New World Notes

Listen: Longtime SLer Gidge Uriza Featured in Leslie Jamison's NPR Interview

NPR just featured an interview with acclaimed writer Leslie James, whose new book of essays Make It Burn, Make It Scream features an excerpt from her widely-discussed 2017 Atlantic Monthly story on Second Life. She reads an excerpt featuring SL veteran Gidge Uriza:

Can You Make Your High Fidelity App Avatar Look Like Your SL Avatar?

I mean I guess? This is what I get when I use the new High Fidelity smartphone app (free on Apple's App Store here; on Google Play here), take a requisite real life selfie, and then modify him to look like "Hamlet Au", my avatar in Second Life. (Which is, in turn, a variation of what I look like in real life, only dressed up like Tom Wolfe.)

As you might have guessed, this is part of High Fidelity's transition from making a metaverse to first creating a kind of "metaverse for Slack" online work space. So as High Fidelity founder Philip Rosedale explains, these are specifically a kind of augmented reality avatar merging real life identity with a virtual one:

We’ve seen the power of personalized avatars at creating a sense of presence, especially for teammates who are physically remote from one another. Whether they’re hopping into a private quiet space for a quick 1:1, meeting in a conference room or gathering in a cafe for coffee, avatars that are recognizable make communication easier and more organic. 

They’re also practical. Non-human avatars are an amazing way to express your creativity, but they may not work well in a professional context. Using an avatar that resembles you also eliminates the self-consciousness around video calls — no more fretting about messy hair or need to worry about that toothpaste dribble on your shirt. 

This strikes me as the wrong direction to take workspace avatars. Almost by definition, the kind of companies most likely to be interested in using 3D avatars in a work environment would be in high tech, gaming, marketing, media, and other industries where there's a premium on personal creativity. One whole point of  whimsical avatars is they're a great way of breaking the social ice between strangers and acquaintances. (Think a big Halloween costume party, but online.) Why get rid of that?

Anyway, check out Philip Rosedale's High Fidelity avatar below. Where his Second Life avatar famously had a handlebar mustache, codpiece, and leather chaps, his HiFi avatar looks more like Philip Rosedale if there was a Japanese anime biopic of Philip Rosedale:

Philip Rosedale's Case for Adding 3D Avatars to Online Work - My Take

Last May we talked about High Fidelity's pivot from building the metaverse to creating a kind of interim "virtual world for Slack" application, and now here's founder Philip Rosedale blogging his case for making that switch:

Trying to make eye contact in video calls has always been awkward at best. If you look directly into the camera, you can’t see your friend. If you look at the screen, you’ll appear to be looking below your friend’s line of sight... 

Avatar technology is a huge step up over video calls. In VR, you can be anything, and while most of us will opt to look like our physical selves, we may also use it to transform our identities completely — ushering in a new era of “blind” job interviews, where the interviewer can’t see sex, color or class. We’ve already built the tools. Let’s put avatars to work. 

I can argue Philip's case in both directions:

On the pro side, there's a whole generation in their teens who grew up owning 3D avatars (Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, etc) and are soon joining the workforce; they'll not only be comfortable with having a 3D avatar in an office setting, they might even expect one on some level.

On the con side, Philip might be over-applying his experience with 3D avatars in Second Life, to 3D avatars in general:

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: