New World Notes

Top 5 Posts Last Week, Including: Avatar Smiles, VR Hype & Moore's Law

• Nylon Pinkney Is Online: How To Socialize With Your Second Life Friends
• Bullet-Time Gameplay Cleverly Created In VRChat With In-World Features
• Was VR Hype Largely Driven By The End Of Moore's Law? (Spoiler: Probably)
• Why Linden Lab's Beloved Community Manager Joined Mixed Reality Startup Ubiquity6
• Second Life Avatar Smiles: Some Come From FaceApp, Others Are "Natural"

Nylon Pinkney Is Online: How To Socialize With Your Second Life Friends

Win $500 in Sinespace's Free Home Region Customization Contest!

Sinespace has a new home region customization contest that starts tomorrow, with the winner (or winners, if you work with a group) getting a cash prize of $500 from the NWN media partner.

 

Every Sinespace user starts out with a free home region, which can then be completely modified by region templates that instantly turn it into a futuristic nightclub, floating city, etc. From there you can further customize your home region by uploading your own furnishings, or buy them from the shop.

 

Here's all the details, and don't forget to share pics and video of your submission on Twitter, Instagram, or Flickr, and tag @sinewavespace. By the way, to help get you started shopping, New World Notes still has some exclusive redemption codes for 500 Gold in Sinespace -- details below:

This Weekend: SL's Legendary Wasteland Celebrates 13 Years of Post-Apocalyptic Creation & Roleplay

Photo credit/location: Teh Mayo in The Junkyard

Starting today and running throughout this weekend, Second Life's beloved and beautifully ugly Wasteland roleplay zone celebrates 13 years as a roleplay community: Here's all the details, with links to live DJ/music events and assorted fun.

The Wastelands is among the best and most creative communities of SL, and while the virtual world might seem overwhelmed by fashion and the latest mesh skin, the fact that this realm inspired by Mad Max, Fallout, and freshly deranged dystopia still thrives is a testament to its members. Here's some of my favorite Wasteland-based projects over the years:

Cajsa's Friday Fashion Foto Choice: Male Style Blogger MattNight84

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and style

I love SL’s fashion blogs. I appreciate the ones that provide information and describe the clothing, but I also love the ones that are just photos -- like this one from MattNight84.

Matt blogs men’s fashion and his blog is LGBTQ friendly, not just Frankenfurter friendly. The blog post is called Insomnia and is a serious fashion photo, but it also reminded me of something that the true star of Rocky Horror Picture Show might wear. It features a single photo with a small song lyric that suits the photo. In this case, from “Insomnia” by Caroline Polachek: 

Dreams of dried fields

That once were green

Burnt by someone just like me

The credits include all items, but I wanted to highlight what might be on Frankenfurter’s shopping list. 

• Harness and Strap Briefs:  Wilder Set by Matova
• Ripped Fishnet Tights by Bossie
• Kinky Boots by L’Emporio & PL

Next up, a great double photo from Matt!

Bullet-Time Gameplay Cleverly Created in VRChat With In-World Features

Many people assume that VRChat's creation tools are rudimentary at best, and that the world is mostly for, you know, being in VR and chatting. But young game developer Lakuza first created this pretty impressive gameplay you're watching above, with a bullet-time movement feature, as far back as 2018. It's located in a hidden portal in his music hangout world, Lakuza Lounge. (You have to complete a series of puzzles, to unlock it.)

"So the goal with this world is to be able to say that everything in this trailer is made by people in VRChat," Lakuza tells me. "In this case, every single visual thing is modeled, textured, rigged and animated by me."

 

And yes. that includes the bullet-time effect, thanks to a clever workaround:

Watch, Listen: Second Life Podcast on the Magic of the Mainland

After a hiatus, Erik Mondrian's YouTube podcast "The Avatar's Voice" is back with a thoughtful conversation with longtime SLer Bizi Pfeffer, who's been in-world since 2007:

We spoke about his travels on the SL mainland and how having a contiguous world can help foster a sense of community and discovery, especially when the spaces there are user-created; the rewards, and occasional challenges, of sharing that world with a diverse population of people from around the globe; and the impact of decentralization & open-source software development (or a lack thereof) on a virtual world platform's evolution and survival.

Funnily enough, during their interview, Erik mentions the commercial for OnLive's late-lamented streaming service for Second Life -- watch below:

Cajsa's SL Flickr Pick: Shika Chan Makes SL's Chibi Community Come Alive

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

Shika Chan has had a lot of fun with the Chitbit avatar. This is a fairly simple picture; a backdrop, a ladder, and some balloons are all there is to draw us in. That makes the avatars the focus and these avatars are particularly fun. The Chibit avatar is made by Guaran-Dou and has produced a small market of creators producing hair and accessories based on the Chibi characters first pioneered in Japan. There is a Chibit group in Flickr which is where I found Shika Chan.

Was VR Hype Largely Driven By the End of Moore's Law? (Spoiler: Probably)

I've written a lot over recent years about how the hype over VR has failed in the face of modest consumer interest, but one question has been flickering in the back of my mind since then: Why did the hype start up again in the first place, after waning in the 90s? The Oculus Kickstarter got the momentum going, but that crowdfunder didn't even raise $2.5 million -- hardly an indication of mass market interest. And to be sure, there are many powerful applications of VR for training, therapy, and prototyping, but that alone doesn't justify the billions of dollars companies like Google and Facebook have poured into the technology.

Cory Doctorow recently suggested a likely explanation that surprised me at first -- that the hype was impelled in part by the end of Moore's Law:

The period in which Moore's Law had declined also overlapped with the period in which computing came to be dominated by a handful of applications that are famously parallel -- applications that have seemed overhyped even by the standards of the tech industry: VR, cryptocurrency mining, and machine learning...

It's possible that this is all a coincidence, but it really does feel like we're living in a world spawned by a Sand Hill Road VC in 2005 who wrote "What should we invest in to take advantage of improvements in parallel computing?" on top of a white-board.

Specifically, Cory expanded to me, "GPUs! Any 3D rendering." And for that matter, offloading most VR rendering to a connected PC, or through the cloud. "And the cloud," as Cory notes, "is mostly low-cost parallel processors!"

My working theory has always been VR hype was powered by the desire to create a successor to smartphones and the Valley's attachment to Snow Crash and other cyberpunk classics depicting virtual reality as The Future. But now I think Cory's explanation is a big piece of the puzzle. After all, some VCs who've invested in virtual reality, not to mention executives involved in VR, have made a similar point about the end of Moore's Law. For instance:

Create Amazing SL Images? Share Your Creative Process With Cajsa!

This is an amazing image created in Second Life by a guy called The Friend Otter on Flickr. Was it completely taken "in camera" or does it have heavy post-processing? Is there a specific WindLight setting at play, or maybe an in-world projector? I have no idea but I'd love to know -- and I bet many readers will too!

Starting soon, Cajsa Lilliehook will start featuring more about the creative process behind the many amazing SL image makers she covers in her column. (Just like she did in yesterday's post about avatar smiles.) So if you create these images, or know someone who does, let her know! Post links in Comments or feel free to message her on Flickr.