New World Notes

Awesome Second Life Avatar Cosplay Tributes to Legendary Authors Sylvia Plath, Karen Blixen, and Virginia Woolf

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

Cecilia Nansen has created a special photo album offering her photographic tributes to her favorite authors and a favorite photographer. I didn’t need her description to recognize the iconic features of Virginia Woolf. She even captures how Woolf seemed to be looking inward, interrogating herself as well as the world around her. Click here to compare with the IRL photo.

For more amazing avatar author tributes, click here:

Since TikTok Can Turn Users Into Avatarized Versions of Themselves, Will the Proteus Effect Kick In?

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As a general rule, when people create a virtual world avatar for themselves, most tend to opt for a conventionally idealized version of their offline selves  -- younger, more symmetrical, in better shape, and so on. Basically, hotter.

TikTok, everyone's favorite social media app controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, has taken that to the next inevitable stage with Bold Glamour, a new machine language-driven augmented reality filter which basically avatarizes a person's real appearance in real time: 

The Bold Glamour filter, now used over 16 million times since its release last month, contours your cheekbone and jawline in a sharp but subtle line. It also highlights the tip of your nose, the area under your eyebrows, and the apples of your cheeks. In addition, it lifts your eyebrows, applies a shimmer to your eyelids, and gives you thick, long, black eyelashes. It has, as the name implies, a glamorous effect. The aesthetic itself is impressive. However, the really amazing thing is how well it functions. The filter doesn’t glitch when your face moves or if something like a waving hand interrupts the visual field, as filters usually do. 

There's obvious concerns that this is yet another social media app that will only worsen users' self-esteem, especially for vulnerable young women and girls.

At the same time, I'm also curious how Bold Glamour might relate to the Proteus Effect. That's the phenomena discovered by Stanford researchers who found that when people embody an attractive avatar in a virtual world, they themselves exhibit more confidence in real life:

Readings: Why The Fight for Real World Racial Equality is Just as Crucial in the Metaverse

It's a common misconception that virtual worlds are a safe escape from our offline prejudices. This is sometimes true but often not the case. In fact, the anonymous nature of metaverse platforms and other virtual worlds can make expressions of racism worse - especially when avatars are based around a realistic human model. Our best hope is being aware of that reality, and preparing for it.

Here's some New World Notes readings on theme:

Tweeko's Photos Beautifully Illustrate the Vivid State of SL Avatar Expression

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

Tweeko loves to shoot her pics from dramatic angles that reveal her subject in a new light. Take “That’s just the way” where she shoots from below, from her feet toward her head, the opposite as more usual pics. The lighting casts all the graphic elements into a deep shadow and lets us focus on her face, her outstretched arm, and her canted legs. I love this picture and it drew me in to take a deeper dive into her photostream. She linked to “Make Me Feel” by Janelle Monae to go with the picture. [Click here to listen]

For more of her framing the body at different angles, click here:

Monday Memory: Metaverse Artist, Grieving For Her Dead Husband, Recreates Him as an Avatar

First published in 2008, "The Husband That Eshi Made" is an essential New World Notes story of how the virtual world can connect us with people in the material realm, even long after they're gone: 

[M]emories of her late husband] wracked her in the grocery store, on the second anniversary of Glenn’s passing.  Since then, Eshi had become a metaverse artist of some acclaim, creating a concert hall made of light, and an evening gown made of fire, among other wonders.  Which is probably why her next stop after the store was her computer. 

“I felt so powerless and alone,” as she recalls, “that I told myself, ‘You know, it might be a sick thing to do, a pathetic thing to do, whatever-- but if I cannot have this guy in real life, I will MAKE him in Second Life.'”

His widow re-created him as best she could-- rather, Eshi Otawara remade herself, transforming her avatar to look like her husband.  And when she was done remaking him, she took Glenn on a tour through Second Life.

She took him skydiving in Straylight. She took him to Ruta Maya for a butterfly ride. “I get to do things with his pixel body that he'd be doing if he were alive,” as she puts it.  She even gave him a flat belly, something she’d known he’d wanted for some time. “I am sure he was cracking up in whatever form he exists now,” she says. 

I ask Eshi what it’s like to become the avatar version of Glenn.

“Like he is hugging me,” she says. “I miss his face most. I used to stare at him all the time.”

Read the rest here.

LOOK: Artist Blends Real Life Photos of Herself With Her Second Life Avatar in Midjourney to Amazing Effect

Five faces of Whiskey Monday and her IRL owner -- via her Flickr

You can create an avatar based on yourself in Midjourney, but famed Second Life artist Whiskey Monday went a step further, combining multiple images of her SL avatar with photos of herself in real life to create an incredible new persona. 

"I put my RL pics first, and then it generated a Midjourney version of me," Whiskey explains. "Then I added SL pics, and did the same thing, and then I blended them all in several steps. I found that Midjourney doesn't do well with glasses, so I tried an older pic without glasses." (See above.)

In the process, she learned something about Whiskey in SL and Whiskey IRL:

"I used to try hard to make my avatar look like RL me. But over the past couple of years, I’ve stopped caring so much and have just played with new faces for Whiskey. I think it would be interesting to try this again with an older Whiskey face. But what I learned this round is that I still have a certain look, even though Whiskey is less like Jenn." (I.E. Whiskey's offline owner.)

Here's some other variations courtesy Ms. Day:

Midjourney Can Turn Your IRL Photo Into a Supercool Avatar - Here's How

Update, 6:35pm PT: I'm having trouble replicating this process with my own photo. If you have advice/tips, please post in Comments! 

Update 2, 11/18: Finally got this to work on my own photo. The original instruction included brackets and quotation marks but those aren't necessary when communicating with Midjourney.

The photo at top left is Nick Yee, founder of gamer market research firm Quantic Foundry; the others are variations of Nick in different genres, as interpreted by Midjourney. 

"It was always possible to do image-based prompts in Midjourney," Nick explained on social media recently, "but they used to be treated very loosely and couldn't be used to replicate faces. The newest version has much stickier image-based prompting."

Here's how you do that: Find a photo of yourself online, and then enter something like this into Midjourney's image prompt:

/imagine <image link> fantasy-hunter-warrior

/imagine <image link> futuristic-cyberpunk-hacker

/imagine <image link> captain-america

(Or instead of Captain America/cyberpunk/etc., whatever evocative genre terms you want to use, of course.)

The results are pretty impressive, especially since AI image readers have a notorious problem with racial bias.

Female Users of Virtual Worlds Get Bodyshamed About As Much As They Do Offline (Comment of the Week)

Great rant from reader "Nadeja", leaping off from my interview in CNN about prejudice against non-attractive human avatars -- specifically, on how it impacts female users in virtual worlds:

Sadly, it's true.

Also it's more than just being fat or slim.

I had messages from guys commenting on the physical appearance of my avatar (i.e. various body parts) and my outfits too, grumpily and selfishly comparing that with their own personal tastes, [as] if the only purpose of women's avatars (and I suspect also the purpose of women in real life) were to please them.

That "no fat chicks" sign, too, was indeed targeting women: nobody cared if guys were fat or slim. I don't mean that guys have no issues looks-wise (as [reader] Penny says, height for them), but there is a lot of pressure on women in terms of what they look like.

Although I usually receive compliments, my avatar has been bodyshamed for my thighs being "too fat".

Someone else bodyshamed in a very paternalistic way my same avatar for being "too much skinny".

Therefore, besides being selfish, is also foolish, because beauty standards are so subjective.

But it is worse than that.

If you make your avatar based on your real life appearance and you have little self-esteem already, that social pressure and comments don't help and you may end up looking at yourself in the RL mirror, feeling insecure and wondering how much obese or anorexic you look, even though you are neither. When you are exposed to this in real life, some girl ends up actually anorexic. But even if it's only a virtual world, it contributes, especially if your avatar is like yourself. Another drop, and another drop... So it's also toxic and can have consequences.

Since it's silly, you can ignore that, right? It's not so simple.

Nadeja explains why, also addressing my point that the most popular metaverse platforms, Fortnite and Roblox, do not have realistic avatars, but cartoonish or LEGO-like ones (respectively): 

I Tell CNN Why Realistic Avatars Bring Real Prejudice to the Virtual World

"Virtual body-shaming: Why the metaverse won't fix our IRL beauty standards" is a thoughtful CNN article partly inspired by a New World Notes story from 2017, about full-figured avatars protesting a fat-shaming Second Life store. I largely lay the blame on the arrival of mesh-based avatar enhancements, which placed a premium on realistic human appearances. Because the more realistic human avatars become, the more our offline prejudices around physical appearance are provoked. As I told reporter Oscar Holland:

"Up until then, there was definitely much more tolerance for diversity of avatar types... But putting a premium on highly realistic, beautiful avatars amplified existing prejudices that we took from the real world into the virtual world." For those users whose avatars fall "outside the norm," incidents of harassment still happen "all the time," Au added. "Anyone with a large avatar is going to get at least a few nasty comments."

It's the reverse side of the "Proteus effect" first observed and coined by researcher Nick Yee: The more attractive our avatars, the more confident the avatar's owner becomes. But by the same token, the more those attractive avatars are realistic, the more our real world biases can come roaring into the virtual world.

 

Here's the full article I wrote back in 2017, excerpted below:

Monday Memory: How Real World Racism Invades Virtual Worlds Through Realistic Avatars

On the bottom right column, I'm starting to add classic New World Notes posts from over the years, most of them written as an embedded avatar journalist. Today's post is "The Skin You're In", a story which illustrates how racism crosses into the virtual world through realistic avatars and customized avatar "skins":