New World Notes

VR Has Floundered on Gartner's Hype Cycle for Over TWO DECADES

Ah, 1995! The Usual Suspects is in theaters, Seinfeld is huge on TV, Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise" is booming on radios... and tech analyst Gartner is predicting that virtual reality is just over its peak in hype but well on its way to mass market adoption:

I got this 1995 chart from a great analysis of Gartner's hype cycle by venture capitalist Michael Mullany, who looks into the model's strengths and weaknesses. As I wrote last week, Gartner inexplicably thinks virtual reality will reach mass market adoption in 2-5 years, but even more mysterious is over twenty years ago, Gartner also believed VR was well on its way to the mainstream. If the 1995 analysis had been correct, you'd already be reading this webpage through VR goggles.

This isn't a dig on Gartner per se, because here's another striking thing when you look at that chart. In 1995, Gartner was basically right about every other technology they were tracking there EXCEPT for VR. Take a good look:

What a White Woman Learned About White Privilege by Roleplaying as a Black Avatar

The question about whether it's appropriate for white people to roleplay as black avatars continues to garner a lot of controversy and acrimony, much of the anger coming from (presumably white) readers offended that the question should even be asked. So I wanted to highlight this insightful comment from Washu Zebrastripe, one of Second Life's very first users (she even met her RL husband IRL), who answers the question from her own perspective:

I haven't played SL in a long time, but those who know me, know that I played a dark skinned avatar. I was one of the very first dark skinned avatars. I started playing SL nearly 15 years ago, and I have grown a lot since that time. This question is something I struggle with. I do not believe my avatar is 'me'. I have no connection to it as a personal representation. I have autism and the idea of an avatar being a representation of me is actually quite confusing.

I kept a RL picture of me and my white skin on my profile. I also noticed a lot of racism and microaggression directed towards my avatar. Skin stores never had anything I could wear. In the early days, clothing layers would have skin tone painted into it to make it blend in with your avatar better, but those skin tones were always light. There was not always hair styles I could wear. I had to pass on so many cute things, because I literally couldn't use them. Those little things also made me more determined at the time to STAY in a dark skinned avatar. These daily frustrations were also exhausting.

She says this experience in a virtual world gave her some clarity about racial dynamics in the real world:

Soda Gnome Hilariously Demonstrates Awesomeness of SL Sandboxes

I could write another long, pretentious post about how disappointing it is that Linden Lab's Sansar doesn't enable dynamic in-world content creation, supplanting it with offline, single-user building tools... or I could just show you this latest burst of wackiness video from NWN favorite Soda Gnome, who illustrates it all in long underwear and a Darth Vader mask. Possible NSFW warning: Contains glimpse of physically improbable pink furry sex, juvenile breast physics , Katy Perry on helium.

Monday Open Forum: What Should New World Notes Cover This Week?

Tell us what deserves coverage in NWN over the next few days and why, including links to pics and video where possible. And yes, self-promotion is permitted, as long as it's awesome.

Top Eight Posts from New World Notes Last Week!

• Jo Yardley, Creator Of Second Life's Virtual Berlin, Also Creates Viral Images Merging Photos Of Modern Europe & World War II
• Philip Rosedale On His Plan To Protect IP Rights Of High Fidelity Users Through Blockchain Registration
• Expectations Of Rapid, Mass Market Adoption Of Virtual Reality Based On Distorted Forecasts, Facebook’s $2 Billion Buy-In, Suggest Insiders
• Decentraland Update: 1800+ Users Spent The Ethereum Value Of USD $25 Million On Virtual Land Plots
• Cajsa's Choices: The Dark & Fantastic Second Life Pop Art Of Freekency Banx
• Is It "Racial Appropriation" For White People To Play As Black Avatars?
• Immerse Medical: Social VR Platform For Medical Training & Visualization
• Gartner Inexplicably Predicts Mainstream Adoption Of VR In 2-5 Years

Comment of the Week: What People Should Ask Themselves Before Roleplaying as Black Avatars

From Bohny Spad's Flickr

This week's post asking if it's "racial appropriation" for white people to play as black avatars provoked much conversation on this blog and on Facebook, so I wanted to highlight this comment from Bohny Spad, a black person in real life who also has a black avatar, making her uniquely qualified to weigh in on the subject:

As a black woman IRL and typically mid to dark skinned avatar as often as possible, I do think it's cultural appropriation. For years I couldn't even find a decent black skin in SL or many other games, so I had to pick the darkest tan I could. Once I found decent black skins that didn't cost 2 to 3 times as much as many white skins, I found the level of racism ramped up by a ton. There is some kind of idea that we are cheap/easy sex, that we enjoy being talked down to, that we somehow can't be intellectual or do things that are deemed "white".

She poses some pointed questions worth asking by people who aren't black, but roleplay as black avatars in virtual worlds:

Jo Yardley, Creator of Second Life's Virtual Berlin, Also Creates Viral Images Merging Photos of Modern Europe & World War II

Jo Yardley, avatar name for the owner and lead creator of the well-known recreation of 1920s Berlin in Second Life, has a fascinating first life project she's even more famous for: Merging archive photos from World War II with their modern day locations in Europe. (As above.) In real life she's Dutch historian Jo Teeuwisse, and her work is currently being featured on the Daily Mail in the UK, but you can see all the images from her "Ghosts of History" project on her Flickr here. You've probably seen some of them on various websites over the past few years, as they've enjoyed spikes of viral interest.

"It started as a tool to help me with research, but it didn't go big 'til after I'd started on [SL] Berlin," Jo tells me.  "Over the years I've done research for movies, TV, museums, authors, etc. But this I started after finding some negatives at a local flea market, and I just had to find out more about them."

By overlapping scenes of peaceful, modern day Europe with glimpses of Europe when it was wracked by war, these pictures have had a profound impact on many viewers:

Philip Rosedale on His Plan to Protect IP Rights of High Fidelity Users Through Blockchain Registration

Right after announcing High Fidelity's plans to mint the virtual world's own blockchain-based currency last week, CEO Philip Rosedale announced equally ambitious plans to protect the IP rights of user-created virtual goods in HiFi through blockchain technology:

When someone buys your sunglasses from you, you create a digital certificate (basically a proof-of-purchase) that officially states that they now own a pair of your sunglasses. Minimally, this certificate points back to the original registered asset, is signed by you as the creator, and is also stored in the public blockchain with a key that can be used by the new owner to prove that they own it (or to re-sell it to someone else). So there are now two ‘official’ documents in the blockchain — the registration of the original design for the asset, and the certificate proving that a copy of it is owner by the buyer.

Read the whole post here, as there's a lot more details. I asked Philip to answer some questions it raises, such as real life lawsuits and how they plan to verify that virtual content registered in High Fidelity isn't violating a pre-existing trademark or copyright in the real world --- and he just sent his replies:

Expectations of Rapid, Mass Market Adoption of Virtual Reality Based on Distorted Forecasts, Facebook’s $2 Billion Buy-In, Suggest Insiders

While Gartner and other analysts predict rapid, mass market adoption of VR, many of the actual VCs who’ve invested in virtual reality, not to mention executives now working on consumer level VR products, aren’t at all convinced this is the case. That’s my impression after recently talking with some insiders involved in VR at the major company level.

“I have done fireside chats with VC firms, private dinners, consulting meetings— they don't believe the numbers from analysts,” as one of them tells me. “But they are are all scared of missing out so…”

A key reason VCs are scared to miss investing in VR is Facebook’s $2 billion purchase of Oculus Rift in 2014. Back then, it seemed like a sure sign to many that virtual reality was destined for immediate mainstream growth. But for some in the industry, Facebook’s high purchase price of an unproven technology in an as-yet untested market just created more uncertainty and confusion.

“The two billion fucked everything up — it made us question jumping in,” one insider puts it. “That distorted the market. We weren't alone in thinking it — it gave everyone doing real work pause.”   

You can see this pause from executives actually trying to sell VR products to consumers. Eve Online head Hilmar Veigar Pétursson was a major booster of virtual reality a couple years ago, but just released a non-VR version of his company's tentpole VR brand. Unity CEO John Riccitiello is more blunt, calling the short term period we’re in the “gap of disappointment” for VR:

The original version was a talk I gave 16 or 17 months ago. I pointed out that a bunch of these forecasts from analysts – SuperData was one of them – were just ridiculous. I showed the gap and tried to forewarn people. They later brought their numbers down and called it the “trough of disillusionment” or something like that.

Gartner’s just-released forecast, however, already has VR out of that trough, on track for the mass market as early as two years.

As for VCs who've invested in VR, analyst forecasts of immediate major growth like these aren’t taken seriously by many:

Decentraland Update: 1800+ Users Spent the Ethereum Value of USD $25 Million on Virtual Land Plots

Ari Meilich of Decentraland,, open standards-based social VR world, recently posted an update to last week's successful selling of USD $25 million worth of virtual land via Ethereum (ETH). He addresses some of the controversy over how tokens were released (excerpts in comments of the original post here), which is a bit too inside baseball for me to have an immediate opinion.

What's more interesting to me is how many people bought virtual land, and how much -- which you can see in this chart from the blog post: Just over 1800 users. And if I'm reading the chart right, most users bought virtual land plots for the ETH equivalent of USD $24, but on the high end, 32 people bought virtual land worth USD $7200 or more.

Which, you know, is pretty impressive: