New World Notes

Nylon Pinkney is Online -- Playing Fortnite: The Gun Gathering Simulator

Watch: Veteran VR Enthusiast Compares Oculus Custom Homes to Sansar

Oculus/Facebook recently introduced Oculus Home User Created Spaces, and longtime VR enthusiast/creator David Hall just shot this impressive walkthrough -- "Homes" is a bit of a misnomer, because as you'll see, it's powerful enough to create a whole mini-world. (Though as Oculus' specs say, only "250 meter cube centered on your home will be navigable"). Fortunately for us, David was featured in the original promo videos for Linden Lab's Sansar (watch below), so he's the perfect person to compare and contrast it with Oculus Homes:

"So there is still a good bit about what Facebook is doing that I don't know," he says. "I have been in Sansar for a couple years and they have come a long way.  I like the workflow a bit better in Homes, I like what Facebook is doing with the inventory system and giving people loot boxes.  I love the high quality interactive items you can get in Homes, like the bow and the laser gun.  Sansar has kind of leaned pretty heavily on the community to create these things and you get varying levels of quality and varying degrees of understanding about the  capabilities of the platform."

On the other side of the ledger, Sansar has more robust features (at least now):

Cajsa’s Flickr Pick: The Story-Rich Second Life Photos of Charlie Namiboo

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

Charlie Namiboo's photostream does not have a single mediocre photo, but I am most drawn to her storytelling photos like "My eyes refuse to watch you leave, so tears will blur the memory..." (above). She places her three subjects who form a triangle of dramatic tension. He's leaving and moving out of the picture. There is also a lot of geometric shapes blocked out in the picture. The triangles formed by her alone, by the shadowed wall, by the subjects, the horizontal lines of light shining on the steps, all combine for a dramatic story.

"Remember how far you've come, not just how far you have to go..."

Namiboo's stories are subtle, not so literal that we know how we are supposed to understand them. This could be a story of someone whose car broke down, looking for a service station that's not there yet. It could be a woman with ambition who is working a job that she would like to leave behind, who wants something new. She's carrying a suitcase, is she running away or running toward a new life? We don't know. As a picture, it's dramatic precisely because we don't know. Telegraphing that this story is open to interpretation, we only see the subject's legs, telling us we get to fill in the details.

Does This Open Source VR Viewer for Second Life Make the Virtual World Look Better Than VRChat?

There's a new update to Firestorm VR, a Second Life viewer for virtual reality headsets, from developer Peter Kappler (links available here on his YouTube page). It includes some fixes and improvements to the open source project from since I first blogged about it last month; specifically new mouse and keyboard controls (as you'll see in the video above) plus better performance: "Stereo should look smoother now", Peter tells me.

And while Second Life is over 15 years old, he believes the VR experience his viewer offers is better than what you'd get in leading social VR platforms:

"Honestly if you go to other VR worlds you will find out that the worlds and avatars are not so complicated," as he puts it to me. "I bet if you build a sim properly and use proper avatars you can make SL look like VRChat -- even better. I saw some avatars that were looking pretty realistic in Second Life which I've never seen in VRChat."

How accurate that is, I leave up to brave early adopters who want to give Firestorm VR a try -- here's some instruction tips and advice from Peter:

Cajsa’s Flickr Pick: Larah Johnson Turns Screenshots of Hit Games Into Art

Larah Johnson's photostream is gamer art. "Out of Gas", taken in Resident Evil 2 (remake), uses the rule of thirds to create a sense of isolation and menace. Not for nothing, the diagonal line of neon on the roof creates a line extending to the lower right corner. Diagonal lines are powerful leading lines.

In "Side Parting" from Assassin's Creed, she gives us a shot ready to hang in the Charles Russell Museum in Great Falls, MT:

Here is "The Guardian", taken in Metro Exodus:

Linden Lab Hiring Content Marketing Specialist to Create Second Life Imagery

If you don't think a job promoting Sansar for Linden Lab is a dream gig, then maybe you'll consider this one ideal:

Linden Lab, a pioneer in the creation of virtual worlds, is looking for a Marketing Content Specialist who can help showcase the beauty and diversity of Second Life to both new and existing audiences. This junior-level position is responsible for creating outstanding short promotional videos, images, and other assets as needed, to be shared in advertising, social media, email marketing, and other outlets. The ideal candidate for this position is already familiar with creating great photo and video content using Second Life. This job requires a solid understanding of “inworld” photoshoots and machinima including knowledge of high-quality and on-trend avatar creation, lighting, poses, and environments.

Much more here; unlike the Sansar job posted the other week, which was San Francisco-based (were roughly half your income would go into paying rent) this one can be done remotely or in Linden's satellite Seattle, Boston, Charlottesville, Atlanta offices. I haven't been a contractor with Linden Lab for ages, but if you know me and I know you're work, I'm happy to be a job reference (if you ask).

And speaking of asking, if Linden Lab asked me who to hire, I'd say this:

Oculus Go Slow: 2018 Sales of Standalone VR HMD Fall Far Below Forecast

New report from Superdata on the VR/AR market shows slow growth for most VR devices, with the high end rigs (Rift, Vive) mired in six figure range of total sales for 2018. Playstation VR remains the main market leader with about 1.5 million units total sold last year. Which is a lot in relative terms, but it also means VR headset sales still trail far, far, far behind console sales in general -- the PS 4 sold nearly 6 million units in just the 2018 holiday season alone.

The standalone Oculus Go VR headset saw a notable uptick in sales during the holidays, with Superdata noting, "The product’s ease-of-use and $199 price point made the Oculus Go attractive to first-time VR headset buyers, pushing device sales to 1M units since its launch in May 2018." However, that's well below Superdata's own forecast for the device last year:

25% of Second Life Land Mass Now Adult-Rated for Extreme Sex & Violence

A recent report by Tyche Shepherd, a top statistician for a major multinational whose quirky hobby is tracking Second Life land ownership on Grid Survey, has a notable milestone: "Adult rated regions were up by 20 to 6000 (25.3% of the grid) while General Rated were up 7 to 2951 (12.4%)." As far as I know, this is the first time that a full quarter of Second Life's total landmass is Adult-rated. That includes private islands like the unsubtly named "Nude", which when you arrive (above), offers you the wonderful promise of something called LifeHump.

Back in 2013, Adult-rated sims represented about 17% of the world, but that percentage has been slowly creeping upward since then. "Adult", of course, does not necessarily mean the place is swamped by virtual porn or  is solely devoted to porn, just that extremely graphic sexual and violent content is allowed within it -- a feature often integrated into "dark roleplay" areas popular in Second Life that are sort of NC-17 versions of Grand Theft Auto, Game of Thrones, and Fallout (i.e. urban/crime, fantasy, and sci-fi roleplay). 

What this data point mean depends on your perspective:

Cajsa’s Flickr Pick: West Shaka Photographs Second Life's Surfer Community

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

West Shaka's photostream is an exploration of a large SL community-- the surfers of Second Life. He takes excellent action shots, framing them beautifully. He puts you right in the water -- don't you think you are just about to get splashed? You feel the sense of movement because he's not centered. Traditional advice is to frame the subject so they can move across the shot; but often, if you put the subject where they are soon to move out of the frame, you get a greater sense of speed. Blink! You might miss it.

High Downloads, Low Usage: Comparing Steam's Top Social VR Downloads to Concurrency Rates

On Mondays I often check concurrency rates of top social VR games on Steam, but to switch things up, let's compare those rates with total downloads (all six are available for free): 

• VRChat: 2,000,000 to 5,000,000 total downloads (and 9300 peak concurrent users yesterday)
• Rec Room: 200,000 to 500,000 total downloads (and 461 peak concurrent users yesterday)
• Big Screen: 200,000 to 500,000 total downloads (and 96 concurrent users yesterday)
• Altspace VR: 100,000 to 200,000 total downloads (and 32 peak concurrent users yesterday)
• Sansar: 20,000-50,000 total downloads (and 14 peak concurrent users yesterday)
• High Fidelity: 20,000-50,000 total downloads (and 7 peak concurrent users yesterday)

VRChat is clearly far and away the market leader, but it's notable how much churn that game and the others are seeing -- i.e. lots of people downloading them on Steam over the last couple years, but most giving up after a few tries. VRChat probably has about 150,000-200,000 monthly active Steam-based users, and a Rec Room team member recently pointed me to stats suggesting that game has roughly 30,000-50,000 monthly active Steam users. So generally, under 10% of Steam users who try these games end up becoming active users. 

Still, that massive churn rate for a free-to-play virtual world experience shouldn't be surprising: