBeat alone gets 9 million monthly pageviews.) For whatever reason, however, most readers weren't teased enough to watch the actual teaser. By way of comparison, this video featuring VR Chat was uploaded to YouTube on March 10 with little or no media coverage, and got nearly 50K views:

Elon Musk, Who Who Thinks We're in a Virtual Simulation, Now Building Technology to Actually Make that Possible

Hey you know how Elon Musk believes we're actually plugged into a computer simulation of the real world created by an advanced simulation, even though that doesn't make much sense from a practical or even philosophical perspective? Funny story, but turns out he's spending money to someday, maybe, make that actually possible:

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is backing a brain-computer interface venture called Neuralink, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company, which is still in the earliest stages of existence and has no public presence whatsoever, is centered on creating devices that can be implanted in the human brain, with the eventual purpose of helping human beings merge with software and keep pace with advancements in artificial intelligence. These enhancements could improve memory or allow for more direct interfacing with computing devices.

So even if there is no advanced civilization plugging us in now, Elon's trying to build the hardware so that we ourselves (as rational and enlightened as we are) to plug in our kids, or our kids' kids. You can read more about it in this long Vanity Fair profile, which includes this on-point comment from VR pioneer (and Linden Lab board member) Jaron Lanier, touching on topics he also mentioned in my Wired article last year:

SURVEY: Does Using Virtual Reality Make You Nauseous?

Please choose the most appropriate answer below! Given last week's post, please also answer (anonymously of course) according to gender identity:

If You Have Virtual Sex as a Praying Mantis Will You Still Eat Your Mate?

Coming soon to Second Life thanks to the new Bento skeleton: Praying mantis avatars! This is an early demo from Angus Tamatzui, who tells me it'll be in his SL Marketplace listings when it's available. SL being SL, some enterprising weirdos will then inevitability figure out how to add "cannibalism after mating"* animation overrides and I just threw up in my mouth a little.

Avatars Against Trump: Climbing Over Virtual Border Walls

Eriko Littlebird shot this photo of a striking SL installation by virtual artist Pale Illusion, depicting real world border walls as cardboard (or to be exact, pixels as cardboard as walls), adding: "I am fed up with those politicians who steal our money to build walls while our parents fought to delete the ones which were built after WWII." Visit Illusion's wall here.

More Avatars Against Trump pics here -- submit your own image or video here.

Social VR Must Transcend VR Headsets Or Meet Second Life's Fate

New Upload VR editorial by my colleague Balaji Krishnan, who argues that new social VR platforms must be relevant and useable to everyone who doesn't own a VR headset:

Combine these two trends — slow growth of VR, plus time/place-shifting of content consumption — and you can see that social VR as it is typically conceived confronts a near-insurmountable adoption hurdle. Facebook and other VR developers are asking consumers to invest a fair amount of money and quite a lot of time on a platform most of their friends still don’t use (since most of them don’t even own a virtual reality device) which also runs counter to every content consumption convenience they’ve enjoyed for the last 7-10 years.

It's not unlike the problem Second Life faced during the 2006-08 hype period, being a client optimized for high-end desktop PCs and dedicated broadband trying to gain traction when the market was rapidly shifting to laptops, wireless, and then smartphones.

The solution? A way for social VR users to still be social with the rest of us:

Top Five New World Notes Posts from Last Week!

• Confirming danah boyd's Early Concerns, Studies Suggest Women Much More Likely To Get Motion Sickness From Using VR
• Survey Results: New Sansar Teaser Leaves Most Social VR Fans Unmoved
• Now That Game Exec Bing Gordon Is On Linden Lab's Board, I Sure Hope They Add Game Systems To Second Life & Sansar
• White Supremacist Groups Quietly Removed From Second Life Search; Second Life Being Second Life, Race-Based Fetish & Furry Groups Remain
• John Carmack: Nausea "Not A Deal-Breaking Problem" For Virtual Reality

Contemplating New Virtual Worlds While Still Loving Old Ones

With Linden Lab's Sansar soon to launch and a game executive now helping to make its new social VR world more commercially appealing, reader Dirran Skytower has some pertinent thoughts for users of Second Life -- and for that matter, developers at Linden Lab -- contemplating the future of Sansar and worlds beyond:

I am in two minds. While I love sailing in SL I accept that there are always going to be much much better sailing simulators outside SL. That is always going to be true because building a standalone sailing simulator will always be easier than building a virtual world that includes mechanisms for sailing. That lies to almost every game. At the same time SL suffers significantly from being intellectually isolated from the gaming world. I suspect that is more at the den of management than the engineering staff...