New World Notes

Stylish Fashion for Male Second Life Avatars With Circus Animals. Yes.

Ren Matsura - れんまつら never disappoints and I have featured the LETCIRREN blog before back in 2020. But Don’t Go Yet is too magical to not stop and share. I love this on so many levels. The utter shock of seeing an elephant on an old chaise lounge is the first delight, but then there is the perfection of the man posed so delicately at the far end, holding a tea cup with pinky extended, legs crossed. A perfect dandy! And then, suddenly, his feet aren’t touching the floor. The elephant has lifted him off the ground and he hasn’t lost a whit of his poise. His suit is immaculate and his shoes shine so perfectly. 

• Suit: [Deadwool] – Sean suit (duke)
• Shoes: [Deadwool] – Wholecut shoes

For more from Ren, click here:

 

Today's Second Life Flickr Pick: Story-Rich Pics by Shoko Tachikawa

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

Shoko Tachikawa shoots storytelling pictures that are so charming. Here she is holding a bow and arrows made of metal with very little fletching which makes me wonder how well they fly. But in Second Life, that sort of thing does not matter. Scripts will make it fly. I love this picture, the contemplative look. She has long sleeves, which might be advisable with a metal bow. After all, if you hold the bow wrong, the string can whack your arm. A metal wire? Owwie!

I wonder if everyone did archery in their physical education classes in junior and senior high? We did. It was so much fun and among my favorite sections during the year. 

For more great stories, click here:

 

Watch: VRChat User Creates System to Control Avatar Movement... With Your Brain. Here's How!

What you’re looking at above (on the surface at least), is a VRChat furry wiggling its ears.

But here’s the thing: The avatar's real life own, Rantis, is doing so… with his mind.

Literally:

“To control my ears I imagine them as a floating number along a slider and I adjust the intensity by thinking about it,” Rantis explains to me. “Imagine having two faders on a DJ deck and you control them by raising and lowering their intensity, the output being focus.”

This is just the latest amazing user-created VRChat innovation I’ve learned about recently -- but the creator, known as Chillout Charles in-world, has been building this virtual world-to-brain sensing headband software for two years:

“The use case that I hear the most is that this is helpful with self expression for those who sit on the autistic spectrum, which is interesting,” Charles tells me. “I only ever thought of self expression as a communication thing I want to improve for fun. I never realized this would have practical benefits, even for the original use case I set out for it.”

As to how this works -- and you can try this out yourself:

 

Today's Second Life Flickr Pick: Eye-Catching Avatar Portraits by Mogovtle

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

Mogovtle’s art is a wonderful illustration of creative limitation, the idea that setting limits actually expands creativity, or as the artist Phil Hansen said, "We need to first be limited in order to become limitless.” 

She limits her color palette to shades of black and white with touches of red, blue, and gold. But that does not mean her pictures are simple. Her pictures are ornate, baroque with their adornments of lace and filigree. So very beautiful. To see her photostream, it’s astonishing how creative and varied her work is within her aesthetic boundaries. This is “Kamilah” (above) featuring a feline who shows up occasionally in her pictures. 

For more of her work, click here:

Can We Solve Economic Disparity With a Transaction Fee? Check Out This Simulation Created by Philip Rosedale

To illustrate the value proposition of FairShare, a new digital currency project from Philip Rosedale, Philip created this interactive simulation of a free market economy. Left to its own devices, his simulation suggests, this kind of economy will inevitably lead to growing divides between the haves and have nots:

Everyone starts with the same amount of money.  When people collide, they buy or sell something from each other. Their wealth is shown by their size and color, with red people being poorer and green people being richer.  Over time, even though the people are identical, the rich get steadily richer simply because they can give or get more than the poor with each transaction.  [emph. mine]

To stabilize inequality while providing a daily income, increase the transaction fee. A small transaction fee provides a daily income and stops inequality from growing too large.

Embedded above, or try it on FairShare's site here. Philip tells me there's an optimal transaction fee to lessen the wealth gap -- and argues that it's a better approach than the government imposing some kind of wealth tax:

Metaverse Platform Roblox Now Has More Monthly Active Users Than the United States Has People (According to RTrack)

This 2024 prediction of mine came true sooner than I expected, as first reported by Matthew Ball this morning:

According to leading Roblox analytics service RTrack, Roblox had an estimated 354 million monthly active users in December 2023. That's an addition of 54 million from last June, when RTrack estimated Roblox to have 300 million MAU.  A knowledgeable insider I trust tells me RTrack is a reliable service, by the way, so I'm inclined to believe these figures as roughly accurate -- especially as they're in line with the company's publicly reported daily active users of 70 million. 

In other words, yes: Roblox now has more monthly active users worldwide than the USA has people. (I.E. 336 million, give or take.)

Roblox the company has moved away from calling itself the Metaverse in the last year or two -- likely to avoid the negative connotations created by failed usages of the term by Meta and various web3 startups -- but did indeed describe itself as the metaverse in its very IPO filing:

Some refer to our category as the metaverse, a term often used to describe the concept of persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces in a virtual universe. The idea of a metaverse has been written about by futurists and science fiction authors for over 30 years. With the advent of increasingly powerful consumer computing devices, cloud computing, and high bandwidth internet connections, the concept of the metaverse is materializing.

Given its record user growth, however, the term may soon be synonymous with Roblox itself.

Unsurprisingly, several developers and content creators who got their start with Second Life are now working full-time for Roblox (either for the company or on the UGC side). Richard Nelson, who was an engineer at Linden Lab for nearly 20 years, is now a senior dev at Roblox.

In my book, he described some of the secrets to the platform's success:

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Smart & Spectacular Cyberpunk Images by Lying Cat

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

Lying Cat is an artist after my own heart. She combines the high-tech/low-life aesthetic of cyberpunk with the simplicity and visual appeal of pop art. Think Philip K. Dick goes to The Factory. Her pictures have the disciplined simplicity of Andy Warhol, but Warhol’s cultural critique focused on the dangerous ennui of mass consumption. Dick’s cultural critique was more systemic and dystopic. There was no time for ennui. Warhol is the early warning bell and Dick is the evacuation siren. We’re in their transhumanist world now. 

She describes her artistic process with Second Life screenshots in her Flickr bio this way: “I edit them for fun, typically with a cyberpunk theme. I use the pre-PBR Alchemy viewer for shots. The only post-processing my photos undergo is my own editing with Pixelmator.” 

For more from Lying Cat, click here:

Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2023年12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.

 

 

 

★New World Notesでは、広告主になってくださる、カスタマーベースを拡大したい日本のブランドを募集しています。メタバース関連のブランドであれば、Second life、VRC、Clusterなど、プラットフォームは問いません。興味のある方は、お気軽にお問い合わせください！★

Monday Memory: Fight Against Front National in Second Life Illustrates the Challenge of Extremist Expression in an Immersive Virtual World

Above: The face of Dr. King shines from the virtual sun upon an anti-fascist protest against Front National in Second Life

In early 2007, in the run-up to Martin Luther King Jr. day in the US, Second Life was wracked by protests against Front National, the leading far right party in France, which decided to set up an official campaign headquarters of the virtual world. The surrounding community, however, wasn't too happy with those plans:

The first night I arrived at the protest against the Second Life headquarters of Front National, the far right French political party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, it was ringed on all sides by protesters with signs to wave and statements to distribute. By the second night I came (this was late last week), the conflict had become more literal, for many Residents had armed themselves. Multi-colored explosions and constant gunfire shredded the air of Porcupine, a shopping island which FN had inexplicably picked for the site of their virtual world HQ, in December.

The server lag from so many people throwing up so much gunfire slows the battle to a slow motion firefight, but I manage to wade up to TonTonCarton Yue, who is strafing the FN building with a chaingun usually associated with an AC-130 gunship, than a political protest.

"Can I ask," I begin, "why are you shooting?"

"Because I hate Front National," Yue tells me simply.

"If you use violence, doesn't that reduce you to their level?" "I don't know," Yue answers, after awhile.

"I don't care. FN equals violence." And having offered that axiom, he returns his aim to the enemy, and unleashes another barrage.

And so it raged, a ponderous and dreamlike conflict of machine guns, sirens, police cars, "rez cages" (which can trap an unsuspecting avatar), explosions, and flickering holograms of marijuana leaves and kids' TV characters, and more... One enterprising insurrectionist created a pig grenade, fixed it to a flying saucer, and sent several whirling into Front National headquarters, where they'd explode in a starburst of porcine shrapnel.

The very fact that a metaverse platform is immersive and enables the creation of 3D content amplifies the challenge of creating a community that's free from anti-social behavior among avatars. Most other Internet communities only need to contend with toxic speech expressed in text and audio/video. In a virtual world, the toxicity can become a literal part of the world itself.

This very point was raised by the organized protesters, holding up Linden Lab's own community standards:

Firestorm Update: Linden Lab Still Tuning PBR Lighting Issues Upstream

Got another quick update from Firestorm project leader Beq, on reports that the Alpha version of the viewer integrating PBR is displaying objects too brightly. Beq says the problem is being addressed by the Lindens:

"Visuals are still being tuned upstream (Linden Lab); ultimately, the Lab is going to drive that agenda because it would make no sense at all for one viewer to render a scene differently; the poor creators would have kittens." (I.E., panic.)

"The current release notes have a standing 'Known issue' that states something along the lines of 'Yes it's too blue, we're working on it'. Any difference between Linden Lab and Firestorm, in terms of lighting, when examined side by side, same settings on the same hardware should vanish once the upstream changes stabilize and flow down to us."

I.E., PBR will run well in Firestorm once the Lindens nail down that known issue. 

Speaking of which, longtime SLer Estelle Pienaar comments that the addition of PBR may create a divide with established Second Life users who can afford to upgrade/buy new devices, and those who cannot: