New World Notes

Why Minecraft is an Example of Pass-Through Technology: Amber Case

Philip Rosedale and I were just discussing the challenge of creating user interfaces for virtual worlds, and this post on pass-through technology by my colleague futurist Amber Case, really helps crystalize why Minecraft's UI is so powerful (and successful):

All Minecraft’s on-screen UI functions are based around the game’s initial core purpose: Use your creativity and gathering skills to Survive a night against the Creepers — in-game enemies that you must build defenses against in order to have another day of gameplay.

That way, players can remain focused on learning all the game’s functions and how they relate to each other, all for the purpose of surviving and defeating the Creepers and the world’s other attacking beasts. It’s only after this that players realize that the UI they first learned for survival purposes can also be leveraged to thrive — creating beautiful and ambitious homes for themselves, or even the collaborative artworks with other players, all of which helps make Minecraft enormously popular over a decade after launch.

Minecraft's user interface is actually pretty complicated, but its singular purpose makes it become, with repeated usage, intuitive and pass-through:

 

Despite Widespread Tech Layoffs, Metaverse Platforms Currently Have 800+ Job Openings

With news that Microsoft is shutting down its VR metaverse platform AltspaceVR, along with widespread layoffs across most of the major tech companies, you might assume the Metaverse as an industry is also feeling the string.

Not so much.

On a quick tally of leading metaverse platforms in terms of active users, along with promising metaverse startups I've written about recently, I'm seeing nearly 800 current job openings at minimum. (And by the way, Microsoft and Minecraft developer Mojang still currently have 6 Minecraft-related job openings.) 

Here's links to these job openings available as of today, January 24, 2023:

Roblox, the market leader among metaverse platforms in terms of users, currently has 194 job openings.

Epic Games, developer of Fortnite/Fortnite Creative, currently has 368 job openings.

Rec Room, the most popular metaverse platform among Quest 2 users, currently has 45 job openings.

VRChat, the best next gen metaverse platform, currently has 19 job openings.

Naver Z, developer of mobile metaverse platform Zepeto, currently has 14 job openings.

Lockwood Publishing, the game studio behind Avakin Life, currently has 7 job openings.

Garena, the creator of Freefire, a Fortnite-like metaverse platform that's huge in Asia/South America, currently has 54 job openings.

There's also at least 150 job openings in promising startups featured by New World Notes, including:

How to Import a Minecraft World Into NeosVR With Mineways; UPDATE: Added GitHub Resource

Update, 6/9: This is the Substrate fork on Github that Frooxius created for this Minecraft import.

Here's more info on how Frooxius, lead developer of the crowd-funded social VR project NeosVR, seemingly reverse engineered a version of Minecraft and imported it into his world:  He didn't actually reverse engineer a version of Minecraft.

"It's using a Substrate C# library called Substrate (with some updates from me) to read the data [link above - WJA] and figure out which chunks are in the file and then uses another community tool called Mineways to export the chunks as geometry," he explains. "That geometry is then imported into Neos and post-processed with materials, positioning, adding some extra things like light sources where torches are and a culling system to handle large worlds."

And here's how other Neos users can try this out:

Watch, Listen: Minecraft Integrated With High Fidelity 3D Spatial Audio

Earphones on to hear a whole new way of experiencing Minecraft -- integrated with High Fidelity's 3D audio API. This not only makes it possible to talk with players around you on the same Minecraft server, but also experience the world itself in immersive audio, so when Creepers are groaning behind you, it will sound as if they are actually behind you, and when you're walking along a river, it'll sound like the river is literally right beside your computer, and so on: 

Dev Makes Minecraft-Style Real-Time Group Building... in VRChat!

Yes, what you're looking at above is Minecraft-style group building in VRChat. The insanely cool brainchild of "Markcreator" (his VRChat account name), it's now available to play for yourself: Click on his Twitter here for more details and the VRChat teleport link.

It's actually dubbed "Udon Minecraft", with "Udon" being VRChat's scripting language, and to judge by the demo video, it captures all the prim-based group building fun that made Minecraft so massive, transplanted to a new platform.

"The goal was and is to make a playable version of Minecraft in VRChat," Mark tells me, "that supported Minecraft building mechanics in real-time with friends and other players.

If you're a developer, you'll want to read Mark's behind the scenes notes, because he came up with some clever workarounds to make this possible in VRChat. Read on:

Minecraft-Based Metaverse Project Looking for Closed Beta Testers

Last year I wrote about the ambitious Minecraft metaverse project of Kim Nevelsteen, a developer with a literal PhD in Mixed Reality, which enables users to jump from Minecraft world to Minecraft world through teleporters. (Watch above). Kim just let me know he's very close to making this project available to the public -- after some closed beta testing.

You can sign up to be a closed beta tester here, but here's some requirements from Kim on what he's looking for:

Man Making Metaverse Connecting Minecraft Servers, Latest Version of Doom

If you're interested in making the metaverse, Kim Nevelsteen is a man you probably want to follow. A developer with a literal PhD in Mixed Reality, Nevelsteen is creating practical applications of metaverse technology -- most recently, as featured above, this metaverse of connected Minecraft servers, enabling users to jump from world to world through teleporters.

The code he created to make this possible will be available soon for other developers to play with, and Nevelsteen says it will be relatively easy to set up:

"It should just be configure and run in order to get basic teleportation," as he puts it. "Enhancements to the code could be anywhere from super simple to extremely complex, depending on the functionality sought. It is a distributed system, and so the state space can be potentially large. As an example, consider the difference between querying the network to see if a specific existing server is ready to accept a teleport -- and querying the network to find all servers open to teleportation. The latter example means dealing with: multiple responses, at different response times, limiting broadcast length (for large networks), and more, while providing a responsive interface to the user.

And yes, Nevelsteen has shown an earlier version of this code to Minecraft its publisher. Sad to say, they didn't seem so interested:

Cajsa's Choice: Minecraft Meets The Beatles' Abbey Road

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

I love “Minecraft” by Andrey-S on DeviantArt. The artist has few pictures, but I don’t care. This picture makes up for everything. Ingeniously recreating the iconic Beatles “Abbey Road” cover (compare below) with Minecraft avatars complete with proper shadows on the street reveals a sensibility to fall in love with.

How Linden Lab Could Create a Minecraft-Style Game Mode in Second Life

Last week's Comment of the Week included the toss-off line "Second Life cannot be changed to be like Minecraft," but reader Will Burns has this week's Comment of the Week arguing just the opposite:

I have to disagree that SL cannot be evolved closer to the Minecraft model. You already have object materials. You already have the damage indicator. There's just no compelling reason to use them. This is because they were never fully fleshed out and implemented as their own options.

That is where LL dropped the ball. Evolving those already existing attributes and giving them purpose baked into the very nature of SL experience itself and not an arbitrary or superficial addition.

By creating the need for it, it makes the experience compelling long term.

Effectively, you'll end up with a Game Mode sim option where items have durability, people have various stats like and RPG, materials can be harvested and used for items to determine durability and so on.

This wouldn't be a foreign concept either, because you'd just be building the mechanics of Life2 HUD and its various components into the grid itself native.

For those who want to set their sim to God Mode, then those game rules are suspended in such spaces and SL operates in those zones like it does now. Leave those zones and the mortality may resume.

Then you start new users out in the mortality mode in an area that can help cater to those needs. They will figure it out from there. Just like in Minecraft where nobody specifically tells you to punch trees. It's emergent behavior.

Yes. In Second Life's early days, the damage-enabled Outlands had much of this spirit and consequently, had a vibrant culture of its own. It really wouldn't take much effort or cost for Linden Lab to experiment with creating a whole new Gamer continent, and see if it gets any traction. And there's already numerous Second Life users building Minecraft-type content. One or two developers could do this in a year or two, so what's the downside?

Since Second Life is So Difficult to Use, Linden Lab Should Pay New Users to Learn How to Use It (Comment of the Week)

Minecraft's simple building interface

Great long comment from Will Clip, who's developed popular games for both Second Life users and for other platforms, responding to the point that understanding Second Life's complexity has become a kind of game in itself:

In my opinion Linden Lab could do so much more helping to ease the 1st steps for new users to improve the user retention rate.

I am a content provider in SL myself. Whenever I find some time to create something new I try to come at it with understanding that for most of the people facing something new, something they are not used to is scary and frustrating.

Creators goal should be to make 1st steps for people when they are trying the new product as easy and fun as possible. Good user interface experience makes distinction between a good and bad product.

Often to the point that even if the product looks better looking, most users will prefer to use the product that is easier to use because using something that is easy to operate is already rewarding by itself.

In my opinion Linden Lab should maybe employ or temporary hire an user interface specialists that would look at SL as a whole and come out with some pointers about how to make SL more easy to use. LL should use the new knowledge to organize content developers, give materials (invest, market) and provide new and better tools for content creation in Second Life.

Will says he's seeing similar complexity in Sansar. But unlike most other virtual worlds and social VR platform, Linden Lab has a key advantage. Which leads Will to propose a novel idea: Pay Linden Dollars to new users to learn how to use Second Life. As he writes: