New World Notes

Watch: The Teaser for Alter Ego is Here, and I Have Questions About FOX's Upcoming Avatars-Meet-Masked Singer Show

Back in May, a FOX producer was reaching out to members of the Second Life community (and presumably other virtual world communities) about Alter Ego, an upcoming avatars-meet-Masked Singer reality competition show. Now set to premiere on September 22nd, here's the teaser.

... and here's my questions about it:

Watch: What Reality Would Look Like With Virtual World Lag

I seriously doubt Verizon's 5G network can substantially address this as much as Verizon thinks it can*, but their ad pretty much nails the laggy virtual world experience transplanted to the real world. (Too bad there's no jelly dolls.)

* As my brilliant futurist friend Amber Case points out, rather than 5G being the Internet speed solution many people in tech have hyped it to be, the likelier scenario is phone users simply sponge up most of 5G's excess bandwidth by watching more movies and such, and so overall performance improvements will be relatively mild.

Watch: Skittish Adds Philip Rosedale's High Fidelity Spatial Audio & Other Virtual World-ish Features to Upcoming Playful Space for Online Events

Skittish, Andy Baio's upcoming "playful virtual space for online events" (go here to register for early access) recently added High Fidelity's 3D spatial audio to the platform, so naturally, I had to get a hands-on (ears-on?) demo from Andy -- watch above, but maybe turn the sound down a bit due to my overly booming voice.

So far Skittish is an incredibly charming virtual world-type space for live meetings of all kinds, especially if they lean toward the whimsical -- think Animal Crossing meets Zoom, except your cartoon animal avatar is the one on camera, not you.

Integrating High Fidelity, Andy tells me, "dramatically increases the cross-browser compatibility, audio quality/latency, and scale for concurrent users." This also makes Skittish the first virtual world-type experience using the API to the Philip Rosedale-led spatial audio technology. (At least the first one that I'm aware of.)

Other new features you'll see in my demo with Andy:

Philip Rosedale Proposes Clever Tweak to Yang-Style UBI: Payments in Cryptocurrency that Quickly Decays in Value If Not Spent

Virtual economy pioneer Philip Rosedale recently unveiled a simulation which suggests that a universal basic income -- the kind recently popularized by Andrew Yang -- cannot ultimately prevent widening divides between rich and poor. 

However, that’s not the end of the story.

In a new simulation just posted on his newsletter, Rosedale proposes a pretty ingenious tweak to the UBI concept -- basically, fund the UBI with a transaction tax, and then pay out the UBI itself in a cryptocurrency that decays over time:

To simulate an ideal wealth tax in this simulation (which would have the appealing property of being easy to actually enact and impossible to avoid), you simply make money decay and fund a uniform dividend to everyone...

Using transaction taxes to fund a basic income is supported by real economists as well. This proposal from Economist William Gale at the Brookings institute is to use a 10% VAT tax to fund a basic income, for example. This Cato Institute Study agrees with the idea that consumption taxes are a better way to manage equity than wealth taxes. And political candidate Andrew Yang’s proposed ‘Freedom Dividend’ is funded by a combination of a 10% VAT and a carbon tax.

Creating a cryptocurrency for UBI that decays in value -- let’s call it “UBI Coin” for short -- incentivizes everyone to spend their UBI on goods and services as quickly as possible. This in turn plows more money into the economy, and prevents growing the rich/poor divide that a standard UBI model can cause. 

You can see this in Rosedale’s latest simulation of economic transactions which factors in UBI Coin, where the wealth of each economic player is represented by size and color (Green = rich, Blue = middle, Red = poor). Look:

Compare that to Philip's previous simulation of traditional UBI, where with every transaction, a handful of Greens rapidly become gargantuan, as most everyone else is impoverished. Watch below:

Rosedale, who supported Yang during the primacy race, tells me he’d love to present his proposal to UBI/cryptocurrency advocates like him -- especially as Philip's approach doesn’t necessarily require government approval or resources:

Andy Baio on Skittish, His Charming New Animal Crossing-esque Space for Online Events and Collaborative Creators

Skittish is "a playful virtual space for online events" now in closed beta, the brainchild of beloved tech veteran Andy Baio, a longtime advocate of Internet-driven creativity. As the video teaser above suggests, it combines the whimsical charm of online games like Animal Crossing, with video sharing and other features associated with platforms like Zoom, along with virtual world-type user creation tools and spatial audio chat.

As Andy explains on his blog, it's his bid to create a new kind of virtual event platform for the pandemic age and beyond, synthesizing the online experiences many of us found joy and relief in during the quarantine:

As depressing as most virtual events were, there were three bright spots of creative experimentation happening over the last year:

1. Experimental Events. The brilliant MUD-like environment created for Roguelike Celebration and the ongoing series of LIKELIKE events showed how event spaces could draw inspiration from games to great effect.
2. Proximity Chat. Second Life has supported spatial voice chat for nearly 15 years, but a crop of experimental new platforms started using spatial/positional audio and video to make virtual parties feel more real.
3. Social Games. Approachable games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Among Us, and Fall Guys were breakout stars of the pandemic, giving us new ways to connect to with friends when we couldn’t be together in person.

There are some amazing projects out there, but I started outlining a hybrid of these ideas: an online event venue for large-scale gatherings that used spatial audio, didn’t assume people were comfortable being on camera, with real-time customization of the space, and built in a 3D engine for a more immersive game-like feel.

Go here to apply to become a beta tester. Andy tells me he and his development team are architecting Skittish to host events with very large concurrencies:

Will Real Celebrities Expand Their Brand With AI-Based Clones Like This?

What you're watching above is a video from social media influencer Taryn Southern, except not quite: It's a "clone" of Ms. Southern, created via an AI platform called HourOne.

"We take a small sample of video footage (ideally captured in a studio, as we did with Taryn), and use our proprietary AI algorithms and generative adversarial networks, to generate an exact digital replica of that person," explains Natalie Monbiot, Head of Business at HourOne. "We can then program the digital twin by way of text or voice inputs, to generate new content delivered in an entirely lifelike way. Uniquely, we don’t do any stitching with our characters – they are fully generated, in the cloud, to deliver with flexible and natural facial expressions -- and since the videos don’t need to be ‘handled’ the potential to scale is enormous."

Monbiot estimates it's possible to save 95% of production costs on future videos, using clones this -- since after all, once Taryn's clone is created, a real life studio, camera crew, make-up, lighting, etc. are no longer required. To be sure, there's a certain dead-eye loss of humanity in the transition from biological Taryn to digital Taryn, as you may notice from the video. But Monbiot says HourOne's AI clones will become more lifelike and expressive in future iterations:

"Today we specialize in face-to-camera video with nuanced and natural facial expression and head motion," as she puts it. "You will certainly see bigger ranges of movement and emotion in the coming months."

From the point of view of well-known online personalities like Taryn Southern, not to mention major pop stars, film celebrities, and beyond, this opens up the possibility of their AI clones continuing to perform, endorse products, make press appearances, and beyond, even while their organic selves are sleeping, or on vacation.

New Philip Rosedale Simulation Suggests Limits of UBI On Rich/Poor Divide

What you're looking at above is a follow-up simulation of wealth inequity by Philip Rosedale, who recently created a simulation which showed how a divide between rich and poor will emerge even when everyone starts at a hypothetically equal state, income-wise.

This new simulation basically models the injection of universal basic income -- a solution to the rich/poor divide recently popularized by Presidential candidate Andrew Yang. But as Philip writes, while UBI helps in the short term, his new simulation suggests that the wealth gap quickly starts growing, even with UBI:

Philip Rosedale Created This Amazing Simulation to Explain Wealth Inequity

What you're looking at above is a fascinating simulation from Philip Rosedale, who is known more for simulating virtual worlds. This project, however, is coded to help explain one of the real world's most vexing problems: Why do the rich get richer? While government regulations (or lack thereof) are a major factor, Philip's simulation is coded to illustrate a certain inevitability to wealth inequities, even when people start in a theoretical equal position. As he explains:

Consider a group of a couple hundred people, wandering around in a big town square, where initially everyone has the same amount of money. Whenever two of them run into each other, they make a transaction. To make these transactions random and unbiased, imagine it goes like this: Pick a random amount of money that is less than the amount held by the poorer of the two. Then flip a coin to determine who gives that amount to the other. That’s all there is to it. In the real world we would imagine that the seller gave in return some good or service of the same value to the buyer, but for the purpose of analyzing how wealth moves around over time, we don’t need to bother with that...

But let it run for just a few minutes, and things look very different! Of 250 people, 5 rich ones have all the money (green), and 96% of the population is poor (red). We can call that big one ‘Elon’. The Gini Index is shown at the lower left, which is a widely used way of measuring wealth inequality. Zero means that everyone has the same amount and 100 means that one person has all the money. 

Much more here. I don't know if he intended this, but Philip's simulation is an effective response to Robert Nozick's infamous "Wilt Chamberlain argument", in which the libertarian philosopher made the case that wealth inequities are justified if people starting at an equal state of wealth voluntarily make some of them much richer. (In Nozick's argument, pay a famous basketball player a lot of money to watch him play.) This simulation, by contrast, shows that inequities, once established, become intractable.

If this seems pessimistic, don't worry -- Philip tells me he has a solution in the works:

Google Stadia Will Still Struggle for Traction Even After Studio Layoffs

Google's game streaming service Stadia is cutting its game development arm to focus more on growing the service as a publishing platform:

Google is shifting away from making its own games for Stadia. It’s shutting down studios in Montreal and Los Angeles, and industry veteran Jade Raymond, who Google tapped to lead the game development division, is leaving the company. Stadia vice president and general manager Phil Harrison wrote in a blog post that Google will keep investing in the service.

From that official Google blog post:

We launched Stadia with the goal of making your favorite games instantly available wherever you want to play them. With the recent successful launch of Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia, gameplay on all types of devices, including iOS, growing our slate of YouTube integrations, and our global expansions, it’s clear that Stadia’s technology has been proven and works at scale.

"Scale" is a relative term, because while I've seen Stadia touted as a killer app for highly desired but difficult-to-run games like Cyberpunk 2077, actual active usage of Stadia still seems scant: According to Sensor Tower, the Stadia app was downloaded for use on Android devices only 40,000 times last December. (And that's only after exceeding 1 million Google Play total downloads last June.) At that rate, total usage of Stadia across all platforms is likely well under 5 million monthly users; it will take many millions more active users to make Stadia an appealing alternative to Steam with its 120 million monthly active users.

One key problem: Stadia still isn't offering a unique enough offering for people who already have video game consoles and high-end PCs, and so have little incentive to switch, especially when streaming still isn't ideal for twitch action games where even a split second delay in responsiveness can ruin the experience. My proposal to Stadia remains the same as it was a couple years ago -- focus on being the best platform for streaming virtual worlds and MMOs:

Mandalorian Made on Massive LED Screens So Actors Reflect The Virtual Light

You probably know already that the visuals for the Disney streaming show The Mandalorian are created in the Unreal 3D engine, but this Vox explainer video shows you how those virtual spaces are integrated with the actual, physical cast: Not through green screen but via giant, curving LED displays, which effectively wrap the actors in a virtual world. Technically more efficient than green screen, another advantage of this approach is that the actors in these shots are illuminated by virtual light. So if the cast is, say, standing there watching a twin star sunset on Tatooine, the warm light on their faces really is cast by the virtual suns. (Also super important when an actor is already wearing a costume with reflective surfaces, as with Mando in the show that bears his name.)