Strawberry Singh's SL vlogger challenge has already attracted dozens of entries worth a look -- YouTube videos of SLers introducing themselves to the world at large, featuring video capture of their avatars matched to their real life voices. (Just check out her Comment thread for all the video links.) Here's one of many good ones above, featuring Isabelle Cheren, who makes it clear that, contrary to the silly stereotype, she has quite an active and successful first life, and enjoys SL to relax. As Ms. Singh puts it:
Seanan was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her novel Feed (as Mira Grant) was named as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2010. In 2013 she became the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo Ballot.
So really the ideal fantasy writer to appear as a fantastic avatar in a virtual fantasy faire. She made an SL appearance last week, here's her avatar:
I was recently talking with the owner of a fairly well-known content brand in Second Life, who shared some jaw-dropping stats with me:
200-250 unique users engage with the brand's content on a daily basis
And from that usage, the brand earns over $5,000 USD a month
And no, I won't say what kind of content the brand is selling, except to say that no, it's not virtual porn. It's notable in itself that this brand is earning revenue that's equivalent to an upper-middle class income in the US.
But even more than that, it stresses a point that recently occurred to me -- one that will become more and more important as Sansar goes commercial: Based on what we know, it's likely that Second Life content creators -- most of them grass roots developers and small, 1-5 person outfits -- are now making more money from Second Life than Linden Lab, Second Life's actual owner.
Pretty nifty way to include a "Friend Me" feature in a virtual world -- High Fidelity users add each other to their connections lists when their avatars literally shake hands.
Well, almost literally -- their digital hands keep reaching out and pushing into each other but. Never. Quite. Fully. Connect. (There's a metaphor in there somewhere!) Anyway, as HiFi founder Philip Rosedale mentions, this is how Metaverse users in Snowcrash also connected:
Auntie Em, I was just in this wonderful kingdom called "Silverlake". Edited by Celeste "Jim" Forwzy, shot by Jake Vordun, this is pretty brilliant avatar cosplay of the Tin Man, Dorothy, Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion if they were goddamn hipsters. (Via Cajsa, of course.)
The Mighty Ginkgo is a fun, chatty, and valuable YouTube channel [2:50am: See update below] full of SL development tutorials, mostly around creating and customizing mesh-based avatars. This one above, for example, explains how to import a mesh-based fairy into SL, and then make that fairy fairly giant. Here's the resultant mega-fairy:
Mashable recently declared IMAX's VR Arcade a "huge hit", and the company CEO seems to agree:
"Our LA facility, which has been opened for roughly 3 months now, has seen over 20,000 unique visitors," said IMAX CEO Richard Lewis Gelfond during the earnings call. "From a revenue standpoint, the center is pacing at roughly $15,000 a week over the last month or so, including our highest grossing week to date, this past week, and continues to exceed expectations." ... At the time, such bullish talk wasn't hard to believe because we kept getting interrupted by the constant flow of consumer traffic coming in off the street. Real, non-techie families and couples were coming in to buy a ticket to a VR experience ($7-$10), and it was like watching the dawn of a new entertainment era.
It's easy to think you're glimpsing a new dawn if you don't scrutinize it against an old entertainment model and do some basic math. For example, contrast those IMAX VR arcade numbers with a small movie theater of, say, some 300 seats:
Assume 28 screenings per week (four a day)
Assume an average of 200 audience members per screening (sometimes more, sometimes less)
Assume each audience member is paying $8 per ticket (roughly the LA average price now)
On that model, our tiny old school movie theater is making way more than the VR arcade:
Remember this stylistically realistic High Fidelity avatar modeled after her owner, High Fidelity's Jazmin Cano? Here's how she was created, as explained by Jazmin herself -- a combination of 3D scanning of her actual, physical self, then layered on top with some artistic flourishes:
"I got scanned at Doob3D and one of our artists did a 'pass' on it, which is a cleanup of the mesh using software that includes Autodesk Maya," Jazmin tells me. "Then we had another artist help sculpt around the eyes to help get it a bit more symmetrical."
Then came Jazmin's final flourishes which added personality to the model:
What you’re looking at above is Ultima Online as you’ve never seen the classic, groundbreaking MMO that's still running after nearly 20 years -- converted from its 2D origins into a full 3D world. It’s a labor of love of veteran game designer and artist Andrea Fryer, who’s worked at Ubisoft and other major companies. Since Easter weekend, she’s been translating UO’s maps into Wurm Unlimited, a sandbox MMO which allows players to own and customize their own private servers.
“For anyone for whom Ultima Online was their ‘first love MMO’, they well know the wistful yearning that is left from experiencing those magical times,” Andrea tells me, explaining why she’s put so much work into this project.
“Each new MMO they try is compared to UO, and so far nothing has fully been able to offer the full array of experiences and feelings that UO provided. So one of the reasons for doing this is to ‘process’ that yearning and channel it into something. Similar to why people will do fan art or musical covers of their favorite star… UO was never made into an official first person 3d game - instead it was always from an isometric god view, so I was extremely curious to see how the world would look if I could actually look around and feel immersed in the environment.”
The other reason is the platform. “[T]he god tools in Wurm Unlimited are just so darned fun to use,” as she puts it. “So it's like you almost look for a reason to use them. Just like when you build a house in The Sims, the process itself is so much fun so you find an excuse to make something, anything!”
When it’s ready for other players to explore, up to 200 can inhabit her Ultima server. At first it’ll just be a “tourist attraction” that players can explore without interacting within. However, since it’ll already come with Wurm Online’s RPG interface baked in, she’s planning to add some light MMORPG mechanics to it:
