New World Notes

Listen: I Talk About Metaverse Art, AM Radio & Cao Fei for ArtNet's Podcast

What Is the Metaverse? And Why Should the Art World Care? is a new-ish episode from The Art Angle, the podcast from acclaimed art world news site ArtNet. I had a great time (despite an allergy flare-up) talking with host Tim Schneider, who interviews me alongside art curator Tina Rivers Ryan and artist Sara Ludy, whose SL-based art I briefly covered here.

Here's some highlights (though of course the whole thing is a good listen):

• 4:25: History of the Metaverse starting with Habitat in the 80s, ActiveWorlds in the 90s; flowing into its origins in Snow Crash, and my working definition based directly on the novel. From that I talk about Snow Crash's early influence on Second Life, to the founding of Second Life and my writing in it, and the first metaverse hype wave in 2006-2008, when major universities and companies put stakes in the virtual world.
• 13:45: I talk about the art world of Second Life, from the Flickr photographer community that Cajsa covers so well, to acclaimed artists Cao Fei (aka China Tracy) and AM Radio (aka Jeffrey Berg)
• 24:00: My take on blockchain-based metaverse platforms, and the categorical mistake I believe they're making.
• 32:20: The valuable social potential of the Metaverse, versus social media. Fellow guest Tina Rivers Ryan points out some serious potential downsides which I also happen to agree with. I've written frequently, for example, about avatar-based racism that is also problematic in the virtual world.
• 40:15: Second Life's influence on current metaverse platforms, especially VRChat.

Cao Fei's first SL art project below, the machinima I.Mirror, along with links for more reading, and highlights from AM Radio's career:

Exclusive: Upland Real Estate Game Quietly Becoming an Immersive Metaverse Platform With Nearly 300K NFT Owners

Yesterday I mentioned that "nearly all" metaverse platforms built around web3 features (blockchain, NFTs, crypto) have little or no active users. I qualified it that way because I recently found out about a possible exception:

Upland, the mixed reality real estate acquisition game (and the first customer for Linden Lab's Tilia payment service), sells NFTs associated with individual plots of land. And so far, the game/metaverse platform has over 285,000 unique Upland NFT owners. (Screengrab above, as shared with me by the Upland team.)

285K might not seem like much, as compared to say Roblox or Fortnite, but it is massive when compared with the current NFT market. As I noted last January, there are roughly 360,000 NFT owners in the entire world across the main blockchains. But Upland's NFTs, as co-founder Dirk Lueth told me recently, aren't tracked by Cryptoslam and most other blockchain analytics firms.

In other words, Upland reportedly has nearly as many unique NFT owners on its own platform as there are NFT owners across all other main blockchains -- and far more NFT owners than Axie Infinity, The Sandbox, Decentraland, and other wel-known blockchain-based games/metaverse platforms.

Notably, most Upland NFT owners aren't active NFT speculators on other platforms, as is usually the case. According to an internal survey, 65% of Upland NFTs owners don’t own NFTs outside Upland.

Hopefully regular readers are wondering if Upland is even a metaverse platform at all. What with its flat 2D experience for the web and mobile browsers, it's not a 3D immersive virtual world, which is key to the classic metaverse definition. 

That is true. But here's the thing: Now that it has an active user base in the six figures, the company is gradually rolling out immersive virtual world features beneath the Monopoly-esque property game -- starting with a casual 3D racing game that's currently in Alpha. Watch:

FTC Action Against Meta's Acquisition of Within Seems Poorly Placed When Meta is Losing Badly to Rec Room & VRChat

Above: Within's Supernatural on the Oculus store with nearly 10,000 user ratings

Fairly big bombshell just dropped:

The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday filed for an injunction to block Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, from buying a virtual reality company called Within [producer of the highly popular fitness app called Supernatural], potentially limiting the company’s push into the so-called metaverse and signaling a shift in how the agency is approaching tech deals... John Newman, the deputy director of the F.T.C.’s Bureau of Competition, said the agency acted on the Within deal because Meta was “trying to buy its way to the top.” The company already owned a best-selling virtual reality fitness app, he said, but then chose to acquire Within’s Supernatural app “to buy market position.” He called the deal “an illegal acquisition, and we will pursue all appropriate relief.”

Maybe I'm missing something, but Within's Supernatural is nowhere near "the top", even in the Quest 2's ecosystem of some 10-12 million headsets. With nearly 10,000 user ratings in the Oculus store, Supernatural likely has usage in the six figures.

That's not nothing, but claiming that's "the top" misses the big picture: Meta is currently losing the platform war on its own platform. Compare Supernatural's usage with numbers announced by the metaverse platform Rec Room last April:

Matthew Ball Interview: The Metaverse Author On Government Regulation, Advice for Beginners Getting Started & Second Life's Importance to Its Future (Part 2 Of 2)

Update, July 22: Bumped up for weekend reading/conversation!

Read Part 1 of our Q&A here. 

In his book The Metaverse, Matthew Ball touches on Second Life and even speaks with the late, beloved CEO Ebbe Altberg about the dangers of breaking user-generated content through platform updates.

During our Q&A this week we had a chance to chat about what Second Life can teach new metaverse platforms.

“We're discovering so many things about virtual societies and communities, there's so many emergent behaviors, and many of them have been discovered or surfaced before," Matt tells me. "Second Life is such a great example. I was telling you the other day when I was asked that question, Is Second Life over or underrated?

"I think it's underrated, because we and I for a long time underappreciated how many behaviors evolved that actually can’t really happen elsewhere that teach us a lot about what to build, what not to do, and how to speak to users upon which you rely on for an economy and user-generated content. Learning that history is important.”

As to the future, much more of our conversation below: Advice for getting started in metaverse development, the important metaverse news announcements that have come out since his book was published -- and what he'd say about government regulation of the Metaverse, if someone like Senator Elizabeth Warren asked:

Matthew Ball Interview: The Metaverse Author on Mainstream Awareness, Negative Implications, NFTs & Blockchain -- and an Exciting New Vision for Interoperability (Part 1 of 2)

Matthew Ball's The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything is now available in bookshelves and online. (Get it on Amazon here, on Apple Books here, or on Bookshop.org here, which contributes a cut to indy bookstores.)

I've been avidly reading my review copy of The Metaverse over the last couple weeks, and while I feel way too biased to write a full review, seeing as I'm now writing my own book on the topic, I will say this: It's an essential and indispensable resource to understanding the concept, and the key business, technology, and policy facets we need to comprehend now, to create a Metaverse that's truly worthy of the name. 

I spoke with Matt earlier this week, delving into many topics from the book, beginning with what's been expanded on from his online Metaverse Primer (which I wrote about here last year):

"The first and last thirds of the book are entirely new," he tells me. "The first third gets into the history of the Metaverse in science fiction and in virtual game worlds and platforms, why gaming seems to be at the forefront of this next generation of the Internet, defining the Metaverse as I see it, and why it is a successor of state to the Internet rather than just application for experiences on it... 

"There are a few sections that are dramatically different; the hardware section in the Primer is about 600 words; in the book it's 12,000 or 13,000. It's fundamentally deeper and richer, part of which is to explain why the future we hope for VR and AR remains far outside of our grasp, while also looking at the other input devices that we might use, such as holography. The section on payments was dramatically changed to talk about the importance of regulation in the space."

Speaking which, Matt also wrote an entirely new section about how much -- or how little -- blockchain relates to the Metaverse.

"I don't believe that the blockchain is the Metaverse," he puts it to me bluntly, "I don't believe that it's a technical requirement. I think there are some interesting potential applications, but it is so relevant to the discourse that I wrote a chapter trying to explain why people think that, what the various perspectives are, and what may or may not need to change for those perspectives to clarify."

Part 1 of our conversation below, including some of my reader questions about NFTs and negative effects of the Metaverse, and an intriguing new way of thinking about interoperability.

Watch: Guy Recreates Bizarre Images from Dall-E Mini in Fortnite Creative

As a fun companion video to two themes discussed last week, the future of art in the AI era, and the future of 3D creation on next gen metaverse platforms, here's both at the same time: A guy creating builds in Fortnite Creative based on images suggested by Dall-E mini. The images themselves are pretty mild (an alien mountain, Darth Vader celebrating his birthday), so I'd love to see someone try to recreate the more bizarre and nightmare images Dall-E often extrudes from its cursed system.

As demonstrated by the dulcet-voiced Mustard Plays, this is also a good demonstration of the Fortnite Creative tools, which include a huge assortment of prefab mesh objects and primitives, both of which can be imbued with physics and other interactivity. And yes, it also enables multi-user creation, which Mustard Plays leverages to host a collab creation contest -- watch below:  

Philip Rosedale's New Vision for Next Gen Metaverse Content Creation Includes Live, In-World, Multi-User Collaboration -- But Can We Bring It Back?

Philip Rosedale has a pretty fascinating new Medium post based on a presentation he recently made at an unnamed Metaverse work group, laying out a vision for value creation in next gen platforms, primarily based on what worked well (more or less) in Second Life -- Clear Property Rights, Collective Ownership and Participation, a Stable Currency Price, and so on. It includes a call for a feature that was clearly unique and great about 3D content creation in Second Life -- but I'm not entirely sure is feasible, beyond SL and Minecraft:

Support Live Collaboration rather than Offline Editing

Having someone stop by and compliment your work-in-progress is a powerful amplifier for participation, as is the ability to recruit passersby to help with a project. Reducing the time delay between content creation and publishing is effective in both virtual worlds and programming languages (compiled versus interpreted). A great temptation in virtual worlds is to take advantage of powerful offline editors (Unity, Blender, etc) and standardized file formats by creating an edit/publish sequence. Roblox, VRChat, and Sansar are examples of worlds taking this approach. But the problem is both that the creator cannot enjoy social interaction while working, and also that multiple creators cannot then work together on one place or project.

Something magical was surely lost when our focus moved away from live, immersive social creation, and we seemed to resign ourselves to offline editing as the inevitable default.

But is it really possible to build an in-world collaborative creation system, where the content is also mesh and optimized?

Philip believes so, when I ask him, pointing to Sony Dreams as an example:

Listen: I Chat About the Future of Music on Metaverse Platforms With Water & Music -- Annotations & Links Below!

Wagner James Au · The Metaverse & Music -- Wagner James Au w/Water & Music

Starting around 7 minutes in, here's audio from my Twitter Spaces chat last week on the Metaverse and music with Water & Music, a music business research DAO collective, spinning off on this huge research paper they just published on the topic (and that I was interviewed for). After the group's intro, our conversation starts at about 15 minutes in. 

Some highlights by time code:

July 27: HBO Debuts "We Met in Virtual Reality", Joe Hunting's Crowdfunded Documentary Devoted to the VRChat Community -- Here's the Trailer!

VRChat/metaverse lovers, pencil in July 27 on your calendar, because that's when HBO is premiering "We Met in VR", Joe Hunting's feature length documentary devoted to the VRChat community. Watch the trailer above, featuring some VRChat worlds that have also been covered here, including the deaf community which teaches sign language in VRChat, and Udon Tycoon, an insanely ambitious roller coaster construction sim.

I've been chatting with Joe since January, when his crowdfunded documentary debuted at the Sundance film festival:

What Should I Ask Matthew Ball About His Book The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything?

Matthew Ball's much-anticipated book The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything is launching on July 19th, and my preview copy finally arrived. (Links to buy it below.) I've already started delving into it, and even after just a couple chapters in, have roughly two dozen follow-up questions I can't wait to discuss with him. 

Speaking of which, I'm interviewing Matthew about the book next week amid his huge press tour. (He's appearing in LA on July 20 with Mythic Quest/Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Rob McElhenney, for instance.)

What questions should I be sure to ask to Matthew Ball? Post in Comments, and I'll include as many as possible in our Q&A.

Here's video from my conversation with Matt last year, on the metaverse platform Breakroom, along with several store links: