New World Notes

Cajsa’s Choices: The Second Life Art Nouveau of Jewel Appletor

"Friends" by Jewel Appletor

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

When I look at Jewel Appletor’s SL images of Flickr, I am reminded of illustrations you might find in turn of the last century’s books, fashion and fiction illustrations that are romantic and rich in Art Nouveau ornamentation. I mistakenly assumed she did a lot of post-processing, but when I interviewed her for New World Notes, I discovered she creates this assemblage in world and photographs it. To say I am blown away is an understatement.

Appletor’s aesthetic grew out her pleasure in the many beautiful pieces she has collected from Second Life creators over the years. She puts them together “to tell a story that comes deep within her heart and soul” as she describes it. Though she began her SL photography by taking photos of her explorations, memorializing the sims she visited, once it occurred to her that she could put together her own tableaux, there was no looking back.

"If I Had Wings"

Appletor is another of the many SL residents whose life was profoundly altered by joining Second Life. This is where she met the man who eventually became her husband and the reason she moved from Canada’s West Coast to the U.S. east coast. A creative in her first life, she is pursuing her dream of couture fashion and window design. As you browse her photostream, where her physical and virtual tableaux are arrayed together, you see the continuity of her vision. While it’s expressed very differently, there is the same richness in ornamentation and affection for the romance of lace, flowers, and sumptuous details.

After the break, Jewel talks with me about her artwork in SL -- and how it led to meeting her RL husband:

So Sansar Has a New Subreddit to Subscribe To: /Sansar

Go here to subscribe and go here to introduce yourself. If it seems awfully quiet, there's a good reason for that -- after getting the word from Linden Lab that "Project Sansar" was going to be officially called Sansar, the host of /ProjectSansar closed that subreddit down and opened the more accurately named one up.

Worlds Adrift Open Sandbox MMO Gets New Trailer -- And Feedback from Early Playtester!

Gorgeous new trailer for Worlds Adrift, the single-shard, open world sandbox MMO with physics, a working ecosystem, and user-generated content -- i.e., a virtual world worthy of the term -- running on the well-funded backbone of Improbable. As it happens, an NWN reader is an early playtester, and recently shared his/her thoughts on Worlds Adrift, also comparing it with the single shard architecture of Second Life.

"Wolkenreiter" writes:

High Fidelity Using Social Work Platform to Help Build the Future of Social VR

High Fidelity is already coming out with some interesting features for its upcoming open source social VR platform, but one of the more noteworthy features is how it's being developed -- on a social task bidding platform called Worklist:

High Fidelity is an open source virtual world platform. We are building the software with a mix of full-time developers, part time developers who are paid here on the worklist, and open source collaborators. As use of the virtual world grows, Worklist will also host paid projects run by other teams.

High Fidelity the startup company lists projects it needs developed on Worklist, and third party developers bid on taking the assignment.

Founder Philip Rosedale estimates 5-10% of High Fidelity's total codebase has been built this way: "942 jobs so far, about $250K that people have earned," he says. "Average job about $250. Probably about 100 people in the community of overall developers so far."

$250K is roughly the annual salary of two Bay Area-based mid-level developers, so this seems like a pretty cost-effective alternative. But the real motivation, Philip tells me, is the open source nature of HiFi:

"The choice to do open source drives the whole thing, because it puts the code in the open so that others can work on it.  This opens up two opportunities outside of salaried engineers:  First, as with all open source projects, unpaid submissions can be made by developers from all over who want to get their work pulled into the 'main' codebase, and we've done lots of that.  But the second opportunity is that with open source code, you can much more efficiently use part-time or contract labor, because the code and process for integration is public."  

With that realization in mind, the Worklist was born:

Second Life Sees Spike on Google Trends After Ozimals Outrage

Correlation does not prove causation*, but since news of the Ozimals lawsuit/bunny extinction in Second Life broke last week, the virtual world has seen a strong and significant spike on Google Trends. I would not be surprised in the least if there was also a spike in new user sign-ups. Because if content creators are making enough money in SL that they're getting into real life legal disputes, maybe there's much more money to be made in there. Or alternately, it could be how, after Second Life was hit by black hat hackers who breached the database, new user sign-ups grew by 300 percent.

Similarly, we could see a spike of new users who've come to see... the silence of the bunnies.

Linden Lab's Bjorn Laurin Speaking About Sansar Social VR Soon

In ~1 hour at #c2m17, @bjorn_gustaf will present on the power & future of social #vr. Join us at the Cabaret stage!

— Sansar Official (@SansarOfficial) May 24, 2017

At Canada's Commerce and Creativity conference, to be correct. Maybe he'll announce something about the "open creator beta" release promised this Summer. Or maybe he'll just talk more about Sansar basketball and such. Let's tune in!

Meet Cajsa Lilliehook: SL Flickr Art Maven & New NWN Contributor!

Cajsa Lilliehook is a longtime SL blogger and Flickr maven whose ongoing series of posts, “What I Like”, are indispensable guides to Second Life screenshots as an art form on Flickr -- so I’m very proud to say she’ll also soon be contributing to New World Notes, delving deeper into this massive and consistently impressive genre of virtual world imagery. ("Cajsa", by the way, is pronounced "Cai" as in "Cairo" and "zha" as in "Asia".)

As you can tell by her smart analysis of SL images, Cajsa has a real life artistic background, competing in several national level contests and even winning a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the very best art colleges in the world.

She fell into critiquing SL images, however, thanks to an unfortunate accident:

“It was July 2007 and I was laid up with an injury to my leg,” as she puts it. “The doctor said I had to staff off my feet for a few weeks.” Randomly browsing games to play while she was recovering, she wound up trying Second Life. “[It] was completely unexpected and so different. I made friends right away. The first person I met in SL, a woman from Latvia, is still a friend, though she does not log on often.”

She estimates she browses through a few hundred SL images on Flickr a day, and cherishes the gems she comes across: “When I find something really new or a picture that evokes an emotional reaction. They are wonderful and make it worth paging through all the tits and d**s.”

Much more about Cajsa, the SL avatar and her RL owner, below:

Bento Avatars Make Highly Fluid Lindy Hop/Charleston Moves Possible

Created by Abranimations using the new Bento-based avatar skeleton matched to real life video capture from a two dozen camera setup, this looks like a pretty significant improvement in how articulate and fluid SL dance moves can now be. The Charleston/Lindy is just about the most challenging and full body-demanding of all dances, so it's cool to see them simulated so well. Not entirely perfect, perhaps, I noticed a few points where the skeleton dislocates in places to replicate the full move. But still an impressive step (and hop) up.

Survey: VR Hurt by Price, Motion Sickness Fears, Fundamental Disinterest

Based on an interview of 926 people by Thrive Analytics, as reported on eMarketer. Roughly half of everyone surveyed is simply disinterested in VR because they're disinterested in VR. Then again, that also means half who are potentially interested in virtual reality -- just not at the existing price points and content offerings.

This is subject to debate, but a lot of this response feels retroactive: People trying to figure out why they're not interested in VR, without knowing themselves.  After all:

Should Linden Lab Have Saved the Ozimals from Extinction?

The Ozimals outrage in Second Life went fairly viral last weekend, earning mass media coverage on the BBC (at right) along with top online outlets like Boing Boing and this Vice post by NWN alum Janine Hawkins; not exactly great PR for SL, since the implication is that user-created virtual content is frequently in danger of real world legal disputes. And like I wrote last week, it's likely that the death of Ozimals will also be damaging to Second Life both as a virtual world and a thriving revenue stream for Linden Lab:

[The company] now faces the danger of thousands of customers with much less reason to keep paying monthly virtual land tier. SL landowners are already giving up their plots at a rapid rate, and can't afford to lose any more of its core revenue source. But we'll sadly soon see how much Linden Lab suffers from the silence of the bunnies.

The company is in a paradoxical position where because all users control the IP rights to own their SL content, Second Life developed a powerful virtual economy, while at the same time, allowing users to maintain those rights leaves the overall economy at the mercy of highly successful content creators.

It's not just about bunnies: consider the recent popularity of Bento-based avatar heads. Were some of the top brands for that content to get hit with an Ozimals-like legal dispute, the impact on the SL economy could be disastrous.

Is there a solution? I'm not sure, but Linden Lab itself once had a marketing partnership with Ozimals, which suggests a general practice: