New World Notes

Second Life Hit By 3 Hour+ Unplanned Downtime; UPDATE: All Services Reportedly Restored After Nearly 5 Hours Offline

Update, 4:04pm: All services reportedly back online as of 3:57pm PT, i.e. nearly 5 hours of downtime. I'm currently logged into SL.

A major unplanned Second Life downtime was officially reported at 11:14 AM PT today and as of this writing at 2:30PT PT, access still seems to be interrupted across major services. (I just tried to load the Marketplace website, for example, but it hung forever.)

Go here for more updates from the official status page. If I'm reading the @SLGridStatus feed on Twitter correctly, this is the longest unscheduled downtime of Second Life of the entire year.

More updates here when I have them!

Linden Lab's 2001 downtime image by Bub Linden. They really ought to reboot it for times like this!

Artist Recreates Famous Francesca Woodman Photo Entirely in Second Life

Violet Evergarden may be dissatisfied with this homage to artist Francesca Woodman but I love it and think it is an excellent recreation of Woodman’s famous untitled work -- view the original here. 

Writes Violet: “The picture has been made entirely in SL, the background textures taken from the photo directly and then pasted on SL objects to recreate the room. It was not an easy process and I'm not happy with how it turned out, but it is the start of a fun project I feel.”

For more stunning photos, click here:

Philip Rosedale on Clubhouse Bringing High Fidelity's Metaverse-Driven Spatial Audio to the Massive Audio Chat App

Hear ye, hear ye 🔊 spAAaAaAatial audio on Clubhouse!

It's like surround sound, but w/ your own headphones. A more vibrant, human experience! Plus makes it much easier to tell who's talking.

thanks to @juberti for this one 👏 rolling out now on iOS, Android coming soon! pic.twitter.com/Zit6F9ijRK

— Clubhouse (@Clubhouse) August 29, 2021

Here's some Metaverse news that requires your headphones for the full effect (click the video above):

Clubhouse, the seriously popular audio chat app  -- it counts at least 10 million weekly active users -- just integrated Philip Rosedale's High Fidelity spatial audio:

High Fidelity’s HRTF technology, which stands for “Head Related Transfer Function,” maps speech to different virtual locations by subtly adding a time delay between stereo channels and replicating the way that high and low frequencies would sound entering the ear depending on a sound’s origin. The result, long used in social VR, gives virtual social experiences a sense of physical presence that good records have been pulling off for ages. Think listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon in stereo with good headphones but instead of sound effects and instruments playing around your head, you’re hearing the people you’re hanging out with arrayed in virtual space.

"If people are going to talk in groups online, they are going to need to use spatial audio to understand each other," Philip Rosedale tells me, shortly after the announcement dropped. "We've put in 8 years (so far) working on doing spatial audio right, and are super happy to have people in the Clubhouse community now able to take advantage of this experience!"

This is the latest, fascinating plot twist in Philip's Metaverse ambitions, originally borne with the founding of Second Life, then re-emerging in his latest start-up, High Fidelity, which was originally founded as a Metaverse company. (Before, that is, pivoting in 2019 to focus on this spatial audio feature).

But where Second Life and the original High Fidelity struggled for mass adoption, it's finally been achieved, if only through spatial audio:

Top 7 Posts Last Week Including: How Communities Can Create More Open Metaverses, Inside Horizon Workrooms' XR Mapping System & How a Real Life Family Was Borne From a Floating Galaxy in Second Life

• This New VRChat World Is Created By Someone Whose Game Worlds Are So Popular, She Now Makes A Full-Time Living Via Fan Donations
• The Metaverse Can't Develop Like The Internet Since It Doesn't Have Open Standards -- But Metaverse Communities Can Help Change That. My Take On Matthew Ball’s Metaverse Primer, Part 6
• Inside Horizon Workrooms: Oculus Vet Jim Purbrick On Mapping Real Offices To Virtual Spaces -- And How His Team Used It During The Pandemic For Their Own Meetings
• This Artist Turns Second Life Into Frame-Worthy Art Photos With Witty Titles
• Sub-Orbital Galaxy Still Floating Above Second Life After 14 Years, Still Inspiring Virtual & Real Communities
• Portrait Of The Artist As A Young A.I.: Rude & Pretentious Art Magazine-Style Questions For "Alejandro"
• SL Gacha Creators Scramble To Create Gacha-Like Systems Without A Gambling Mechanic Before Linden Lab's September 1 Deadline

This New VRChat World is Created by Someone Whose Game Worlds Are So Popular, She Now Makes a Full-Time Living Via Fan Donations

Kitchen Versus Kitchen is a zany new world game in VRChat (click here to play) from a mysterious developer known only as Jar. Her hit VRChat worlds are so popular, they account for roughly 1 in 10 of the virtual world's total user activity, and are more popular than most VR games made by established game companies. (Seriously: More on that below.)

This new game, as you might imagine, takes its inspiration from solo/local co-op cooking games which seem ideal when translated into a social VR setting. 

"I've played games like Overcooked and Diner Dash before and really enjoyed them with friends, and since VRChat is a social game it just seemed like a natural fit to do something similar," she tells me. "Also game mode aside, there was (and still is?) just an overall lack of worlds with cooking activities and everyone loves cooking, myself included."

As is screamingly apparent from the trailer above, the race to cook the right recipe in time quickly leads to all kinds of culinary mayhem. Getting all that to work in VRChat on a technical level, says Jar, was no easy job:

Great SL Fashion Beautifully Shot With the Black Dragon Viewer

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

Val Cloud’s blog Dear Inventory is full of great posts featuring her own products with other people’s creations. I was completely taken by the pose. Look at her hand holding the strap. She didn’t credit the pose, but that is probably because she uses the Black Dragon viewer which has such powerful in-world pose tools. She has a tutorial here but I don’t speak Portuguese. She has a separate blog for her store Guapa, so she does not over-promote in this fashion blog.

Click through to her post “Sienna” for additional details or below: 

The Metaverse Can't Develop Like the Internet Since It Doesn't Have Open Standards -- But Metaverse Communities Can Help Change That. My Take On Matthew Ball’s Metaverse Primer, Part 6

I'm blogging Matthew Ball’s must-read, nine part metaverse primer over the Summer; my take on Part 1 is here,  my coverage of Part 2 is here, with Part 3 coverage here, Part 4 coverage here, and Part 5 here.

As with previous parts of the Primer, Part 6, "Interchange Tools + Standards and the Metaverse" delves into just how difficult making a Metaverse worth the name will be. Because while many say the Metaverse is the Internet's next generation, the actual Internet was launched by academics and government researchers who valued open standards. But the major companies/platforms which are likely to launch the Metaverse are very much closed, for the most part:

All of the video games console operating systems, which are required to use console hardware, have chosen not to support open or third-party rendering API collections, such as OpenGL or WebGL. Instead, Microsoft Xbox exclusively uses Microsoft’s DirectX, while Sony uses its GNMX for PlayStation. Mobile devices typically support multiple standards, but they often restrict (or outright block) access to many drivers, which helps drive developers to their proprietary offering. PC and Mac are more open, but they’re optimized for Microsoft’s DirectX and Apple’s Metal APIs. As a result, a developer’s software needs to be written specifically for each platform’s ‘standards’. Fortnite needs to use Microsoft’s DirectX for Xbox, and Sony’s GNMX for PlayStation, Nvidia’s NVM for Nintendo Switch, and Apple’s Metal for iOS. Only Google’s Android has built its solution around OpenGL, but one could argue its dominance with Chrome and Chromium controls these standards for the web.

GPUs also have their own flavor of these protocols, too. Nvidia’s drivers are effectively a ‘platform’ that developers utilize to access a PC user’s hardware, working in concert with Microsoft’s DirectX, for rendering.

But if companies like these want to keep their standards closed, their customers, unified, can demand otherwise. As Matthew writes, the runaway success of Fortnite caused gamers to clamor for the chance to play together with their friends on other devices -- and their clamor grew so great (as did their threats to take their eyeballs elsewhere), even proprietary AF Sony finally complied:  

Inside Horizon Workrooms: Oculus Vet Jim Purbrick on Mapping Real Offices to Virtual Spaces -- and How His Team Used It During the Pandemic For Their Own Meetings

Last week's launch of Facebook's Horizon Workrooms garnered a lot of guffaws due to its sheer Zuckerbergian much-ness, but beneath the VR-for-office meetings platform is some impressive tech.

On his blog, Jim "Babbage" Purbrick (who helped lead development of Workrooms)  goes into detail on a key Workrooms feature -- virtual mapping of the user's real meeting location/surroundings:

[Workrooms] shows you an entirely virtual environment, but asks you to indicate the position of real world objects like your desk in a process which feels like a more detailed guardian setup process. Workrooms then positions your avatar in the virtual world so that your real desktop aligns with your virtual desktop.

When you reach out and touch the virtual desk your hands touch the real desk. As long as the important virtual objects within arms reach are mapped to real objects, the virtual environment can be much bigger than the available real space while maintaining the illusion that every virtual object can be touched as well as seen.

Jim (who left Facebook late last year) allows that this is not the type of set-up you want to be strapped into for your entire day: "Currently you wouldn't want to use a Quest all day," as he puts it. "But you could easily attend several typical hour long meetings a day without feeling uncomfortable."

Throughout the pandemic, the Oculus group developing Workrooms would actually use their own platform to hold meetings:

This Artist Turns Second Life Into Frame-Worthy Art Photos With Witty Titles

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

Heidi Rewell gives her pictures the best titles on Flickr. I mean, even if they were not good pics, you would want to look just for the titles. But they are good pictures, so bonus! 

Take “Did you know that? Some unicorns like to dress up as horses.” She sets her horizon one-fifth of the way up, leaving the sky to fill the picture using the unofficial rule of fifths. The horses are nearly hidden by the tall grass but that seems appropriate when they are unicorns disguised as horses. 

For more beautifully illustrated facts, click here:

Sub-Orbital Galaxy Still Floating Above Second Life After 14 Years, Still Inspiring Virtual & Real Communities

Photo credit: Susietea Resident via Inspire's Flickr Group

Twelve years ago, Bonny Greenwood was floating in outer space on an asteroid doing tai chi to trance music when she struck up a conversation with a friendly passerby. (As one does.)

Then again this is a common thing to happen in Inspire Space Park, a suborbital galaxy that’s been floating high above Second Life since at least 2007 -- created, as the founders told me back then, “to make the perfect ‘chill’ place in SL that wasn't about sex, or ads”. (Watch me twirl above the galaxy below.)

It’s still orbiting above the virtual world, I am happy to report, and has very recently expanded to include an earthbound fantasy forest and steampunk-themed park. Click here to visit yourself.

It was co-created by Earth Primbee, and as a testament to the community that’s developed around Inspire Space Park over its lifespan, he is still after all these years able to cover land tier costs from donations:

“It is the feeling one gets when the music and scene combines,” Primbee muses to me. “Maybe you are dancing, doing Tai Chi, meditating, or orbiting and find that moment where it all comes together. It is a peaceful feeling. People need that and the people have insured it stayed. Became a home of sorts. A place where many have met for the first time. A shared place for them after.”

Inspire’s original co-creators have since moved on, and Primbee himself has largely turned over operations to three women. Which brings us back to Bonny, among the triumvirate of the galaxy’s new managers: