New World Notes

Tomorrow, 2pm-6pm PDT: Join VR Evangelist XaosPrincess in High Fidelity for a Worldwide Lockdown Party

XaosPrincess in High Fidelity from her home in Bavaria

 The Lockdown Dance Party runs tomorrow (April 25) from 2pm-6pm PDT in High Fidelity, and it should be a massive, worldwide rave. It's organized and hosted by famed social VR evangelist XaosPrincess, who's been trapped like most of us in a Coronavirus quarantine for weeks:  

"Ever since the lockdown has been announced in Bavaria on March 20th," she tells me, "I have been dreaming of getting all my friends from social VR together, in order to experience the heartwarming feeling of being part of a friendly crowd again."

Here's all the details for joining the fun via PC, Mac, or VR. The event is hosted by startup Tivoli Cloud VR, who will donate $10 in cloud computing power to fight coronavirus via Folding at Home for every single person who joins the party -- to bring your friends, and have your friends bring their friends! And if you do attend, don't forget to take and submit cool pics to our #NoAvatarSocialDistance challenge!  

Nylon Pinkney is Online: Who's Zooming Who

Friday Fashion Find: Be Delicious, Rosalie Ergenthal's Tasty SL Style Blog

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

Be Delicious is a blog that has been featuring SL fashions since 2012 and posted its 3336th post on Wednesday. It’s a candylicious confection with a sheer dress over some fancy lingerie. I think something to wear at home and definitely not at work.

• Bra - Moon Elixir x MUSE - Beautiful Stranger Bra  **New @ Belle**
• Garter - Moon Elixir x MUSE - Beautiful Stranger Garter  **New @ Belle**
• Thong - Moon Elixir x MUSE - Beautiful Stranger Thong  **New @ Belle**
• Dress - V/. VoluptasVirtualis -[Naomi] **New @ Fameshed X**

I love her next blog post - reassuring messy me that yes, I can spill food in SL:

How YouTube Star Mr. Moon Made His Hilarious Second Life Video

"Ticket to Hell" from popular gaming YouTuber Mr. Moon. like I said last week, is the best and raunchily funniest Second Life "outsider" video in a long while. What’s also amazing, as Moon told me recently, is how he made it. While Mr. Moon has produced epic videos in other online games/MMO like Dayz Z and Ark, this was his first foray into the 17 year old virtual world.

“I always thought [Second Life] would be the perfect place to create some content,” he says. “I had no idea going in what I was going to create, it really all came together in an interesting way.”

I was surprised myself how he created it. Here’s some behind the scenes secrets from Mr. Moon -- spoilers if you haven’t yet seen “Ticket to Hell” (and you should already, it's right up there):

Second Life Flickr Photographer Pick of the Day: Marianne McCann

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

Marianne McCann’s “Up a Tree” is a great example of her Flickr stream, pictures of a child having fun, living a very typical child’s life, with camp, school, playing with friends, and in this case, hanging off a tree limb. I love that her hair hangs down. 

Below the break, you can catch Marianne with friends who absolutely do not know what they are doing.

Half-Life: Alyx So Far Sold About 680,000 Copies, Has Been Played By About 180,000 Valve Index Owners (Based on SuperData Numbers)

New revenue report from Nieslen analyst firm SuperData* has some very interesting data for people following MMOs/virtual worlds and VR, especially in the wake of Valve's first VR-only game:

Half-Life: Alyx performed modestly by the standards of AAA games but was a blockbuster by the standards of virtual reality (VR) exclusive titles. A total of 860K gamers played the PC VR title in March. The game had a limited addressable audience, as there was an install base of fewer than 4M PC-compatible VR headsets at the end of 2019. Direct purchases of Half-Life: Alyx generated $40.7M in revenue, and hundreds of thousands of free copies of the game were also bundled with devices like the Valve Index headset to boost interest in VR.

If your real interest is how many people bought and played Half-Life Alyx, some back-of-envelope math gives us some pretty reliable estimates (assuming SuperData's numbers are also fairly reliable):

How This Incredible SL Image Was Created With Black Dragon & Photoshop

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

LilyKitty Sixpence creates magnificent photos that range from pure fun to dreamily romantic, but I was struck by “Ultraviolet” which is such a joyous expression of rebellion that I had to ask how she did it. Luckily for you, she explained it all. 

She gave some general background on how she does most of her photos before getting into the specifics: 

She uses the Black Dragon Viewer and recommends it highly. “It's got a lot of graphical options that help get the best base shot you can get. It also has a built-in model poser that is very useful, even if you are simply adjusting a store-bought pose. Unfortunately, you can only pose yourself with it for now.”

She edits in Photoshop. “Even for beginners I suggest looking at Lightroom (or the Camera Raw Filter). Just upping the clarity a bit can bring out tons of details.

If you're looking to dive into it more than that, I'd say just go for it.: LilyKitty recommends watching tutorials on YouTube and following along or applying them to your own shots. Or even just learn by doing, experimenting with the tools. “Learn about layers, masking, blending modes, and the adjustment layers. Learn to work non-destructively - so you can always go back and fix something. It's daunting to take on all at once, but by doing it and learning something each time you will begin to understand how each of these parts works and how they can help you with your ideas.”

Click for all the deets on how she created this amazing picture:

Magic Leap's Massive Layoffs Today Telegraphed by Tiny Headset Sales

It's the worst possible news to happen to the VR/AR industry right now, but also the most unsurprising:

Bloomberg reports that half of Magic Leap’s employees were laid off, roughly 1,000 in total. Magic Leap was in the process of exploring a sale, Bloomberg had also reported, one that could value the company at $10 billion. Magic Leap is one of the most well-capitalized consumer hardware startups ever, having raised more than $2.6 billion from investors, including Google, Alibaba and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.

Citing COVID-19, CEO Rony Abovitz wrote in a blog post that the company needed to shift focus to enterprise applications of its technology. Early-on, Magic Leap had long emphasized that it was a consumer device company.

I've been expecting this shoe to drop since late last year, when I first heard insider whispers that Magic Leap was selling shockingly tiny numbers of its augmented reality headset -- something more or less confirmed by The Information last December:

Take the Crowded Virtual World #NoAvatarSocialDistance Challenge!

Image credit: Moth Heartsong

Here's a quarantine-related challenge that isn't specifically about the Coronavirus, but instead, is about what what we've left behind in recent weeks -- and what virtual worlds of all kinds now make possible: The chance to be in crowded spaces with many people.

Presenting the "No Social Distance" Crowded Avatars Challenge! Here's the rules:

• Take screenshots of user avatars posing together in a virtual world -- the more, the better.
• Be creative about the crowding! Recreate a movie scene or something from current events, or whatever comes to mind when you read the words "no social distance". 
• Despite the fact that some of you read the last rule and thought, "giant orgy!", please keep submissions PG-13.
• Strongly recommend pics without masks, PPE, and other pandemic-related paraphernalia. (Not having to worry about COVID-19 in virtual worlds being the whole point of this challenge!)
• Upload your picture to Flickr or Instagram and tag it "#NoAvatarSocialDistance".
• Post a link to the Flickr/Instagram picture in Comments of this post and include your name for credit and award (see below).
• Deadline: Image link must be posted to Comments of this post by May 5th, 12:01am PST! 

New World Notes image curator Cajsa Lilliehook and I will select our 3-5 favorites based on amount of avatars and artistic quality, and put the final winner up for a reader poll (assuming we get at least three great submissions). And to make things a bit more interesting, I'll award L$10,000 to the grand prize winner.

Watch: Furry Explores Incredibly Realistic Room in VRChat, Is Duly Impressed

I'm not sure why many insist on assuming VRChat's graphics options are low end or limited when I keep coming across walkthrough videos like this: A humanoid cat called Coopertom exploring a jaw-droppingly realistic Airbnb in VRChat. The least surprising part of that sentence is "humanoid cat", as furries seem to dominate the cutting edge of creativity in VRChat as they still do in Second Life. (See also: This furry aeronautics educator who recreated Mirror's Edge in VRChat.) What's more surprising is the vividness of the recreation, possibly followed by the fact that people are now creating and renting out Airbnb-style experiences in VRChat.

To be honest, I wasn't completely dazzled by Coopertom's walk-through until about 2:00 minutes in: When you see... dynamic shadows! Of his avatar! Cast on the floor!

As for finding a place as amazing as this in VRChat, he has some advice: