New World Notes Newsfeed: Metaverse Content I’m Currently Consuming

New links added (nearly) every weekday!

Unfortunately today's newsfeed is all about Facebook and the metaverse:

Facebook spending over $10 billion developing the metaverse this year:

"I recognize the magnitude of this bet," Zuckerberg said [in an earnings call]. "This is not an investment that will be profitable for us any time in the near future."

Zuckerberg argued that Facebook had to build out a lot of fundamental technology first before it can rake in any meaningful returns with AR and VR. "Our goal is to help the metaverse reach a billion people," he said, adding that he hoped to reach that goal by the end of the decade. That's when it could also become "a real business story," Zuckerberg said.

This is a tad bit more than the $5 billion over 5 years that Facebook recently announced (scroll down), but I guess that was only referencing EU-based employees. Again it's a mystery how Facebook plans to "help" make a billion people strong metaverse when its VR headset install base is so small, as is its erstwhile metaverse platform. More on that here. 

Facebook whistleblower "shocked" by Facebook's metaverse investment:

Frances Haugen was “shocked” when she heard the company planned to hire 10,000 engineers in Europe to work on the “metaverse,” a version of the internet based on virtual and augmented reality, when its money would be better spent on safety, she told British lawmakers Monday.

“I was shocked to hear that Facebook wants to double down on the metaverse and that they’re going to hire 10,000 engineers in Europe to work on the metaverse,” she said. “Because I was like, ‘Wow, do you know what we could have done with safety if we had 10,000 more engineers?’ It would have been amazing.”

The irony is, by spending so much on the metaverse which could have instead been spent on engineers who could help make Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp much safer, the entire company is in an extreme PR crisis and faces imminent government regulation. What happens if US regulators demand that Facebook sell off Oculus and its other arms, or at minimum, orders the company to remove mandatory Facebook ID log-in from its Quest devices?

Video purporting to be Quest 3 and upcoming avatar/metaverse/mixed reality applications from Facebook leaked. Originally via "Bastian", while Tom's Hardware has a good in-depth write-up. All of this or none of this could be announced at Facebook Connect this Thursday, but it definitely seems premature to announce a new HMD when the Quest 1 and 2 are only a couple years old. Check back on the 28th! 

Previous days' entries after the break:

 

Syrmor has a new VRChat interview after a long lull, and I think it's the first with someone rocking a human avatar (above). Lip synch is quite impressive, something that doesn't come across with all VRChat's furries and assorted non-human avatars. Read my profile of Syrmor here.

Here's two long reads for the weekend, the first from Ralph Koster, on ownership in virtual worlds, sample:

Let’s get one thing out of the way first. Ownership of anything digital is illusory, and always will be... The history of computing is full of examples of trying to stuff this genie back in the bottle. It’s why we have software licenses, EULAs, subscriptions, dongles, DRM, and the DMCA. Oh, and everything about crypto. They are all about turning an infinite resource back into something scarce, recreating a non-digital world.

Send to your NFT-loving friends who think NFTs are The Next Big Thing! 

Next up is Unity's VR head/longtime metaverse evangelist Tony Parisi, with The Seven Rules of the Metaverse:

Rule #1. There is only one Metaverse.

Rule #2: The Metaverse is for everyone.

Rule #3: Nobody controls the Metaverse.

Rule #4: The Metaverse is open.

Rule #5: The Metaverse is hardware-independent.

Rule #6: The Metaverse is a Network.

Rule #7: The Metaverse is the Internet.

... All of which seem highly debatable to me, but hopefully I'll do a deep dive in that next week!

"Improbable takes another crack at explaining the metaverse" is the Game Industry Biz title but good lord the interview with CEO Herman Narula is a wild ride. If it's this difficult for us to explain the metaverse's value, it's going to be a challenge to maintain interest in the term when it inevitably loses its luster.

"Roblox, the Gaming Site, Wants to Grow Up Without Sacrificing Child Safety" is The New York Times title which reflects the company's continued attempt to broaden its demographic appeal (see previous entries below) but reporter acknowledges without really addressing ROBLOX's recent (and very non-grown-up) ban on politics and even kissing.  

Facebook plans to spend over $5 billion on developing its metaverse over the next 5 years. The headline that Facebook the company probably prefers is, "Facebook plans to create 10,000 jobs in the European Union over the next five years in a push to build a digital world known as the 'metaverse.'" But assuming an average of $100,000 in salary per year per employee, that's $1 billion a year. It's hard to imagine how 10,000 people can work on the same platform at the same time, especially when you consider that Roblox Corporation has less than 1,250 employees managing 200 million active users. I've already gotten reports that Facebook Horizon has been mired by turnover and lack of focus, and I can't imagine how throwing 10,000 more people at the project will make matters better. But OK.

Speaking of ROBLOX, the company recently added more realistic avatars (or should I say less LEGO-like), in a likely bid to make the platform more appealing to people in their teens and early twenties. At first glance they still have some way to go before giving Fortnite's stylishly cartoonish avatars competition.

The savage economics of streaming on Twitch, from longtime analyst Joost van Dreunen: There's currently 8 million active Twitch streamers, but 25 percent of the 10,000 top earners make less than minimum wage. So that likely leaves 7,500 who make a decent living from streaming, and a few hundred out of 8 million who do extremely well (i.e. earning six figures US$ or more).

Speaking of Roblox, here's TechCrunch's deep dive into Core, the Epic-funded, would-be ROBLOX killer. 

🤔 “Perception of speed changes with FOV” – found on Reddit. I’ve always felt that expanding FOV risks increasing motion sickness due to greater opportunity for vection, but maybe a fuller FOV will more closely match your natural expectation, which will be more comfortable? pic.twitter.com/nu4jb2tkc2

— Ben Lang (@benz145) October 17, 2021

Love this visual demo on the importance of field of vision in immersion (versus nausea).

Playable Worlds is hiring an art director. Here's Raph Koster's vision for the metaverse his new startup is building.

Previous days' links after the break:

At the risk of Squid Game-but-in-a-virtual-world overkill, here's YouTube virtual world queen Carmen King playing one of the many hundreds of fan games inspired by the epic Netflix series in ROBLOX. I remain surprised ROBLOX the company doesn't seem to mind, but seeing as Washington Post reporter Gene Park also just played a Squid Game ROBLOX experience too, I guess they truly don't.

Good god Sotheby's now has a Metaverse page ("Sotheby’s Metaverse is a home for this new art movement built on the foundations of crypto and NFTs") which suggests the definition for the Metaverse has become so broad it now effectively means, "Digital stuff we can maybe make a fuck ton of money from." 

Speaking of which, Steam just banned blockchain and NFT games, with a developer hit by the policy saying, "Steam's point of view is that items have value and they don't allow items that can have real-world value on their platform." If one of the world's largest distribution platform for PC games keeps consistent with this policy, I'm not sure how much blockchain and NFT-based games can sustain themselves. The obvious alternative is The Epic Games Store, which now reports over 160 million active users to Steam's 120 million... but Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has also voiced serious reservations of getting involved with NFTs. To wit:

Replied:

We aren’t touching NFTs as the whole field is currently tangled up with an intractable mix of scams, interesting decentralized tech foundations, and scams.

— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) September 27, 2021

UPDATE, 5:03PM PT: Actually Sweeney just announced:

Epic Games Store will welcome games that make use of blockchain tech provided they follow the relevant laws, disclose their terms, and are age-rated by an appropriate group. Though Epic's not using crypto in our games, we welcome innovation in the areas of technology and finance.

So that's interesting! Meanwhile, in legacy Metaverse land, Linden Lab is hiring a software engineer to improve Second Life. More on that later, as the description is somewhat boggling.

 

Squid Game comes to Second Life... sexily. Well this was inevitable. There's over a hundred items in the Second Life Marketplace tagged with "Squid Game", including several for turning a dystopian tale of economic desperation into a setting for superhot fashion shoots. (I searched for Squid Game-themed roleplay areas in Second Life, but those aren't as readily available.) To be sure, all these wild IP infringement fan tributes are nothing in comparison to the hundreds of user made Squid Game experiences in ROBLOX that have been played more times than the actual show has been watched.

Vive Flow: VR as a $499 luxury appliance for relaxation. Almost everything about the design and the presentation and the software suggests Vive is targeting an audience who's not particularly interested in VR, but may want immersive forms of relaxation and relaxed viewing:

HTC wants people to use the Vive Flow for visually immersive but mostly stationary experiences. So you can watch a 360-degree video or sit in a virtual environment, but you can’t use apps that require full-fledged virtual hands. (This rules out most well-known VR games.) The camera tracking gives you a more natural experience than a headset that can only detect the angle of your head, but the app catalog and the somewhat loose-fitting glasses-style design mean you probably won’t be walking around.

HTC says the Flow will launch with 100 apps and support 150 by the end of the year. In addition to uses like streaming video, its release announcement promotes the Tripp meditation app and the VR therapeutic service MyndVR, which is tailored for older adults. You can also engage with VR social spaces like Vive Sync and watch streaming video, something that’s proven popular on AR glasses. The Flow will support a limited subset of the apps on HTC’s Viveport store, and users can subscribe to a discounted, Flow-focused $5.99-per-month version of Viveport’s app subscription service.

I say "almost" everything, because to control the Flow, you need to use it with... an Android smartphone. But if you can afford to pay $499 for an optional peripheral, you almost certainly own an iPhone.  

Niantic's development platform for the real world metaverse is called... Lightship:

We are empowering creators to seamlessly and realistically bring virtual content into the real world. Niantic Lightship supports hundreds of millions of users through a client platform that sets the standard for AR, mapping, social and security. As part of our longer term vision for AR, we are also building the 3D map of the world with our Virtual Positioning System (VPS) and advanced tools to power a whole new type of contextual content at a global scale.

Sign up here for the November 8 launch event. This comes only a few months after the CEO threw down the gauntlet against virtual world-only Metaverse projects. But as I wrote at the time (noting that Niantic's only hit is Pokémon GO), "the market for a 'real-world metaverse' is far from proven."

Roblox now serving ads on all Rec Room searches on iOS 😄 pic.twitter.com/DtWOHdVlaf

— Shawn Whiting (@ShawnRecRoom) October 12, 2021

ROBLOX marketing to Rec Room's userbase. (See above, from a Rec Room team leader.) Metaverse wars seem to be heating up! 

 

This image above via an anonymous Twitter account may or may not be a sneak peek of the HTC Vive Flow, but starting tomorrow, we'll know for sure. What's even more interesting to me is how the Flow fits into HTC's plans for a metaverse of its own (according to Janko Roettgers of Protocol):

Viveport Verse will allow people to "explore the world beyond physical space," "meet people around the world" and "explore a variety of events, from virtual tourism and exhibitions to sports events and festivals," the company states on a publicly available staging site.

The service is designed to be accessible via VR headsets as well as mobile devices and desktop computers, and will feature some sort of NFT tie-in. It will also allow people to create their own content, as well as upload 3D objects from services like Sketchfab. Verse is "an open space for users to generate rooms and 3D objects - create your own spaces with friends or an entire world," according to the staging site.

One thing conspicuously missing from this scoop -- any mention of Valve, which co-developed the first Vive HMDs and gave them a huge push by making Half-Life: Alyx a Vive exclusive. Is that a shoe that's still going to drop, or a mysteriously missing shoe?

Filmmaker crowdfunding a full-length documentary about life and love in VRChat, shot entirely in VRChat. Trailer is above, crowdfunder, which has already raised nearly $5000, is right here on GoFundMe.  Hat tip: Ryan Schultz.

Stop recklessly letting kids under 12 play with VR, especially at school. Seriously, just slow your roll.

Speaking of all that, don't forget to RSVP here for my October 21 fireside with Matthew Ball and The Washington Post's Gene Park!

See Second Life screenshots in 360 degrees. Not sure if the full interactive 360 effect will display here on this blog depending on your browser, but here's a collection of responsive images on Flickr which make use of the new-ish snapshot tool feature from Linden Lab. (Hat tip: Martha Stevens.)

Salvadorans convert their free Bitcoin to US dollars. I recently speculated that most Salvadorans are not using Bitcoin to buy goods and services because they are instead HODL-ing it in hopes what little they have in Bitcoin goes up in value. But this section from a (very interesting!) New York Times article on the Bitcoin in El Salvador suggests many are being even more sensible about it:

To promote the currency’s use, the government has created a cellphone application — Chivo Wallet — which allows citizens, including many who do not have bank accounts, to send and receive bitcoin-denominated claims, convert them to dollars and withdraw them from special A.T.M.s. It also gave $30 in bitcoin to every Salvadoran who adopts the wallet.

But the app has been plagued by technical failures, and many A.T.M.s ran out of money as people rushed to convert bitcoin holdings into the more stable dollar bills.

If many Salvadorans don't trust Bitcoin even when their officially government backs it, instead preferring yanqui dollars, what hope does Bitcoin actually have their.

Why Facebook's Metaverse Might Be A Big Mistake. Spoiler alert: Because Facebook's value is from its social network, and you can't really map that onto an immersive 3D space.

Matthew Ball on dystopia versus The Metaverse. Covers the topic I discussed last August here but from a more optimistic angle. Speaking of which, don't forget to reserve a seat to meet Matthew in the Metaverse next week.

Facebook removing its name from its Horizons metaverse, dropping support for Unity. I mean, wow:

Facebook removed its brand from in-development social VR platform Horizon and plans to focus the effort around VR-based building tools with a $10 million fund to encourage creators. Horizon Worlds is the new name for Facebook Horizon and the company is removing support for Unity-based worlds, encouraging creators building with that game engine to seek release on the Oculus Store.

Latter move is incomprehensible, former move is understandable given recent news -- seems indicative of the heavy turnover and lack of development focus I've heard about from an insider. But I thought Facebook wanted to be a Metaverse company?

If NFTs are the new tulip mania, wonders Philip Rosedale, where's all the NFT tulips?

Speaking of Philip, here's a handy list of Clubhouse rooms where High Fidelity's spatial audio (added last August) especially shine, including live comedy, music concerts, even all-audio theater!

My #VRChat Tower Defense is now released! Been working on this for a while and I think it's looking really good 🙂

Sorry for the twitchy video it's so hard to be a good cameraman in VR pic.twitter.com/XOj83j1e6z

— Anton Bergåker (@DragonCoke) September 22, 2021

Someone in VRChat made a full-fledged tower defense game in the world (video/credit above). Yet another sign of the platform's creative vibrancy. Much more here.

Flickr launches a non-profit foundation to preserve images on the platform. Good news (hopefully) for the thousands of people who use Flickr to share their often excellent virtual world screenshots. (Hat tip: Kottke.)

Linden Lab unveils new -- and temporary -- Second Life avatar surnames for sale, including... Lecter.  

ROBLOX brings top pop band 21 Pilots in the metaverse for a "live" concert. Watch above, includes some impressive visuals: Very much appears to be an attempt to top Travis Scott in Fortnite, with the duo becoming giant avatars that players encircle and slide around. Also noteworthy that 21 Pilots are performers in their early 30s and appeal most to people in that 25-34 demographic. I.E., this also seems to be an attempt to mature ROBLOX's appeal beyond its current user base of mostly teens/pre-teens. (More on that in the next post.)

"The developer behind the NFT project, ‘Evil Ape,’ suddenly disappeared along with its Twitter account, website, and $2.7 million," reports VICE. Expect more of that to happen with other fly-by-night NFT projects that aren't backed by established brands and public figures.

Alphabet’s DeepMind A.I. lab turns a profit for the first time ever. Fairly reliable sign that neural network-level AI is practical and scalable. May very well lead to SkyNet, but at least Nettrice Gaskins got to make some great art using DeepMind as a palette. (Hat tip: USC's Mike Zyda.)

AT&T's 100 Thieves VRChat world attracts dozens of visitors. Screencap taken in the last hour -- compare and contrast AT&T's 21 visitors versus the 2,182 in the hottest world -- or for that matter, the 943 playing a VR fan remake of Among Us. No shock to anyone who's worked with corporate sites in virtual worlds, but I am surprised the partnership with 100 Thieves, a huge e-sports gaming brand, isn't drawing in more visits from their community.  

Flickr users, please tell Cajsa about great virtual world photographers on Flickr for her indispensable New World Notes column. Second Life is her main focus but she's also featured gorgeous images taken from Red Dead Redemption online and other immersive spaces.

Facebook's downtime causes Oculus avatars to become ghosts. One of many side effects of Facebook's multi-platform outage yesterday: With no way to comply with Oculus Quest 2's mandatory Facebook ID log-in,  Oculus' disconnected avatars became ghostly apparitions. Which actually look pretty cool! Another ironically hilarious side effect of the downtime: Facebook employees were not even able to get into Facebook buildings to work on their Metaverse.

Good "WTF is even the Metaverse" Q&A explainer from The Verge that avoids the common-but-simplistic "It's from a dystopian novel!" criticism that I criticized a few months ago by citing Snowcrash's actual author on Metaverse companies, and gives proper credit to Second Life as a pioneer: 

DIDN’T WE HAVE A WHOLE METAVERSE HYPE CYCLE AROUND SECOND LIFE IN THE ‘00S? WHAT’S DIFFERENT NOW?

It’s true: plenty of new “metaverse” phenomena aren’t really novel. People were becoming digital land barons and selling virtual items in Second Life nearly two decades ago. Schools and businesses have opened satellite campuses in that world and others. Social 3D spaces like CyberTown long predate Second Life. Even before that, early virtual worlds popped up in the 1970s with text-based multiuser dungeons or MUDs. Many older worlds also inspired the kinds of utopian predictions we see around the metaverse today. One reason we might be experiencing the hype cycle again is that graphics technology and internet connectivity has significantly advanced since, say, Second Life’s 2003 launch.

That last part misses some important nuances -- for example, ROBLOX launched in 2006 at the peak of SL/metaverse hype, and still has rudimentary graphics compared to Second Life. Someone could devote a whole blog explaining why Second Life missed its opportunity to grow. Oh wait. 

Facebook/Oculus requires everyone joining the company to read Ready Player One, but in light of recent, Achilles-heel revealing revelations around disturbing Facebook policy and deceptions to the public, maybe people at Facebook/Oculus didn't get the point of the book and its sequel, writes David Berkowitz: "[Y]ou can't just build a new digital world; you have to work on fixing the real one too or it means nothing. Zuck, it's all there. Read your bible a little more closely." Then again, as I wrote back in 2016, Oculus' founding executives see the Metaverse as a salve for real world poverty.

AT&T Station is now LIVE in a dedicated world row, featuring 100 Thieves content plus interactive games, #HBOMax trailers, easter eggs and more! To kick it off, @ATT is hosting a virtual avatar drop until Oct 7th. Don’t miss your chance to collect 2 exclusive @100Thieves Avatars! pic.twitter.com/RKy5e2omAg

— VRChat (@VRChat) October 1, 2021

AT&T launces a marketing world in VRChat. Largest corporate sponsorship in VRChat by far. Because corporate sites in virtual worlds are so successful. Oh wait. (Hat tip: Adeon.)

NFT-based MMO Axie Infinity gets massive revenue and gold farmers ( if not many actual users):  

The AXS token is the native token of Axie Infinity. It is used to as the main in-game currency. Hence, if the revenue of the game is high, the utility of the AXS token increases, boosting its value.  According to Token Terminal, AXS is driving about $28.9 million in weekly revenue. Annualized, this is equivalent to $1.5 billion in revenue, which is comparable to blockbuster games in the traditional gaming sector.

There's so much revenue to be earned Axie's NFTs, many people in the Philippines are earning a real life living gold farming the game. This despite the fact that it has less than 100,00 actual users. ("Nearly 60,000 people are now playing Axie Infinity, Axie’s head of growth Jeffrey Zirlin told CNBC [last May])". That looks to me like a bubble looking to burst.

Would you buy a Metaverse stock? Bottom line analysis of ROBLOX's stock from The Motley Fool. "Management's long-term goal is to hit 1 billion DAUs and 1 billion user hours every day on Roblox. An audacious goal, but one that should make investors excited." However, no mention of two potential downsides for shareholders: PR/regulatory backlash of how its mostly-underage content creators are treated, and IP infringing content that parents of ROBLOX players probably won't be wild about. 

The Metaverse gets a high art, operatic treatment:

That father, the libretto slowly reveals, recently lost his wife. In a state of unbearable grief, made worse by thoughts of his own mortality and what it would mean for their adult daughter, he secretly undergoes a procedure to upload his consciousness — and in the process end his physical existence. It’s technology so new that, despite its thorny implications, has yet to be regulated. He then returns to his daughter, granted virtual immortality but unable to, say, give her a hug on the way in.

Watch the trailer to Upload above, which showcases the opera's impressive use of mixed reality technology.  

 

For weekend guffaws, here's a whole Instagram account devoted to Second Life memes. (Many posts NSFW or just kinda dickish rather than funny.) Here's a good recent one:

Hat tip: Much-missed cartoonist Nylon Pinkney.

Two long reads for the weekend: Here's a fascinating thought experiment about creating an actual map of the Metaverse by analyst/consultant Doug Thompson, known as Dusan Writer in SL back in the day: "The map is based on blockchain so that all of the placements and transactions are open and transparent."

Compare and contrast with MMO expert Raph Koster, who's now making a Metaverse of his own, and argues that maps aren't the right metaphor for the Metaverse: "Look: My car is old enough that it has a built-in navigation system with a DVD of maps. It’s hilariously obsolete! Why do we think it’s OK for our metaverse future to work this way?"

Tim Sweeney wants to make the anti-Facebook Metaverse. Great interview/overview by Gene Park of the Washington Post:

To Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, people are tired of how today’s Internet operates. He says the social media era of the Internet, a charge led by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, has separated commerce from the general audience, herding users together and directing them to targets of the company’s choosing rather than allowing free exploration... For years now, he has eyed a solution: the metaverse. And steadily, over several years, Epic has been acquiring a number of assets and making strategic moves with the goal of making Sweeney’s vision for the metaverse a reality.

The thing is, if we move away from Likes and Shares of social media, how will be democratically discover great content in the Metaverse? An open question I hope to discuss with Gene and Matthew Ball soon.

DeadMau5 works with community creators on Core to create a complete music video (watch above). No word yet on how much these creators were paid, but here's some of them (credited in the official announcement), with stories on how Core has changed their lives:

Sino is a music producer for local artists in Pakistan turned Core creator. His earnings from Core helped him pay his bills, rent, etc. and support his family during the pandemic. He switched careers and is now a full-time game developer... Dragonballduraq is a 19 year-old recent high school graduate. She joined Core three days after the jam started and made a winning submission in seven days using Core for the first time and having no professional experience making games or environments. [BFM and Amonbeaufils also contributed.]

Valve seems to be building a standalone VR headset with the codename "Deckard". Read the whole report on The Verge, which somehow doesn't have a single Blade Runner reference.

Startup raises over $5 million to build experiences in ROBLOX. Strong sign that an online game is officially a successful platform when other game companies can raise money to build experiences on top of it. No word if Netflix will make an official Squid Game game on ROBLOX. 

Famous re-paintings recreated with Minecraft-style voxel-based terrains. Imagine the same process could be done with mesh, so that high resolution virtual worlds could also look like paintings when seen from a bird's eye.

Created a "Tennis Game" shader implementation in @pemathedev's in-game Shader-in-a-Shader compiler and VM in VRChat! Try it out for yourself! #screenshotsaturday https://t.co/rDIo9Sl7di pic.twitter.com/DXVDlSHNR0

— fuopy (@fuopy) September 4, 2021

Mad scientist makes a shader compiler for VRChat, for which people are already making applications, like the one above. Via @prvncher, who notes: "This is insane - people are writing programs encoded in textures and parsed in a shader that runs in VR Chat. The lengths the community will go to build custom content is astounding" (Emphasis mine.)

Speaking of VRChat, there are over 33,000 items for sale on Booth, a Japan-based content selling platform like Gumroad. Hat tip: A snarky reader who's cued me to update my estimate of people who make money from VRChat. 

Linden Lab hiring a Chief Information Security Officer: Unless I missed it, this would be the company's first CISO. The role seems targeted mainly for serving Tilia, the company's new-ish spinoff for online game payments. For one thing, there's nothing in the job description about stopping Copybot.

The Metaverse is not for kids (at least using VR): "There's a reason pretty much every VR company says '13 and up' for their devices," says industry leader Avi Bar-Zeev, citing recent research. "If you're a parent or teacher using VR for under 13 kids, you're taking a risk. Do you know how big?" Read my most recent interview with Avi here.

The MMO called New World already has over 500,000 players days after launch. As I wrote last year, "New World is not actually the kind of world New World Notes usually notes -- no robust content creation tools that I can see, for one thing, and shouldn't a world called New World be more about exploring the new world, not killing other people new to the new world?" Then again, maybe it's worth another look: Should New World Notes note New World further?

Watch: Eerie and amazing technique for depicting avatar expression by artist Chris Jones, who explains how he did it here. Hat tip Adeon, who observes: "My brain is fully willing to accept this as either a mocapped real face or some kind of painted real face It's rendered rather than realtime so it's not very impressive for games. But realtime always trails behind rendered." True that.

Metaverse company best practices for furry employees? Linden Lab's "Soft Linden" ponders: "If you worked at a company with a bunch of self-identifying furries, is there anything you would do to make the furries feel equally included?" An interesting Twitter thread follows. CC: Everyone working at VRChat.

23% in the US say they would "like to spend some time exploring the metaverse,” according to a Forrester research survey. Which sort of contradicts the accompanying Forbes article title, "Consumers Aren’t Ready For The Metaverse Yet". But 23% of the US is... over 75,000,000 million potential US metaverse users. That's roughly the number of Americans who watched Avengers: Endgame in a movie theater.

Second Life finally gets Multi-Factor Authentication for user's accounts. Helpful tip from u/jarmade: "Just remember to write down your two-factor authentication codes in a notebook or print the QR code image, in case you lose/break your phone or the app."

Here's TechMeme's news capture of Facebook's "responsible" metaverse imitative. New World Notes' mordant take gratifyingly included.

Yesterday's links below:

Beloved longtime Linden Lab engineer's avatar turned into 3D sculpture as a retirement gift. Created by acclaimed metaverse artist Bryn Oh, it may look like Oz Linden (aka Scott Lawrence) is bending down to pick up a burning server, but he's actually meant to be in Second Life's standard "AFK" pose: “I felt it was nice to make Oz in 'away' because maybe retirement it's more of an adieu than a goodbye," Bryn explains. 

Snoop Dogg officially joins The Sandbox metaverse: "Snoop Dogg will own 'virtual land' in the metaverse including access to a stylized digital mansion, as well as launching his non-fungible token (NFT) collection including player avatars and a limited ‘Snoop Dogg Private Party Pass’ that gives users VIP access to concerts, events, Q&A sessions and dedicated 'NFT drops'." Hopefully someone tells Snoop that the Sandbox (to judge by its web traffic) only has users in the low six figures, i.e., less people than would come to an IRL Snoop concert.

Google Stadia now accessible through Xbox's browser: "Wow," enthuses Metaverse analyst Matt Ball. "Big leap for openness."

New Limits Give Chinese Video Gamers Whiplash. If the Metaverse really will be the post-mobile Internet, China's ruling class sure seems intent on tossing away its place in it.

Two GPT-3 AIs talking to each other. About as eerie as the title suggests. Fortunately not eerie enough to cross the Uncanny Valley. 

Comments

[Martha Stevens]

Second Life 360s are really beautiful.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/secondlifeofficial/galleries/72157719804170632/with/51434630662/

[Wagner James Au]

Cool thanks, I'll check it out! I've only seen Facebook versions which I'm not as much a fan off.

[Mint]

Speaking of NFTs, there was an attempt to introduce them into the YA (young adult) genre through a project called Realms of Ruin and that backfired tremendously. https://twitter.com/BadWritingTakes/status/1450954558990077958 and https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/1451029725149732864 are two Twitter threads that discussed the project, which lasted all of three hours!

The other NFT project that has been met with a LOT of fan anger is the Neopets Metaverse project, but that one is still going. Polygon did an article about it here. https://www.polygon.com/22722915/neopets-nft-controversy-noneonfts-metaverse

I don't see the value in NFTs personally, but if someone is going to try them, they should really think about how receptive the market is to those NFTs.

[Mint]

OK, correction - it wasn't three hours, more like five for Realms of Ruin. Still, it was a very short-lived project that will likely haunt the reputations of the authors involved for some time to come, at least among the reading and writing community on Twitter.

[Wagner James Au]

Oh wow interesting, thanks!