New World Notes

Jeri Ellsworth's Tilt 5 Kickstarter Sells 1500+ AR Units in Under a Week

Jeri demo-ing Tilt 5 at GenCon

Less than a week after launching a Kickstarter for Tilt 5, a totally new approach to augmented reality, it's attracted over 1700 backers and pre-orders of over 1500 Tilt 5 AR kits, totally blowing past the original $450,000 pledge goal, and fast approaching $1 million total. At this rate, interest in Tilt 5 could reach or surpass the $2.4 million raised for the original Oculus Rift Kickstarter which launched the current generation of VR.

CEO and co-founder Jeri Ellsworth attributes this success to her company's precise targeting of a specific market (board gamers/gamers who also play board games) which she discussed with me last week:

Judging By My Inventory, "5% of Second Life Content is Adult" Sounds About Right -- Comment of the Week

Pictured: Cassie Middles' Inventory Management Tutorial

Lots of readers guffawed at a Linden Lab staffer's claim that just 5% of its Second Life revenue comes from Adult-rated content, but reader "irihapeti" took a look at her inventory, and...

5% would probably be about right overall content-wise.

I have 18,884 items in my Inventory.

Of which 12 are NFSW devices. Clothes, hair, shoes, bodies, jewelry and appliers accounts for about 4,300 of which maybe 10 outfits could be considered NSFW in the real world.

And 18,884 is on the low side, for a typical Second Life user! In any case, here's the what the rest of her inventory looks like (and this is probably similar for most other SLers):

Top 7 Posts Last Week, Including: A New Vision for AR Gets Kickstarted, Facebook Launches Second Life-ish Social VR World & Much More

• Adult Content Is "Under 5%" Of Second Life's Revenue, Says Linden Lab Staffer -- And Don't Expect Adult Content In Sansar Anytime Soon
• Watch: Mirror World Capture Technology That's So Accurate, You Can Create A Virtual Space That's Accurate To Its Real Life Location To Within One Inch
• Facebook Horizon Is Social VR Inspired By Second Life -- Which Seems To Be Making Some Of Second Life's Key Mistakes
• Cyber Harassment Legal Expert Wins MacArthur "Genius" Grant -- Read My 2014 Interview On Her Proposal To Strip Anonymity Privileges From Abusers
• Jeri Ellsworth's Vision For Her Tilt 5 Gaming System -- And For Growing The Augmented Reality Market
• The Value Of 3D Avatars In Online Work Spaces
• Yes, Many Top SL Fashion Brands Are Likely Outsourcing Content Creation To The Developing World

Sinespace Launches $24,000 Content Creator Contest With Themed & Free-for-All Challenges -- Content You Created in Other Virtual Worlds Eligible!

Sinespace (a proud sponsoring NWN media partner) just announced monthly and weekly creator challenges for Unity developers, established Sinespace creators, and 3D mesh artists/modelers, with a chance to a total of $29,000 in prizes, including $24,000 in cash rewards.

 

Pre-existing, mesh-based content you created for other virtual worlds, games, and platforms like Second Life are also eligible for this competition, as long as you port and submit it to Sinespace (instructions below).

 

This contest includes three themed challenges:

• Witchcraft: Witch-themed clothing, accessories, furniture item or a spawnable memento. 
• Carnival games/mini-games: Short, casual games (single-player, PVP, or PVE).
• “Out of this world”: Create a unique, interactive, outlandish sci-fi/alien-themed environment using the Sinespace SDK. 

Winners in each category get $2000, $3000, or $5000 plus a 1 year Exclusive Creator membership. One runner-up in each category will get $1000 or $2000  plus a 1 year Exclusive Creator membership.

 

Sinespace is also awarding $500 to the best item or scene submitted to its servers in the preceding week (subject/theme is creator's choice), from now until February 2020:

Visit in Second Life: Oneko Shrine, A Peaceful Respite from the Virtual City

New to Mitsumi-Town, an intricately detailed Second Life sim painstakingly modeled after a Tokyo neighborhood, there's an equally detailed and realistic place to visit and take virtual selfies: Oneko Shrine, modeled after real shrines in Tokyo neighborhoods. A path leads you from the urban bustle to a lush and lovely place: Click here to visit.

As with the whole town, it was created by a team lead by Eripom Moonwall, an SLer who actually lives in Japan and has built up a successful SL weapons business in her spare time as a Tokyo-based financial consultant. 

Adult Content is "Under 5%" of Second Life's Revenue, Says Linden Lab Staffer -- And Don't Expect Adult Content in Sansar Anytime Soon

Linden Lab developers on the Sansar team, Lacie and Galileo Linden, just hosted an Ask Me Anything on Reddit which is bursting with pretty fascinating questions and answers. (Many of them, unsurprisingly, are actually about Second Life.) One notable thread started by "May_I_Be_Frank" delves into a topic the company is usually very reluctant to talk about -- virtual porn:

Is Sansar still taking the position that it won't allow adult content? My understanding of Second Life is that the vast majority of its stable income stream is from adult activity - either directly or indirectly. Is that wrong? If it's not wrong, what market is Sansar after here that other platforms don't already provide?

Lacie at first replies with an answer from the SL team at Linden Lab, "While adult activity is popular in Second Life, it only accounts for a fraction of the overall economic and social ecosystem"... but when pressed to be more specific, comes back with this from the Second Life staff:

So, there are many ways to look at this, so it’s hard to give a true split. In the narrowest definition, it’s under 5% of our revenues. Of course, there are lots of ways to consider adult content’s indirect impact, and that could probably be a larger share of revenues. 

So that "Under 5%" comes with a heavy caveat. For instance, 25% of the entire Second Life land mass is Adult-rated to allow extreme sex and violence,which is a whole other topic. Presumably "under 5%" refers to genitals for avatars, sex animations, and all the other necessary particulars for pixel sex -- i.e., all the items which inevitably led to the unfair branding of Second Life as a game for people who can't have sex in real life.

Speaking of which, Linden Lab's team was pretty adamant that adult content is not coming to Sansar anytime soon -- in part because Sansar has established relationships with major corporations:

Watch: Mirror World Capture Technology That's So Accurate, You Can Create a Virtual Space That's Accurate to Its Real Life Location to Within One Inch

A @6d_ai experiment, shows 6D visual scans are *also* slam maps where coords = real-world coords. Phone is tracked & rendered in the scan! Content placed in a scan aligns with the real-world. Critical for authoring of AR content when you can’t be at the physical site & mixed ARVR pic.twitter.com/5npt7MBQyW

— Matt Miesnieks (@mattmiesnieks) September 24, 2019

Remember this demo from from 6D.AI, a startup that's creating a 3D mirror world of real life from the input of standard smartphones? Here's the latest demo from CEO Matt Miesnieks, showing that the virtual world (on the laptop) has a near-exact overlay with its real world counterpart, and is updated/mirrored in real time. So much so, the demo suggestions, that you can walk through the real life location simply by navigating your position in the virtual version.

"It’s accurate to about an inch, plus or minus," Miesnieks tells me, which he attributes to "[an] error in ARKit tracking." (I.E. from the attached iPhone he's using.) 

Does this mean that this technology could turn a whole real life environment into a one-to-one 3D game/virtual world space?

Listen: Longtime SLer Gidge Uriza Featured in Leslie Jamison's NPR Interview

NPR just featured an interview with acclaimed writer Leslie James, whose new book of essays Make It Burn, Make It Scream features an excerpt from her widely-discussed 2017 Atlantic Monthly story on Second Life. She reads an excerpt featuring SL veteran Gidge Uriza:

Cajsa's Flickr Pick: Tristan Flinders' Superb Second Life Portraits

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

So I am scrolling through Flickr looking for pictures I like and Bam! Right in mid-skim I see what looks like my brother's high school photo! (Above.) It isn't. It's a picture of an avatar. And really only from the nose up, the mouth is different. But wow, it was a shocker. I have to check out the photographer, naturally, and there was Tristan Flinders and a stream full of fabulous photos. The title is “I’m NASTY” which might make admitting how much he looks like my brother (when he was young) problematic, but the photo is, itself, striking. I like when people crop pictures so we are asked to fill in some of it ourselves. It makes photos more memorable, even ones who resemble no one.

Facebook Horizon Is Social VR Inspired By Second Life -- Which Seems to Be Making Some of Second Life's Key Mistakes

We saw some signs last February that this was coming and now it's here: Facebook just unveiled its new social VR world, called Horizon:

Starting with a bustling town square where people will meet and mingle, the Horizon experience then expands to an interconnected world where people can explore new places, play games, build communities, and even create their own new experiences.

Before stepping into Horizon for the first time, people will design their own avatars from an array of style and body options to ensure everyone can fully express their individuality. From there, magic-like portals—called telepods—will transport people from public spaces to new worlds filled with adventure and exploration. At first, people will hop into games and experiences built by Facebook, like Wing Strikers, a multiplayer aerial experience.

Go here to request early access. (If you have Oculus Rift or Oculus Quest, that is, but more on that later). If talk of Horizon's "telepods" eerily reminds you of Second Life's early "telehubs", and Horizon's staff being called "Locals" is reminiscent of Second Life users being called Residents, that's no surprise. There's a lot of Second Life's DNA in Oculus' VR efforts, which are driven in significant part by some early Linden Lab staff who joined Facebook/Oculus. (Facebook's acquisition of Oculus in the first place was led by Second Life's co-founder.)

And it looks appealing in many ways! For instance, the Pixar-like human avatars will likely appeal to a mass market. Their lack of legs may seem off-putting to virtual world veterans, but it's a solution to an uncomfortable problem: Very few people in the world are skilled at navigating a fully articulated avatar, let alone while trying to do that in VR.

At the same time -- and this may totally change with future updates -- I also spy some potential problems with Horizon that still stymie Second Life and keep it a niche product. For instance: