New World Notes

Reminder: Meet Jaron Lanier in Sinespace Tomorrow at 2pm PST -- Or Watch Our Interview Streamed Live on New World Notes

Click here to reserve a seat as a Sinespace avatar for tomorrow's special virtual world event with VR pioneer Jaron Lanier, widely credited with popularizing the term "virtual reality" itself. We'll be talking about Lanier's latest book, Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, his current work as Interdisciplinary Scientist at Microsoft, and his thoughts on the latest generation of VR technology and social platforms. Jaron was also an advisor for Second Life during its founding, so we may touch on that as well. His Sinespace avatar is an octopus with dreds, and we'll definitely chat about that. 

If you can't attend as an avatar, a live video stream of the event will also be broadcast here on New Worlds Notes, so tune in tomorrow at 2pm!

Sansar Sees Little User Growth Despite Partnership With Top Twitch Streamer - Daily Usage Still Below 50

Sansar daily peak concurrency and average users via Sansar creator Gindipple -- click to embiggen

Linden Lab has been making some smart moves to grow Sansar lately, chief among them partnerships with UmiNoKaiju, a Twitch/YouTube streamer with over 60,000 subscribers on Twitch alone (announced in mid-April), and outreach to top Overwatch teams Houston Outlaws and the San Francisco Shock (announced May 9) [See update below]. The strategy is that thousands of fans of these gamer celebrities should want to hang out with these personalities (and with each other) in Sansar, and it's a good one -- it is after all a core reason for VRChat's mass growth recently.

Results so far, however, are negligible: Above are more recent peak concurrency and average user charts courtesy Sansar game developer Gindipple, who collects user data via a a back-end API -- daily averages are about 5-10, daily peaks are about 45-50. Last time I reported this data in late April (see below) concurrency levels were running between about 10-50 throughout the day, with average daily use around 5-15.

At best we can probably say there's been a very small growth in usage since these gamer outreaches. I'm personally surprised by this, because I expected growth of at least a few hundred. That may still happen if the gamer personalities do more to ramp their fans into Sansar, but so far, sadly, that's not happening. 

Compare last month's usage after the break:

Cajsa's Choices: Seven Stylish Second Life Male Fashion Photographers

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

One of the most common complaints from men in Second Life is the lack of clothing and events that cater to them. Some defend the lack of options as the natural result of men’s disinterest in fashion, but that reflects a reality more than twenty years in the past and not the current reality where the growth in menswear outstrips the growth in womenswear. Men in SL are interested in fashion, and thankfully, there’s a cohort of talent male fashion bloggers to guide their way.

Ian Dark blogs at El Eterno Resplandor. His pictures are casual, slice-of-life photos–a man enjoying himself about town and SL. I like his attention to the background. His style is very casual and relaxed, but he gives his pictures life with well thought-out settings and vignettes with him surfing, playing basketball, and just having a good time.

Roy Mildor blogs at his eponymous blog. All his blogs are titled with inspirational quotes such as “Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent……!”  His photos are varied, from portraits such as this one to gorgeous black and white photo that opens this article. He is experimental, trying out different styles, black and white, color, and experiments with light, action shots, portraits. His photostream is fun and filled with variety.

Many more metaverse males below!

Linden Lab Hiring Web Engineer for Second Life, Multiple Roles for Sansar

Linden Lab is currently hiring like crazy, though notably, much more for Sansar than their main money maker Second Life. (Which is still so profitable, the company can finance Sansar development without needing further venture funding.) Last SL-related job posting I noticed was in March, for a digital marketing manager, though it's quite possible I missed some other listings. Somewhat curiously, the company cut a dozen staff roles in February, and since then, are hiring new people for at least eight slots. Back then, Linden Lab told me, "[W]e have not had major layoffs. As with all companies, occasionally at Linden there are minor team reorganizations to optimize things internally." Looking at the new job board, that looks accurate -- even if the reorganization seems distinctly tilted in favor of Sansar.

Anyway, check the listings here and some thoughts from a recently departed employee here. My personal take:

Watch: Gender Bending in Second Life Leads to Hilariously Inevitable Results

Soda Gnome is back with his raciest, Star Trek-iest SL video yet! Last episode, the beloved helium-voiced adventurer put aside his garden gnome avatar to become a bodacious babe in a bikini, gender bending across the Second Life grid for comedic fun... until he bumped into another female avatar, and fell head-over-gnome-heels in virtual love. (Watch below.) Which means, of course, Soda now has to get his girlfriend to fall out of love with Soda's female alt avatar while also getting her to fall for Soda's male alt avatar. (Whew.)

Find out what happens above. Content warning: Excessive underwear dancing.

The end result is inevitable as it is hilarious (spoiler warning):

WATCH: Facebook's Jim Purbrick Demonstrates Tech for Deploying Multiuser VR Experiences for the Web

This is a pretty impressive talk from Facebook's Jim "Babbage" Purbrick (a Linden Lab alum) showing off Replicated Redux (get on GitHub here), a new technology to help create interactive, physics-enabled multiuser, VR experiences for the web in React 360. Babbage being Babbage, the talk is deeply geeky, so if you're not a coder, scroll to about 22 minutes in, and see what Replicated Redux makes possible -- including a Boggle game his team built for Oculus Rooms.

Basically, Reactive Redux helps eliminate the lag of multiuser experiences, especially in 3D/VR:

"Most virtual worlds and online games run their game logic on a server so that the world can continue to exist after people disconnect and so people can’t cheat because the server can be trusted," as Jim explains. "Every time you interact with these games your input has to be sent over the network, processed by the server and then the results sent back to you before you can see what happens. This can take hundreds of milliseconds even in the perfect case when the only limit is the speed of light and so a lot of online games feel laggy."

Up until now, addressing this lag has been time-consuming for developers, he says:

Sansar Beset by "Constantly Shifting Priorities" Asserts Ex-Linden Staffer

Take with several grains of sodium, but there's a new Glassdoor review of Linden Lab by a senior software engineer who just exited the company:

I've been on many projects and have never seen one so badly run - yo-yo management, constantly shifting priorities, rarely a clear line of authority (instead, you get directives from multiple areas), constant employee turnover, and almost no oversight...

On the mostly plus side, our anonymous engineer also notes: "CEO [Ebbe Altberg] is great and actually kind of inspiring (the board of directors.... not so much)." His or her description of Sansar fits what I've also heard from insiders, and you can see the shifting of priorities in just how Sansar was just re-positioned from social VR to a cross-platform hangout space.

Mesh Generator: Advantages & Caveats for the SL Prim-to-Mesh Converter

Good conversation on the pros and cons of The Mesh Generator from Naonao Watanabe, the tool for converting prim-based builds into mesh in Second Life, from two longtime builders. First some advantages (and tips) from Han Held:

I've been using the Mesh Generator tool for roughly three or four years now. It's been a huge lifesaver for me, and there have been a number of times when I've managed to get significant LI savings by using it... Even though I am playing with Blender and related tools (like Avastar) the scales haven't quite fallen from my eyes yet. Mesh is still a confusing jumble for me.

One thing I'm doing with generated meshes which seems to help some is to import them into Blender and then clean them up there. Using the "mesh" > "clean up" submenu in Edit Mode and then hitting the object with "degenerate dissolve" and "decimate geometry" and re-exporting it.

I only usually end up doing that for OpenSim, which has become more finicky about meshes since the release of 0.9. But occasionally when the LI is through the roof in SL that procedure has helped to bring it down to earth.

That said, there are still a number of times (like 1/4th of the time) where I find out that the LI of the Mesh Generator-created mesh object isn't that much less than just simply prims ...in that case, I just stick to prims.

Some caveats from Chic Aeon, referring to the tutorial video featured in the original NWN post:

Oculus Go Sells Only ~ 100-200K Units in First Month on Market

The standalone Oculus Go VR headset hit the market around the first of May, a complete VR system (no PC hook-up required) selling for just $199, and was widely touted as the device best positioned for mass market success. Sales, however, still seem slow. In the /Oculus conference, "Heaney555" makes an educated guess of under 200,000 units based on publicly known numbers:

To set up Oculus Go, you use the companion app on your iPhone or Android phone...  The Oculus Go app for Android is currently in the 50K - 100K downloads category... So taking the 50K-100K number for Android and doubling it to account for iPhone, we get 100K - 200K Go's sold already.

Less than 200,000 is not nothing, but it's lagging from the initial forecast from top industry analyst SuperData, which predicted 1.81 million units sold for 2018. Hardware sales are typically strongest in the first few weeks and then remain flat until the holidays -- so Oculus Go's holiday season will need to see a miraculous sales spike, to meet that forecast.

By point of contrast, here's what sales of highly desired consumer hardware products focused on delivering 3D interactive content looks like:

Comment of the Week: Don't Be Optimistic Just Because the Loss of Private Sims in Second Life Has Slowed

Last week when I pointed out that the constant loss of private sim estates in Second Life (Linden Lab's main revenue source) has been slowing, reader "Granger" wasn't having any of that:

Optimism is useful when warranted... misleading when it's not based on reality. It is difficult to look at the trendline of that graph and find anything of positive validity. SL dropping "only" 2% as compared with a prior 4+% is putting icing on a mud cake. The reality is it is still dropping.

When we drop the optimism, a more productive and realistic route is to try to figure out WHY it is still dropping. That trendline is still significantly downward and all the optimism in the world isn't going to change that. So we do well to address the issues rather than say, "Well, it's not as bad as it could be..."

The key reasons for the continued loss of private sims, as Granger sees it: