New World Notes

How to Create Adjustable Archimatix Objects in Unity 3D to Use in Sinespace

Good tutorial to see during the long Labor Day weekend for people who create in Unity 3D: Watch "wetcircuit" show you how to create Archimatix objects with handles, so you can dynamically adjust them in Sinespace (An NWN partner!) simply by clicking and dragging. (Here's how to use Archimatix objects in your Sinespace home region.)

And here's what you can do with an Archimatix object once you're in the virtual world:

Wetcircuit's also on Twitter. Join Sinespace’s Discord for technical questions, or post them in Comments below!

SL Superstar Fashion Brands Fri.Day & Elikatira Launch Collaborative White River Brand & In-World Store

NWN YouTuber Cassie Middles is taking a Labor Day weekend hiatus, but she passed along this hot tip for SL fashionistas looking for shopping fun over the long weekend:

"Fri. Day and Elikatira opened up a new collab store the other day called The White River Co. A collaboration of clothes, shoes and hair. Very cute and both designers are quite large in the SL fashion world."

If Ms. Middles says it, it must be true. Here's White River's SL Marketplace page, and here's a teleport to the brand's standalone sim devoted to their fashion.

Virtual World/Social VR Survey Results Show Strong Interest in Second Life, "Sons of SL", and VRChat

Here's the results to the survey conducted by metaverse blogger Ryan Schultz, which asked readers on his blog, New World Notes, and users across several virtual world/VR themed Facebook pages, to state which virtual worlds  they have an account with. (But not necessarily regularly use.) With 1,676 responses, this is a pretty decent, if unscientific, sample.

Unsurprisingly for this audience (and the world's 15 year existence), Second Life remains the proverbial 800 lbs. gorilla. More notable is that the top ten is dominated by "sons of Second Life", i.e. worlds that are closely related to SL in one direct way or another -- Sansar being created by the same company, Linden Lab, High Fidelity created by Second Life's co-founder (which is also funding Philip Rosedale's new company), Sinespace* being lead developed by Adam Frisby, a former SL entrepreneur who's also one of the co-founders of OpenSim -- which is itself an open source version of Second Life, while Kitely and InWorldz are themselves OpenSim spinoffs. So in the survey's top ten, VRChat, AltspaceVR, and Rec Room are the only three with no direct relationship to Second Life.

In terms of current usage, Second Life still gets the most concurrency (in the mid five figures every day), followed by VRChat (high four figures daily), and OpenSim-related worlds (probably low four figures, combined).

More commentary from Ryan here.

Watch Live: Nylon Pinkney Turns an SL Screenshot Into a RL Portrait

Watch live video from Elleinadart on www.twitch.tv

"Nylon Pinkney", SL name of supremely talented East Coast-based artist Elleinadart, is streaming now on Twitch doing what she does so goddamn well: Capturing the essence of an SL avatar in a real life drawing. (Read more about how she does that here.) Doing it in a live context where she interacts with live viewers and talks about her technique as she does (and also, pauses to let out her cat) elevates it into something special.

Loving Magic Leap: A Veteran Virtual World/VR Developer Explains Why

Magic Leap's launch has attracted some snark, but a veteran virtual world/VR developer half convinces me to give the Leap another look. Dulce Baerga is CEO at River Studios (clients include pop legend/VR pioneer Björk) and a longtime virtual world user/developer (she's Kandy Roussel in SL) and after putting it through its paces, she is quite impressed. Virtual world fans, she tells me, will particularly love "the XR aspect of the device. The fact you can pull things out of VR space and place them in your RL environment."

For her, the device's integrated web browser is also a winner:

"WebXR works awesomely in their Helio browser... I was placing digital furniture assets into my RL space just like I would in Second Life. I pulled them out of WayFair's webVR page and placed them in my RL space." (See video below.)

She's also impressed with Magic Leap as a content creation platform -- with some caveats:

Watch: Two RL Artists Talk About SL & Sansar, Sex, Creativity, Choice, Etc.

On the face of it, this is a humanoid fox talking to a brunette babe with action movie inclinations. But the fox is Erik Mondrian, who in real life is currently completing his MFA at a top arts school (California Institute of the Arts), and the brunette is MangroveJane (IRL Alison James) an artist whose Second Life work was recently exhibited in a real life gallery. So it's a fun and thoughtful video podcast worth a listen. (With great screenshots interspersed throughout.)

"Some of my favorite sections from the episode," Erik tells me, "are when Groves talked about her first five days in SL, stubbornly learning to jump, and having her 'existential crisis' there [2:10],  when she brought up the idea of avatar prejudice [11:50], and the discussion about the differences between platforms like SL and Sansar, particularly when she talked about the idea of the 'map' (for something like the SL mainland) and its psychological effect on users vs. the isolated experiences of Sansar [17:50]."

One point that jumps out at me is at 4:00, where Erik talks about how Second Life has no set goals, which Jane relates to SL's media reputation for being a giant, pervy virtual sex hovel -- and then points out that, like a real life city, the red light district is only one of many options you can choose from. This is a common belief among the SL community, and while it's not wrong, I think it misses a larger point:

Survey: Strong Majority of Tech Workers Want Twitter to Ban Alex Jones -- But Most Tech Workers AT Twitter Don't

Interesting results to a new survey just conducted on Blind, the popular anonymous online community for tech workers, over the still-contentious question of whether violence-provoking conspiracy theorist Alex Jones should be banned from Twitter (the one social platform which still hasn't banned him, despite public pressure to do so.) With 5,137 users taking the survey between August 18 and August 24, a supermajority (over 60%) supported banning him. Notably, however, only 21% of Twitter employees supported a ban -- meaning an even larger supermajority of Twitter staff support CEO Jack Dorsey's insistence that Jones shouldn't be banned from their platform.

Important caveat -- while there are 950 Twitter employees on Blind (company spokesman Kyle McCarthy tells me), only 56 took the Alex Jones survey. So this small data sample may not be as representative as we'd like. Still, the fact that such a large percent support Jones' non-banning suggests that's probably the general consensus among Twitter staff.

McCarthy showed me how the survey numbers broke down by company affiliation, which reveal some fascinating trends in Valley opinion:

Coders Re-Create Blade Runner's Voice-Controlled Esper Machine as a Chrome Web App

Click here right now if you're using Chrome and your computer has a microphone, for a fun mini-app that recreates a classic depiction of  technology in a movie that's over 30 years old but still feel like the future: The voice-controlled Esper Machine from Blade Runner. (See the scene below, preferably with a whiskey, neat.)

Built by Andy Cummins and a couple other devs for a hack-day event at their digital media company Cogapp, it uses the Web Speech API, OpenSeadragon, IIIF and HTML5 Canvas. More detail on his Medium here:

Why did we want to do this? Partly because it would be fun but also because voice control is becoming more and more prevalent. We wanted to explore how well voice control works when using a browser rather than an additional piece of hardware. We’re also only [one year] away from the 2019 setting of the original Blade Runner movie, so this kind of thing should be standard by now, right?

Voice-activated control is standard, but because the computer misses what we're saying roughly one-third of the time, and most of us aren't Harrison Ford being paid to pretend to talk to a computer, we rarely use it. Except maybe for a fun afternoon break. Don't forget to growl "Give me a hardcopy" at the end. (If you have a printer hooked up.)

Will Decentraland Property Speculation Hurt Decentraland as a Virtual World? The Founder Argues Otherwise

It's like 2008 all over again! After years of New World Notes coverage of Decentraland, the ambitious, open standards-based social VR world project which sold $25 million+ worth of virtual land last year, it's now being covered by the BBC itself. (Watch above.) After much attention to the virtual tulip mania that's consumed many virtual world/cryptocurrency fans, the BBC gives us some of our first early glimpses of Decentraland the virtual world, which is still in very early development. Some major landowners might be a bit surprised by the rudimentary graphics and interactivity so far. As I put it to Decentraland founder Ari Meilich:

"The more that's spent on virtual land, the more that these investors will expect an AAA-quality game when it launches -- and there will be much more pressure to launch it soon. Don't you think?"

"We feel pressure but not because of speculation," Ari tells me. "But because we’re a team of people that want to create a new market and leave a mark. If they expect AAA-like graphics, they’ve been watching the wrong channel. We’ve said plenty of times that’s not the aesthetic we’re shooting for, but rather low-poly to accommodate even lower end devices.

I tell him that by "AAA", I didn't necessarily mean graphics, but a highly polished, complete experience that could, say, hold up to Minecraft in its current incarnation, but as an MMO. Isn't that what they're shooting for?

 

Vice's Motherboard Features Izzy Button's Realistic Imperfections for Default Perfect SL Avatars

Samantha Cole of Vice's Motherboard, being a savvy tech journalist, saw the significance in the sudden rise of realistic enhancements to default-perfect avatars -- and so now Izzie Button's cellulite and stretch marks and her blue veins in breasts for female avatars are now being featured on Vice, where Izzy tells Samantha:

“At some point my customers started requesting ‘imperfections’ from me such as wrinkles, eyebags, pores, and aged scars,” Button told me in an email. “They told me they wanted their avatar to look more real, and that they don't want to look like everyone else with flawless poreless skin, young faces, and skinny shapes...

“I’ve noticed there is a trend in SL, away from looking like flawless Barbies with perfect poreless and smooth skin and skinny shapes," she said. "A lot of people don't want their avis to look like dolls anymore, like everyone else. it's more about individuality and realism now, about being unique and standing out from the masses.”

Along with a move to embrace real life imperfections through an avatar, I suggested some other trends that helped make this market possible:

"We've been seeing avatar beauty standards in Second Life become more diverse in recent years,” he told me in an email. “For one thing, Kim Kardashian-type style has become very popular in SL, giving rise to many more full-figured bodies and multicultural looks.” There’s also the phenomenon of Second Life fashionistas sharing their avatar customizations in screenshots and video on social media, such as Flickr, Instagram, or YouTube. “So there's a real effort to bring novelty and personality to these images.”

 Much more here.