New World Notes

Cassie's Clips: Sneak Preview of SL's Salem Halloween-Themed Event Starting Tomorrow, and Favorite Styles from the Ongoing Hair Fair

For the upcoming weekend, NWN YouTube correspondents Cassie Middles gives us an advance look at an upcoming Second Life event, and shares some favorites from an ongoing one: Salem (opening tomorrow), and the Hair Fair.

"Salem is an event all about the beautifully dark or cheerfully playful parts of Halloween. Filled with stores of all types of Halloween or autumnal-themed Decor, Accessories, Clothing, Hair, and even animals. This is my all-time favorite event, one I look forward to every year. With a gacha gallows section at the landing point and two more rings filled with stores, it's a massive event that is perfect for the witch, vampire, or just dark at heart." She got a sneak preview of the sprawling scene, which you can starting by watching above, then continue on to part 2 and 3 on her YouTube channel. Direct teleport to Salem here, Facebook page for the event here.

Next up: The Hair Fair launched last week, featuring dozens of fashion designers donating virtual hairstyles, with sales going to benefit Wigs for Kids, for children suffering from hair loss due to chemotherapy and other challenges. Cassie got some friends together to select their favorites -- watch below:

Now in LA: Experience Awesome 3D Video & Machine Learning-Based Music Projected on the Walt Disney Concert Hall -- Adaptive Sound Artist Robert Thomas on How the Soundtrack Was Created

Video shot during last night's WDCH preview by Brooke Erdmann

If you're anywhere near downtown Los Angeles between tonight and October 6, you absolutely have to experience WDCH DREAMS. I was lucky enough to attend a preview with my wife last night (almost bumping into the Mayor, who was also there) and we were utterly dazzled by this flood of images and music echoing off Frank Gehry's famed concert hall:

The Los Angeles Philharmonic has commissioned award-winning media artist Refik Anadol to create unprecedented, breathtaking, three-dimensional projections onto the steel exterior of Walt Disney Concert Hall to signal the commencement of the LA Phil’s 100-year anniversary celebrations. Free and open to the public, nightly performances are scheduled to occur every half hour, with the first performance at 7:30 p.m., and the last at 11:30 p.m., September 28 to October 6... WDCH Dreams’ accompanying soundtrack was created from hand-picked audio from the LA Phil’s archival recordings. Sound designers Robert Thomas, and Kerim Karaoglu augmented these selections by using machine-learning algorithms to find similar performances recorded throughout the LA Phil’s history, creating a unique exploration of historic audio recordings. 

Adaptive music/sound artist Robert Thomas, as longtime New World Notes readers know, has been creating ambitious audio experiences across many mediums and technologies over the years. (Full disclosure: Also a pal.) I first met him when he was creating voice-activated installations and location-reactive soundtracks in the virtual world of Second Life. After SL he went on to co-create projects with luminaries like Massive Attack, Imogen Heap, Ben Burtt (sound designer for the Star Wars movies), and Hans Zimmer. (Robert and Zimmer worked with director Chris Nolan to create an interactive audio app for his movie Inception.)

Based in London, Robert tells me how he and his collaborators used machine learning to take and shape disparate performances and composers from the LA Phil's massive archive of recordings, and sculpt them into a completely new soundtrack:

Visit a Vast, Virtual World Retrospective of DC Spensley's Acclaimed SL Art

Click here to teleport to a Linden Endowment for the Arts sim which is now hosting a vast exhibition of Second Life-based art created by DC Spensley ("Dancoyote Antonelli" in SL), a Bay Area-based artist whose metaverse work has been featured by the New York Times, Reuters, and various art journals. Abstract, massive, and ambitious, his creations are among the best of SL art. Within the SL community, he's probably most known for his ZeroG Sky Dancers performances (watch below).

"Second Life (SL) came along at a point in my life where I had nearly a decade of digital artwork saved up with no place to show it," Spensley tells me. "When a curator brought me into SL in 2006, I had this intense feeling of 'coming home' and on top of that, I was able to put a pretty nasty video game addiction to work and create some of the best work of my artistic career in this space."

The exhibit launched last week and runs until the end of 2018. Because DC has been creating in SL for so long, the works have existed long before many recent updates to the world's graphics features, and should be approached with that in mind. As He puts it:

Linden Lab Promotes Harry Potter Roleplay in Second Life

Harry Potter and the Ambiguous Intellectual Property

To judge by this screengrab from the Second Life log-in screen featuring a "Hogwarts" sign (top right corner -- click to embiggen), there's either an official Harry Potter-themed experience in Second Life, or this is a fan-made sim for Harry Potter roleplay, a very popular (and passionate) sub-community in SL. (I've e-mailed Linden Lab for clarification.) In either case, it's provoked some frustration among members of the SL Potter roleplayers:

Cassie's Clips: How to Make Second Life Look & Work Better Than Ever

NWN YouTube correspondent Cassie Middles has this stupendously helpful tutorial of hacks that'll help improve your Second Life experience. Tips via Cassie include:

• Using View Angle: "To make your photography experience more realistic and less fish eye."
• RezPlat: "To create a platform easily beneath you."
• Ctrl+Z: "For undoing move errors."
• Edit Appearance Pose: "To make it easier to edit without that awkward pose."
• Camera Tools: "For better machinima style videos."

