New World Notes

Cajsa’s Flickr Pick: Artistic Screen Captures from Forza Horizon

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

It always surprises me how many game screenshots are of vehicles. Most of them do not draw my eye, but I was surprised by how dynamic these pictures from Forza Horizon are, shot by artist Tribal Graph. This picture is a Ferrari from 1962. What’s not to like? The magic in this photo comes from the curving line leading us into the distance. Depth of field makes it more real. The TBL for Tribal on the license plate is a nice touch.

Philip Rosedale on What Libra & Bitcoin Can Learn from Linden Dollars

Above: Philip Rosedale's 2009 Slideshare for turning Linden Dollars into global currency

Great Medium post for cryptocurrency geeks by Philip Rosedale, who reveals his slide deck from 2009 -- back before hardly anyone knew about Bitcoin -- explaining his plan to turn Second Life's Linden Dollars into a global real world currency. As I never get tired of pointing out, Linden Dollars are still used for more daily transactions than Bitcoin, so Philip's analysis of that plan is worthwhile for crypto advocates -- and perhaps even more relevant to Facebook's plans to create a global cryptocurrency called Libra.

For instance, he talks about how Second Life's very international userbase shaped his approach, and compares that to the direction Libra is now taking:

Linden Lab Should Create an Official Optimized Avatar to Break the Monopoly of Resource Hogging Mesh Bodies (Comment of the Week)

Great conversation last week about how VRChat encourages optimized avatars with a ranking system, versus Second Life's hands-off policy, which has encouraged a nightmare of bad optimization. It's become so bad, as Amanda Magick points out on her blog, you can even come across avatars with over 8 million triangles: "It was almost like she was a virtual black hole sucking in everyone's frame rates from within about half a sim." (As pictured here, via Magick Thoughts.)

JohnC points out that this is due to Linden Lab enabling a handful of mesh body brands to effectively hold a monopoly on the entire SL experience:

Unfortunately they have allowed 2 or 3 badly optimized top bodies to become the standard. And now people have bought into these products, spending crazy amounts of money on them, they are not about to switch to something inferior out of the goodness of their hearts.  And why should they, when it is the responsibility of Linden Lab to provide a top quality avatar and sort out the lag for themselves, not leave it to the community. 

His solution? Break the monopoly from the top with an official, optimized mesh body:

Top 6 Posts from Last Week: Appraising Libra Coin, Optimizing SL; Rec Room Stats, VR Drone Hacks, Instagram vs. Aliens, and a Lonely MMO

• Nylon Pinkney Is Online: If Close Encounters Happened In The Instagram Age
• Watch: Piloting A Drone With A VR Rig While Still Seeing The Drone In AR
• Rec Room/Against Gravity Site User Demographics: 174,000 Uniques, Mostly Male, Notably Older Than VRChat Site Users
• Things We Lost In The Flood: A New, Massively Multiplayer Loneliness Simulator Where Players Can Only Share Messages In Bottles With Each Other
• Libra Has Promise, Says Virtual Currency Expert/Blockchain Skeptic Adam Frisby, But Faces Adoption, Trust & Storage Challenges
• SL Should Adopt VRChat's Avatar Rankings -- And SLers Should Be Less Like Barbie, More Like Elizabeth Warren

Second Life Survey: Are You Interested in Attending SL's 16th Birthday Party?

It's that time of the year again, the official annual celebration of Second Life's commercial launch. But are you attending? Please take this survey, share with other SLers, and feel free to explain your answer in Comments below!

Nylon Pinkney Is Online: If Close Encounters Happened in the Instagram Age

Watch at 9am PT: How to Create Makeup & Tattoos for Sinespace Avatars

Starting at 9am PT, watch the latest Master Class live stream tutorial from Adam Frisby, co-founder of Sinespace (a proud sponsoring partner of New World Notes). Today he'll be showing 3D artists how to create makeup and tattoos for avatars in Sinespace, among the largest markets in the Sinespace economy. (Example below.)

Clickthrough to watch and comment on YouTube, or on the Twitch stream. This is one in a series of Master Class tutorials for artists and content creators -- see the full schedule on the Sinespace blog.

Watch: Piloting a Drone With a VR Rig While Still Seeing the Drone in AR

This latest brain-expanding mixed reality hack from Toronto developer Lee Vermeulen is a bit difficult to process visually, but it's basically this: He is flying a Tello drone with a Unity-based controller that is hooked up to his Vive VR headset and Knuckles hand controllers. So the inset video you see is the stream from the drone's camera.

However, he's not navigating the drone completely through the VR headset, because he has its AR passthrough function enabled. That way, he can still see the drone in real life while also seeing through the drone's video camera:

Rec Room/Against Gravity Site User Demographics: 174,000 Uniques, Mostly Male, Notably Older Than VRChat Site Users

SimilarWeb, my go-to resource for online/mobile data, just shared with me some exclusive user data for the site of Rec Room/Against Gravity (the studio behind the social VR platform). While this doesn't give us direct user data on Rec Room the download client itself, it gives us a pretty good estimate on unique users over time, and demographics. So:

Total unique visitors over the last 12 months globally are 174,130.  That would track with my estimate that Rec Room probably has about 20,000-30,000 active monthly users.

As above, over 3 in 4 users are female, with the largest age cohort (34%) being 25-34 years old.

Compare and contrast that with SimilarWeb's VRChat site user demographics: 82% are male, with the largest age cohort (43%) being 18-24 years gold. This suggests Rec Room's user base is on average older than VRChat's user base, with 1 in 3 users aged 35 or older. Not surprising, since Rec Room is much more VR-centric than VRChat, and VR rigs aren't cheap -- typically, people outside college age can best afford them.

Rec Room/Against Gravity site demographics by location are also worth a look:

Cajsa SL Flickr Pick: Boo Boo Beautifully Chronicles a Second Life Romance

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

Boo Boo’s photostream is a delightful chronicle an adventurous Second Life romance. I love this picture of them saying goodbye to Chouchou. It typifies their stream which they describe as “The things we do, the places we explore, the moments we share..” It also reflects the joyful optimism they share. Be sure to look at the other pic from the same day. A lot of the photos are blown out by light giving them a feeling of softness and joy.