New World Notes

Senior Citizen Struggles to Compartmentalize Her Second Life from Her Retirement Community Real Life

Last week's post "Only The Young Think The Elderly Want To Live Their Last Years In Virtual Worlds" provoked an intriguing conversation, highlighted by some charming thoughts from Stephanie Meyer, who writes this really helpful new SL user guide blog, and has direct and very personal experience on the topic:

In RL, I am happy to live in a retirement community with many social activities.

In SL, I am happy to be able to explore and create without anyone thinking I'm weird.

In RL, I seldom talk about what I did that day in S, because I have found that it results in a lot of eyeball rolling.

In SL, I am not going to tell anyone about the RL Ice Cream Social with music by the International Philharmonic Ukulele Orchestra.

In a way, I feel compartmented. Just as sometimes I feel a disconnect in SL when changing alts and avatars, in RL I have to remind myself "Everyone act normal".

I'm hoping that by the time I am 100 there will be more integration of the realities.

With online game worlds growing larger and VR headsets getting cheaper every year, I suspect she'll get what she's hoping for soon. In the meantime, you know what they say: Second Life is for people who don't have ukulele-themed ice cream socials in real life.

Picture credit: "My Ukulele" by Susanne Drechsler, who rocks the virtual uke well.

One Scary Way Face-Capture Apps Like FaceApp Can Be Used to Manipulate Voters: By Morphing a User's Face With the Face of a Preferred Candidate

Above: Images created in Balienson and Yee's Stanford study, subtly morphing the face of 2008 Presidential candidates with the test subject's face, significantly changed the political choice of many test subjects

There's been much speculation and satirical humor over the viral popularity of FaceApp, the Russian-owned "see you how you look old" app with a dubious Terms of Service which claim a "transferable sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish" users' photos. But can modifying user photos really be used for nefarious goals -- for example, to secretly influence the next US Presidential election?

Yes, it can.

Last decade, some highly-regarded Stanford academics, including Jeremy Balienson and Nick Yee, conducted an amazing if fairly terrifying experiment which did just that.

"Between 2004-2008," as Nick Yee recently explained in this Facebook post, "we ran a series of studies where we morphed people's faces into the faces of presidential candidates (at a 35:65 ratio). We found that people are more likely to vote for candidates that look more like them (even in high-stakes/information races like the 2004 Kerry/Bush election), and this photo manipulation was largely undetectable at a 35% ratio."

Emphasis mine. As you can see above in the images under the 35:65 Blend column, the photos of candidates Hillary Clinton and John Edwards have been very subtly morphed with the test subjects in Balienson's experiment.

Doing that was enough to change their overall choice:

For the Trans Community of Second Life, the Virtual World is a Chance to Discover Their Real Life Selves (Guest Post)

The author at Second Life's transgender memorial

Excerpted and revised from Cajsa Lilliehook's extended feature originally published in Eclipse Magazine

In Second Life, there is a memorial honoring transgender people who have lost their lives to violence or suicide. For many, the virtual world offers a respite where people can be who they are without the risks they may face in their first life. It also offers people who are questioning a safe place to explore their identity. They can discover themselves. 

I recently interviewed several people to gain a fuller understanding of the way trans residents find community and strength in Second Life. Their experiences are varied and SL has served as a refuge, a revelation, or a catalyst. While they do not represent the full spectrum of the trans experience, they offer insight into a group of people who find succor and even joy in Second Life.  At the same time, they also find suspicion and bigotry from SLers outside their community -- in particular, from a Second Life-based gossip site, and among those who confuse catfishing with a deeper identity.

Meet Virtual Trans Pioneers James, Nep, Kayla, Tiffany, Ishtar 

Second Life was critical in helping James, a trans man, transition; his fondest Second Life memory is coming out and the acceptance he was met with there. “I lived in a very rural and honestly unsafe place and SL drastically helped me feel like I wasn’t alone,” as he put it. 

Nep Faulkes (above) is a trans woman who has known her entire life that she was a woman trapped in the wrong body. “I got reacquainted with an old friend who had already transitioned around the same age I was at the time. She gave me a lot of advice and help along with several trans friends I have met through SL.”

Kayla (above) is a trans woman who tried to transition nearly twenty years ago, but faced such transphobia she went back in the closet, only expressing her authentic self online. "When I found Second Life,” she told me, “Not only could I be expressive of my gender, but also my real personality and visual styling. "

Second Life Avatar of Obama Depicted at Age 63 at End of Trump's 2nd Term

Second Life avatar photographer Flight of Osiris created this striking portrait of Barack Obama's avatar in Second Life, but six years from now. "[I] thought if Donald Trump finishes two terms as president then Obama would be 63 at the time and I assumed would be brow beaten having seen his legislation accomplishments undone," Osiris explains.

While there are several avatar mesh heads of Obama for Second Life, they depict him as he was when he was President. "[I] used layers and a few filters to give him more wrinkles," says Osiris, "a bit more shadowing round the eyes and some shine on the head to make his hair appear whiter, plus black and white images have a vintage quality to them, so people naturally appear older."

The portrait's title, as you might have guessed, is "Good Luck America":

SL Should Adopt VRChat's Avatar Rankings -- And SLers Should Be Less Like Barbie, More Like Elizabeth Warren (Comment of the Week #2)

Great conversation in this post praising VRChat's new avatar optimization rankings (from Excellent down to Very Poor, for avatars over 70,000 triangles) -- including this great comment from reader "Finni Graves", who agrees with reader "Cake" that Second Life should adopt these rankings:

I've invested a lot of my SL esteem in the whole crazy avatar adornment scene. Then one day, after trying to navigate a horrible shopping event, I've got to stop being so selfish and hogging so much resource. What's the point of looking good, if I don't feel good? These ridiculous mesh bodies, heads, hair. clothes, and accessories are literally sucking the life out of our SL. We must simplify ourselves because this whole hamster wheel isn't working.

Cake is right. All of us need to be graded harshly and it is our duty to ask ourselves, " do I really need this?". It's also the duty of content creators to make consumers aware of the optimization of their products and to guarantee it. They should have to be graded too, at least on Marketplace. 

Finni says SL's many fashion bloggers should advocate optimized avatars and stop promoting resource heavy avatars which degrade the performance for everyone around them. And then, notably, likens these reforms to the plans put forth by the US Presidential candidate who's leading the charge to reform the American economy by penalizing people whose greed hurts society and the environment:

Inside the Avatar-Based Transgender Community of Second Life

ECLIPSE magazine has a fascinating and beautifully illustrated feature on the transgender community in Second Life. Perceptively written by NWN contributor Cajsa Lilliehook, who interviewed six transgender SL users, it connects their struggles in the virtual world with the real life activism of the LGBTQ community, and the tension they sometimes encounter with the SL community at large -- for instance, by resisting the traditional concept (and accusation) of "catfishing":

“SL allows us to be seen as the men or women we are inside," as one member explains to Cajsa. "Because of this, I feel this is not catfishing and is incredibly different than people who 'role play' a different gender. My interactions with anyone in SL, whether a romantic interest or friend, are much more genuine and real than how I interact with most people in RL because everyone in SL knows me as Tiffany... not the person I was born as."

Read it all here. Also read: "Second Life's Strength Is Its Power To Transform Identity -- And The "Weirdos" Who Embrace It".

Avatar Cosplayer Creates Tracer of Overwatch By Recycling Second Life Parts

Tracer SL cosplay by Alexandria Brangwin - see high res version here 

Avatar-based cosplay has been popular in Second Life since the world started, but the introduction of mesh into SL has somewhat spoiled the fun, since it's not uncommon to find unauthorized 3D models that have been ripped and plopped right into the world. Where's the challenge in that? Longtime gamer and SLer Alexandria Brangwin, however, created this truly impressive Second Life cosplay of Tracer from Overwatch the old-fashioned way:

"There are a lot of pre-made full avatars on the Marketplace but they often suck really bad," as she tells me. "They're scanned or lifted from other game files so they miss a lot of fine detail and end up looking very low quality -- even have no animations, no bento hands, not even eye movement... death to the project if you're trying to achieve specific poses." 

So instead, she went virtual world dumpster diving through Second Life's massive library of content looking for parts to recycle:

DeepMind Tech Uses Smartphone Camera to Capture User's Expression & Movement, Then Replicates It on Phone's Avatar in Real Time

From DeepMotion, the AI company which taught NPC avatars how to argue, and how to learn how to dribble basketballs, new avatar technology coming for the Samsung Galaxy S10:

Led by industry experts from Blizzard, Disney, Pixar, Ubisoft, and Microsoft, DeepMotion leverages the latest in AI technology and robotic control theory, allowing users to instantaneously animate their emojis simply by moving in front of the phone’s camera. With DeepMotion’s Digital Avatar simulation, users will now be able to use their body to express themselves more fully. The new technology will bring body language to emoji communications, which to date have been limited to facial expressions and simple head movements. Users can now capture body movement using the rear camera, or upper body movement using the front-facing camera.

More here, another video below. The demo video leaves me a bit confused as to how the avatar interacts on the phone itself -- in an app, or on the default screen, or what -- but if the real time motion capture works as well as represented, I'm impressed. And plan to check this out in person next week at GDC.

8 Posts on Confronting Real Racism in Virtual Worlds to Read on MLK Day

Black Second Life User Shares Real & Virtual Experiences With The Confederate Battle Flag:

"I wish people knew how much it hurt to see the flag on TV and in places which are supposed to represent everyone in a fair manner, like court houses. I have been to places in Second Life which had the flag up... We always knew what it meant. That we and others with our color are not wanted around that area. It is like putting up a 'Caucasian only' sign. I have a lot of bad memories with that flag. Like walking past homes of people who have them proudly displayed in front of their homes... while at the same time, the mean stares we got just for walking by their home."

Cajsa's Choices: Celebrating Fantastic Black Avatar Portraits For Juneteenth

 I convinced a couple other friends of mine who are Black to join SL back in 2007, but they were disappointed in the quality and variety of  black skins back then and left the game. It’s true, most skins were shades of bronze, and a deep ebony like this one would be hard to find. I love the way the highlights define this picture so powerfully, the highlights on her hair, her face, and her top. A skin designer told me back then that the reason skinners didn’t make dark black skins is that people didn’t buy them and people didn’t buy them because they didn’t know how to photograph them. 

What People Should Ask Themselves Before Roleplaying As Black Avatars:

If you aren't black, the luxury of throwing on a black skin and playing black should make you think about why you want to do that. Do you know black peoples IRL? Do you think they would be ok with what you do in SL? Do you actively call out the racist thoughts and behavior people have towards a black person, or do you just [say] "LOL I'm white"? Do you think it's cool to be black, but IRL you engage in black shaming, like saying things are "ghetto" or "hood"?

Avatar Skin Tone Experiment Reveals Strong User Preference For Whiteness:

In virtual worlds and MMOs where most aspects of avatar appearance can be instantly changed by a few button clicks -- including gender and skin tone -- do we leave our real world attributes and preferences behind? After noting that avatars with lighter skin seem to get more likes than darker ones on Flickr, I enlisted the help of Mandy Smith, a popular SL fashion photographer on Flickr, to take two photos of the same avatar in the same pose in the same location, with the only difference being her skin tone...

Lack of Avatar Racial Diversity in an MMO Makes Black Users More Likely to Create White Avatars & Hide Their Real Race, Academic Study Suggests:

Lee gathered 56 study participants — half identifying as white and half identifying as black. She then had them read a fabricated magazine story titled “Meet the Coolest ‘Second Life’ Residents.” The eight “Second Life” avatars profiled in the story were either all white, in the low-diversity scenario, or an equal mix of white, black, Hispanic and Asian, in the high-diversity scenario. She then had them perform two tasks: Create and customize their own virtual avatars, and rate their willingness to reveal their real racial identity through the appearance of their virtual avatar. She found that black participants reported less willingness in the low-diversity scenario, and that they also created whiter avatars, as judged by objective raters.

Three classics after the break:

Second Life Users Show How Their Avatars Have Evolved Over Many Years

Pictured: Laura Blues

Strawberry Singh has a fun new challenge for SLers to show how their avatar looks in the new year, versus how it did many years ago; it's a fun illustration of all the graphical upgrades made to the platform over many updates. (Some of them inadvertently leading to a tragedy of the commons.) Here's some of my favorites posted to her thread, including that of Strawberry herself: