New World Notes

Watch: I Talk Marketing in Roblox, Grassroots Creators, and the Metaverse vs. AI at GamesBeat 2023's Metaverse Forum

Here's my Metaverse Forum appearance broadcast at GamesBeat 2023 last week, along with Chris Brandt, CMO of Chipotle (creator of this burrito-making game in Roblox), Roblox VP Nick Tornow, with Shuchi Rana moderating. Topics include: 

• What got each of you interested in the Metaverse?
• There are many definitions & many tiers of the Metaverse, what does it mean for each one of you?
• What are some of the foundational elements/building blocks that people should be thinking about when it comes to the metaverse?
• To anyone who thinks AI has taken over the conversation, how would you defend the Metaverse?
• Who do you think will play a key role in defining & building the metaverse?

Featuring (around 23 minutes in) a mention of Blueberry, which first started in Second Life before going multi-metaverse platform, and LA Gurlz, a top creator in Roblox who's featured in my next book.

Reality Check: Metaverse Platforms Still More Used Than ChatGPT

Important Pew Research report on ChatGPT popped up right before the Memorial Day weekend:

Overall, 18% of U.S. adults have heard a lot about ChatGPT, while 39% have heard a little and 42% have heard nothing at all....

However, few U.S. adults have themselves used ChatGPT for any purpose. Just 14% of all U.S. adults say they have used it for entertainment, to learn something new, or for their work. This lack of uptake is in line with a Pew Research Center survey from 2021 that found that Americans were more likely to express concerns than excitement about increased use of artificial intelligence in daily life.

Emphasis mine. 14% of US adults translates to about 36 million adults who have actually used ChatGPT. That tracks with OpenAI's report of 100 million monthly active users overall a few months ago, and SimilarWeb's data suggesting that the strong majority of ChatGPT usage is from outside the US.

That's quite impressive growth in such a short time! Then again, I strongly suspect that's the ceiling of ChatGPT's user growth (at least in its current version) since it doesn't have an obvious networking effect hook like social media. We join TikTok or another social platform not just because it contains interesting content, but also because we want to share content with our friends who are also on it. 

By contrast, all the people who are probably curious about ChatGPT have already used it, but there's no particular inherent motive for everyone else to do so. (Yes, most everyone will probably use some version of ChatGPT and other LLMs in a search engine like Bing or other existing use case, but that's indirect usage.) If that's the case, I would not be surprised if we start seeing consumer-level ChatGPT usage level off as its novelty factor fades. 

In any case, it's still true that that the top popular metaverse platforms still have a much larger user base than ChatGPT:

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Dramatic Roleplay Shots by Adachi Yasumori

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

Adachi Yasumori’s “I Will Find You” is a fabulous picture. The avatar does have that implacable mood of the title, the intrepid hero pacing himself, not scrambling through the sheep, but moving with a slow, determined pace that will outlast any galloping hunter. Or is he the hero? He could be the bad guy chasing down the good guys. 

For more pics, click here:

Top 4 Metaverse Posts Including Notes on Apple's Upcoming XR Announcement, VRChat's Belated Creator Economy & OpenAI's Ambiguous Stance on Creating Adult Content With ChatGPT

• Is VRChat Already Too Late To Roll Out Its Creator Economy?
• A Second Life Memorial To George Floyd's Murder -- And A Plea Not To "Move On" From It
• What UploadVR's Ian Hamilton Will Watch For At Apple's XR Reveal At Next WWDC -- And What I Fear
• Does OpenAI Actually Prohibit ChatGPT-Powered Sexbot Avatars In The Metaverse?

Second Life Fashion Friday: Witty Style Ideas from Jordan Whitt

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

Whitt-icisms is a cleverly named blog by Jordan Whitt. Her post Beauty Is an Attitude gives us another play on words with a literal knife-edge eyeliner application. Of course, there is a knife-edge brush for eyeliner and shadow, though not one so literal as this. This picture just made me laugh because it was such a clever witticism, or should I say Whitt-icism. 

• Top - Petal Lace Top from Coco (group gift)
• Hair - Muse from Truth
• Skin - Jasmine Skin from Belleza
• Eye Liner - Black Liners from Belleza
• Pose - Sharp from PiXit (Sabbath Event) ends June 11th
• Backdrop - Masculine Bathroom Backdrop from Synnergy Tavis

For more wit by Whitt, click:

Is VRChat Already Too Late to Roll Out Its Creator Economy?

VRChat recently announced in-world monetization options for creators, and I've been wondering since then whether it's too little, too late. The founders' extreme caution around a creator economy is totally understandable, but the virtual world already has about 4-6 million monthly active users (by my estimate), making its population about the size of Los Angeles. And there are easily 1000+ VRChat creators already monetizing on third party sites like Patreon, YouTube, Gumroad, and so on.

The other challenge: VRChat is primarily played on Steam and through the Quest, both of which take a 30% cut. As compared, for example, to Patreon, which only takes a 5-12% commission; top YouTubers usually get into direct sponsorship deals, and pay YouTube zero percent in commissions. So creators already established on those platforms have more incentive to encourage fans to support them that way, and not through in-app payments.

All that said, I reached out to some top VRChat creators for their take on monetization:

Reimajo, who created the imperssive Roller Coaster Tycoon-type sim in VRChat (watch below), actually thinks it could be a better option than Patreon:

A Second Life Memorial to George Floyd's Murder -- And a Plea Not to "Move On" From It

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

On this day, just three years ago, George Floyd was murdered and the clarion call of “Black Lives Matter” that began with Trayvon Martin’s murder spread far and wide. It even looked like there was a sea change happening. Sadly a lot of the energy behind that has since been dissipated.

Jupiter Firelyte's picture above, “Say Their Names”, could be interpreted as capturing that “moving on” sense. The avatar is walking past a mural of murdered Black people without pausing in much the same way most of us move on, because it’s not an existential threat to us. She posted it in September 2020, when politicians were afraid to speak in favor of police reform and we decided silently, one by one, that order was more important than law. 

For a tribute to the Black Lives Matter protests, click here:

What UploadVR's Ian Hamilton Will Watch for at Apple's XR Reveal at Next WWDC -- And What I Fear

https://t.co/TVYLxiTQTZ pic.twitter.com/KcbXk2fmu9

— Ian Hamilton (@hmltn) May 23, 2023

Apple is widely expected to finally reveal its long-awaited, much-rumored XR headset at this year's Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, starting this June 5 -- even moreso because for the first time, Ian Hamilton, long time XR industry reporter at UploadVR (and .gif mood master), was invited to attend. (Road to VR was also invited.) 

Here's what Ian will be looking for from Apple, when he's among the gathered reporters:

"If they mention the price I’ll be curious what the reaction will be in the audience," as he puts it to me, "and how Apple talks about its commitment to plans for the future."

He contrasts that with the reaction among the crowd at Oculus Connect, when the Quest MSRP was revealed. "Developers in the audience cheered when they heard $399 for Quest. Apple will probably need to wow that audience with something other than price."

And yes, Ian has also heard the frequent rumors that Apple's XR headset will have a starting (and gut- punching) price of $3000, but he's still waiting to see if that's actually the case: "It’s just one of those things where I’ll truly believe it when it’s stated by Apple publicly."

The other rumored feature is around XR avatars for Apple's platform: "If they show human-like avatars I’ll be extremely curious whether it’s a live demo or pre-recorded, and whether those avatars get out of the Uncanny Valley."

Because according to other frequently reported rumors, Apple is developing those too:

One of the headset's marquee features is said to be lifelike avatars that have accurate facial features captured by the included cameras. Each eye will be tracked by at least one camera, letting the headset accurately show the user's gaze on an avatar. With precise eye-tracking, the headset will be able to perform foveated rendering to conserve power by only rendering imagery in full resolution directly where the user is looking.

I share Ian's curiosity, because hyperreal human avatars would be a really, really bad idea, especially if there's no other option for consumers but them. Not only is there no proven market for photorealistic human avatars, they provably unleash a number of unintended negative consequences. As avatar expert Nick Yee explained to me for the book:

 

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Moody Metaverse Images from Lunaspina

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

Lunaspina’s stream is a whole mood and that mood is melancholy. The fog-shrouded building with the shadow of a lone person feels cold and lonely. She amplified the melancholic mood by adding a texture layer that created a sooty feeling to the entire scene. Her picture reminded me of Christine L. Corton’s London Fog: A Biography in which she tells how the ancestral fog that so thoroughly inhabited the city for centuries before dissipating in our more environmentally-conscious time. 

For more melancholy metaverse pics, click here:

Does OpenAI Actually Prohibit ChatGPT-Powered Sexbot Avatars in the Metaverse?

One point raised by readers of my story about the inevitable arrival of ChatGPT-powered sexbot avatars in Second Life: Is this even allowed by the service's owner, OpenAI?

Stone Johnson, creator of the Uma bot that I interviewed, answers the question this way:

I should say that there is no violation of Terms of Service because this is solely roleplay without any intent or occurrence of real sexual activity. It is strictly metaverse roleplay, in regions of Second Life classified Adult.

Furthermore, the discussions are non-erotic and it is only the additional AI components of my separate code systems, and the visual and role play contexts that might be construed as being erotic. [As has been noted], there is active and strong filtering of Adult content in GPT 3.5-Turbo.

In other words, the sex bots' "minds" are powered by ChatGPT, but ChatGPT itself doesn't power the bots' sexual/physical/proprioceptive features. (Which suggests a fascinating if kinky new twist to Descartes' mind-body problem.)

In any case, OpenAI's Terms of Use displayed here actually don't mention anything that prohibits sexual content per se: