New World Notes

Our Second Life Flickr Group of the Week is Decidedly Edgy & Different!

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

Charlotta Jackman aka Handdrawn posted this intriguing picture she called “Keep playing with fire…You’ll never be able to handle the heat.” I love this picture. For one, it’s so different from the usual pictures of body or headshots or landscapes. She zoomed in close and is sending a message, a warning to all who would trifle with her. 

I found this picture in the group Second Life's Edgy -Different. So what is edgy or different? I spent some time browsing through the group to find out. This is an adults-only group, but don’t worry, if you’re okay with occasional explicitness here or there, it’s a lovely group of photos. 

For more edgy and/or different pictures, click here:

New On My Patreon: I Interviewed the Creator of a New VRChat-Based Volleyball Game That's So Playable, It Has a League & Live Sportscasts!

New on my Patreon: We've tried for decades to make a physics-enabled game involving a ball that people can play together from around the world in real time. Most attempts end up being comically, unplayably laggy. But a new team-based volleyball game in VRChat, has been good enough to generate not only a large returning audience, but also player leagues, even live sport casters on YouTube. Join for free to read about it first here.

Kickstart This: Help Expand the Virtual Worlds Museum -- Benefits Include a Custom Virtual Exhibit Build in Arrival.Space!

The Virtual Worlds Museum just launched a Kickstarter to expand what's already the most comprehensive -- and now award-winning -- online resource for information on virtual worlds (in my somewhat biased opinion) into a full-fledged immersive experience and live community hub:

Visitors can interact with immersive, browser-accessible exhibits and experience WebXR and interoperable worlds from their devices on Arrival. Space. Paid tours will provide in-depth insights into milestones, from early web experiments to immersive environments.

You’ll also join MetaTr@versal portal crawls, where avatars explore interconnected worlds through portals. These unique events redefine what it means to travel across digital realms.

Much more here. The top supporter tier, for $9999, is actually quite a bargain for companies and brands to consider:

Collaborate with the Virtual Worlds Museum™ team to create a customizable 3D world in Arrival. Space featuring your product or service. Work closely with our expert 3D artists and receive pro-level consulting throughout the process.

I've been involved in projects like this in multiple virtual worlds, and the cost is usually more like $20,000-50,000.

Here's some examples of branded experiences in Arrival.Space, via VWM founder Julian Reyes:

Four Favorite SL Photographers on Primfeed, the New Flickr Alternative for Second Life Creators

Casja's column on the great SL photographers on Flickr is being moved to tomorrow, so it's a perfect time to feature some creative accounts on Primfeed, the new Second Life-centric social network. After we put out a call in search of Primfeed talent last week, Graeme Fairelander gave us a glorious list. Here's four of my favorites from that group of twenty-one.

To start, I can't resist a subversive send-up of the famous motorcycle skid from Akira, and Lying Cat (aka @blarn.boo) does one marvelously above. Much more on her feed in this vein, teeming with badass ladies of cyberpunk  though she notes, images contain "No AI". (An increasingly frequent artists' note we're seeing on social media images and also machinima video.)

Three more after the break. And much thanks to Dream Seeker Estates (on Primfeed here) for sponsoring this post!

 

Watch: Seriously Amazing VRChat Avatar Makes Me Miss Them in SL

Speaking of VRChat hiring, I kinda feel like the company should go ahead and hire community creator/merchant "lackofbindings" to make default avatars. Because, I mean, watch above. (Starts slow but shit gets real around 20 seconds in.)

I watch this somewhat whimsically, because amazing avatars like this once seemed pervasive in Second Life as well (as here, in 2007) but are much less prevalent. They're still around, to be sure, but you have to look in earnest, and they're definitely in less abundance on the active marketplace. My working theory, as I wrote in the book, is the launch of avatar-based mesh for ultrarealistic humans too quickly dominated the market after 2010: 

While Horizon Worlds Layoffs Loom at Meta, Metaverse Platforms Rec Room & VRChat Are Hiring Many Roles

Meta is now laying off thousands of employees while all but announcing that staff working on Meta's Horizon Worlds is next on the chopping block this year. So it's important to note that Rec Room and VRChat -- two metaverse platforms which have ironically thrived on Meta's own Quest platform -- are currently hiring:

Rec Room job openings:

• Machine Learning Engineer
• Product Data Scientist
• Senior Product Data Scientist
• Engineering Gameplay Engineer, Retention
• Principal Product Manager | Discovery

VRChat job openings (selected):

• Senior Data Scientist, Product Analytics
• Staff/Principal Designer
• Senior Server Engineer - Experience
• Senior Manager, Trust & Safety
• Director of Product, New Audiences

All remote roles, too! That they're hiring is not a surprise, since VRChat has (by their own reporting) 10 million active users, while Rec Room (by my estimate) has well over 20 million users. What is somewhat surprising is that neither company was acquired by Meta, seeing that much or most of that user base -- nearly 70%, in VRChat's case -- use a Meta Quest headset. But oh well.

In VRChat's case, by the way, I know several staffers were deeply involved in Second Life back in the day, while the founders are very much aware of the platform. Also, I recently chatted with a VRC staffer who got their start as a community developer, and shared some about the VRChat corporate culture and advice on getting hired:

Cajsa's Choices: Lally O’Leary's Vibrantly Varied Second Life Imagery

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

Lally O’Leary is a fun account to follow, in part because you never know what she will do next. I said something similar four years ago when I wrote about her back when she called herself Lally Starsparkle. Whatever her last name, Lally is sure to please. I love “The Photographer” where she makes the intriguing decision to leave a lot of space bin the field before the subject. It creates a sense of vastness that would be lost if her subject were up close in the foreground. 

For more exciting photos from Lally, click here:

Challenge: What IS the Geographically Largest, Contiguous, Multi-User, Fully Explorable, Online Virtual World?

Last week's post on Second Life's huge geographic size as a unique selling point brought up some interesting points. Technically SL is probably not the "largest" if we're only talking about geographic size, but I think the apples to apples comparison question is precisely this: 

What is the Geographically Largest, Contiguous, Multi-User, Fully Explorable, Online Virtual World?

By "contiguous", I mean there are no load screens in between areas, and by "fully explorable" I mean just that: Some online worlds like Eve Online, MS Flight Simulator, or even single-player worlds like Starfield are extremely large, yes, if judged only by map size. But the actual user explorable part of the map size is much less than that. I.E., MSFS basically models the entire world, but you can't, say, land your plane and walk into a nearby diner. 

Video (also) via @brainthink.bsky.social, who has also happened to explore Second Life, and found it technically wanting: "The SL mainland is geographically large," they explain, "but the rendering times of structures and objects is absurdly slow. As a real life sailor, I tried sailing in SL once on a rezzed sailboat and quickly gave up. It wasn’t enjoyable at all, sadly."

That has at least somewhat improved since the SL grid moved to the Amazon Cloud in 2020. And while there are thousands of private sims that are not generally accessible, or require a load screen when teleporting there, the major mainland areas, as reader Kaylee West argues, makes for some sprawling, serendipitous adventures -- notwithstanding property owner ban lines:

Cajsa's Choices: Elise's Avatar Portraits Exude James Dean-Like Coolness

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

Elise chooses to work in black and white which, in my opinion, is a perfect fit for her rebel with-or-without a cause aesthetic.

Truly, looking at her stream my first and strongest reaction was if James Dean were a woman.

It’s not the occasional cigarette, either, it’s the stance, the way she poses her body, relaxed, confident, cool, raw, and rebellious.

She has that style, her stance is everything. 

For more from Elise, click here:

 

Meta's CTO Memo Was an Early Signal of Company Shifting Away from VR/Quest Toward AR & AI (Comment of the Week)

With news breaking that Meta is now laying off thousands of employees to focus on its AI products, this comment from reader Martin K last Thursday sure seem sadly prophetic:

Since Quest headsets and Horizon Worlds cannot succeed on the scale of Meta's ambitions (and certainly not in 2025), I'm reading [Meta CTO's internal memo] as a preparation for a major shift of focus away from mixed reality and Horizon Worlds towards augmented reality +AI glasses (at the end of this year or in 2026). (And I'm sure that Meta will find a way to describe this new focus as an evolution of their vision of the Metaverse. Maybe the new/true/real Metaverse or whatever. They'll come up with something.)

If this shift of focus towards AR glasses and AI is already planned, why not just announce it? I assume the purpose of this whole exercise (and its predictable outcome) is to rationalize the scaling down of the MR and Horizon Worlds teams, prevent or shut down internal discussions about this change, and give some employees a chance to leave or switch teams before they are fired.

But I'm biased because Meta's VR strategy never made much sense to me. Thus, I guess, I'll just wait, watch, and limit my engagement with the Quest platform.

"Despite the reductions," MSN reports, "Meta still has around 1,000 job openings in California, with hiring efforts focused on AI and other business-critical roles." So, yes, I agree with Martin that limiting engagement with the Quest is probably a good idea. 

As for my original rant about Bosworth's memo, there's a pretty good conversation on it on LinkedIn, where it went mini-viral.