New World Notes

Founder Hubris Led to Magic Leap's Fall -- But Valley Hubris Enabled Its Rise

Bloomberg News has a great long feature on the rise and fall of Magic Leap, which raised $3.5 billion on the prospect of transformative AR technology, only to lose nearly all of that money in the fires of hubris. The company is still operating, but mainly now as an also-ran competitor to Microsoft's HoloLens/AR for enterprise use business. The hubris of Magic Leap's founders is not surprising -- it's pretty much par for the course for any startup that attracts that much funding so fast -- but the story doesn't cover another variation of hubris. 

Specifically: Why did so many major tech companies and VCs invest so much money on a product -- i.e., a head-mounted display -- with no successful track record whatsoever? Especially when one of the Internet's largest companies (Google) recently demonstrated the social disasters inherent in AR glasses -- i.e. "Glassholes"?

But invest they did, and took great pains to do so:

Fabulous Photos Shot in the Virtual World Rain

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

It’s raining today here in Oregon and it is such a relief after all the smoke from the wildfires. I know we had a big storm on the 18th, but it was at 3 A.M. and most people missed it. I thought I might feature great photos of virtual rain since that glorious torrent stopped between the beginning and the end of this paragraph. 

“True love isn’t Romeo and Juliet; it’s Grandma and Grandpa who grow old together” is a lovely (Up-inspired?) picture by Angel Roxley whose June and Jonathan pictures were featured a while back. 

Next: Is it real or is it Second Life? 

Is the Ideal Metaverse a Network of Linked Places, or a Seamless World?

Continuing his blog series on what he's learned as a lead developer/consultant at Oculus, Eve Online, and of course Linden Lab, Jim "Babbage" Purbrick has a new post arguing that the architecture of the metaverse should be a network of linked, small spaces:

As the Second Life continued to expand and change at an ever faster rate it became increasingly important to have ways to find the good stuff. Bookmarks, searches and external blogs indexed the expanding world helping people find things. Rather than walk, fly or sail around the world people would teleport from place to place or event to event. Even if you wanted to walk it became increasingly hard to do so: more and more parcels of land became private, restricting entry to both people and any scripted fish unlucky enough to try to swim across the boundary... Technologically, Second Life also began to split at the seams. The addition of Second Life URLs (SLurls) allowed blogs to link to locations in Second Life and people increasingly wrote scripts which published out to the web and Twitter or pulled data in from the web to visualize in 3D....

[I]t was incredibly encouraging to see some of the earliest experiments in social VR at Oculus try something similar by linking Oculus Rooms to other experiences via coordinated app launch (CAL). While the first CAL implementations linked Oculus Rooms to a fixed set of published experiences it’s easy to imagine people using similar technology to build environments which link to their favorite locations around the Metaverse just as early web sites curated links to favourite content around the web.

I understand Jim's reasons for wanting the Metaverse to act more like the web -- but then that means the Metaverse acts less like a world. Or as I put it to him:

"Don't linked small spaces create a sense of discontinuity and hurt immersion and a feeling of being in a 'world'? In your post, you mention some virtual worlds that link with small rooms (Metaplace, Whirled and Sansar), but they're all small in terms of user bases. The biggest virtual worlds, Minecraft and Fortnite, are huge contiguous spaces."

Babbage's reply to that:

Epic Invests in Core to Expand Unreal's Metaverse Potential -- And Increase Its Competitive Advantage Against Apple

I've previously called Core, the new Unreal-based, user-generated game development platform from startup Manticore,  as a kind of Fortnite-meets-ROBLOX concoction. So I wasn't surprised at yesterday's news that Epic, publisher of Fortnite and developer Unreal, directly invested in the company:

[Core] is getting an injection of $15 million, thanks to a funding round led by Fortnite creator Epic Games, in order to expand even more. “At Epic we believe the industry is ultimately headed to games becoming more like open platforms where creators can build their own worlds,” Epic president Adam Sussman said in a statement. “Built in Unreal, Core exemplifies this future and goes one step further by providing the environment for anybody to create great multiplayer games, and a metaverse playground where players discover endless entertainment.”

This investment adds some financial heft to Epic CEO Tim Sweeney's ongoing battle with Apple, which he's described as a war for the future of the metaverse. If Core is successful, it'll become an alternate marketplace for Unreal-based games beyond Apple's control -- and a potential candidate for an Unreal-based metaverse.

Virtual World Fire Photographed in Memorial to Real World Wildfires That Devastated the West Coast

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

Eoleon Elcano posted “World on Fire” when wildfires were spreading throughout the West. My own state lost a million acres to fire and some 40,000 people have been evacuated. The house I rented when I first moved here was burned to the ground. The smoke that permeated the air in Portland was so intense, I could taste it if I licked my lips despite having the doors and windows closed. This picture brilliantly captures that wild intensity and is so timely. In her “About” page she says she uses Black Dragon, PhotoShop CS6 and a graphic tablet for editing. I am always intrigued and impressed by Second Life artists responding to first life crises. I think she captured the intensity of our wildfires. 

More extraordinary pictures ahead:

Content Creator Goldmine: Studio Ghibli Releases Hundreds of Movie Images for Free Use, Including Stills from Miyazaki's Masterpiece Spirited Away

If you're reading this blog you're probably both a virtual world content creator on some level and a fan of Studio Ghibli films, so this news should come as an incredible gift:

Now the studio is making another unprecedented move, by announcing they’ll be releasing hundreds of images from their movies for the public to use free-of-charge, with one caveat: they’re to be used “within the scope of common sense.”

That includes stills from Hayao Miyazaki's masterpiece Spirited Away (like this one above). Click here for all the free images.

There's already quite a lot of Studio Ghibli tributes in virtual worlds, of course, like this Second Life recreation inspired by Laputa: Castle In The Sky. So I'm excited to see what's created with this trove of legit content.

As for using it "within the scope of common sense”... I'm pretty sure that's a polite way of saying, "No hentai, you freaks." 

Anyway, here's another from Tales from Earthsea:

This Artist Uses Second Life Screenshots to Tell Whimsical Stories of Robots

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

“Nannybot Portrait” is a striking picture of Nannybot with a bird. Created using overlays to simulate painting, I like how anachronistic this is, the futuristic robot with the bird in the style of a Renaissance painter. It made me smile. It is part of a series conceived and executed by Samanta Yates in some epic role-play storytelling. Samantha is a naughty angel whose mother needs some help to manage her and the house. Enter Nannybot, “The latest innovation in domestic assistance and childcare for the busy homemaker from Sirius Cybernetics Corporation! Equipped with extensive GPP (Genuine Person Personality) the Nannybot 4000 is mostly unlikely to be the result of fatal injury.”

Mary Poppins has nothing on Nannybot...

Linden Lab Needs to Punish Poorly Optimized Mesh -- Or Reward Well-Made Mesh (Comments of the Week)

Good reader thread responding to my somewhat tossed off remark that, "While you should definitely encourage users to customize their avatars, you also want to impose optimization restrictions so avatars don't become a bloated lag-inducing disaster like they have in SL."

The problem, as Alicia observes, is the company behind Second Life has enabled (encouraged?) poor optimization:

Linden Lab has set the maximum for textures at 1024x1024, and most creators end up making their textures too damn big (any texture size over 1024x1024 max), which then will be forced to the max of 1024x1024; but, remember that LL never set limits on how many verts/faces a mesh item should have. The textures issues, on the other hand, can easily be fixed if people simply went with the allotted sizes (64x64, 128x128, 256x256, 512x512 and the 1024x1024 max) SL can manage.

Also, knowing how to keep the MB down on the textures also helps if the person knows what their doing in GIMP, PhotoShop, or any other photo manipulation program. When it comes to mesh, you still have mesh hair that shoots an avi's complexity near or past 100k, and the same thing can happen with jewelry, clothing, etc. Verts/faces counts also increase/decrease when you resize any mesh object (trees, shrubs, etc.) All of these individual issues ultimately becomes a huge problem that never gets handled as LL only wants to continue working as is...

Everyone knows that LL will never impose restrictions on how maximum number of verts a mesh item can have.

Pulsar argues that Linden Lab should set out rewards and/or restrictions around mesh:

Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass Becomes Biggest Cloud Streaming Service by Far, Acquires Bethesda to Become Even Bigger

I'm pretty convinced cloud streaming is going to be the future of online games, especially virtual worlds, so today's acquisition by Microsoft of Skyrim developer Bethesda is worth keeping an eye on:

As the gaming industry transforms from a device-centric era to a player-centric era powered by new technology that provides the freedom to play with friends anywhere on any device, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) on Monday announced plans to acquire ZeniMax Media, the parent company of Bethesda Softworks, one of the largest, privately held game developers and publishers in the world. Creators of critically acclaimed and best-selling gaming franchises including The Elder Scrolls and Fallout among many others, Bethesda brings an impressive portfolio of games, technology, talent, as well as a track record of blockbuster commercial success, to Xbox. Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft will acquire ZeniMax Media for $7.5 billion in cash.

The very announcement hints at streaming as the future: The end of buying expensive gaming PCs and consoles, and rather, using cloud streaming and edge competing to jump into virtual worlds from any device, even an old laptop or mobile phone. And with this purchase, Microsoft has a huge content advantage to add to its fast-growing subscriber base:

Top 6 Posts from Last Week, Including Avatar Creation Advice from a Virtual World Veteran & A Slapping Rap Song Inspired by SL

• Zuckerberg Wants Oculus Quest 2 To Sell 10 Million Units. The First Quest Hardly Sold 1 Million.
• There's A Playable, Physics-Enabled Tribute To Fall Guys In Second Life
• Someone Made The Bates Motel & Mansion Of Hitchcock's Psycho In Second Life
• How To Create Avatars For Virtual Worlds -- An Oculus/Linden Lab Vet's Advice
• Watch: Someone Made A Rap Song About Second Life And It Fricking SLAPS
• Poignant Images Of Sadness Created From Virtual World Screenshots