New World Notes

Why Core is Spending $100 Million to Make a "Multiverse" (Not a Metaverse)

Manticore,  the startup behind Core, a kind of Fortnite-meets-ROBLOX UGC platform, just announced $100 million in venture funding from Fortnite publisher Epic and other investors. That's not a surprise in itself, especially since ROBLOX's recent IPO made that UGC platform more valuable than top traditional game companies like Electronic Arts and Take-Two Interactive Software. What's more surprising to me is that the announcement describes Core not as a metaverse nor as a "a digital playground and community" (the company's original description for itself)... but instead, as a "creator multiverse".

Why the term change?

"We have been talking about the multiverse for a long time but didn’t use that word until the last year or so," Manticore CEO Frederic Descamps tells me through a spokesperson. "We see Core as a multitude of universes, connected or not, depending on what the users decide. Players and creators are ultimately the ones who will determine how all these worlds and universes are connected."

It's why, Descamps adds, they're not calling Core a metaverse:

Facebook's Oculus Quest 2 Sales Claims Probably Don't Mean What You Think They Mean

Quick tip on spin detection: When a company spokesperson claims their figures have "doubled" or even "quadrupled", but decline to give you specific, absolute numbers, make sure your antennae twitches furiously. So it is with Facebook's Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, recently making this claim about Oculus Quest 2 sales which are being breathlessly repeated by VR enthusiasts:

In response to [BusinessWeek reporter Emily] Chang’s question about when VR will begin to see mainstream traction, Bosworth said:

“If you look a little closely, I think it’s starting to happen right now. The fact that Oculus Quest 2—in just a few months on the market—has outsold not just its predecessor, but all of its predecessors combined, is a tremendous indicator that we are now at that point where we have broken through from the early adopter crowd to an increasingly mainstream crowd.”

This is indeed a significant milestone, especially considering that Quest 2 has only been on the market for five and a half months, while the company’s first headset launched five years ago. 

Is it though? The thing is, what a company says to a reporter is often different from what they're legally obligated to accurately state in their earnings report:

Today's Flickr Pick: A Male Ophelia & Other Delights from Hwan

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

Hwan’s “My World of Make Believe” took me by surprise. When I looked at it, I immediately thought of Ophelia, the woman who drowns herself in Shakespeare's Hamlet. She has been painted many times, though often gathering flowers before drowning herself. I sometimes think painting Ophelia was a prerequisite for pre-Raphaelites. But Hwan’s picture made me think specifically of John Everett Millais’ Ophelia. In both of the pictures, the person is still alive with their necks bent back and their bodies arched. While he is more pacific, his eyes closed, they both are accepting their fate. They both lie in still waters with flowers floating around them. 

Seeing a picture reminiscent of Ophelia but with a man made me think how rare that is. There are so many Ophelia artworks, but what about drowned me? There are some, but notably, in those pictures the water is turbulent as though only high seas could drown a man unlike the still waters of a quiet pond and the many Ophelias. There are even many photographic Ophelias.

The next is a bold red, yellow, and green, click here:

User-Made Game in VRChat Becomes So Popular It's Being Turned Into a Standalone Game for Oculus & Steam

Since launching last August, "The Devouring", an incredibly ambitious multiplayer survival horror game created inside VRChat, has become a huge hit within that virtual world's community -- level designer Lakuza tells me it's since attracted nearly 350,000 total visits and counting. So I wasn't totally surprised to learn that two of the original development team members are now turning "The Devouring" into a standalone game for the Quest and PC VR.

"The Devouring started just as a fun project with friends, but it turned out to be a great development experience," as Fionna, one half of the newly-formed Studio CyFi, tells me. "After the response to the release [in VRChat], we started to think about taking it further. Cyan and I have been working together as a great team for a few years now, and it just started to make sense to work together to make The Devouring available on its own."

This will be the first professional game created by her co-founder Cyan, who at first had only planned for it to be an experience in VRChat. "[B]ut realizing the success of The Devouring meant that it could become more than just a VRChat world," he tells me.

That The Devouring has become popular enough to transition into a standalone game is a pretty sure sign that VRChat has reached escape velocity as a UGC platform. Longtime readers may remember Tringo, a user-made game made for Second Life that became such a hit in that world, in 2006 a media company bought the rights and published it on the Nintendo Gameboy Advance and other platforms.

But VRChat the company is expected to soon introduce monetization options for creators on the platform -- so why not just wait for that?

NEO-Japan Now Open: Twice-Yearly Tribute to Great Japanese Content Creators in Second Life Inspired by Anime & Cyberpunk

Click here to teleport to NEO-Japan, a twice-yearly shopping and explorational event featuring some of the best Japanese SL content creators inspired by sci-fi anime and cyberpunk classics ranging from Blade Runner to the Second Life-based city Insilico. Here's the official homepage of the event, which is a bit difficult to navigate but has copious inspirational images and links. While the event showcases content by Japan artists, my Japanese language correspondent Sanny Yoshikawa tells me attendance is about 80% international and includes English translation -- and is always packed with visitors from around the world. Indeed I just stopped by and even on a weekday afternoon, the landing point is fairly bustling with avatars.

The extravaganza kicked off last Saturday and runs until April 18; the adventure starts here.

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Casual Male Fashion & Fun With Virtual Dogs

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

Enzo Bernardone is a micro-blogger, someone who blogs fashion only on Flickr. He likes to tell stories with his pictures. I find them charming. The boat full of beer cracks me up. He obviously loves dogs because they are frequent partners in his pics. 

For more stories, click here:

Catwa Head Mob Crush Perfectly Encapsulates Current State of Second Life (Comments of the Week)

Photo of Catwa sale mob crush by SL blogger Kirsten Corleone; large version is not worksafe.

The L$1 sale of Catwa avatar heads caused the Marketplace website to crash due to heavy demand, provoking Linden Lab to remove the item from the store, and instead, make it available in-world on several sims... which also overloaded with head-hungry shoppers (see pic at right). All this happened while Linden Lab advertised a search for an engineer who could help craft the virtual world's future -- and that irony was not lost on some New World Notes readers:

Crashing Marketplace over a L$1 Mesh head is cause to weep for all of the [SL users] who have taken over Your World, Your Imagination. Not having that mesh head is the first step in having a head of your own. Stop the madness.

-- Clara Seller 

I think Clara's arguing as others have, that mesh has made Second Life a consumer-focused world. To be sure, there have always been sim-crashing shopping crazes, but in older times, there would also be massively popular arts and culture events across the virtual world at the same time -- but now those are far and few.

The laggy in-world mob crash also shows the limits of the Amazon cloud migration's ability to improve performance (though it definitely has improved) and points to the fundamental problems with legacy code:

Monday Memory: This Second Life Dress Was Auctioned Off for $1700

All the recent hype over NFT-based virtual art* speculation reminded me that Second Life, as usual, anticipated that trend well over a decade ago -- for instance, this dress by acclaimed designer Eshi Otawara which was sold in 2008 at auction for L$460,000, roughly $1700 in USD, with all proceeds going to benefit the annual Relay for Life in SL, a community-run campaign sanctioned by the American Cancer Society. That wasn't even the most paid for a virtual item in Second Life, for in 2006, there was a L$600,000 bid (around $1850-1950 at market rates) in an auction of a pink Dominus Shadow muscle car, donated by engineer Francis Chung.  

Sad to say little of the NFT craze is going to benefit a good cause like that but at least (as Nettrice Gaskin eloquently explains) it does offer a new revenue stream for under-represented artists.

*If you're still wondering WTF is even an NFT, here's a fairly funny explainer from SNL:

Last Week's Top Posts Including Hands-On With a High Fidelity-Powered Virtual Event Space & an Afrofuturist Selling Deep Dream-Based Art as Eco-Friendly NFTs

• Koster Teases Playable Worlds' Upcoming Project, Hints At Cross-Device Cloud Streaming & Much More
• Linden Lab Hiring VP Of Engineering To Help Define Future Of Second Life
• Why Afrofuturist Nettrice Gaskins Sells Her Deep Dream Art As NFTs On The Greener Tezos Blockchain
• Watch: Neos VR May Have The Best UI & Feature Set In All Social VR
• Watch: Skittish Adds Philip Rosedale's High Fidelity Spatial Audio & Other Virtual World-Ish Features To Upcoming Playful Space For Online Events
• VRChat's Mirrors Help Enhance The World's Crucial First-Person Only Perspective

Play in VRChat: Incredibly Detailed Driving Sim With Multiuser Support & Real Foot-to-Virtual Pedal Control

I didn't think this would be possible but there's now a driving simulation in VRChat with an insane level of detail. (If you have VRChat installed, click here to play)

"It's very well scripted and a great example of the types of interactions that are possible with the Udon language [VRChat's scripting system] when close care and attention is taken," my top VRChat source Adeon tells me. "I also didn't know the feet trackers in full-body [VR] could be used as an input device".

As that suggests, yes: In this sim, you can drive a standard shift in VR and control the car's clutch, brake, and acceleration with your actual feet.

More details from its creator, Varneon: