New World Notes

Tim Sweeney Has an Epic Vision for an Open Metaverse -- But Unanswered Questions "Who Needs It?" & "Who Wants It?" Remain

Master VR podcaster Kent Bye has a valuable Twitter thread on a SIGGRAPH 2019 talk by Epic's Tim Sweeney, who just laid out his vision for an open metaverse. (No surprise Epic has plans to build one, as that was evident when the company rolled out user-creation tools for Fortnite last year.) In opposition to say, Facebook, Sweeney's metaverse is admirably open and not a walled garden: 

.@TimSweeneyEpic
What is the Metaverse?
Real-time social medium to share experiences & ceators need to be able to create their own stuff.
Needs to have an open economy that participants can participate & survive w free market economics without corporate dystopian control.

— Kent Bye VoicesOfVR (@kentbye) July 30, 2019

As with any other metaverse framework, however, two basic questions (far as I can tell) remain unaddressed:

Libra Has Promise, Says Virtual Currency Expert/Blockchain Skeptic Adam Frisby, But Faces Adoption, Trust & Storage Challenges

Everyone in tech is talking today about Libra, the new blockchain-related cryptocurrency initiative led by Facebook in association with many major companies and organizations. (Read this detailed summary from Josh Constine on TechCrunch.) Assuming it isn't regulated to death by concerned government officials, can it live up to the utopian promises made in its promotional video (see above), while becoming a functional alternative to existing currency system?

"Biggest hole is just whether or not people trust it," virtual currency expert Adam Frisby tells me, in a chat today. "I think some will. Honestly, if it was anyone but Facebook pitching this (even if their stake is a minority one), it'd be way more likely to succeed."

As longtime New World Notes readers know, Adam has been involved as an entrepreneur in virtual world economies for over 15 years, and recently wrote a much-shared VentureBeat essay detailing his skepticism for blockchain. Libra, however, has promise, because (in his words) "it [s]olves a lot of the issues with blockchain, by not really being one."

One interesting point he raises: The industries with the greatest incentive to use Libra now are on the edge of the mainstream economy -- for instance, gambling, online gaming, porn, and the burgeoning legal pot industry in some US states. In my view, their rapid embrace will likely turn Libra into "Vice Coin" -- a brand association which might hamper Libra's adoption by the wider mainstream. (Which is probably not what Facebook and its partners were going for.)

On a technical front, Adam me, the heavy storage requirements may prevent Libra from becoming decentralized. Other challenges remain. For more detail, here's our lightly edited transcript:

Monday Flashback: Slack Began as Work Platform for Making a Virtual World

When listening to my interview with Philip Rosedale, where he talks about creating a virtual world-meets-Slack for distributed work groups, here's a fun irony worth keeping in mind: Slack itself was originally created... in order to create a virtual world. Specifically, Stewart Butterfield's web-based world Glitch. As he told me back in 2011:

“[Glitch] is a game, and not a total open virtual world. There are some tools for creative expression now and more will be added, but anything which would count as ‘user-generated content’ will have to fit within the constraints of the game (without the constraints, there's no game left). So, much of that will be visual customizations (to avatars, houses, locations, etc.) and some of it will be ‘other’ stuff (the non-visual: collaborative music making, player-created games, etc.)”

His development team for Glitch was based around the globe, so they needed a unified communication channel where they could work together, and that's the seed of what eventually became Slack, after the small but much-loved world closed down:

Listen: Philip Rosedale on the Future of VR, the Metaverse, and Building a "Virtual World Meets Slack" Workspace - The New World Notes Interview

Interview starts at about :09 seconds in

UPDATE, 4:40pm: Bumped up for weekend listening/discussion!

Days after Philip Rosedale announced that his social VR company was laying off 25% of its staff and focusing on building Project Lilypad, a cross-platform virtual world for workgroups, I got on a Zoom call with him to talk about that news and related topics. Highlights include news that High Fidelity is coming to Oculus Quest, his thought on the fate of VRChat and other social VR worlds in the wake of this pivot -- and the final word on open work spaces, of which Rosedale was once a prominent advocate.

Timestamps and notes/quotes below:

00:30 Philip and the founding Second Life, my stint as an embedded journalist within it — and walking the virtual world.

01:54: Philip’s mission to build a massive virtual world through High Fidelity and VR headsets — and how the slow adoption of HMDs and their shortcomings for use in work contexts have made it difficult to launch a true Metaverse-type virtual world. Leading to High Fidelity’s pivot to create a cross-platform virtual world-based workspace for teams as a way of growing the market for an eventual Metaverse.

06:20: How High Fidelity’s pivot is like virtual worlds meet Zoom, or a virtual world meets Slack. The challenge of creating an online workspace in the face of open offices — and their opportunity for telecommuting workers, and as a solution to the rises costs of living in tech hubs like San Francisco and New York.  We also delve into the productivity problems inherent in open office spaces, which Philip once advocated. (“Let me go on record and say ‘I was wrong’.”)

12:28: The fate of High Fidelity’s consumer side, in terms of the virtual world and its blockchain-based commerce system. “I’m deeply committed to building the Metaverse… so I’m not spinning down any of that”. That includes plans to release High Fidelity of Oculus Quest soon-ish — date TBD “in the next couple quarters”.

Next: High Fidelity and PSVR, going multi-platform, and how to request early access to Project Lilypad.

Mozilla Adds 3D Creator to Hubs, Web-Based, VR-Ready Virtual Rooms

You can now create scenes for Hubs without leaving your browser!

Spoke is a 3D editor from @mozilla that lets you quickly build 3D environments and share them with your friends.

Check out the new and improved Spoke:https://t.co/5pFzFZJ7pq pic.twitter.com/a8BTQpRYfB

— Robert Long (@arobertlong) May 14, 2019

I haven't played around much with Hubs, Mozilla's web-based virtual room platform, but it's impressively responsive and user-friendly (if rudimentary). And now it comes with Spoke, Mozilla's 3D creator/room editor:

How to Run Minecraft on a Rasberry Pi from the Rays of the Sun - New Mixed Reality Human Wellness Project from Jeff "AM Radio" Berg

Behold, minecraft powered by the sun. Digital isn't just code. "We don't need a generation of coders. We need a generation of digital thinkers..." -Block Breaker @mraspinall pic.twitter.com/GH6PHhlnYX

— Jeff Berg (@parametricshape) April 16, 2019

This is a gloriously geeky project from artist/coder Jeff Berg, famed for many years as the virtual world innovator known only by his avatar, "AM Radio". It's also a virtual world project with a decided mixed reality twist: Running Minecraft purely from solar energy. This is possible with the Rasberry Pi, the single-board computer, which comes pre-installed with Minecraft, and some savvy hacker fu from Berg, who figured out how to do it for well under $200 (price list below).

While running Minecraft from the sun's rays is a cool project in itself, Berg's ultimate goal is to use Minecraft's display environment to indicate the health level of plants in the office, which in turn, will also suggest the wellness levels of the people in the office too. "Plants thrive in a good environment," as he puts, "People thrive in a good environment." (Which is why, in the video, you see sensors hooked up to a plant.)

"I suppose it would end up in charts, spreadsheets and databases," he allows. "With Minecraft however we have the chance to allow anyone at any skill level to explore data in 3D, in context of the spaces they occupy, in a simple and inviting interface for any age that promotes exploration, Design Thinking in spatial contexts, and scenario building." (More on that later in a follow-up post.)

Formerly a UX designer with IBM during his virtual world days, Berg is now digital skills leader for North America at Arup, an engineering and design consultancy. This side project of his is directly connected: "My AM Radio work in Second Life in large part was an exploration in this direction and is related," as puts it. "I have applied for a grant for this research, but will likely to continue on my own with or without funding."

Here's his full step-by-step parts breakdown, with an illustrated schematic:

Want to Play in Pillowfort? As Google+ Goes, Plurk Slumps, and Twitter/Facebook Remain Toxic, a New Social Network Emerges

Pillowfort is a new-ish social network with a charming name that gamers are starting to talk about, especially in the wake of Google+'s official death. (While it never caught on with the public, G+ had a strong fanbase of virtual world users.) Facebook and Twitter's problems with toxic users and bot manipulation remain epic, and Plurk, another social network with a cult following of virtual world fans, has been slumping in recent years. Will they prefer to help build a Pillowfort?

"It seems rather more locked down than Google," says Pillowfort fan, virtual world expert, and social media power user Patchouli. "It doesn't offer Google's +1 Likeish button, it doesn't do Events proper (though you can probably do blogposts listing events and tag them accordingly so that's a workaround), and it hasn't wound its tentacles throughout multiple services like G+ did. It's also lacking in anything resembling 'Social Search'.  You can only look for stuff within Pillowfort. The only connections you can forge with other social networks are direct HTML links in your posts.

"A lot of this is probably a function of how much more work needs to be done to bring Pillowfort close to the standards we're used to in our other socmedia toolset. That and the fact that many social media networks enable cross-network sharing only through mutual contracts (and when these break down, it more often than not turns acrimonious at best - remember when Instagram links suddenly degraded from TwitterCards to obscure HTML links after Facebook bought Instagram out?).

"So in short, G+ refugees will be faced with not having a lot of things, but Pillowfort has core functionality that matches up quite well to what any service without a direct tie-in to the Google ecosystem can probably manage."

So that's what Google+ users can expect. For folks from other social networks:

Company Roaming Planet to 3D Scan Whole Ecosystems to Incorporate Into Unreal-Based Virtual Worlds

When you watch this jaw-dropping video, keep in mind that none of the elements from nature are actually from the real world -- though at one point, most of them were. This is made possible by a company called Quixel, which has been roaming reality for a long time, 3D scanning whatever they saw from the material world they considered worth incorporating into virtual ones:

On our global scanning expeditions, we scan entire biomes and ecoregions to capture everything contained within them. From the smallest blade of grass to the largest cliff, every element is scanned and made fully modular, enabling you to create the most detailed worlds imaginable.

So almost like a 19th century naturalist expedition, except all the samples aren't sent back to museums, but to 3D rendering studios. More on how they made this specific video from the Unreal blog:

DeepMind Tech Uses Smartphone Camera to Capture User's Expression & Movement, Then Replicates It on Phone's Avatar in Real Time

From DeepMotion, the AI company which taught NPC avatars how to argue, and how to learn how to dribble basketballs, new avatar technology coming for the Samsung Galaxy S10:

Led by industry experts from Blizzard, Disney, Pixar, Ubisoft, and Microsoft, DeepMotion leverages the latest in AI technology and robotic control theory, allowing users to instantaneously animate their emojis simply by moving in front of the phone’s camera. With DeepMotion’s Digital Avatar simulation, users will now be able to use their body to express themselves more fully. The new technology will bring body language to emoji communications, which to date have been limited to facial expressions and simple head movements. Users can now capture body movement using the rear camera, or upper body movement using the front-facing camera.

More here, another video below. The demo video leaves me a bit confused as to how the avatar interacts on the phone itself -- in an app, or on the default screen, or what -- but if the real time motion capture works as well as represented, I'm impressed. And plan to check this out in person next week at GDC.

How Sims 4 Content Creators Make a Good Living from YouTube

When we talk about virtual world content creation on New World Notes, we're usually referring to merchants who sell virtual items in Second Life and so on. But FastCompany has an intriguing report of another niche that's spun out of Sims 4 -- creating tiny Sims 4-based houses on YouTube, and making money from the YouTube ads, sponsorships, and merchandise:

To her surprise, she discovered an entire community on YouTube devoted to building elaborate houses in The Sims... she began uploading her own builds, as they’re called, to YouTube under the name Deligracy (she goes by her username, for privacy). Today, she has 810,000 subscribers and even sells merchandise, like sweatshirts, mugs, and phone cases. Deligracy’s channel has become so popular that she quit her job as a junior graphic designer because she was making more money from YouTube. Some of her most popular videos, which get tens of thousands of views, aren’t of the most elaborate houses Deligracy can dream up: Instead, her audience is obsessed with tiny homes.

As a rule of thumb, if your YouTube channel has subscribers in the six figure range, you can make a comfortable full-time living from sponsorships -- and when it gets into the seven figure subscriber range, you can make a very comfortable (as in lawyer's salary and above) living. Notably, Deligracy (and other Sims 4 creators) are focusing on a specific niche -- i.e. tiny houses -- that seems to be drawing lots of viewers from outside the Sims 4 fanbase. 

I.E., here's a tip for talented home builders in Second Life, Sansar, and beyond: Your best market may not be in-world, but on YouTube.