Got questions for Cassie? Post below or on her YouTube channel which you should definitely subscribe to.

Sinespace Featured on VentureBeat With Report on New User Growth & Revenue Numbers, Certified Creators Program

Kudos to NWN partner Sinespace for this great coverage by Dean Takahashi on VentureBeat:

Sinespace is billing itself as a massively multiplayer online sandbox world in VR, and the company is launching what it calls a Certified Creators program to try to boost the creation of user-generated content in Sinespace. It hopes that it can stand out from others because its technology won’t be “pinned in time,” but rather will change with the times as graphics and other technologies move forward.

 “We are trying to build a virtual world that is future proof [says founder Adam Frisby]. "The goal of what we are doing is to make it accessible to everyone."... He said that the company’s monthly active users grew from 10,000 in June to more than 15,000 in August. And Sinespace players are also buying more content from creators, with the average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) in August hitting $20 a month, up from $17 a month in June.

More about the Certified Creators program and its special advantages on Sinespace's blog. Highlight:

Black Dragon Second Life Viewer Adds Full Animesh Support With Custom Animation Control - Great Tool for Machinima, Group Shots

Black Dragon, the third party Second Life viewer with a cult following among hardcore graphics fans, has a new update that will likely make it a favorite among machinima makers and screenshot photogrpahers who want to create group shots: Full support for animated mesh avatars, i.e. animesh. Being the brainchild of NiranV, Black Dragon's version of animesh is unique among other SL viewers -- direct control of animesh via a control UI he's created:

"Any viewer with animesh can do it via scripts," as Niran tells me, "but Black Dragon can also simply copy all animations playing on yourself to any animesh." This is viewable only via the user's perceptive, but that's all you need when shooting machinima or screenshots. "I'm planning to use this for music videos," he adds. "Who needs other people if you can just do it with yourself, a few times making copies of myself is possible now kinda."

More about the Animation Control from Niranv's blog, and future update plans:

Yes you can stop, freeze, slow-down, speed-up and copy and paste animations from and onto them. Since they are just objects I see no reason LL would not allow me to allow you to do whatever the heck you want with them.

The poser however does not support animated mesh YET. This is the next thing I'm going to work on in addition to some nice extra features for animated mesh, such as copying your shape and attachments to them.

Animated mesh as it is right now does not support neither, they won't have attachments and their shape cannot be changed, I plan on changing that. 

Here's a video of what this looks like in action, featuring Niran dancing with a copy of himself:

Another Look at AnyLand: Social VR With Prim-Based Building, a New PC Client & 10,000+ User-Created Areas

It's been two years since we took a look at AnyLand, a VR-based virtual world for Oculus and Vive that evokes Second Life in its very earliest incarnation over a decade ago, when the creative space was open and abundant, and we all built quirky things of wonder with prims (i.e. building blocks). Lead creator Philipp Lenssen just hit me up with an AnyLand update of what's new since then -- starting with a PC client  that you can get on Steam here.

You can't create with the PC client, by the way, but you can interact with everyone else, and the 3D scenes they've created. Philipp: "[Use] WASD to start moving, and Esc to open your dialogs. You can then navigate dialogs as normal, but with the mouse. Voice chat and pretty much everything else works as usual, so you're basically sharing the same universe and talking to the VR-ers."

Since 2016, 10,000 areas have been created by users -- here's a brief video tour from Philipp :

Oculus Connect 5: Watch Live Video Stream of VR Announcements Here

I'll hopefully have time later on to separate the onstage hype from actual substance, but until then, here's a livestream via OPEN PC Reviews of Oculus' 5th developer conference, i.e. Oculus Connect 5. Please share thoughts below!

Bonus commentary: Upload VR's Ian Hamilton live tweeting from the conference floor:

Who is the goddamn word wizard @oculus who renamed “inside out tracking” to “oculus insight” — can’t tell if I owe you a drink or an angry rant. Probably both.

— Ian Hamilton #OC5 (@hmltn) September 26, 2018

Divisive SL Secrets Gossip Blog Relaunching as Virtual Secrets Site for Multiple MMOs - But Not Due to Recent Second Life Ban, Insists Co-Founder

Notable update to the fate of SL Secrets, the user-submitted gossip/slam site which was so divisive and upsetting to many in the SL community, Linden Lab apparently banned its owners from Second Life entirely. In a recent update, co-founder Kesseret announces SL Secrets will soon become Virtual Secrets: "This leaves us open [to[ the opportunity to expand into various other MMOs or virtual worlds that we seem interested in expanding into," she writes there. "This domain will redirect to the new domain when the change happens."

Kesseret tells me this rebranding is not due to Linden Lab hitting them with a trademark infringement suit -- "Nope", she says, when I asked if they received a legal notice -- nor is it due to her recent banning in Second Life:

"[The change] was being thought of before I realized I was banned," she says. "I was actually 'on hold' mid-June according to my e-mails. Being banned just made it easier to give up the SL part. We do not have a Second Life presence anymore."

The real motivation, she says, tracks with a larger trend of other SL-centric media properties away from a strict Second Life focus: