New World Notes

Want to Try IMVU? The Mobile Metaverse Has Weekend Extra Credit Offers

My recent post on the massive growth of IMVU, the mobile-based metaverse, provoked a lot of conversation and curiosity. And so if you're interested in trying it out -- or you already have an account, and want to see what's new -- Lindsay at IMVU just let me know about two special Credit offers this weekend. (Click below for details.)

To be sure IMVU is a fairly different experience than traditional virtual worlds like Second Life, but some readers have found value in both:

"I started in IMVU, after being given a writing assignment for the Metaverse Tribune as Allen Eppenberger a few years back," longtime reader Joey1058 says. "At first I couldn't see how it was useful. But it grew on me. And I actually spend more time in IMVU than SL. I will say there is more drama in IMVU as opposed to SL."

Now to the offers, first for existing users:

Buy a 10,000 Credit package for $9.99 and get an extra 2,000 PROMO CREDITS*.

*One bonus credit package reward per account. Purchase must occur on IMVU’s app before 8/2/20, Sunday, 11:59 PM PST. Bonus rewarded within 24 hours.

Offer good from Friday, 12am PST - 8/2/20, Sunday, 11:59 PM PST

 And below, details for new IMVU users:

Visit in SL: Amazing Sim With Multi-Varied Themes -- With An Open Call For SL Artists Who Want to Freely Host Their Works There

This SL sim called Sinful Retreat (saucy) is a worthwhile explore this weekend, whether you're in search of an artful location -- or you're an artist who wants a location to show off your work. Click here to teleport.

First the location: "[I]is a land of incongruent realities," owner and lead creator Chuck Clip tells me. "A Victorian town built on a bridge leads to a gothic Basilica. all of it looking over a post apocalyptic trailer park, with a portal that leads into a story book forest." Sounds like a club Stefon would visit... with his mom.

And now the opportunity for artists:

Find SL Sites to Visit By Visiting the SL Blog, Living in a Modem World

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

“A Touch of Dim Sum Gardens in Second Life” is one of many travel posts from the prolific historian and explainer of Second Life, Inara Pey. Here she explores a beautiful Asian-inspired full sim with gardens, statues, and so much to see she discovered new things on her second visit. There are several photos and a well-explained travel tour of the Gardens in her post. 

• Dim Sum Gardens (Malrif, rated General)

Another post with what seems a fun challenge below the cut:

Watch: Will Second Life's New AWS Cloud Deployment Improve Performance?

Linden Lab is starting to test a new deployment of Second Life running on the Amazon Web Services cloud, beginning with a copy of Blake Sea on the Second Life Preview Grid (known as Aditi)  -- and virtual world explorer Nodoka Hanamura just arrived from the sea with this video, putting the cloud through its paces in many vehicles. (Action starts at around 1:30 in.)

The most notable result? Near-seamless sim crossing, a much-desired but near-elusive goal. As you'll see in the video, there's a split-second pause when traveling from one sim to another, resembling what it looks like in many open world games -- as opposed to the several seconds or more rubber band-ing mess it's usually like in SL.

Frame rate, Nodoka tells me, what's fairly decent: 

Real Life Video Rendered Into Beautiful Fractal-Like Art Via Multiple Programs

Filmmaker and animator Chadrick Scott (a fellow Linden Lab alum from back in the day) has been posting some seriously gorgeous computer animated clips like this to his Instagram. They began as real life video, but as Chadrick tells me, evolved into these fractal-like videos through some heavy post-processing via multiple programs.

"Starts with a [RL] model, but I use everything from After Effects to random apps. My favorite is Mirror Lab or Glitch Lab for the Android, but I don’t use that solely. Sometimes a piece of work will go through 5-6 programs before I put it up on Instagram."

His advice for achieving an affect along these lines:

SL Flickr Pick: Emi's Beautiful Beach Photos Drenched by the Virtual Sun

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

“Blinding” is the word not just for this picture, but for Emi’s stream of sundrenched photos. She has a love of the sunlight that cannot be denied. We see her from the back, lit by a blinding sun and framed by fiddlehead ferns and other foliage. It’s well done and shows her uniquely sunny style. 

More sunny pics ahead:

VR's Pandemic Winter: Oculus Quest Only Now Reaches 1 Million Unit Install Base, According to SuperData, Which Downgrades HMD Sales Forecasts

The numbers from Nielsen analytics company SuperData seem to welcome us to VR's winter season:

The growth outlook for augmented and mixed reality (AR/MR) headsets has been revised downward due to Q2 setbacks for consumer AR/MR. We now estimate that AR/MR headsets will only account for 23% of XR revenue by 2023, down from a prior projection of 36%. Magic Leap experienced mass layoffs after it failed to appeal to consumers or developers of consumer software. The company has now pivoted to focus on enterprise customers. Similarly, smartglasses maker North was acquired by Google, reportedly for less than the firm had raised in venture funding. There are reports Apple is testing AR devices, and a product from the company will certainly grow the consumer AR market overnight. However, we believe a consumer AR headset from Apple will not arrive until 2022 at the earliest and will take some time to reach true mainstream adoption. 

More here. While SuperData also reports that the Quest outsold the PSVR in Q2 2020 (the second quarter since Q4 2019 that this has happened), the Quest install base remains surprisingly now:

SL Flickr Pick: Gwin Leshelle Creates Kawaii Pics to Brighten Your Day

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

If you want to feel happy, just go to Gwin LeShelle’s photostream where a bright, cheerful world of kawaii pastels and brights wait to brighten your day. I love her photos because they make me feel happy. She manages to deal with a Flickr trend I don’t like, framing the photos sideways to make them good for group banners, in a way that does not drive me nuts. As you see, there is enough of an angle to make this a picture I can enjoy without turning my head or my screen. Seriously, folks, everyone and their cousin is turning their photos 90°, be original and turn it °45 to 60° or even not at all. 

More kawaii happiness below:

If COVID-19 Kills Off the Hands-On VR Demo, How Can VR Grow?

Earlier this year when the pandemic hit for the first time, my family and I were fairly well-prepared, in the sense that we had a huge supply of sanitary wipes on hand, even when store shelves had been completely wiped out of every bacteria-killing product.

Why? Because late last year, I had been spending quite awhile doing VR demos. Which basically means wiping down the equipment with sanitary wipes, every time another person steps up to give your VR product a try.

It's really the paradox of virtual reality: Convincing people it's a powerful technology means spending quite a lot of time physically touching them in real life. "Eye condoms" like the one here -- popular at VR conferences, often handed out right at the entrance -- are a laughably thin level of sanitary protection. They might help prevent infection from bacteria on the VR headset, but you're still in close contact with one or more strangers throughout a typical VR demo, sharing the controllers, holding and positioning people around so they're tracked properly, often literally holding hands with them, so you can make sure they're properly clicking the proper controls. 

I thought about all this after Upload VR's Ian Hamilton made a very astute point:

Top User-Made Games on ROBLOX Played as Much as Top Company-Made Games on Steam

Pictured: Today's top played games on Steam via SteamDB; inset is today's top played game on ROBLOX, Adopt Me

I get the impression many virtual world enthusiasts don't quite grasp how massive ROBLOX is, so here's a comparison:

• Adopt Me, a user-made roleplay pet care game on ROBLOX, created by a small team of grassroots-level prosumer developers, has been visited over 10 billion times, and today at this writing, is being played by nearly 700,000 concurrent users.
• Which means Adopt Me is being played today by more people playing games on Steam like Grand Theft Auto V and PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS, created by international companies worth billions which employ hundreds of developers and staffers to make and serve these games.

See the data above. While ROBLOX is generally pigeon-holed as a "kids game", the company behind it very much has building the metaverse as its ultimate goal, and are paying its user creators fairly well to make that happen: