New World Notes

Zoom Website Traffic Jumps 15% Since Coronavirus Outbreak, Social VR Usage So Far Seems Flat

It's news that probably won't surprise the many millions now working from home since the last few weeks, but here it is: Traffic to the website of Zoom, the remote conferencing services company, has strongly jumped since the end of January, when the WHO first declared the Coronavirus to be an international health concern. According to SimilarWeb, traffic jumped to about 14 million visits total at the end of February, representing 15% in growth. Curiously, the competing service Skype has seen a slight decline in web traffic over the same time. My interpretation: Since Skype is a much older service (founded in 2003, versus Zoom in 2011), most active Internet users already have Skype, and are visiting Zoom for the first time to download the client as they prepare to do remote work.

At New World Notes, we've been wondering if we'd also see a rise in online virtual world/social VR activity. But so far, not so much. Take a look:

Could Linden Lab Save Second Life With A Streaming Service? A Former OnLive Producer Estimates the Costs

Pictured: OnLive service SL Go streaming Second Life on an Android tablet in 2014

We talked about the problems of "updating" Second Life earlier this week (many readers are still talking about it!). Briefly summarized, Second Life runs on a 3D graphics engine that's nearly 20 years old, while upgrading to a new engine, such as Unity, would break most existing content: Creators would have to re-upload their mesh content, while prim-based creations would simply be lost. (And many classic SL regions are mostly or completely prim-based.) 

There is, however, a third option to save SL as it exists: Give it an OnLive-type streaming subscription service, as it used to have four years ago. OnLive subsequently went defunct and was sold to Sony, but most everyone who did use OnLive's SL Go testified to its awesomeness: It not only enabled streaming of high quality graphics on iOS and Android tablets with little lag, it made using Second Life on low-end PC/Mac laptops a dream. (I helped launch SL GO as a consultant/media partner, but now that that disclosure is no longer necessary, I can affirm that, yes, it really was that great.)

But how much would it cost for Linden Lab to fund the deployment of a streaming service of its own? I put that question to Dennis Harper, formerly the Senior Product Manager at OnLive who led the design and production of SL Go, and is now a VP at analytics/entertainment company Asteri.  Dennis tells me the scaling costs would be challenging, but then lays out a couple scenarios where it would work:

With Improbable Struggling, the Dream of Truly Massive, Single-Shard MMOs Also Seems in Peril

Well this is disappointing:

London tech startup Improbable saw its operating losses rise by almost two thirds to £63.7m million [i.e. about $82 million] in the year ending May 31 2019... Improbable is currently working on its SpatialOS cloud computing solution, which enables larger and more complex simulations. The poster child was Bossa Studio's Worlds Adrift [pictured], an MMO that permanently marked the consequences of player actions, such as wrecked ships and felled trees, and had a wildlife system that saw creatures continuing to more around and reproduce even when all players were offline.

But the studio announced in May 2019 it would be closing the game after just over a year in Early Access.

This was followed by the closure of Spilt Milk Studios' Lazarus and Mavericks: Proving Grounds developer Automaton Games entering administration. Without these titles, the only visible games applications of SpatialOS are Midwinter Entertainment's Scavengers and NetEase's Nostos.

This despite $500 million in funding! But quick correction to the Gameindustry.biz report above: Seed, the highly ambitious massive strategy MMO from Klang Games (which I consult for on occasion), is another SpatialOS project and is still strongly chugging along toward release, last I heard. 

Still, the larger trend is not encouraging:

Philip Rosedale Tracks Mouse Latency on Google Stadia & NVidia NOW

Philip Rosedale recently posted a cool hack for tracking system latency: Basically, you perform an action with the user interface, then track how long it takes for the system to register that action by recording cause and effect on your smartphone in super slo-mo, then counting up the total video frames, and doing some basic math:

Multiple the number of frames counted by 4.1 to give you the number of milliseconds of round-trip latency. For example, if you counted 10 frames, that would be 41 milliseconds.

He recently tested mouse latency on the new streaming services Google Stadia and NVidia NOW (see above) running one of the Witcher games, and came up with this startling figure:

How That Amazing Unity Demo Dissolving Reality Into Pixels Was Made

Last week's post on Ruben Fro's amazing "melting reality" Unity demo dazzled many. Fortunately, he recently shared with me some of his creative process that made it possible:

"So, I’m using 360 cameras to record streets and daily life, then I use a series of scripts to analyze all the frames, choose the best ones and do further optimizations before sending everything to the photogrammetry pipeline that recreates a point cloud model. After that I’m running it in Unity using a geometry shader I developed to render point clouds in a more cinematic way."

The effect isn't merely meant to be visually impressive, but also evocative of how we experience reality:

Watch: Amazing Video Made In Unity Converts Reality Into Dissolving Pixels

Dissolving Realities Vietnam #1 from Ruben on Vimeo.

In today's mind-melting demo, a Vietnamese street seems to dissolve into unreality right before our eyes. Created by Ruben Fro, who captured and converted the real location into a 3D data model through photogrammetry, then ran that through Unity 3D, where reality becomes a point cloud that can be melted into its underlying pixels at a whim.

Watch: Brain-Melting Unity Demo Turns Polaroid Photos Into Slices of Interactive, Manipulable Reality

It's difficult to describe what's happening in this astounding Unity demo by game design student Matt Stark, but I'll go ahead and try: He's created an interactive world where the user can take a "Polaroid photo" of the surroundings -- and once taken, the photo becomes its own little interactive, manipulable, physics-enabled world.

As you might expect, Mark tells me he created this effect for a puzzle game he's working on. "I think the puzzles could be open-ended, allowing the player to approach them creatively," he tells me. "I'm at the stage of brainstorming level mechanics and trying to decide what the anatomy of a puzzle in the game should be." 

As for achieving this effect, here's how he does it:

Jimmy Wales on WT Social, His New Social Network: Pseudonyms Allowed on the Platform's "Real Names Culture"

WT:Social is a new and much-needed social network led by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, which unlike Facebook, Twitter, and the other market leaders, won't make money on targeted (often intrusive or dishonest). Instead, like Wikipedia, it'll be run on donations. It's not however affiliated with the online encyclopedia. As Wales puts it to me: "This is just me having fun trying to invent something new." 

You can go here to sign-up  as Wales and his team scale up the system to take on more new users.  "[We have] only 2 developers who are mainly scrambling to keep the site running," Wales explains. "I am hopeful that the waiting time will end in a few weeks time as we beef up our infrastructure (again!)"

While Facebook in particular has ongoing controversies with real name identities, and the company's insistence on them, Wales tells me WT:Social will have a more nuanced approach to that question. When I ask him, "What's WT Social's policy around anonymous/pseudonymous user identities, such as game handles?", here is his take in full:

Struggling Stadia Should Shift Away from Twitch Games to Virtual Worlds

Google recently launched Stadia, its OnLive-like streaming service for AAA games, and to no one's surprise who's ever been involved with streaming services like OnLive (like, um, say, me), the reaction so far has not been surprising:

• Google’s Stadia Just Ain’t It (Kotaku)
• Google Stadia Wants You to Replace Your Video Game Console. Don’t. (New York Times)
• Google Stadia is here, but there are still huge issues (CNN)

The amazing thing is this was entirely a foreseeable reaction. Stadia is leading with action-oriented AAA games where split second reaction times are essential to gameplay. Which brings up the core problem with streaming services for that kind of content:

There is simply. No. Fricking. Way. To get past. The speed. Of goddamn light. I mean seriously. Dude:

Apple's AR Plan Per The Information: Headset in 2022, Glasses in 2023

Insider tech industry news site The Information has a great scoop on Apple's plans for augmented reality (subscription required), and given The Information's consistently reliable track record, I'm inclined to believe it:

Apple is aiming to release an augmented-reality headset in 2022 and a sleeker pair of AR glasses by 2023, The Information has learned... Apple’s headset, code-named N301, will offer a hybrid of AR and VR capabilities, according to people familiar with the device. It resembles the Oculus Quest, a Facebook virtual reality headset released earlier this year, but with a sleeker design, these people said. Cameras will be mounted on the outside of the device, allowing people to see and interact with their physical surroundings, they said. Apple wants to make heavy use of fabrics and lightweight materials to ensure the device is comfortable to wear for extended periods of time, executives said in the presentation in October.

... In contrast, Apple’s AR glasses, code-named N421, present bigger technical challenges than the headset and are further from release. They are meant to be worn all day, and current prototypes look like high-priced sunglasses with thick frames that house the battery and chips, according to a person who has seen them.

This report contradicts earlier rumors that Apple's AR glasses were coming next year and would be third party (which seemed believable to me at the time). Then again, Apple pushing an AR/VR headset back to 2022 is a good idea, especially if Oculus Quest sales continue to disappoint in the short term; that gives Apple time to reschedule the release of their own headset, as needed.

Another tidbit from The Information addresses AR's "Glasshole" problem -- i.e., how do you project information onto glasses in a social situation without the user appearing to be a disconnected jerk ignoring everyone around them? Apple's apparent solution: