New World Notes

New World Notes Open to New Sponsoring Partner! Here's What You Get

Above: Typical clickthrough rate for a NWN partner

While I furiously write my next book, Why the Metaverse Matters, I continue updating New World Notes as much as possible every day (with the indispensable help of Cajsa's Choices). I'm grateful to everyone reading these words. I see both my upcoming book and this ongoing blog as part of the same ongoing conversation we have on the daily, as we follow the future of virtual worlds and metaverse technology in all its strange twists and turns.

That also means I'm looking for a new sponsoring partner. (Or two.) I'm not great at self-promotion, but here's my pitch: 

New World Notes is the longest running and most read metaverse/virtual world blog with a primary focus on Second Life and its many spinoffs, metaverse platforms, and related technologies, often cited by the New York Times, the BBC, Bloomberg, Wired, and other top outlets. According to Similar Web, we typically attract 100,000-150,000 visits a month (sometimes more, sometimes less), and more key, we get our partners results: Above are the clickthrough rates to the Second Life Marketplace listing of a recent media partner.

Who's an ideal media partner for New World Notes? Basically any brand or organization that New World Notes readers would be interested in and find valuable, including:

Afrofuturist Nettrice Gaskins Creates Utterly Stunning Art With Midjourney

 

Dr. Nettrice Gaskins, an acclaimed Afrofuturist scholar who pioneered the Deep Dream neural network as an art medium back in 2019, is now experimenting with Midjourney, the new AI project that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to generate new imagery.

The results, some of which you can see here, are deliriously stunning. Nettrice's image above, for example, was generated by a line from Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (one of her favorite novels): 

“For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it."

"[Midjourney] tries to understand human language," Dr. Gaskins explains. "It's about the text; the order of words. The cool thing about NLP AI (Midjourney, DALL-E, etc.) is another person can use the same exact text prompts (same order, etc.) and never be able to duplicate the ones I generated. This means every single image is one of a kind / unique."

Here's another that she generated through inputting the text, "Afrofuturistic Black woman botanist in trippy alien utopia":

Metaverse Safety Week Announced to Help Prevent "Cambridge Analytica 2.0" & Other Security / Privacy Crises

Registration is now open for Metaverse Safety Week, an online conference from XR Safety Initiative (XRSI), the brainchild of Linden Lab veteran Kavya Pearlman.

"It is essential to getting things right at every level. especially when it comes to safety, privacy and cybersecurity," as she tells me. "Currently besides the XRSI privacy and safety framework there are literally no frameworks that factor these aspects into the risks assessment, along with factoring in several converging technologies."

This is probably why we regularly see huge privacy crises like this one happening in metaverse platforms even when they're backed by companies spending billions to produce them.

And the problems seems to be getting worse, not better:

This is What Paris Looks Like in VRChat, Which You Can Access With Meta Quest

In case you're wondering, there's roughly a dozen Paris-themed worlds in VRChat, the metaverse platform that's accessible through Steam and Meta's Quest platform -- including this one, "Paris Tour", an explorable portion of the City of Lights including the Eiffel Tower. It even comes with classic French music and a racing game! 

I note this because at the moment, seemingly half of Twitter is gawking at a recent announcement that Meta's Horizon Worlds is expanding into France -- because the official announcement looks like this:

SL Name Survey Results: 75% Wouldn't Pay to Change Their Avatar Name

What's the value of an avatar name? With 138 responses, here's the results to our survey, "Will you spend $15 to $50 to change your Second Life account name?" (Which is how much it costs to do just that, via a new Linden Lab offer.) Nearly 75% answered No.

In Comments to the survey post, readers were mostly not impressed:

"I really don't understand why this needs to cost money. There is no justification for this... why does it cost money? It's not like the Labs are employing someone to sit there and mash through a pile of paperwork forms."

Then again, the results also show that over 1 in 10 respondents are so interested in changing their avatar name, which when you think about, is quite a lot:

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Musician in the Metaverse on Multiple Instruments

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

mSilverwolf loves music and it shows in his pictures of himself playing various instruments in Second Life. “The Sax” is a gorgeous black and white with lots of fog. It comes with a song, as well, an old favorite, “Pride and Joy” by Stevie Ray Vaughan. [To listen, click here.]

For more musicianship, click here:

France's Le Monde Remembers the Fall of Second Life's Biggest User-Run Bank & The Limits of Virtual World Libertarianism

French-fluent readers, the great Le Monde of France has a new article on a famous old story from the virtual world economy, part of a larger series on the topic: Comment Ginko Financial, la plus célèbre banque de « Second Life », s’est écroulée -- i.e. "How Ginko Financial, the most famous bank in “Second Life”, collapsed".

Ginko, as longtime readers may remember, was an SL-based financial service offering incredibly high interest rates to users, attracting high skepticism over its management and cash liquidity, not to mention allegations that it was a Ponzi scheme, until Linden Lab finally shut it down.

As I discuss with Le Monde reporter Florian Reynaud, the Ginko case was another lesson for Linden Lab on the limits of libertarianism. Florian also managed to get an official statement on Ginko from Linden Lab, but it's very broad -- because,  he tells me, the Lindens don't have anyone still employed there who even remembers that far back.

Read the Linden Lab statement below along with an English excerpt (albeit with a mediocre translation from Google):

No, Virtual Reality is Not In Its "Early Days" (Comment of the Week)

Above: Nintendo's consumer VR launch in 1994 

Is the market for VR headsets small and active usage apparently low (especially among Gen Z) because virtual reality is still in "early days"? Reader Nadeja thinks otherwise:

I don't think we are in the early days of VR. The earliest HMD were made in the 1960s. NASA worked with HMD in the 1980s, Nintendo had something too. [See above - WJA] Then there were several commercial releases in the 1990s. Now we are in the 2020s.

I rather think that VR headsets aren't so practical and human-friendly. I'm not talking about the technical limitations, the lack of peripheral vision, nausea, the risk of hitting or stumbling on anything as you have essentially a blindfold... but about the HMD device itself.

You could say that someone can wear a HMD for hours, but in general sunglasses and eyeglasses are probably about as much as one can take, and some people still prefer contact lenses.

We need a paradigm shift around HMDs. When VR will be as widespread as smartphones, we would likely not use HMDs, but something else.

Fun fact: In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg predicted that VR HMDs would replace the smartphone by 2025. With the smartphone market currently at about 6.5 billion, compared to VR's total install base of maybe (and at most) 30 million, I'm sort of guessing that's not going to happen.

The categorical mistake, I think, is not realizing that unlike VR, mobile phones had an immediate and obvious broadly valuable use case from the very beginning:

Top Posts Last Week: Amazing SL Imagery, SL's Constantly Delayed Web/Smartphone App & Virtual Real Estate Advice for Snoop Dog

• Survey: Will You Pay $15-50 To Change Your Second Life Account Name?
• Second Life For Web / Mobile Indefinitely Delayed Again (Again)
• What The Sandbox & Snoop Dogg Could Learn From Second Life
• This Creator Illustrates Her Graphic Fantasy Story With SL Avatar Photos
• Stunning SL Life Avatar Portraits Created To Look Like Classic Hollywood Starlets

What The Sandbox & Snoop Dogg Could Learn from Second Life

Anthropologist Tom Boellstorff has a new thought-provoking essay on The Conversation, pointing out the importance of learning from metaverse/virtual world history. For instance, what Second Life's real estate management policies can teach new metaverse platforms like The Sandbox:

Second Life originally had “point-to-point teleportation” (P2P). You could arrive anywhere in an instant. But in 2003 Linden Lab, the company that owns Second Life, disabled P2P. Residents trying to reach a destination would appear at the nearest “telehub.”

This had implications for real estate. Valuable for businesses and entertainment, plots of land near telehubs sold for top dollar — until 2005, when Linden Lab suddenly announced the end of telehubs and the return of P2P.

Land near former telehubs no longer had special value; some people lost thousands of dollars. The most powerful landlord can’t change the laws of physics, but Linden Lab could literally recode scarcity out of existence.

Fast-forward almost 20 years. Land next to Snoop Dogg’s virtual mansion is scarce: A plot could cost $450,000 because The Sandbox doesn’t have P2P. But were the company to suddenly add P2P, that $450,000 investment could become nearly worthless. 

The thing is, The Sandbox's actual user growth is tiny, so the value of Snoop's Sandbox property is negligible. By implementing P2P, Linden Lab created universal inherent value in Second Life real estate, no matter the specific location in Second Life. Partly for that reason, unsurprisingly, there are far more active users in SL than in The Sandbox.