New World Notes

Welcome Equimake: New Platform for Free, Real-Time Collaborative 3D Creation on Web, Now a New World Notes Partner!

Equimake is a seriously cool, free-to-use platform for collaborative real-time 3D creation on the web partly inspired by my book; starting next month, I'm proud to announce Equimake is a sponsoring media partner to New World Notes!

Created by Canadian developer Alexander Yevsyeyev, you can not only share, create, and script interactive 3D scenes with others, but Alex is rapidly adding features which enable more integration of content -- for  instance, you can embed images from Imgur or Flick into an Equimake scene. (Watch above.) And yes, Alex tells me he's hoping to add integration with Primfeed and other social media platforms.

"My passion is helping people and see them grow," as he puts it. He recently led a team of artists, programmers, and QA on a large project, and this experience helped shape what he hopes to do with this self-funded project.

"Equimake is aimed to help learners get better grip on technology, and try to tinker with 3D art and code and see what they like or dislike about it. For advanced users, I also plan to make Equimake fun and engaging where they can either teach others, share knowledge, or simply deploy their amazing art and code."

More details and project roadmap below. You can also ask Alex about Equimake features or updates in Comments or on Equimake's Discord.

 

PBR Coming to Firestorm "In Weeks" -- And It Will Make Second Life a Much More Game-Like Experience, Explains Firestorm Dev

Image featuring PBR by Terry Fotherington

After a much anticipation, the Firestorm viewer -- by far the most-used Second Life viewer --  will very soon going to add PBR:

Since Linden Lab released the PBR viewer last November, we have been working with them to identify, prioritise, and squash numerous bugs and usability issues. Our team called out the issues we felt were show-stoppers as part of that effort. That list can be found linked deeper in this post, but suffice to say that over the last 5-6 months, Linden Lab has been working on those bugs alongside their continued enhancements programme.

To get to the front of the crowd and try things early, join the Phoenix Firestorm Preview Group in-world and grab the download links from the notices there.

By soon, Firestorm development head Beq tells me, she means "weeks not months". Physically based rendering will greatly enhance the Second Life experience visual experience, giving it much more vivid lighting. (And yes, mirrors.)

Interestingly, Beq tells me the update will also make Second Life feel decidedly more like a AAA game:

"The mantra 'SL is not a game' has and I guess always will apply in the sense that SL itself has no progression, no score, no plot, but the underlying software is very much a game engine," she elaborates. "Modern game engines expect you to be focused on them, they own the system while you are playing, and the viewer is now a bit more like that than it ever was before."

That means Second Life will more immersive, but as Beq notes, that runs counter to how many power SLers experience the virtual world:

Please Join My Patreon for Exclusive Articles & Special Benefits, Including Ads & Sponsored Posts on New World Notes!

I just launched a Patreon with excitement and trepidation! If you’ve found my blog and books valuable over the years, I hope you consider subscribing, or at least joining Patreon to follow my updates for free.

Starting in the next week or two, subscribers will get exclusive early access to feature articles, available for the first time only here on Patreon. These will be in-depth, deeply reported stories about virtual world culture across Second Life and the broader Metaverse -- from business to art, to amazing new projects and established personalities.

In return, paying subscribers will also get a number of benefits, including copies of one of my books, and several ways of promoting your own virtual world/metaverse-related business or project -- both here on New World Notes (which will continue as usual!), and to my 20,000 followers across social media.

Is there a market for premium news and cultural stories about virtual worlds, and the communities which make them real? Let’s find out together! 

New Startup Building Platform That's "Garry's Mod meets GTA meets SL powered by UE5"

Hypersonic Laboratories is a new startup which just got funding to build HELIX, an upcoming multiplayer role-playing sandbox platform for user-generated content (UGC). I got an early peek at what they're building, and the ambition is pretty impressive. As David Chiu, Hypersonic's head of business, put it to me: "Think of it as Garry's Mod meets Grand Theft Auto meets Second Life powered by Unreal Engine 5".

So, yes, intriguing. Also notable that the development team has veterans of major game developers from Roblox/Uplift Games (creators of "Adopt Me") and Activision. This roughly fits my prediction in the book that we'd soon see the rise of Grand Theft Auto-type metaverse platforms. 

Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat has the whole story, including:

There's a Whole Huge Flickr Group Devoted to Photographing Virtual Rain & Storm in Second Life. Here's Some Favorite Pics!

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

I started looking for virtual world storm pics after a conversation with my brother in Minnesota, which was hit with 4 inches of rain in the last two days. I remember my delight in the rain outside Cream Shop long ago. I needed to find some rain today and Rain and Storm SL, a group of 659 members and more than 2,000 well-moderated pictures, came through.   

“Never Let Me Go” is a romantic picture, two people so into each other they ignore the pouring rain. The tail lights make them stand out in red, the color of passion. It’s a fabulous picture from Persephone Smythe. I love her use of light and color.

Audrina Tolsen shared this picture taken by Angel Reignz. It’s a great snap with lovely lighting but what I love most is how her dress illustrates how far SL has come. When I started Second Life, we could spend hours in the rain and our clothes remained relentlessly dry. I love our new wet clothing that lends so much verisimilitude to our pictures as in this other gem.

For more rainy days, click here:

 

Can Primfeed Succeed Flickr? I Talk With Luke Rowley, Creator of the Upcoming Social Network for Second Life Avatars

With continued reports that Second Life content creators on Flickr are being banned or penalized for various infractions -- including top creator Teal Aurelia, who tells me "they keep banning accounts on really minor/subjective Terms of Service violations" -- I've reached out to Flickr's CEO for a response.

Another response to all this is Primfeed, a new social media service for Second Life users, set to launch next month.

It's a project by Luke Rowley, whose SL services EasyBloggers and EasySubscribers are already popular with Second Life content creators. He was originally planning to launch an SL-focused social media platform in 2025.

But the recent Flickr fracas stepped up that schedule.

"I’ve seen more and more people complaining about Flickr and their policies, people getting suspended etc," as he puts it to me. "I’ve always felt [we were] missing something 100% dedicated to Second Life. Sometime I just wanted to browse SL content, and not having my feed filled with ads and suggested posts like Facebook."

Thousands of SLers have already expressed interest, either by responding to his project proposal in a Google form, on his Facebook feed, or by visits to the Primfeed site itself.

But creating and sustaining an image-heavy social media platform is no easy task, usually demanding many developers and powerful, well-financed back-end architecture. Can Primfeed do that? Read on to find out.

If AI is Soon Supposed to Replace Millions of Jobs, Why Has US Unemployment Remained Historically Low Despite the Launch of ChatGPT?

Unemployment data via Statisa

I keep seeing ridiculously bold predictions that artificial intelligence is going to wipe out massive numbers of jobs in the very near future -- within the next five years, even! -- but these forecasts seem to overlook a highly inconvenient fact: The US is currently enjoying historically low unemployment. 

Actually, two inconvenient facts: Since the launch of leading generative AI programs like ChatGPT and Midjourney in mid-late 2022, the US unemployment rate has dropped even lower, largely remaining below 4%. (See above.) With these platforms on the market for nearly 2 years and quickly gaining mass adoption, shouldn’t we already see some kind of consistent increase of unemployment?

There is definitely turmoil and anxiety over AI  replacement, and substantial job cuts may be happening in highly concentrated areas (more on that below), but to me  that’s a related but different topic. A new Challenger Report estimates the job loss numbers due to AI on the scant side:

Amazingly Varied SL Avatar Character Portraits by Fairūz Intifada

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

Fairūz Intifada’s “You Were Glass, I was Ice.” feels like a dream. The two women are in a gentle, loving embrace. Now look closely at their hands. They may seem gentle, but they are equipped for violence as well as love. They feel otherworldly, in a very cold world. Fairuz uses color to create the environment and the characters. You know it’s cold because it’s blue and blue is a cold color.

What’s so amazing is that Fairuz can create these characters and others who are completely different. The variety in her pictures is amazing.  

To see what I mean, click here:

 

Make Second Life's Android App Directly Downloadable, Readers Suggest

Interesting idea from readers, responding to the news that Linden Lab is restricting access to Second Life' many Adult-rated regions in the upcoming mobile viewer, mainly to satisfy Apple's App Store regulations against graphic sex/violence content: 

"How about making the app available on another site not so restrictive?" asks Kaylee West.

I had a somewhat skeptical reaction to that at first, seeing how large a userbase the App Store  has. But then reader "Phaethon" riffs on that idea with some specifics:

Cajsa's Choices: Utterly Vivid Avatar Portraits by Cicciuzzo Gausman

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

Cicciuzzo Gausman is Second Life’s Lon Chaney, a man of a thousand faces. This is #1151. Casually browsing through Flickr, you might think he’s a portrait photographer who shoots a very specific, closely-cropped sort of head shot. And yes, they are all really good headshots, but you would be missing the real art, because every one of those headshots is a selfie. He’s creating an entirely new persona in each picture. This is the art of making shapes, and yes, he has a store.

Take this guy, He doesn’t look like an avatar worn just out of the box. He’s somebody you can hang a story on. He works in IT for a company in Omaha. He thought his life was ordinary until yesterday when he caught an attack on the company’s servers. This was no ordinary hack and he knows they won’t stop trying… 

For Face #1000, click here: