New World Notes

Watch: NVIDIA System Converts Real Life Into a Virtual World -- But Probably Won't Replace Actual Virtual Worlds

Using a complex system of algorithms which marketers insist on calling "AI" (making my teeth grind in the process), engineers at NVIDIA have made it possible to convert real world video into a 3D virtual world:

The network operates on high-level descriptions of a scene, for example: segmentation maps or edge maps, that describe where objects are and their general characteristics, such as whether a particular part of the image contains a car or a building, or where the edges of an object are. The network then fills in the details based on what it learned from real life videos. The demo allows attendees to navigate a virtual urban environment that is being rendered by this neural network. The network was trained on videos of real-life urban environments. The conditional generative neural network learned to approximate the visual dynamics of the world such as lighting, and materials. Since the output is synthetically generated, a scene can be easily edited to remove, modify, or add objects.

My first thought was, "Hundreds of level and map designers are soon gonna be out of a job." My second thought was: Don't be dense. 

Magic Leap Launches Avatar Chat With AR Chatroom & Media Sharing, Cartoonish, Low-Detail Avatars

Continuing in its now familiar "Where's the fricking whale we were promised?" theme, Magic Leap just announced Avatar Chat with media and browser sharing features in (what looks to be) a small, augmented reality chatroom setting. If you were hoping to see vivid recreations of your friends as full featured 3D avatars displayed right in front of you, seeming to be sitting on your couch or resting against a wall or whatever, this is not for you: The avatars are extremely low-detailed, disembodied heads.

In fairness, the limited graphics seems to be by design -- probably because this is meant to be a light application for content sharing. Still, the lack of "Wow" factor continues to be a frustration for Magic Leap:

Flickr Announces It Won't Delete Creative Commons-Licensed Images -- Escape Hatch For CC-Tagged Virtual World/MMO/Game Screenshots?

Above: Political satire image created in Second Life, given a Creative Commons license, and uploaded to Flickr before November 2018

Many virtual world users who upload mass amounts of screenshots to Flickr are concerned that many of them will soon run afoul of the company's new policy limiting free accounts to 1000 images, with images over that number to be deleted (unless a user becomes a Pro subscriber). However, it looks like there's a possible escape hatch for at least some of those images -- the Creative Commons license. As Flickr's CEO just put it in a blog post:

We won’t be deleting anything that was uploaded with a CC license before November 1, 2018. Even if you had more than 1,000 photos or videos with a CC license. However, if you do have more than 1,000 photos or videos uploaded, you’ll be unable to upload additional photos after January 8, 2019, unless you upgrade to a Pro account.

So that implies a Second Life-based image like the one above, by Cajsa Lilliehook, won't be removed. In my observation, most SL screenshots on Flickr ironically carry the default "All rights reserved" tag, however, so this conversation wouldn't apply to them. But a substantial number have a CC tag -- partly because Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig was an early adviser to Second Life, and even appeared in SL on occasion, so the CC concept is fairly well known within the community.

The next question, of course, is if this policy applies only to photos and videos, or also to screenshots and video. And that raises a whole host of follow-up questions:

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:

Flickr CEO Confirms Virtual World Photographers "Are Photographers" -- But They Should Still Check Flickr's New Policies Against 1000+ Images, Commercial Promotion

Flickr CEO Don MacAskill just confirmed in an online forum that virtual world photographers "are photographers". This statement clarifies Flickr's new policy announcement suggesting that non-photographic images would be removed from the service. Second Life and other virtual worlds/games have strong sub-communities of people who upload beautifully composed and lit screenshots to Flickr. SL's Flickr presence in particular seems largest and the most thriving, counting dozens of groups, some with nearly 30,000 members each, but groups dedicated to screenshots they took in The Sims, World of Warcraft, and other MMOs and virtual worlds are active there too.

Unsurprisingly, in recent days the SL community on Flickr has been roiled with concern and confusion over this new announcement, fearing it means their images would be removed. But MacAskill just made it plain that they're here to stay on the platform, responding to a question from one SLer: 

Virtual photographer are photographers. You care about photography, so we care about you. It's that simple. I don't know where the idea that you aren't "real" photographers, or that virtual photography is somehow spam, came from but that's not from me. You are welcome at Flickr.

In this, MacAskill is actually being loyal to Flickr's origins -- it was first created in 2004 as a tool for a virtual world called Game Neverending, and co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield are quite familiar with Second Life and SLers using their service. (I was still at Linden Lab when one staffer shouted excitedly, "I saw Catrina and Stewart logged in!") 

All that said, virtual world photographers who do use Flickr should read this announcement and the updated community guidelines, because it's still probably relevant to them, especially these sections:

What Developers Should Know About Unity 3D's Entity Component System for Building Massive Game Worlds

Unity just dropped this jaw-dropping video demonstrating its Entity Component System, featuring "4.5 million Mesh renderers, 200,000 unique objects per building, 100,000 individual audio sources, 5000 dynamic vehicles", all running at 60 frames per second. More from the company blog:

Create massive game worlds with ECS: Our Entity Component System (ECS) team has teamed up with two artists from the FPS Sample team and in just two months they have produced a futuristic cityscape showcasing our current progress on the ECS foundation and Burst. The demo was built using 2018.3 with some modification and the plan is to ship this demo to the public with full source and assets sometime in 2019. It heavily relies on the new Nested Prefab workflow also available in 2018.3, as well as newly developed features that enhance the experience of working with very large sets of GameObjects. It demos asynchronous scene streaming, a new ECS culling system, C# audio system, and HLOD among many improvements to ECS tooling and debugging features.

That's a lot of 3D graphic geekspeak, so I turned to Adam Frisby, my local Unity 3D expert, to explain what this means for developers:

"Technically ECS is already available in current Unity releases -- its real benefit is in swarm management; there are occasional cases where you might want to have hundreds of thousands or millions of 'something' (be it enemies in a game, or buildings, or particle effects, etc). ECS lets you squeeze the last drop of performance out in managing them with minimal overhead."

However, don't always expect the kind of performance that you're seeing in this demo: "[T]hey've clearly pushed instancing to new levels to get 4.5 million objects in a single scene, even on mobile. However it is important to note that this is just rendering and audio - once you add physics back into the mix the overall practical limit might be lower."

Also, this cautionary point: "Most developers - particularly new ones - probably wouldn't, and shouldn't, be touching this. It's very much a specialized system intended for specific applications; it will increase your workflow requirements using it -- but if you're doing something specialized and need raw performance, it's great."

Adam's analysis of the back-end code changes, and why they're important:

Has Minecraft Prepared a New Generation for the Metaverse?

The conversation on concurrency tests and which virtual world deserves the title "metaverse" continues, with reader Matti Deigan nominating a world that's usually not under consideration by the metaverse cognoscenti:

Minecraft communities (Yogcast) have stuffed 2600+ users into a single server. And that's already an example of being able to connect multiple worlds together on a single server with teleporting between the worlds and services using portals…. Can that be then considered a metaverse as well?

Good question. Especially since, eight years after I first interviewed Markus Persson about his little indie game, Minecraft still counts 91 million monthly active players. Reader "LoirL" concurs, and jumps off from that argument:

I consider Minecraft to be the first breakthrough virtual world, created by its users, a prototype-metaverse perhaps. A new generation is accustomed to playing, creating, communicating, watching, listening, and reading via Minecraft. That children and teens are having formative encounters with games, online social experiences, and user-generated content across media platforms through Minecraft suggests that the future for virtual worlds is robust.

As youth grow accustomed to participatory imaginary worlds in which they can communicate with friends, customize avatars, create, play, share information, have fan experiences, follow characters and stories, compete in games, and strengthen media and computer skills in order to show off to and compete with their peers, they bring the elements of virtual world participation into everyday life. Since Minecraft emerged organically from single-player games into user-generated multiplayer synthetic worlds and a community-created virtual world, the experience of Minecraft is an experience of agency and empowerment.

She argues that High Fidelity's concurrency tests, while still small relative to Minecraft (or Dual Universe), remain meaningful: 

Watch: MICA, Magic Leap's Eerily Human AI Avatar Who Looks You in the Eye

Word on the street is this is the most impressive tech unveiled at this week's Magic Leap conference. Say hello to MICA -- because she'll soon say "hello" back, while looking you in the eye:

Mica was sitting at the table in the same room. She smiled at me and look at me. I was struck that she wasn’t just looking at me. She was looking in my eyes. She tilted her head from side to side... When I noticed how attentive she was, I moved my head forward and looked in her eyes. She did the same and looked at me. I moved my head back and she moved her head back too. She was mimicking some of the movements that she saw me make. She didn’t talk, but that is coming in the future.

UploadVR's Ian Hamilton was staggered on an ontological level:

I need to process some thoughts. The Mica AI left me in a deeply introspective mode. I didn’t want to think of it as “she” but I couldn’t control my reaction. They Ex Machina’d me a little bit. https://t.co/gHZyzIAXKi

— Ian Hamilton (@hmltn) October 11, 2018

Full keynote below, beginning with inspiring words from company CMO Brenda Freeman and acclaimed designer Robin Hunicke, an apparent (and admirable) attempt to make a clean break from the startup's history with internal sexism, followed by a fireside featuring Neal Stephenson and John Gaeta (the Matrix effects guy), with Andy Serkis and others soon after:

Microsoft Follows Google Into AAA Game Streaming -- But Both Confuse Technical Capacity for Market Desire

Not even a week after Google announced its own game streaming service, here's Microsoft offering one of their own:

Our vision for the evolution of gaming is similar to music and movies — entertainment should be available on demand and accessible from any screen. Today, I’m excited to share with you one of our key projects that will take us on an accelerated journey to that future world: Project xCloud. Today, the games you play are very much dictated by the device you are using. Project xCloud’s state-of-the-art global game-streaming technology will offer you the freedom to play on the device you want without being locked to a particular device, empowering YOU, the gamers, to be at the center of your gaming experience.

Good news for hardcore gamers who want to play the latest title without having to own a new console, or PC gamers who want to play their games on older machines or other devices. However, both Google and Microsoft are making a massive category error: Just because technology makes a service more convenient to use doesn't necessarily grow the market for that service. That bad assumption comes right out in the announcement video:

It's amazing for traditional console players because it gives them another place to play. But what's incredible is for the people who haven't been introduced to this type of gaming, people who've never seen a franchise Halo or Gears [of War], it's pretty big.

This is roughly crazy pants. Every owner of an iPhone and a high end Android from the last 5 or so years already has access to console-type games on their phones, like this one:

Nonplussed: Google Shuts Down Its Social Network After Data Breach Scandal - Join Me on Plurk or Discord?

The Google+ social network gained some popularity 5-7 years ago among virtual world fans who wanted to maintain their avatar-based accounts as Facebook was banning those. Some bad news there:

This March, as Facebook was coming under global scrutiny over the harvesting of personal data for Cambridge Analytica, Google discovered a skeleton in its own closet: a bug in the API for Google+ had been allowing third-party app developers to access the data not just of users who had granted permission, but of their friends. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s almost exactly the scenario that got Mark Zuckerberg dragged in front of the US Congress. The parallel was not lost on Google, and the company chose not to disclose the data breach, the Wall Street Journal revealed Monday, in order to avoid the public relations headache and potential regulatory enforcement...

Shortly after the story was published, Google announced that it will shut down consumer access to Google+ and improve privacy protections for third-party applications.

Where to go now, if not Facebook or Twitter?