New World Notes

Watch: How to Stream Second Life as a Facebook Live Video

Today around 4:30pm SLT click here to watch a pretty cool Halloween-themed demo of an impressive video hack -- streaming Second Life as a Facebook Live video. It's a fun way to interact with Second Life content both for existing users who might not be able to log in, and to show virtual world content to the billion-plus people on Facebook every day.  A virtual window into the virtual world, in other words, from within the real world social network.

This hack comes thanks to metaverse evangelist James T. Reichert (SL name Illiastra Ascendent), who's doing this via a free program called Open Broadcaster Software. (Via Joyce Bettencourt, here's a step-by-step tutorial for using OBS,) I just did a trial run with James T.,  who's still optimizing the stream to be as lag-free as possible, which was still fairly fun. 

Via James, here's a step by step guide to using OBS for Second Life, along with a general YouTube tutorial for OBS:

Sinespace Halloween Events: Costume Contest & RL Prize Giveaways

Curious to check out the spooky side of Sinespace, the upcoming Unity 3D-based virtual world from SL pioneers (and NWN media partner!), there's three Halloween events happening today/tomorrow, starting today at 2PM Pacific/SL time with a costume content/dance party at the 381 Club with live DJ Kathryn. (To find it in the viewer, just click Explore and search for the club name.) Then at 9pm Pacific/SL today in the Gothika club, there's a "'Shrodinger's Playlist" dance with a random prize giveaway of a real life cosmetics bundle. More details here on the Sinespace blog with events listed in UTC, i.e., 7 hours ahead of PST.

Watch "Harbinger", the Scariest Second Life Machinima Ever Made

Since it's Halloween, here's "Harbinger" from 2010, one of the very best Second Life machinimas ever made, and for me by far the freakiest. Turn down the lights, put on some headphones, and click play. Created by Phaylen Fairchild, it's got great voice acting and a solid screenplay, playing off the tension of real life impinging on the virtual world. As Phaylen told me back then:

Should Linden Lab Just Sell Sansar Already? (Comment of the Week)

Reader "Pulsar" previously posed that bold claim:

A rich company could buy Sansar even if it isn't profitable, just to grab some asset, tech and patents, and then close it. Yahoo did that with Cloud Party. That would be a preferable scenario for LL, rather to just fail and lose the investment. Either a radical change happens, or it's likely that Sansar isn't going to be profitable, given the current setup.

Here's why Pulsar postulates that:

High Fidelity Social VR Used to Train Students in Oil & Gas Drilling by University of North Dakota

More use cases of social VR like this, please -- not another flailing attempt to create a consumer product for a tiny market, but actually using VR for real world work applications:

Located in Grand Forks, ND, the VR Training Lab provides detailed, interactive virtual model of the state of the art drilling platforms currently in operation in North Dakota and around the country. As an introduction to the techniques and skills need to operate a drilling platform, the VR Training Lab enables engineers to train on the use of drilling machinery, including practice with complex drilling processes, in a risk-free virtual environment... “VR will democratize the use of simulation for training, and this project is a perfect example of using our platform and VR to rapidly develop a training solution for safety in the Oil and Gas industry”, says Philip Rosedale, CEO of High Fidelity

North Dakota is a hot bed of US oil production, so I imagine that students trained to drill in VR might soon mention that training in their resumes when applying for a real world job in the industry. The real question now is how effective the VR training is, compared to (more costly, time consuming, and dangerous) teaching simulations on actual oil rigs.

Top Five New World Notes Posts from Last Week!

• Linden Lab Acknowledges Item Duplication Bug Roiling SL Creator Community, Reports Start Of Fixes
• Atlantic Monthly To Feature Epic Exploration Of Second Life Next Month
• Cajsa's Choices: The Deconstructed Portraits Of SL Cyberpunk Tralala Loordes
• Watch: Now In Beta, Second Life's Animesh Feature Promises To Transform Virtual World With High Quality NPCs, AIs And Beyond
• Since Even Snapchat Can't Sell AR-Lite Spectacles, Every Augmented Reality Company Should Be Freaking The Hell Out

Linden Lab Acknowledges Item Duplication Bug Roiling SL Creator Community, Reports Start of Fixes

Second Life content creators have recently been roiled by the rumor of a nasty bug that might potentially threaten their livelihood: The bug, the rumor roughly goes, somehow enables an item to be duplicated into SL inventory after a service disruption. In recent days, belief that the bug indeed existed and was even being exploited by some content sellers burst wide into open contention:

“Last week a few creators, new ones, jumped on the bandwagon of certainty that this glitch is real and began a social media barrage,” as a well-established content creator summarizes the controversy to me. “Advising people not to buy gacha on the Marketplace and to start filing complaints to Linden Lab, as well to file complaints about resellers they are suspicious of.”

Perhaps in response to that, Linden Lab staffer Simon Linden addressed the rumor in an open in-world meeting of content creator earlier this week:

Atlantic Monthly to Feature Epic Exploration of Second Life Next Month

Leslie Jamison's avatar in Second Life (pic by Gidge Uriza posted with permission from The Atlantic)

The Atlantic, among the world's most prestigious news and culture magazines, is going to feature an in-depth exploration of Second Life in the next two-three weeks, both online and in print. It's written by acclaimed writer and novelist Leslie Jamison,  author of The Gin Closet and the bestselling Empathy Exams, who's also a columnist for the New York Times. During its preparation I talked with Leslie for nearly two hours, and to judge by her probing questions (and then the exhaustive follow-up queries from the Atlantic's fact checker), she's brought her considerable talents to the task.

"The most fascinating aspect of writing this piece was absolutely, hands down, talking to a wide variety of Second Life users and hearing about the varied, surprising, and often deeply moving ways they have found meaning in the world of Second Life," she tells me. "I found users generous and acute and incredibly thoughtful about why Second Life was meaningful to them, whether it had to do with building a family, building a virtual national park, building a relationship, building a musical career, building an alternate identity, or just building a house. I immensely enjoyed spending months in conversation with users, and spending time with them in-world as well."

The journey, of course, also came with daunting challenges:

Should Augmented Reality Graffiti Be Illegal?

Good thing even training wheels devices for AR aren't selling very well just yet, because that gives us much more time to answer ethical questions some of us have only started to ask. Such as:

A new batch of apps that allow users to create hidden graffiti using AR raises an important question about who is legally allowed to “tag” a place. Physical graffiti itself is illegal without the permission of a property owner, but what about virtual graffiti? If not immediately viewable by the public, how big a crime is it? If it is just for a group of friends, or patrons, or other groups, is it an intrusion on the property? At some point, the answer is probably yes. When a space becomes “public” is in fact defined by law (thought not yet in MR). However, Yelp reviews of a particular “place” have been perfectly acceptable up to now, suggesting some general societal tolerance for open commenting on private places.

... Will cities require a similar permit or approved labeling process for content that is tied to public locations? What history or cultural perspectives will be prioritized or denied, if any? Figuring out the right number and providing equal access to all participants will be a challenging political task, equal to, or even harder to align consensus around than the recent debates over Confederate statues. The “vandalization” of a virtual, public Koons exhibit enabled by Snapchat provides an early sign of the complexity of the debate to come.

Many more compelling points from futurist Matt Kanen here, in an article I came across via game designer Raph Koster, who has been making related points in recent months. The image above, by the way, is from a short that conveys a lot of these questions in six disturbing minutes below:

Don't Forget to Meet a Virtual World Pioneer in a Virtual World Today

The pioneer is Richard Bartle, the virtual world is Sinespace, the time is 11:30am Pacific/SLT, the media partner is me. No promises if a green kung fu master will also be there, but cross fingers. Go here for all the details.