New World Notes

Listen: Wall Street Journal Launches Epic Four Part Series on Second Life!

Been looking forward to this for months (it's been that long in the making, I did my 2 hour recording with the podcast team in July) -- The Wall Street Journal's podcast on the founding of Second Life:

We’re in a metaverse déjà vu moment. Companies are spending billions of dollars creating new metaverses, imagining a 3D virtual future. But there’s a metaverse that’s already been around for decades. In this world, people have started businesses, built homes and fallen in love as avatars. In a new four-part series from The Journal, producer Annie Minoff heads back into that largely forgotten metaverse – Second Life – to tell the story of the metaverse we already have and what it can reveal about the one that’s coming.

Stream on Spotify above, or listen or read the transcript for Part 1 here; also available on Apple Podcasts here.  

BREAKING: Neal Stephenson Himself is Making His Own Virtual World Called... THEE Metaverse

Lamina1, the Metaverse-as-a-Service startup co-founded by Neal Stephenson, just published a white paper adding much more detail to the platform that they are building -- join their Discord to get it. 

The core announcement, however, is this: Neal Stephenson himself is making a virtual world:

 

 

Neal Stephenson’s THEEE METAVERSE

Under active early-stage development, Neal Stephenson’s THEEE METAVERSE promises a richly-imagined interactive virtual world with an unforgettable origin story. Built on the Lamina1 chain, creators will come to experience Neal’s vision and stay to develop their own. Stay tuned for more details.

This might surprise people who assumed the Metaverse was simply a fictional conceit from his 90s novel Snow Crash, but most of his subsequent books and career have been building up to this point. As he told me in a long interview recently, when I asked him how his novels influenced Lamina1:

“After I wrote Snow Crash I got to know people in the tech industry who had read the book and who had been working on projects like Habitat…  and they had figured out long ago that you couldn't build these kinds of virtual communities without basically, other people's code running on your hardware. So they've gotten really interested in the problem of how do you do that without letting them take over your computer and then began to look to cryptographic solutions as a way to create that kind of controlled execution environment.”

Some of his other novels have also explored and  expanded on the original Metaverse concept:

“If you look at the Diamond Age, that is a book whose entire plot makes no sense unless you assume the existence of a worldwide network that can transfer money anonymously. So now that the girl in that book, Spence, and Miranda know each other through a virtual environment for years, but they have no way to establish each other's real world identities, because of this anonymous system. The whole plot story basically revolves around that….

“In REAMDE, that’s explicitly about a video game in which real world money can be used, to carry out financial transactions and about the kind of various complications that arise from that. Fall is kind of in a sense a sequel to REAMDE, to re-engage some of the same characters and sort of takes that to the wildest possible extreme.“

As for this white paper, much of it delves deeply into how it will integrate with web3 technology (blockchain, crypto, etc.) For virtual world/metaverse developers, here’s some of pacific technology Lamina1 is creating:

This Amazing Machinima of a Tiny Cosmic Void Was Made With No VFX -- Because You Can Actually Get a Tiny Cosmic Void in Second Life

This short experimental but seriously cool machinima by rising star creator Vrutega (read his SL spotlight profile here) looks like it was made in After Effects or some other post-production platform, but it was actually recorded entirely in Second Life.

"Everything was shot in-world," he tells me. "No VFX was used for this. I used an interactive skybox and changed the WindLight to match the hue of the DarkStar Pocket item I was holding."

And yes, you can get a copy of your own DarkStar Pocket this weekend at the Tokyo Zero event in SL - [click here to teleport].

Self-taught, Vrutega did later add the sharp audio effects:

Second Life Fashion Blogs Are Overwhelmed By Lingerie & Swimsuit Spreads. Artifex Silence Is a Stylish Break from That.

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

Artifex Silence is an SL fashion blog by Artifex1 Voxel. This is Post 61. Artifex is minimalist blogger. No fancy titles, no descriptive text, no details on what appealed to her, but she takes great pics and offers complete, well-organized credits. This appealed to me because it’s something someone might actually wear. It also perfectly captures this time of year. It’s starting to get a bit chilly in the morning, so a light sweater is a comfort but it’s hot in the afternoon and you know legs don’t feel the cold the way arms and shoulders do. So there it sits halfway between summer and autumn. Perfection in dressing for the season. 

• Zenith| Sadie- Black
• Betrayal| BLANC Graffiti Bag
• Kibitz| Kyla’s earrings
• Kunglers| Jaiska ring
• Gos| Hi Top
• MINIMAL| VIBE Backdrop 3

I like Artifex Silence, I like Artifex’ style. She’s not flashing bits and boobs to draw your attention. She’s getting attention with taste and style. I confess I am sick to death of blogs with nothing but lingerie and swimsuits. Do these avatars not have lives outside their bedroom? Artifex is no prude but she knows clothes express more about you than your lingerie. Fashion is story-telling. Lingerie is the preface. Clothing is the novel. There are too many unfinished stories in fashion blogging. 

For more fashion perfection, click here:

Watch: Powerful YouTube Series on People Transformed Through Fortnite Creative

"Created in Fortnite" is a really beautiful and moving YouTube series from Epic Games, mini-documentaries of diverse individuals whose lives have been transformed by becoming builders in Fortnite Creative. Here's one above on GQuanoe, who created the much-shared tribute to MLK's "I have a dream" speech in Fortnite.

Also cool: Grace Lind Hubbell at Epic, who helped put this together (with Victory Pictures), got her start in Teen Second Life. Her avatar name was Lucky Figtree, and she worked on SL-based experiences like Global Kids and Relay for Life back in the day. And now here she is, helping lead a big budget production for Epic Games. In other words: it's a documentary series about people who've been transformed by the Metaverse, told with the help of someone who's been transformed by the Metaverse.

Here's another one featuring Sophieex, a young British mother (sorry, mum!) who became fast friends and Creative collaborator with a New York-based creator called Caiya:

Look: Wild, Neon-Lit Second Life Avatars Photographed by Celestial Machine

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

Welcome to Celestial Machine’s world, a neon-bright, wild, and frenetic world as crazy as anything you can imagine. But he can imagine it. And it’s brilliant. I am at a loss to describe his work, but I love it. And just so you know, it only gets wilder from here. 

For even wilder pics ahead, click here:

This VRChat Explorer Photographs Beautiful Worlds Like These -- But The Most Popular One Here May Surprise You

Neomance is another great VRChat explorer. Like Bradlee, he explores the platforms' many worlds, takes breathtaking photos of his favorites, and posts them in a dazzling cascade on his Twitter.

Like many -- most? nearly all? -- of the active VRChat community, he discovered VRChat through "random YouTube videos, and I got on to socialize with random people".

Unlike most others, he's spent 2 years actively exploring the platform, deeply browsing the user-created worlds, and learning to photograph them like a pro. (That's even led to a few for-hire VRChat photography jobs.)

Here's five of the favorite recent worlds he's photographed -- tweets include creator credits and info for visiting them yourself:

• Abrepear
• suishogu (pictured at right)
• Ecology (pictured below)
• Forest Magic Shop
• Floating Delight (also pictured below)

If you've explored VRChat at all, you'll notice that many of the most popular and well-visited worlds aren't necessarily the most beautiful -- and vice versa. In fact, of the five worlds listed here, the most popular one might surprise you:

This Flickr Creator Makes Second Life Look Like Paintings You Can Visit

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

Michael Lysios lives in a very beautiful world that he shares with us on Flickr, with pictures that show places in Second Life as we’ve not seen them before. It’s just all so beautiful. And he adds a SLURL so you can teleport to see the place yourself. The sky in “Cherishville” is stunning and I love how the line of the road is accentuated by the bushes and then the fence. It directs our eyes, but so subtly. [Teleport here]

For more of the natural beauty of Second Life, click here:

How to Play With Second Life's Puppetry Project -- If You're Hardcore!

Linden Lab only recently announced its Puppetry Project, enabling real time control of Second Life avatars through webcams and other movement tracking devices. But unsurprisingly, while the project is very much in Alpha, hardcore SLers are already unpacking and setting it up. That includes Judas Shuffle (love the avatar name, that's him above), who recently posted some very detailed instructions for doing so yourself. Word of warning before clicking, this is for an unreleased project and requires some tech savvy (or extreme patience) -- so click here and read with caution.

"My favorite experience in virtual worlds so far was smiling at someone and having them smile back," Judas explains. "If it all works as well as it should it will bring people closer together." 

Hilariously, he got it going and posted these instructions only days after it was announced, which suggests some strong desire to see it in Second Life. ("A user in the beta grid got it working with my instructions.") To be sure, the final version should be relatively plug-and-play, but, "The [current] release as-is is about letting coders see what they can do with it. The puppetry build I would think means if you have the know how you could connect it to anything."

Yes, anything, not just webcams. In fact, Judas sent me this video of SLer Chaser Zaks running the Puppetry viewer through Blender:

Watch: Shopify Experimenting With Mixed Reality, AI-Powered Fashion

AI is enabling some really magical experiences. 🪄

Originally planned to share this tomorrow, @sergeyglkn scooped us! 😜

Keep on eye on this space. It moves fast! 💨 pic.twitter.com/Of8PgJWZMM

— Russ Maschmeyer (@StrangeNative) September 19, 2022

This is a fun and impressive demo: Online e-commerce site Shopify prototyping AI image generation used in fashion. (Russ Maschmeyer is AR/VR head at the tech company.) It was created in collaboration with Sergey Galkin, who explains how it was made on his own Twitter thread: "The prototype was made in Snapchat Lens Studio + post-processed in Adobe After Effects. Images were generated by Dalle 2." 

They're demonstrating this for a real world clothing context, but the virtual world applications are even more obvious. (I mean how many wacky T-shirts does the average consumer really buy, versus new avatar outfits?) Being able to adjust the style, fit, and composition of the clothing item itself seems like the next obvious next step.