New World Notes

In Praise of Rec Room's Live Creation & Teaching Features -- and a Defense of Its Cartoonish Graphics (Comment of the Week)

Many interesting comments in last week's post about Philip Rosedale's desire to bring back in-world, collaborative creation as the gold standard, including this one by Martin K., going into detail about how many resources it has for that feature.

Have a look at this page, it links to Discord servers of dozens of classes that are taught live in VR. (Discord is typically used for scheduling classes and other asynchronous communication.) These are not videos but live classes in VR. 

How many such live classes about creating worlds are there in VRChat? In Second Life? Supporting a culture of live teaching is probably reason enough to support live collaboration.

Rec Room the company also has a very active YouTube channel devoted to in-world creating and scripting (see above).

Writing further, Martin somewhat objects to my comment that Rec Room's cartoonish, blocky graphics may not be broadly appealing: 

Top 5 Posts: The Future of Artificial Intelligence & Art, 3D Creation, and a Chat About Live Music in the Metaverse

• Pioneer Metaverse Artist Jeffrey "AM Radio" Berg On The Future Of Art In The A.I. / DALL-E Era
• This Second Life Photographer Defies Convention To Shoot The Grungiest, Least Glamorous Virtual Lifestyle Images Possible
• Philip Rosedale's New Vision For Next Gen Metaverse Content Creation Includes Live, In-World, Multi-User Collaboration -- But Can We Bring It Back?
• Listen: I Chat About The Future Of Music On Metaverse Platforms With Water & Music -- Annotations & Links Below!
• Linden Lab Should Offer Per Country Pricing For The Estimated 1 In 3 Users Not In Wealthy Nations

Pioneer Metaverse Artist Jeffrey "AM Radio" Berg on the Future of Art in the A.I. / DALL-E Era

From AM Radio's Flickr

Update, 7/15: Bumped up as long-ish weekend read and conversation for the weekend!

Jeffrey Berg, the artist and technologist who became famous as the Metaverse artist known as "AM Radio", a Second Life avatar who created profoundly surreal and poignant immersive installations like "The Faraway" (above), a rusty train lost in the wheatfields, recently discovered a surprising thing:

It is now possible, using programs like Craiyon, a text-to-image generation tool powered by AI (a variation of OpenAI's DALL-E), to automatically create images strikingly similar to the Second Life installations which took him many hours if not days to create in 3D.

See below:

"Was messing with Craiyon today and I wondered the impacts it could have on metaverse space creation," as he mused to me recently, sharing the results above. "3D geometry rather than a generated image from plain text input doesn’t seem like a huge stretch."

That started a long, fascinating, and -- this being AM Radio, after all -- moving conversation with Jeff on the future of art in the era of DALL-E, AI and machine learning in general, and promising AI-based art like that by Dr. Nettrice Gaskin:

Dutchie Update: Beloved SL Housewares Creator in Recovery from RL Surgery. Help Support Her By Buying Dutchie's Special Summer Bundle!

Good news from Froukje Hoorenbeek, owner of the popular Dutchie housewares brand in Second Life. As I mentioned in May, she was preparing for some serious RL surgery to repair two fractured vertebrae. Mutual friends tell me the surgery has been done and was successful, so she's now offline in recovery.

That also means she's not able to actively update her houseware offerings. So if you're inclined, now would be a good time to consider getting The Dutchie Spa Bundle, a special discount Summer offer from the beloved creator.

And speaking of mutual friends of Dutchie, if you're on Plurk, you may want to get in touch with Solitary Star. I can't say why, so just get in touch.

More Dutchie bundles below, and all my best for a speedy Dutchy recovery!

Fashion Friday Tribute: Preciosa Benelli, an SL Style Blogger I First Befriended During Out Virtual Nightclub Days

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

GLITZZ | B(U)Y ME is a recent post from Preciosa Benelli’s blog Preciosa’s. It made me laugh because I thought of the sea lions who went viral this week after chasing people off their beach in California. [Click here to watch!] While Preciosa’s blog post features her bikini and the pose set, I had to hunt down those sea lions, too.

I like that she adds a personal note at the start of her posts. Her Spanish language message on this one hit home, as it’s about the friends who stay in touch, that reconnect after an argument, and those that stay. (Or don't.) 

It hit home in a strange way, as Preciosa and I were friends when I worked picking up prim trash at a club where she worked as a dancer. For some reason, the club allowed anyone to rez prims, and many patrons would leave behind all sorts of random stuff. My job was to go through the club twice a day, inspecting and returning discarded prims.

Anyway, that was back in 2007 before I started doing photography. We just drifted apart which is sad because I remember her as a lovely, positive, and optimistic person, but I definitely failed the vale la pena (“worth the effort”) kind of friendship. 

• Set: [Glitzz]  - Monick Set - Panties & Top - Legacy/Perky, Maitreya/Lara & Petite, Kupra, Reborn/Juicy, Freya, Hourglass & Nerido Push Up
• Pose: B(u)Y ME - Free Mind Poseset SF - 5 bento female poses & Mirror - Hat & Rocks Included @ eBEnto Event (30% off during the event)
• Sea Lions - Sealion/Seal at TLC Animals, by True Redrose on Marketplace, Inworld

For a great casual outfit, click here:

This Second Life Photographer Defies Convention to Shoot the Grungiest, Least Glamorous Virtual Lifestyle Images Possible

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

Karma Weymann’s photostream is unique, avoiding the usual conventions of Second Life photos. Instead of high fashion and luxury seaside homes, she gives us low-rent apartments and making do. There’s no luxury on her timeline and that makes it unique and fresh. She’s resolutely iconoclastic and imaginative. This made me think of Portland and the persistence of the protesters, many of whom wore bike helmets to protect their heads from police batons and other hazards. However, Black Bloc members would not be caught dead with a flowered shirt tied around their waist. 

For more of Karma’s unique vision, click here:

Philip Rosedale's New Vision for Next Gen Metaverse Content Creation Includes Live, In-World, Multi-User Collaboration -- But Can We Bring It Back?

Philip Rosedale has a pretty fascinating new Medium post based on a presentation he recently made at an unnamed Metaverse work group, laying out a vision for value creation in next gen platforms, primarily based on what worked well (more or less) in Second Life -- Clear Property Rights, Collective Ownership and Participation, a Stable Currency Price, and so on. It includes a call for a feature that was clearly unique and great about 3D content creation in Second Life -- but I'm not entirely sure is feasible, beyond SL and Minecraft:

Support Live Collaboration rather than Offline Editing

Having someone stop by and compliment your work-in-progress is a powerful amplifier for participation, as is the ability to recruit passersby to help with a project. Reducing the time delay between content creation and publishing is effective in both virtual worlds and programming languages (compiled versus interpreted). A great temptation in virtual worlds is to take advantage of powerful offline editors (Unity, Blender, etc) and standardized file formats by creating an edit/publish sequence. Roblox, VRChat, and Sansar are examples of worlds taking this approach. But the problem is both that the creator cannot enjoy social interaction while working, and also that multiple creators cannot then work together on one place or project.

Something magical was surely lost when our focus moved away from live, immersive social creation, and we seemed to resign ourselves to offline editing as the inevitable default.

But is it really possible to build an in-world collaborative creation system, where the content is also mesh and optimized?

Philip believes so, when I ask him, pointing to Sony Dreams as an example:

Beautiful Male Avatar Action Photos from the Aptly Named Matrix Spirit

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

Matrix Spirit’s recent snap of him riding a horse into a river is a great illustration of how far Second Life horses and pose-making have come. Look at him holding his hat, using it to urge the reluctant horse further into the river. Look at the wide eyes on the horse, afraid to step on an uneven riverbed he cannot see. You just know there are rocks there. I love that our pictures can be so much more expressive now. 

For more of Matrix in action, click here:

Listen: I Chat About the Future of Music on Metaverse Platforms With Water & Music -- Annotations & Links Below!

Wagner James Au · The Metaverse & Music -- Wagner James Au w/Water & Music

Starting around 7 minutes in, here's audio from my Twitter Spaces chat last week on the Metaverse and music with Water & Music, a music business research DAO collective, spinning off on this huge research paper they just published on the topic (and that I was interviewed for). After the group's intro, our conversation starts at about 15 minutes in. 

Some highlights by time code:

July 27: HBO Debuts "We Met in Virtual Reality", Joe Hunting's Crowdfunded Documentary Devoted to the VRChat Community -- Here's the Trailer!

VRChat/metaverse lovers, pencil in July 27 on your calendar, because that's when HBO is premiering "We Met in VR", Joe Hunting's feature length documentary devoted to the VRChat community. Watch the trailer above, featuring some VRChat worlds that have also been covered here, including the deaf community which teaches sign language in VRChat, and Udon Tycoon, an insanely ambitious roller coaster construction sim.

I've been chatting with Joe since January, when his crowdfunded documentary debuted at the Sundance film festival: