New World Notes

Top Six Posts from Last Week, Featuring ChatGPT to Create Virtual World Landscapes & a Survey for Second Life Merchants

• SL Merchants: Please Take This Short Anonymous Survey On The Second Life Economy For My Upcoming Report!
• How Immersive Virtual Worlds Can Transform People For The Better: Excerpt, Making A Metaverse That Matters
• Kickstart This: Update A Groundbreaking Mixed Reality Hide-And-Seek For IOS/Android -- Jim "Babbage" Purbrick Is Helping Develop!
• WATCH ChatGPT Generate Working Terrain In A Virtual World When Prompted
• SL Mobile App Access To Adult-Rated Regions Inevitably Removed
• Her Starring Scarlett Johansson Actually Has More Interesting Things To Say About AI Than Either Sam Altman Or His Detractors Think

SL Merchants: Please Take This Short Anonymous Survey on the Second Life Economy for My Upcoming Report! (Use Laptop/Desktop)

As promised, here's a short anonymous survey for SL merchants who regularly cash out their L$ earnings, which I'll be implementing in an in-depth report next month. NOTE: Take survey on desktop/laptop with a mouse/trackpad for best results, or click here to take it directly on Google Forms.

My hope is the results give the entire Second Life community a valuable overview of the virtual world economy on its 21st anniversary, so the more people who take it, the better -- please share with the SL merchants you know.

Also feel free to leave comments below on important topics not covered in the survey!

Second Life Friday Fashion Blog to Follow: I’d Rather Be Overdressed

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

I’d Rather Be Overdressed is from AnandaHeart, a blogger after my own heart, overdressed and fully dressed. Her newest post Calista highlights a gorgeous gown from Jumo. With a low-cut neckline and a high-cut slit in the skirt, it violates the old rule of choosing one or the other, but not both. That rule, though, is long gone. She kindly provided a SLurl for where she shot this picture. [To teleport to Le Chateau 80’s, Click Here]

• Jumo Calista, for Sense - closes June 8
• Doux Jules, for Dubai - closes June 14
• Sigma Cowgirl Charm necklace, for Shotgun Pop Up Wild West - closes June 16

For more tasteful elegance from Anandaheart, click here:

How Immersive Virtual Worlds Can Transform People for the Better: Excerpt, Making a Metaverse That Matters

Why does the Metaverse matter? Because at its best, it enables millions of people around the world to serendipitously form diverse, creative, economically sustainable communities in the same shared, immersive space -- one that's largely free from the toxicity of traditional social media and barriers of the real world which divide us.

In this excerpt from Making a Metaverse That Matters -- audio version 50% off until June 7 on Audiobooks -- I write about the powerful effect of "you are there" immersion:

Kickstart This: Update a Groundbreaking Mixed Reality Hide-and-Seek for iOS/Android -- Jim "Babbage" Purbrick is Helping Develop!

Now on Kickstarter: Can You See Me Now, a crowdfunder to update a groundbreaking mixed reality game of the same name for the modern era of iOS and Android. Launched in the early 2000s, it helped inspire the creation of Pokémon Go, but Can You See Me Now is much more accessible:

"It's hide-and-seek with the hiders online and the seekers in the real world," veteran virtual world dev Jim Purbrick explains, "but having two parallel realities and the players relying on information leaking between the realities make it interesting and feel like each reality is haunted by ghostly presences from the other." Purbrick worked on the original game from UK tech art collective Blast Theory before going on to work at Linden Lab and Meta, and will also help develop this modern update.

In the original version, the real world runners were kitted out with bulky PCs and GPS trackers, but with the reboot, it will just require a smartphone to run. The gameplay creates the cool and eerie experience of existing in two realities at once:

Wandering New York SL is A Huge Flickr Community Devoted to Photographing Virtual Manhattan. Here's Some Favorites Pics!

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

Wandering New York SL is a Flickr group devoted to a Second Life sim recreating that metropolis. It’s funny, I’ve been to New York state several times but have never been to New York City -- except in Second Life where I immediately trapped myself under this very subway entrance. This was just one of several black and white photos by John Francis LaVille, all fabulous photos that could have been shot by a real camera, but for the lack of people. [Direct teleport to New York City in SL here]

For more pics from Wandering New York SL, click here:

WATCH ChatGPT Generate Working Terrain in a Virtual World When Prompted

When I recently wrote about all the impressive innovation happening on Wolf Grid, an OpenSim-based virtual world developed by small team, I didn't even mention one of its coolest breakthroughs:

Wolf Grid has an option which uses ChatGPT to generate usable terrain with a prompt.

Watch above, with the money shot happening around 6:30 in. In the first demo, requesting a "cat" turns the land into a mountain range that's a picture of a cat (kinda sorta), while requesting a "maze" actually generates a working maze that springs up on the land. 

"Basically," lead developer Lone Wolf tells me, "we have some software between the AI and the grid that deals with any issues."

From the user perspective, they communicate with Bobby, the Wolf Grid's AI assistant, which is integrated with ChatGPT.

"[We] use our software to decide what to do? Do we need to generate an image? Do we need a terrain? Do we need to answer a query? Then it works out which 'bit' of ChatGPT to talk with, meanwhile recording information so it's able to know who said what to him, and then interpreting the information back from the AI and translating to a useable thing."

Wolf tells me Bobby will eventually be able to make all this work on the grid live. Unless I'm mistaken, this is the first instance of a virtual world actually using ChatGPT to generate physics-enabled terrain, as opposed to non-interactive, diorama-type backgrounds. (Correct me if I'm wrong, readers!)

Getting generative AI to create working virtual world terrain is more challenging than it might seem, but Mr. Wolf tells me they've done that:

 

SL Mobile App Access to Adult-Rated Regions Inevitably Removed

As Second Life's iOS/Android app finally gets close to launch, here's a good catch from Reddit /SecondLife host "0xc0ffea". In a message to users of the closed Mobile Alpha group, a Linden Lab staffer inevitably announced the app won't be able to access Second Life's naughty sims:

We are planning the exciting transition of the Second Life mobile app from Private Alpha to Public Beta in the near future. Expanding the audience for the app means that we must comply with app store requirements, including limits on the types of content that can be displayed in apps.

In order to move forward, we will soon be removing access to Adult-rated regions on the mobile app. In the longer term, we are working on finer-grained controls for content maturity in order to allow maximum freedom while complying with app store requirements.

For now, you will see this message when attempting to visit an Adult region: "The location you selected exceeds the content maturity limit on this device. App stores restrict the type of content that can be displayed in apps."

I say "inevitable", because Apple is fairly restrictive about violent and sexual content in its App Store:

Cajsa's Choices: SL Avatar Portraits Shot Like Cool Film Noir Characters

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

Matty King’s “It’s a Beautiful War” is a quintessential picture from his stream that flows with one striking portrayal after another of a guy who is a perfect character for a noir film. You know, the stranger who walks into a bar and all the conversation stops as tension builds because you know the bar’s resident tough guy will be compelled to confront him and then back down. And of course, the stranger wasn’t interested in taking over the bar’s toughest customer position, he was just thirsty. 

For more SL noir, click here:

Her Starring Scarlett Johansson Actually Has More Interesting Things to Say About AI Than Either Sam Altman or His Detractors Think

In case you missed it, the latest version of ChatGPT (previously here) is now under fire from Scarlett Johansson:

Johansson said Monday that OpenAI used an "eerily similar" voice to hers for their new GPT-4o chatbot despite having declined the company's request to provide her voice.

Earlier in the day, OpenAI announced it would no longer be using the voice, but did not indicate why.

"Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system," Johansson wrote in a statement, which a representative shared with NBC News. "He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI. He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people."

... Johansson voiced an artificial intelligence chatbot in the 2013 movie “Her,” which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman referenced in relation to the company's new voice offerings — something Johansson noted in her statement.

While Altman seems to think the movie Her was basically a product demo, his detractors on social media are largely depicting Her as a dystopian cautionary tale. 

However, I checked back on what I wrote about Her when it came out in 2013/2014, and its depiction of sentient AI is much more interesting than either depiction (spoilers ahead if you haven't seen it yet, and you totally should):