New World Notes

Top 5 Posts Including a New Concurrency Peak for VRChat & Ambitious Single-Shard Grid Architecture for Resonite

• Second Life Streaming Launches to Select New Users This Week -- And More from My Latest Interview with Philip Rosedale
• Resonite Creating Single-Shard Grid Enabling Infinite, Contiguous Realities
• Watch: In Love Me, Two Sentient AIs Played By Kristen Stewart & Steven Yeun Become Human Avatars After Civilization's End (January 31)
• In New Records, VRChat Hits Nearly 140,000 Concurrent Users --- And 200+ Users in Single Instance
• Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2024年12月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan

Cajsa's Choices: Supremely Cool Avatar Self-Portraits by Ines Lauria

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

Инес Масуки ...🚭, or Ines Lauria, chose this single picture for her Flickr showcase and it’s an apt choice as it very much captures her sensibility. Despite the “No Smoking” symbol in her account handle, it’s a bit of work to find a picture of her without a cigarette. She seems very much the laconic, cool young mod, casually dressed with a cigarette in hand. The sort of cool edge that makes even the most casual clothes seem like high fashion. 

For more from Ines, click here:

Second Life Streaming Launches to Select New Users This Week -- And More from My Latest Interview with Philip Rosedale

Now on my Patreon is the start of an in-depth interview I did with Philip Rosedale on Project Zero, the company's code name for streaming Second Life on a browser. 

One point he mentions (that I initially missed coming back from the holidays in early January): Starting this week, they're letting a select number of new sign-ups try out Project Zero, to see if that helps retention.

"Basically, their first session will be just completely over the browser," as Philip told me last month. I'll follow up on that soon, but for this week, here's part one of my Q&A with Philip on Project Zero's overall strategy -- including price considerations, why they're launching it now, and much more. 

Join my Patreon for free to read first here.

Watch: In Love Me, Two Sentient AIs Played By Kristen Stewart & Steven Yeun Become Human Avatars After Civilization's End (January 31)

Coming January 31 (at least in the US) in the acclaimed indie movie Love Me, Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun are a sentient buoy and satellite (respectively) who meet, fall in love, and re-create themselves as human avatars who live out the end of humanity together. The trailer at least looks pretty powerful, though I'm avoiding reviews so I can watch it fresh.

More about the movie soon-ish, I hope: I recently reached out to the movie's writer/director team, Sam and Andy Zuchero, themselves married in real life, who put me in touch with the studio's publicist about an interview. 

Then again, the very next day, all parties involved (including me) likely fled Los Angeles at the coming of a raging, city-consuming firestorm. So our interview about a movie about the end of civilization may be indefinitely delayed. Which is an extra layer of tragic irony none of us needed right now or ever.

Resonite Creating Single-Shard Grid Enabling Infinite, Contiguous Realities

Frooxius, lead developer of Resonite, the crowdfunded metaverse platform with 10,000+ active users, recently revealed his new vision for a single shard virtual world grid. Unlike, say, Second Life, where the grid are sims interconnected in a way that resembles the real world, the Resonite approach will be much more brain-melting:

"It's a bit like seamless grid," as Froox puts it to me, but more generalized. Grid is one of possible arrangements, but not the only one. The goal is to enable each domain to be arbitrary arranged relative to the others -- and even move relative to the others."

So another words, you could be crossing from one "session" -- basically Resonite's version of what Second Life calls a "sim" -- and walk into one that's totally different. I.E. go through a barn door and end up on the Moon.

"Yeah, you could have a doorway that enters a completely different session," he tells me, when I run that scenario by him. "Or you have a big house somewhere in a big world. You enter it and inside is a whole new session - potentially even bigger on the inside. The house could be a tiny one too, so you shrink down to enter it."

Frooxius believes this architecture will open up new possibilities that a Second Life-like grid doesn't easily enable:

"With SL grids you can't really make whole planets, solar systems or galaxies, that are recursively subdivided. You can't have a session inside a spaceship that can travel through worlds. With this approach you have a lot more possibilities and flexibility."

But wouldn't this break immersion, since there's no coherent whole? Is a random jumble of very different realities even a "virtual world" at all?

Frooxius argues otherwise:

Virtual World Writing Delayed by Real Life Conflagration

Apologies for the delay in blogging, but this was the view from our Los Angeles neighborhood last night, followed by an inverted pyramid of black smoke which blotted out half the morning sky. I'm safe and out of (relative) danger, and hope to be back posting on my usual pace tomorrow, when the material world has stabilized (relatively).

Stay safe, everyone, and care for the people around you as much as you can!

Cajsa's Choices: Tupper Moran's Delightful Rockwell-Esque Americana Re-Enacted by Second Life Avatars

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

Tupper Moran wrote in the description for “The Puppy Shower” that she likes Norman Rockwell and Thomas Kinkade’s artwork and aspires to offer an homage to their work with her own. She seems to trend more toward Rockwell by featuring several people in the midst of living life, the way he did. In “The Puppy Shower” they are all laughing because the puppy just shook water off to dry while giving the woman a shower. It’s a fun picture and does have that feeling of Americana that was central to Rockwell and Kinkade’s work. 

“The Trick or Treat Gang Cometh, Again” is another slice-of-life Americana, the annual candypalooza that occurs when families knock on neighbors’ doors and are rewarded with candy.

The title made me look for an earlier Trick or Treat Gang picture and from 2022, I found this delight: 

 

My Five Metaverse-Related Predictions for 2025 on Meta, Apple, Roblox, VRChat & Second Life

Just to put my 2025 predictions in digital concrete:

• Apple won't announce Vision Pro 2 this year. This one feels inevitable with sales still slow and production of Vision Pro 1 already winding down.

• Thanks to the launch of Linden Lab's mobile app and cloud streaming, Second Life increases peak concurrent users by at least 20%. That would mean hitting a CCU of around 55K-60K.

• A leading metaverse platform start-up will be acquired or announce itself as being on an IPO track. Despite (or rather because) of VRChat's painful layoffs last year, I think that startup is best positioned to jump to this next level -- especially after hitting another peak concurrency record.

• Roblox reaches 100 million daily active users. This one feels a bit like a cheat, since the company just announced hitting 88.9 million last quarter. But a big juicy milestone like that will still encourage a reassessment of the Metaverse concept, and renewed interest in Roblox in particular.
• Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses will not reach a 2 million install base this year. A research firm estimates Meta reached 1 million shipments late last year, but I seriously doubt that growth will continue to any great degree.

In New Records, VRChat Hits Nearly 140,000 Concurrent Users --- And 200+ Users in Single Instance

As expected, VRChat hit another platform concurrency record over the New Year's Eve holiday, hitting nearly 140,000 CCU as peak. (136,589, to be exact.) That's a new record breaking the last one of 100,000+ on NYE of 2023/2024, though falling a bit short of the 150,o00 I predicted last month. 

This continued usage growth is pretty impressive for VRChat the company, especially after coming out of some painful layoffs in 2024, when 30% of the staff were let go. Despite those cutbacks, another milestone was achieved. Ironically, while avid VRChat users know all about that, most of the tech world was still on holiday when it haappned, and probably didn't notice. 

VRChat community head Tupper has the details on Bluesky, where they also reveal a new record: Over 200 users in a single, uncapped shard/instance. Up until now, VRChat instances are usually capped at around 50, but the company did some updates to grow the potential of its instanced concurrency:

12 Amazing Second Life Images We Couldn't Feature Last Year. So Here They Are to Start 2025!

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

I suppose opening the new year by looking back at the old year is a bit at cross-purposes, but I can’t resist. I thought it might be fun to highlight some favorites that for one reason or another, I failed to highlight in 2024. I love this gorgeous picture from January. It’s called “Walk with Me” from Vee. She erases most of her picture, leaving the essentials. You just see her legs, the shadow tells you it’s a sunny day and there are the wildflowers along the path suggesting she’s enjoying some free time outdoors. In an interesting play on the rule of thirds, her subject fills one-third while white space fills two-thirds of the picture. It’s brilliant.  

Aria Blackwood posted “I’ll Find Someone Like You” in February. I love the way the structural details of the building seem almost like lace in the silhouette, while the fronds of the pine trees look like feathers. The sun is setting behind the house, the light creating a vignette framing the picture beautifully.

Samyi posted “Paris Piage” in March. He uses Depth of Field in an interesting way. The sharpest part of the picture is a rivet in the folding chair. Everything becomes more blurred as they are more distant from that rivet. The way he frames the picture, he almost divides it into quadrants, but the rivets are perfectly in place for the Rule of Thirds. 

Sari Choche posted “At Night” in April. I love this for capturing exactly how I feel when I wake up in the middle of the night, confused. The circle of light over her head could be the flash of a camera but to me, it is the disappearing remnants of a dream, the kind of dream that wakes you up in the middle of the night. This picture made me feel seen because I seldom know why I wake up in the middle of the night, but I will sit up and my thought balloon is exactly this empty. 

For more 2024 favorites I missed , click here: