New World Notes

How to Make Virtual World Screenshots Look Like Old World Paintings

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

Now that's we've all marveled at Scylla Rhiadra's stunning tributed to Degas paintings, Scylla pulls back the curtain to explain her techniques for turning raw Second Life screenshots into an image like the one she created above.  (Original here on her Flickr.) While these images include multiple avatars, they are actually all her:

My basic process is to start with a composition that is, most often, comprised of multiple figures – because part of what I want to capture is the relationship between the young dancers, which must have been simultaneously close and supportive, yet also fiercely competitive. Rather than using a small army of alts or friends, all of these figures employ my own avatar, and the images are produced by a composite of multiple shots of each. I take separate depth maps for each, as well as supplementary shots to deal with things like clothing glitches and subtle lighting effects.

“The Dancer VII: Les coulisses” (above) includes six figures, and was composed of nearly 20 different shots merged or worked together in different ways. (Interestingly, Degas began his own training as a painter by producing paintings from photographs, and he remained interested in photography throughout his life.)

Next comes post-processing in Photoshop and running it through a free Adobe app:

 

Viewfinder, Which Started as a Viral Brain-Melting Game Demo, Finally Coming to Steam & PlayStation 5 With New Features, Story

Remember Viewfinder, that utterly cerebellum-frying Unity demo from 2020 by game design student Matt Stark? I'm psyched to say it's finally becoming a full-fledged game, available soon for PlayStation and Steam. (In fact, here's the fully built-out Steam page.)

Viewfinder is for everyone who played the Portal games and said, "Yeah that was fun but it doesn't make my brain mushy and hurty enough." Basically it puts you in an interactive world where you take a "Polaroid photo" of the surroundings -- and once taken, the photo becomes its own little interactive, manipulable, physics-enabled world.

Probably best to just watch the trailer above, to see what I mean. (And read below for how this was done technically.)

Since getting picked up by indie publisher Thunderful (which also put out the seriously fun title Steamworld Heist, among other hits), Matt tells me that he his team have added quite a bit to that already stellar gameplay mechanic:

These Stunning Images Inspired by Degas' Famed Ballerina Paintings Actually Started as Second Life Screenshots

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

I saw Scylla Rhiadra’s stunning "The Dancer VII: Les coulisses" and immediately recognized it as an homage to Edgar Degas and his series of paintings of dancers. Scylla doesn’t just focus on the same subject matter, she captures his use of light. (I have written about her facility with light in 2020 and 2021.) 

She has a fascination with light and shadow that reflects Degas' own. I love how she makes her work seem like a painting you could find at The Louvre. I asked her about her project and about how she creates her painterly effect. Her answer was so well done, I decided to just turn the rest of the column over to her and get out of the way:

I enjoy dancing, in both RL and SL (I’m better at it in the latter), and I have produced more than a few images on the subject, but I also like the way that dance, and most supremely ballet, transforms the human body into kinetic art comprised of shapes in motion, without losing the "human" that is defined by that body. It is also sometimes one of the more complicated and interesting ways through which we connect with one another, whether it is through a choreographed dance performed together, or expressed more intimately through romantic or sexually-charged couples dancing.

For the rest of Scylla’s story, click on:

Unity for Second Life Project Launches Discord Featuring Live Dev Streams - Starting Today at Noon PT!

Click here to join the Discord server for Crystal Frost, the Second Life viewer on Unity project I blogged last week and the brainchild of longtime dev Berry Bunny (Kallisti#2038 on Discord). Starting today at Noon PT, Bunny's going to livestream her development of Crystal Frost there, an eventually announce the release of a usable client:

"I will be posting screenshot highlights to the public areas of the Discord after I finish each coding session," she tells me. "Basically the Discord will have daily updates and screenshots Mondays through Thursday, and once I get a somewhat usable client going (even if it's not ready to replace other viewers), which I hope to do by the end of the month, I'll be posting weekly binaries."

She also launched an optional Patreon for the project:

 

Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2023年1月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan

Sanny Yoshikawa が、New World Notesのなかから、毎月おすすめのバーチャルワールドニュースを日本語で紹介します

Sanny Yoshikawa covers the monthly virtual world highlights from New World Notes for virtual Japan.

 

 

No, ChatGPT Can't "Write" Code. It Even Makes Up Code That Doesn't Exist.

Fun comment from reader Ravelli Ormstein, spinning off from my post about how full of fail ChatGPT is when you ask it a question you're an expert on:

First, I asked ChatGPT to write a LSL script that would turn on a light when the sun went down. It wrote a nice script, but it didn't work because the AI was using an LSL function that didn't exist. So I complained about it. The AI apologized and fixed the script by using another non-existent function.

This went on until I specifically asked for a script that only used existing functions. The script was usable and in the style we usually write them, with a 300 second timer. The AI kept apologizing for making mistakes until I asked it never to apologize again.

This is an important point, because I've seen some people claim that ChatGPT can write Second Life apps in Linden Script Language (or for that matter, any coding language). No.

Very roughly analogized, ChatGPT is like a natural language version of Google search. So if you ask ChatGPT to write a working script that happens to already exist in its massive database, you may sometimes get lucky with an actual useful response. Otherwise, you'll only get an answer that's most probabilistically coded to appear like a useful response -- in other words, the AI version of Making Shit Up. 

Anyway, more fun from Ravelli with ChatGPT, with a plot twist:

Top 5 Posts Including: Metaverse Competitors Slow Meta Quest Growth, a Unity Viewer Project for Second Life & Richard Bartle Tries Telling Basic Virtual World Concepts to a Web3 Crowd

• Why Bonnie Bots Attract Backlash Across Second Life, While Grid Survey Bots Do Not: Tyche's Take
• Richard Bartle, Top Virtual World Expert, Tries Explaining Core Problems With NFT & Blockchain At A Crypto Conference. It Does Not Go Well.
• BREAKING: Veteran Developer Creating New Second Life Viewer... For Unity!
• Meta's Quest 2 Price Increase Due To Competition By Rec Room & VRChat, Contributes To Slow Install Base Growth
• Bonnie Bots Update: Avatar Search Function Removed From Website After Discussion With Linden Lab; Expect More Updates Soon

Bonnie Bots Update: Avatar Search Function Removed from Website After Discussion With Linden Lab; Expect More Updates Soon

Here's the latest update to Bonnie Bots, the data-hoovering bots which collect publicly available Second Life user information and publish it to the web:

The website no longer has the Avatar Search function, a feature which caused the most controversy and contention among the SL community.

This removal comes after the Bonnie Bots team had yet another conversation with Linden Lab. However, this reportedly wasn't done due to any policy violation:

"Linden Lab has never required us to make any changes to the website," as spokesperson Skyler Pancake tells me. "Suggestions have been made by Linden Lab which have provided additional insight, but any changes made have been decided by our team internally."

This is hardly the last word in this saga, however. In response to the user protest, Linden Lab just posted (a few hours ago) an update on the official blog:

Meta's Quest 2 Price Increase Due to Competition by Rec Room & VRChat, Contributes to Slow Install Base Growth

Meta's Q4 2022 earnings report was earlier this week, with revenue from Reality Labs, its XR/metaverse division, bringing in $727 million -- down from $877 million in Q4 2021.

So now it's time to play everyone's favorite guesstimating game: How many Quest 2's were sold, and what's the total install base?

Assuming that $727M is mostly from Quest 2 sales (now at $399), that comes out to about 1,800,000 units. That's the high end. Factoring in revenue from app sales etc., let's call that 1.5 to 1.8 million Quest 2 units sold during the Q4 2022 holiday season. 

That's quite a dip in sales! When it sold at $299 over the 2021 holidays, it sold around 2.9 million units (give or take). I'm not surprised, though; increasing the MSRP on an appliance even though it hasn't fundamentally improved is, well, bonkers.

Now let's look at the total Quest 2 install base:

BREAKING: Veteran Developer Creating New Second Life Viewer... for Unity!

Above: "Vastly more realistic lighting. This is a sunset in Crystal Frost."

SLer Berry Bunny (Kallisti#2038 on Discord) is a longtime developer who's been working on various Second Life projects for well over 15 years. Along with some impressive in-world games, she's done mixed reality projects for Italia Telecom and a nursing school experimenting with Second Life as a distance learning tool, among others.

Her new project, however, is somewhat more ambitious:

Crystal Frost, a new third party Second Life viewer that runs on Unity.

Yes, that means Crystal Frost should (eventually) work on mobile, displaying Second Life on a smartphone. 

If she succeeds, Crystal Frost would also offer a substantial leap in graphics quality for Second Life. (See the images in this post, courtesy Bunny, including the comparison with Firestorm below.) But Bunny has even greater ambitions than better graphics:

"Having a modern graphics engine that's multi-threaded, easier modability, implementing ray tracing and proper VR is super easy," as she explains. "I have ideas about how to implement VR and make it feel like VRChat. But I need to make the client stable and get rigged meshes working before I even attempt it. Also, theoretically better performance than the Linden Lab-based viewers, if I do it right." 

VRChat is actually a large part of her motivation for taking on this project: "'[I'm] wanting to see SL become better, and wishing that VRChat had something comparable to SL's robust inventory and modular avatar system." (And also she's bored and wants a fun challenge.)

Above right is a pic via Bunny showing off another feature: "Local light support, translating SL's old school lights to real world physically based material type lights, specified by lumens, via Unity's HD Rendering pipeline." 

How is this even possible, and what does Bunny need to get this project hopping along faster? (Sorry.) Read on: