New World Notes

Philip Rosedale Announces High Fidelity Changes to Comply With EU's New Data Privacy Rules

High Fidelity founder Philip Rosedale just sent me over more specifics on the social VR platform's changes to adhere to the GDPR data privacy rules -- including plans to help third party developers connecting their own servers to the network.

"[W]e think that the GDPR is great," Philip tells me, "and sets the right framework that really should be used by all services worldwide (not just the EU): 1. People's identity information as well as usage data is their own property and should be under their clear control. 2. Companies should never unnecessarily collect or store data in a way that could be harmful to people in the case of a breach."

 

In particular terms, that means these changes:  

 

"Updating our privacy policy and Terms of Service to specifically enumerate exactly what data we store and/or log. So things like e-mail address, or IP addresses in the case of logs, or usage info that helps us find crashes (which you can opt out of already). [We're a]dding a process allowing people to request erasure of their data. [And m]aking various registrations and signing up for the appropriate EU services we need for GDPR. "

 

I imagine we'll see similar changes to other social VR worlds which want to avoid heavy fines, many of which are probably playing catch-up: 

"[O]nly seven percent of businesses report being in compliance with the GDPR, and 28% have not even begun to work toward the May 25 deadline. Non-EU companies can't relax either—fines for non-compliance are stiff and any service offered to an EU resident, regardless of whether the service is free and which country hosts its servers, has to play by the rules."

 Speaking of which, here's Philip on how High Fidelity is helping third party companies connected to its network comply with the GDPR too:

Is Second Life Not Growing Because Its Most Dedicated Users Keep Dying Off? (Comments of the Week)

Pictured at right: SL demographics as reported by Linden Lab in 2008

Why does Second Life keep getting hundreds of thousands of new user sign-ups, while it's monthly userbase refuses to grow? Longtime SLer David Cartier makes a point I hadn't quite considered:

I've been seeing a fairly large number of new accounts, lately, where the driver clearly doesn't have a fricking clue what they are doing, so we are seeing at least SOME new people. I've also known quite a lot of people who've simply died over the years. That has to be affecting the numbers just as much as getting tired of receiving the friendly - and yet dreaded - "Wow you're really OLD!!!" IMs. Given the generally older user base I'm guessing that is going to trend upwards in the future.

That is true. The last time Linden Lab reported SL user demographics in 2008, 15% of the population were over 45, and 23% were between 35-44 in age. (See chart above.) Ten years later, any of those users who are still in Second Life are in their 40s, 50s, 60s, even 70s and 80s. And the reality is, a small but significant percentage are, sadly, going to pass away every year. (Including pioneers like Lumiere Noir.)

Chic Aeon makes a related point from her perspective, starting out in Second Life over a decade ago as a student at an Ivy League school:

Top 6 NWN Posts from Last Week: Sansar's Low User Numbers, Emergent AI in SpyParty, How Poorly Textured Mesh Hurts Second Life, and Much More

• SpyParty: Creator Chris Hecker On His Hit Indie Game That's Like An Avatar-Based Turing Test Meets James Bond
• Sansar Concurrency Less Than FIFTY Users, According To API Data -- No Growth Of Social VR Platform From Ready Player One Tie-In Experiences
• Graphics Pro: Poorly Textured Mesh -- And Poor Communication About Mesh By Linden Lab -- Is Hurting Second Life Performance
• Social VR Platforms Making Changes To Comply With The GDPR-- High Fidelity's Philip Rosedale & Sinespace's Adam Frisby Supportive Of The EU's New Data Privacy Regulations
• Avatars Infiltrate Instagram As Influencers For Real World Brands
• Second Life's 15th Anniversary Infographic -- Annotated With The Inside Stories Behind The Datapoints

SpyParty: Creator Chris Hecker on His Hit Indie Game That's Like an Avatar-Based Turing Test Meets James Bond

SpyParty, the long-awaited indie game which recently hit the Steam store, is pretty much like the Turing Test, except with headshots. In Alan Turing's challenge, you have to guess whether you're communicating with an AI or a human, based on what they say. In SpyParty, from acclaimed game designer Chris Hecker, you have to guess which avatar among a crowd of AI-powered avatars is actually being controlled by a human, based on what they do. Which, yes, means competing with another player who has to pretend to be an avatar-based AI. (Watch the trailer above to see what I mean.)

"[T]hroughout my work in games," Hecker tells me, "I've always tended to flip things around. So for the Spore creature animation system, instead of trying to procedurally generate animations, I tried to figure out how animators work and map that back onto the player-created creatures. So in some sense flipping around the usual 'make the AIs behave like people' thing to make the player behave like an AI was squarely in my wheelhouse." (Here is Hecker hanging with his former boss Will Wright, lead creator of Spore, among other industry leaders, including Rod Humble.) 

This meant creating a pretty complex system of AI behavior for the avatars at the party -- but also making it routine enough that a human can learn to emulate an AI:

"They have a lot of layered behaviors, so they can be holding a drink while they're having a conversation, and the system tries to balance between these," says Hecker. "A lot of the complexity comes from the interactions between these 'situations' as I call them. I add more and more of these as time goes on. I don't think they'll ever be mistaken for humans, but again, that's not the goal, they just have to be emulate-able for a human, so in some sense having a 'clockwork' AI that has some probabilistic predictability is good."

Hecker has been conducting player testing for many years, and has seen some interesting emergent behavior and trends emerge:

Sinespace Updates Next Month: Create & Sell 3D Objects Made In-Game, Dynamically Edit Region Textures & Lighting & More

New blog post up on Sinespace, the upcoming MMO/social VR platform (disclosure: a proud sponsoring NWN partner!), teasing the major features and updates coming next month. Top addition: Dynamically do in Sinespace what you're seeing above, with a Unity extension called Architmatix -- and then sell what you create in-game in the Sinespace store:

Integrating Archimatix into Sinespace means that creators will be able to create powerfully modifiable objects and sell them in-world. After being placed, these models can be easily shaped and modified, making the whole process of designing much easier, even for 3D modeling beginners! 

Also in May: a feature for changing the lighting and other visual features of an experience:

Join New World Notes' Discord Server for Friday Fun, VR/MMO News Tips

Click here to join, and connect with my Discord account directly at WJA#3523. We're up to nearly 100 members now, with lots of cool folks, news, and convos. There's even a channel for submitting News and Events tips that I often refer to for NWN posts! 

Sansar Concurrency Less Than FIFTY Users, According to API Data -- No Growth of Social VR Platform From Ready Player One Tie-In Experiences

Sansar data concurrency via Sansar creator Gindipple -- click to embiggen

Sansar game developer Gindipple has been collecting data that Linden Lab provides through a back-end API, counting the number of users logged into the social VR platform's published experiences at any given moment. The concurrency levels, as you can see above, are surprisingly small, running between about 10-50 throughout the day.

"It's pretty obvious there isn't much growth right now," as Gindipple puts it to me. That's not to say he's discouraged by these numbers: "I wouldn't be here if I didn't think it was set to win the game. So it's got a ways to go yet. They've been a bit slow on development, but there is some recent indications that they are starting to focus some on what I feel is important, allowing us programmers to create rich interactive scenes."

These Sansar concurrency numbers, by the way, are not necessarily reflective of the platform's entire usage -- many Sansar experiences are still set to private/unpublished, and based on his network's activity, Gindipple estimates total concurrency may be as much as three times the stated amount. However, in terms of active users that average consumers can interact with at any given time, it's in the two figures.

To my knowledge, this is the first published estimate of Sansar usage, which puts it around the range of High Fidelity, but well behind Rec Room (with concurrency in the hundreds) and way behind VRChat (with concurrency in the many thousands).

What surprises me most is that Sansar has official tie-in experiences with Spielberg's hit Ready Player One, promoted when the movie came out in late March. Look at the stats there:

Graphics Pro: Poorly Textured Mesh -- and Poor Communication About Mesh by Linden Lab -- is Hurting Second Life Performance

RL professional visual designer Penny Patton can make Second Life look as good as Fallout 4, even on an older computer, and writes great tutorials on improving SL graphics performance through better building. But that points out a key problem with overall SL performance: Many if not most Second Life content creators do not know how to optimize their 3D objects, and Linden Lab doesn't tell them. So often, unless they're lucky enough to read something like Penny's blog, their creations inadvertently hurt everyone's SL experience:

"SL's strength is that it allows enthusiasts to go wild with creativity, but in realtime 3D rendering there's practical limits on resources," as Penny puts it to me. "And Linden Lab has never really communicated this very well to the userbase. Or provided tools the average user can use to manage those resources. Lots of SL content creators truly believe that texture use has no impact whatsoever on performance, and when someone tries to explain otherwise to them, they point to things like draw weight, saying if textures were really an issue, Linden Lab would have included them more heavily in features like that."

The introduction of mesh has actually made this problem worse:

"Back in the days of prims you had a limited number of surfaces to apply textures to. An SL prim has a set number of surfaces that you can apply a texture to," Penny explains.  "And you're limited in the number of prims you can link together. But with mesh, you can chop it up to apply dozens of textures."

It gets still worse with more recent feature additions: "Then you throw materials into the mix. If you're using spec and normal maps that's three textures per face instead of just one. And in 3D modeling, you create the 'UV wrap' dictating how the texture is applied to the model. And lots of creators do this very wastefully, using a 1024x1024 texture, but with over half of the texture being blank, unused space that just eats up memory for no reason."

Linden Lab's failure to explain these issues contributes to the problem, which is then compounded by community members who miss the larger tragedy of the commons problem at play:

"Whenever you bring up content optimization in SL, creators who don't understand it mistakenly see it as a restriction on their ability to create content," says Penny. "I'm banned from several stores simply for sharing my views on texture use in SL. People get really heated about it. But it's like Neil DeGrasse Tyson loves to say about science, it's true whether you believe in it or not. When people waste resources, we all pay the cost one way or another."

To explain what she means -- I acquired and uploaded some close-ups of poorly textured mesh objects from Second Life (names removed to protect the innocent!) for Penny to review. Read some of her advice for improving on them:

Why Some People Roleplay As Virtual Families - Classic NWN Quote

Virtual world "families" are a subculture that is both fascinating and decisive -- it may seems strange to many why people want to roleplay as a "Mom" or "Dad" of other players who in turn roleplay as "kids". In many cases, they are roleplaying social roles that are impossible to them in real life. As one virtual mom puts it to me:

It has always been a big deal to me that I haven’t been able to have children. In fact, it sent me into a depression for a long time after I found out that it just wasn’t going to happen for me. And adoption, unfortunately, is not in the cards for me in RL for various reasons. Also, my immediate family is very small. I have never had a sibling close to my age because my sisters were quite a bit older than me when I was born, so I was basically raised as an only child. It’s just my parents and me now, and the rest of our extended family all live very far away.

As for adults roleplaying as kids, it's often a response to difficult real world conditions. As one virtual kid once put it to me:

Social VR Platforms Making Changes to Comply With the GDPR-- High Fidelity's Philip Rosedale & Sinespace's Adam Frisby Supportive of the EU's New Data Privacy Regulations

The European Union is putting the General Data Protection Regulation into effect next month, and as I reported last week, the rules are going to cause some changes to social VR and virtual world platforms -- even those with servers based in the US.

"We like the GDPR in it's broad respect for human privacy, and will work to fully comply with it," High Fidelity's Philip Rosedale tells me. "It is aligned with our own mission to give full control over identity and user data to end-users and not ourselves."

 

One unique challenge with High Fidelity is it's a grid-based metaverse, with servers owned by individual users and organizations.  "Because High Fidelity servers are operated by others and not by us, some of the data that is of concern is gathered not by us but by those server operators," as Philip puts it. "We will work to add features as needed to allow appropriate controls for those server operators subject to GDPR requirements." He says the company will announce specific changes soon.

 

Second Life and Sansar will also see some changes: "Linden Lab is taking all actions to stay in compliance with GDPR regulations for both Sansar and Second Life," company spokesman Brett Atwood tells me. "Our company continues to respect and value the privacy of all our users and works diligently to ensure that we follow best practices for data protection across all platforms." He says a more detailed announcement will be posted in coming weeks.

 

Sinespace is already working on implementing changes in time for the GDPR's deadline in late May: "[W]e're adding a lot more to the privacy policy indicating where and when third parties can access data (e.g. our credit card processor will get your name and card details in order for us be able to bill you)," lead developer Adam Frisby tells me. "[We're] adding clarifying text around things on our signup and account pages, indicating exactly what things like an email address may be used for; finally we're adding a easier account deletion process to satisfy the 'right to be forgotten' parts of the legislation."

 

Echoing Philip, Adam is also welcoming of the GDPR, and explains why its rules matter: