Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
“Woman of the Wood” by Daze is amazing. I cannot guess how much is Second Life and how much is digital painting, but I don’t care. I love everything about this picture from the woodgrain sky and land to the forest fill in her clothing. Daze centers the photo to give us elements of symmetry (her body, her hands, the trees) and asymmetry (her hair, her eyes) that are in balance. This is an imaginative painting that takes elements from SL and creates something new and exciting.
"[R]equiring users to own their own words, so to speak, has the effect of bringing online speech to a level playing field as offline speech," Professor Citron explains to me. "Offline, social norms develop as people react to speech and gauge people’s reactions. Workers are far less likely to sexually harass fellow employees because others will think badly of them and because it may in fact be cause for termination and liability for the employer."
In online spaces which allow people to identify themselves by their real name or by an anonymous pseudonym -- such as Twitter -- that calculus changes:
Since every climate change march needs a fashionable protester with an evening dress and a robot arm, AllesIst Klaar submitted this striking image, accompanied by her heavily footnoted blog post. (She actually submitted this to the Flickr feed last week, but given recent news, seems like months ago.)
Rather than create an AR headset for a wide variety of use cases, Tilt Five’s vision is first to start with a specific target market for augmented reality:
“Our focus to take what you love about video games and board games and marry them together,” as she put it to me. (Tabletop gaming is a $7 billion market, she notes, while videogames are 100x that number.) So Tilt Five’s AR experience is tightly integrated with its game board, and integrates well with many existing tabletop gaming systems -- including Fantasy Grounds, which holds the license to miniatures for Dungeons & Dragons and other major franchises.
Her company's HMD has a wider field of view than any other AR glasses on the market (110 degrees, versus, say, Magic Leaps’s maximum 50 degrees), and unlike other AR headsets, can do full object occlusion, in which virtual objects seem to block out real objects behind them. She says Tilt Five can also maintain focus at variable distances, i.e. you can lean back or move forward, and the virtual objects will remain clear -- another thing other AR headsets can't accomplish.
Tilt Five is based on technology that Jeri first developed when she was at Valve Software*. (She negotiated to keep the IP rights amidst a layoff.) It was also at Valve where she had a view of the future in which AR/VR would dominate. But it was then, she tells me, that she also saw how long it would take for the industry and mainstream consumers to catch up to that future.
So Tilt Five is her vision for augmented reality that’s immediately appealing to an existing market right now: a social gaming system that can be played with friends around the same board, or with two or more boards around the world, connected online. But that’s just the start:
I mean I guess? This is what I get when I use the new High Fidelity smartphone app (free on Apple's App Store here; on Google Play here), take a requisite real life selfie, and then modify him to look like "Hamlet Au", my avatar in Second Life. (Which is, in turn, a variation of what I look like in real life, only dressed up like Tom Wolfe.)
We’ve seen the power of personalized avatars at creating a sense of presence, especially for teammates who are physically remote from one another. Whether they’re hopping into a private quiet space for a quick 1:1, meeting in a conference room or gathering in a cafe for coffee, avatars that are recognizable make communication easier and more organic.
They’re also practical. Non-human avatars are an amazing way to express your creativity, but they may not work well in a professional context. Using an avatar that resembles you also eliminates the self-consciousness around video calls — no more fretting about messy hair or need to worry about that toothpaste dribble on your shirt.
This strikes me as the wrong direction to take workspace avatars. Almost by definition, the kind of companies most likely to be interested in using 3D avatars in a work environment would be in high tech, gaming, marketing, media, and other industries where there's a premium on personal creativity. One whole point of whimsical avatars is they're a great way of breaking the social ice between strangers and acquaintances. (Think a big Halloween costume party, but online.) Why get rid of that?
Anyway, check out Philip Rosedale's High Fidelity avatar below. Where his Second Life avatar famously had a handlebar mustache, codpiece, and leather chaps, his HiFi avatar looks more like Philip Rosedale if there was a Japanese anime biopic of Philip Rosedale:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Duna Gant’s “Winter Wind” would be beautiful if printed on high-quality paper, framed, and hung on my living room wall. Warm sepia tones belie the cold sterility of a winter tree, but then we know the trees are only waiting for spring to sally forth. There is a suggestion of wind from the texture overlays.
I think that the 'avatar as representation and extension of yourself' is less important than the effect it has of anchoring you mentally in the environment. That is the crucial difference with 3D environments imho - saving you the mental effort of constructing a virtual space in your head to hold everyone in and keeping you feeling as if you are all working together in the same place, looking at the same material or experience. This is both the power and the challenge of virtual environments for work - you need to experience it to understand it. With AULA, our 3D collaboration environment for enterprises, we always have the same experience - before entering people are skeptical, after they immediately see the benefit.
Having said all that - the ability to change hair styles and colors is essential for a certain section of the userbase :)
Maybe the best solution is offer the option of a customizable avatar and a default one with minimal avatar-ness, so to speak -- for instance, like the avatars above, used in Immerse Framework, a toolkit for multi-user creation of VR environments.
Are there any supporting sources for the "cheap mesh labor in India" type comments? Not really aware of how the large brands operate but have always been curious and would like to learn more.
My friend is also convinced that none of the big designers spend any time in SL and have never been part of the community. Some of the negative sentiment seems to be exacerbated by lack of insight.
The second point is probably true for many major designers, who tend to not be less involved in Second Life as users, partly because they can no longer participate in-world without being swamped by customer requests/complaints. (It's difficult to even keep their alternate accounts anonymous.)
Far as the question about India, I don't know of any specific SL fashion brands doing this, but it's quite plausible. In fact, I'd be surprised if they weren't doing any outsourcing. After all, major content creators have been outsourcing Second Life work to the developing world for nearly 15 years:
The Value of 3D Avatars in Online Work Spaces (Comment of the Week)
Maybe the best solution is offer the option of a customizable avatar and a default one with minimal avatar-ness, so to speak -- for instance, like the avatars above, used in Immerse Framework, a toolkit for multi-user creation of VR environments.
Posted on Monday, September 23, 2019 at 02:36 PM in Comment of the Week, High Fidelity | Permalink | Comments (2)
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