New World Notes

Star Atlas Sure Seems Less Like a Metaverse Platform & More Like an MMO

Star Atlas occasionally appears on my Metaverse Radar as a virtual world to potentially follow, but this report from CoinDesk leaves me wondering if it actually is a metaverse platform at all:

... Star Atlas has two tokens that drive all game operations: POLIS and ATLAS. POLIS is the governance token with a market cap of $14 million and ATLAS is the payment token with a market cap of $18 million, according to data from CoinGecko. Players buy ships, NFT-based space vehicles used to explore deep space, from the in-house marketplace to start the game. These spaceships with different details, crews and components are critical in a player’s capability to fight rival factions and discover assets scattered across the Star Atlas metaverse...

And so on. Little or nothing is said about powerful content creation tools, which is a core feature to the Metaverse.  Star Atlas's design document also says little about that, beyond a single vague reference to "optionality to incorporate player-created content". Compare and contrast Star Atlas with Dual Universe, and the former comes up short:

Watch: What Social VR / Metaverse Platforms Can Learn About User Safety from 2D Virtual Worlds

Here's the latest talk from Linden Lab veteran Jim "Babbage" Purbrick, who applied what he learned from Second Life and other pioneering virtual worlds in his work for Eve Online and Meta, with the focus here on user safety, i.e. keeping annoyances from trolls and other bad actors in the virtual world down to a dull roar.  

These are lessons, as he tells me, "from older, 2D and text-based virtual worlds [that] are often ignored by VR developers. This talk shows how we applied those lessons to Oculus Venues.

"Technologies change, people stay the same."

This is true. One key lesson Jim and his team applied was real time responses to active harassment. (Starting at around 29 minutes in.) If a troll is scurrying about causing problems during a live event, they need to be dealt with in real time, not after abuse reports have been filed by users and processed the next day: 

Today's Flickr Pick: Wow-Worthy Virtual World Landscape Photos

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

Some pictures are just so striking all I can do is say “Wow!” and sit back and enjoy them. This is a Wow! picture. I love the layers of mountains in the background giving the picture depth and texture. I love that we can see the knots in the rope webbing. Joanna Kitten has mastered the art of Second Life landscape photography. I was wondering if this was really SL or some video game when I saw the teleport link. Yes, she makes SL look this good. [Teleport link here.]

For more stunning landscapes, click here:

Top 5 Posts Last Week: What VRChat Gets About the Metaverse That Meta Does Not -- Plus When to Say "The Metaverse" vs. "A Metaverse Platform"

• Launching In Second Life: A Massive Education Campus Bringing Together Many Projects Into A Shared Serendipitous Space
• Metaverse: "The" Or "A", Capital Or Lower Case: A Naming Convention Proposal
• Watch: Improbable Demos Hundreds Of Concurrent VOIP-Enabled Players In Close Proximity
• Watch: What VRChat Gets About The Metaverse That Meta Does Not
• SL Fashion Blog Tip: How To Export Your Avatar Outfit Details To Text

Watch: Seracast's Fun Live Stream from The Seraphim Sim

Streaming live now from the Seraphim sim (click here to teleport), here's Del and Kess bringing their inimitable zaniness to your Monday. As a bonus, they're offering a couple of fatpacks full of various Outlet items to folks who show up!

Launching This Saturday in Second Life: A Massive Education Campus Bringing Together Many Projects Into a Shared Serendipitous Space -- UPDATE: Added Teleport Links for This Weekend's Opening

UPDATE, May 20: Bumped up post for the weekend launch. Teleport to the welcome sim here. SLurls to the Eduverse sims up now are:

• Science Circle: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The%20Science%20Circle/72/129/30
• Virtech: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Virtech/127/126/31
• Community Virtual Library: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Cookie/201/212/21 
• Mayo Clinic:  http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Mayo%20Clinic/121/170/34
• Whole Brain Health:  http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Inspiration%20Island/82/100/23
• University of New Mexico (at Rockcliffe): http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Rockcliffe%20Village/48/42/23

In the first flush of general interest in the Metaverse, literally hundreds of colleges and universities opened up a virtual campus in Second Life -- up to and including Harvard -- but most of that enthusiasm has drifted away in recent years.

Starting this Saturday at 11am PT, however, a group of dedicated educators are soft launching a new Second Life-based project with the help of Linden Lab: The Virtual Worlds Education Consortium: Click here to teleport. 

Unlike that previous era, where universities each had their own isolated (and usually empty) SL campus, these educators are creating an expansive, shared campus:

"[S]o that there is always something going around, green dots on the map, people come to check something out, see something else nearby, etc.," as VWEC member George Djorgovski (a professor at Caltech), explains it to me. "This alone can help the groups already in SL, increase the collaboration and resource sharing, etc. "

 

And they have strong buy-in from Linden Lab:

Cajsa's Choices: Friday Fashion Finds for Furries of Second Life

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

Rainbow Pixelfarts’s [Hyzura Resident] blog is called “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and Twirl a Whirl caught my eye with the sheer joy it depicts. Do you remember how much fun a hula hoop is? If you forgot, this pic captures it. 

•  |Hazy Doll| (by Cynful Ghost) Blu's Neon Hooping Pose Set @ Abnormality (ends May 28th) 

For more furry fashion, click here:

Discuss: Hilarious UGC Platforms-as-Dungeons & Dragons Alignments

For group chat, peep this hilarious D&D alignment chart by Redditor u/TheTrickyDoctor. Personally I'd put Second Life into the Chaotic Neutral category, but that's just me. It was posted in Reddit's VRChat group, so assume a bias there.

And if you want the creator's summary, read on:

Nadej Dae Turns Second Life Screenshots Into Otherworldly Imagery

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

Nadej Dae’s photostream is otherworldly. “Even trees have wings” is an excellent example. It’s a shot of a tree, a magnificent tree, but still just a tree. However by making this a duotone with bold light and shadow it seems foreboding and spooky, an alien tree from another planet perhaps. 

For more eerie pics, click here:

Metaverse: "The" or "A", Capital or Lower Case: A Naming Convention Proposal

I wrote out a definition of the Metaverse recently taken directly from Snow Crash citations -- my futile attempt to address the slew of "No one knows what the Metaverse is or when it will exist!" media coverage. Now here's another abuse worth addressing that sets my avatar's teeth on edge, as recently seen in a tweet from Gartner*, a highly reputed analyst firm:

It is expected that a Metaverse will provide persistent, decentralized, collaborative and interoperable opportunities and business models that will enable organizations to extend digital business

There. Is. No. Such. Thing. As. "A" Metaverse.

Here's my own naming convention, based again on Snow Crash, and on whatever expertise on this topic I can claim: