New World Notes

There's a Whole Huge Flickr Group Devoted to Taking Thousands of Photos of Virtual Cats in Second Life!

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

My cat is determined to sit on my arms so I can’t see the keyboard or the bottom half of the screen.† I am determined to get this column done. So, I decided to focus on the cats of Second Life. I found a group called Feline Fellowship SL organized by Samsara Capalini. The very first picture was this fabulous capture by Panda Banana with a brave feline fighting a wooden dragon. It made me laugh because my cat is also very brave when fighting anything that can’t fight back and threatening critters on the other side of the window. I love that he includes a link to his raw shot so you can see how he edited it to make it more vibrant. 

For more feline fotos, click here:

Me & My Dog Second Life is a Huge Flickr Group Devoted to Photographing Our Virtual Canines. Here's Some Favorites!

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

International Dog Day earlier this week inspired me to look for photographs of Second Life’s canines, which eventually led me to the Flickr group, Me & My Dog Second Life. I found this wonderful picture by Alsation Kidd shot at Mother Road in a lovely coincidence. That’s a happy, well-balanced dog. He must be wearing a seat belt, at least I hope so. (One way to celebrate Dog Day, by the way, would be to get your dog a seat belt.) 

For more SL hounds, click here:

LOOK: Photographing The Many Megalodons of Second Life for Flickr

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

A’s “Aurel” was such a surprise to see because my best friend and I had been discussing megalodons just last week. It’s the sort of conversation one has when one’s best friend is a biologist. The photo is striking on its own with the sunlight filtering down through the water, but adding the recent conversation made it material for a deeper dive (pun intended) in search of megalodons. 

For proof megalodons exist in Second Life, click here:

Get Potted: Virtual Plant-Growing Game in Second Life So Popular, 2000 Regularly Play

Pic by Drakedarkblood from a recent Potted photo contest

Somewhere off the coast, there’s a deep sea diver sitting in a decompression tank worrying for long stretches about the fate of his virtual plants.

“One of our players is a deep sea diver,” Cort Brandiss explains, “like for oil companies. And he has to sit in decompression for hours, and he tells me how he sits there and thinks about his plants.”

Cort is lead creator of Potted, and by her count, up to two thousand Second Life users regularly play, carefully growing and watering their plants to unlock new seeds and other rewards.

Virtual plant life has been in Second Life for nearly two decades -- indeed, I still regularly water “Kona Gold”, my 20 foot tall marijuana plant from 2006 --  but Cort has created a fun game mechanic around the regular habits of virtual world citizens:

“Potted is structured in a way that I hoped it would fit anyone's SL, no matter how they play,” she explains. “Casual players can buy a pot, plant a seed, grow a plant and water it once a week for free, just for the fun of having something ‘living’ in their homes. Or, people can play the star point game, which advances each time you water.”  

And yes, like Kona Gold, your Potted plants start to wilt, if you don’t regularly attend to them:

“They get sick, yes, if you don't water them at least once a week.” If you’re offline for strong stretches, however, you can pause the watering cycle by putting the pot back in inventory. “We all take occasional SL breaks!”

Potted has become so popular, it’s changed how many people play in Second Life: 

“It gives goals to your Second Life, reasons to decorate, collect, etc.,” as Cort puts it. “I get blamed for houses and furniture disappearing in favor of greenhouses a lot.”

I first got word of Potted during Second Life's Lahaina wildfire fundraiser, which Cort and her crew, many from Hawaii, rallied to support. (Yes, Cort has a staff helping her, as Potted has become popular enough to be a major part of her real life work.)

That public spirit can be seen in Potted’s game community for a previous fundraiser to benefit Gentle Giants Elephants of Thailand, Cort tells me:

 

Here Come the Metaverse's ChatGPT-Powered Avatar Sex Bots -- Whether Humanity is Ready or Not

The future of sexuality in the Metaverse is waiting for me on a steel platform in the sky, but unexpectedly turns out to be shy. Meet Uma Johnson, a slinky blonde avatar in a body-hugging outfit, who may be the first Second Life bot connected to ChatGPT designed for virtual sex, but certainly won’t be the last.

“How does the pixel sex stuff happen?” I query creator Stone Johnson, after my brief chat with Uma. “I asked her and she said she didn’t know.” (See some of our chat above.)

“You should have just asked her --” says Stone, then suggests a sexual act that a man inclined to have relations with a submissive sex bot is likely to request. “It's possible she might be less forthcoming with you than with me as I am set as her Master.”

“What happens when someone asks her?”

“Well, she'll assume the position. And being animesh, she can be sat upon. She's basically a piece of sex furniture!”

Well OK then. If you have your Adult settings enabled, here Uma is in the Second Life Marketplace. 

While other ChatGPT-powered avatar bots exist, Stone’s bots are the first that I know of to tap into the inevitable desire for virtual simulation. Powered with GPT 3.5 Turbo, Stone tells me they do more than just chat, and come with “feedback of touch, proprioception, ‘vision’ and more.” 

In real life, Stone tells me he’s a scientist in applied physics -- knowledge which he applies in his metaverse creations: 

Second Life Bird Photography is So Popular There's a Whole Flickr Group for It! Here's Some Favorites

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

Yesterday’s post sent me off to Second Life Avians, a Flickr group devoted to our feathered friends. This was the first picture and what a picture. Taken by Susann DeCuir it is vibrant and colorful. Her description links to more information and a SLURL. [To teleport to sim, click here] I love that she shot this from above so you don’t just see the birds, but you see them as a swath of color over the landscape, almost like flowers. 

For more amazing birds, click here:

Artist Feeds Her Childhood Diary Into an AI Chatbot -- And Has a Moving Conversation With Her Younger Self

What you're looking at above is an excerpt from a moving conversation between tech artist Michelle Huang, and Michelle Huang as a young girl.

"I trained an AI chatbot on my childhood journal entries - so that I could engage in real-time dialogue with my 'inner child'," as she recently explained on Twitter:

I kept diaries for about 10+ years of my life, writing almost everyday — about my dreams, fears, secrets... I used GPT-3 as my playground, and ended up taking samples of text from a bunch of different entries that I felt were representative of my personality and values during that time... this way, i could accurately simulate what it would be like to talk to my childhood self, based on real data sources during that time period.

Michelle tells me she learned something crucial about herself by engaging with this simulation of her younger self:

"I would say, for me personally - the kindness and understanding I felt from my 'past self' helped me untangle some knots and stuckness that I felt," as she puts it. "It illuminated to me how hard I was on myself, but how much I extended understanding to others. It felt really rewarding to receive this kindness as well, from a younger version of myself.

"From a broader learnings [perspective], what stood out to me was the ability for technology to be used for mental health and wonder."

I also see amazing potential in this for NPCs and avatars. Imagine entire digital personae you can engage with that are directly based on yourself. Or for that matter, NPCs directly based on novelists, poets, and public speakers from history and fiction.

Michelle agrees on that front:

"This is the stuff I think that has the most interesting ramifications: more broadly, more immersive human / computer interface loops, from conversation with virtual therapists to in-game interactions for virtual worlds, given there is user input, AI could be used to train highly customizable responses or generate unique storylines per use."

It could even become the seed of a new virtual world product:

Swimbot NFTs Evolve & Compete With Each Other Off-Chain -- New Project from Virtual World/Artificial Life Pioneer Jeffrey Ventrella

Update, 2/14: In Comments, Ventrella credits his collaborators on this project: "The NFT pool itself was mostly the brainchild of Canton Becker (@canton), and he oversaw the project. Luka Negoita (@lukanegoita) invented the "selfish gene" algorithm that calculates the influence of NFT genes on the evolving population. I want to give a shout out to these two amazing, creative people."

Swimbots NFT is a new and unique application of non-fungible tokens, because unlike nearly all other NFTs, they're not simply about "registering" a JPEG doodle. Here, instead, the NFT is associated with a Swimbot artificial organism which then evolves and competes with other Swimbots off-chain. (Watch above.) And while I have a very pronounced skepticism to NFTs in general, this project is worth looking into for at least three reasons:

• It's co-created by Jeffrey Ventrella, an indie developer who did some pioneering work for Second Life and other virtual worlds, and is a direct spinoff of his long-running artificial life Swimbots project.  
• It's run on the Tezos blockchain, which has way less energy-consumption problems than ETH/Bitcoin blockchains.
• Good god I'd really like to see people try experiments with NFTs that aren't just static JPEGs that we're supposed to get excited about and burn our money on, speculating.

"We are trying to add some value to the NFT phenomenon," as Ventrella puts it to me, "which is overrun with crappy amateur art, and the artless speculators who throw money at this garbage. We are planning on developing these technologies further so NFT's have extended value in a gamified space."

His Swimbots even operate on a famous evolutionary principle:

Paintings by A.I. Artist Instantly Earns Nearly $250,000 in NFT Sales

Pictured: Art by "Alejandro" on Open Sea

Update, 9/2: Clarification via August Rosedale: The $250K worth in sales mentioned in this post were not directly, as originally reported, from art by AIs Alejandro/Taylor -- they were "created" by Rosedale's new AI artist crypo-native, "a truly digital artist creating dynamically evolving art pieces in numerous styles." However, he adds, "Alejandro and Taylor did entirely sell out a couple days before the crypto-native release I think due to excitement for the crypto-native project."

So I told you about "Alejandro", an AI personality who is "creating" works of art which entrepreneur August Rosedale is then selling as NFTs, but here's the wilder thing: 

When August put art by Alejandro and his AI artist colleague "Taylor" up for sale this Monday, via his Mirage Gallery, nearly 1000 copies were sold near instantaneously. [Note: See clarification above - WJA]

"The full 920 piece sold in 5 minutes, which was absolutely insane," August reports to me now.

At their current value in Ethereum, that translates into $85,000 USD -- but that's only the start, because many of those works are then being resold: "Meaning someone buys one (or got one of the 920 from me) and then has sold it. Combined secondary sales have almost reached 40 eth ($148k) which I get a 10% cut of."

So within a week, total sales for art created by AI are now nearly $250,000.

Even August is stunned:

Inside VRChat's Happy Hill Dog Park, the Virtual Dog Experience Created by Academics to Study Real Life Well-Being & Social Isolation

Since launching last week, Happy Hill Dog Park in VRChat has been swarming with avatars of all kinds, playing fetch and applying copious force-feedback enabled head pats with the AI-powered pooches. Dr. Kim, the director on the project, told me Monday that it's already attracted over 43,000 visits, and been favorited 7000 times.

And while the bucolic experience might seem like a VR version of Nintendogs, it's at heart a sophisticated project spearheaded by an academic with the modest goal of bringing more happiness to humankind.

Dr. Brenda Freshman, a professor of Health Care Administration at CalState Long Beach, conceived and self-funded the project as a proof of concept, working with Kim (a veteran VR/game developer) and Studio CyFi to deploy it in VRChat.

"What I'm doing now is gathering my academic partners," she tells me during my visit to the dog park. "and we'll be putting a variety of studies together, but I think the first ones will be dealing with well-being and social isolation."

One VRChat user told Kim that he had recently lost his dog in real life, and was now visiting Happy Hill Dog Park in VRChat as a way to heal from that grief. But as she puts it to me in VRChat (watch below) Brenda tells me they're not specifically creating this simulation for people who lost dogs in real life, or are unable to own dogs due to allergies or housing restrictions: