New World Notes

Study: Online Video Meetings Impair Creativity -- Opportunity for Virtual World-Based Conferencing?

The title of the study published in Nature is "Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation", but it's specifically referring to Zoom-style online video calls:

 In a laboratory study and a field experiment across five countries (in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia), we show that videoconferencing inhibits the production of creative ideas... Specifically, using eye-gaze and recall measures, as well as latent semantic analysis, we demonstrate that videoconferencing hampers idea generation because it focuses communicators on a screen, which prompts a narrower cognitive focus. 

This tracks with my personal experience. I do countless editorial/brainstorming calls on Zoom and Skype video, and to make real substantial creative progress, find myself putting a browser window in front of the video feed, so I don't get distracted by people looking at me (looking at them). Or only having my camera on for the Hello and Goodbye portions of the call.

This strikes me as an opportunity for virtual world/metaverse platform-based meetings where typically, there is no direct eye contact, and the visual cues are immersive 3D graphics:

Reader Says He Can Run Second Life for Linux on a $250 Tablet!

Update, October 18: Many more details from Thor in Comments below. 

Replying to our open forum call for tablets that can run Second Life, Andabata Thor sent along this screenshot with details:

"I am often on SL by tablet CHUWI Hi10X 10.1 inch. 1200x1920 and Clear Linux OS. I think that for a senior like me it is not a bad experience..."

I believe he's referring to this tablet which is currently selling for under $250, but buyer beware. Hopefully Thor comes along with more details and tips because his setup sounds fairly unique.

Facebook Internal Survey: 1 in 4 Not Convinced By Zuckerberg's Defense Against Whistleblower Allegations -- Nearly Half Want Government Regulation

As promised last week, here's the results of a survey conducted last weekend by staff at Blind, an anonymous messaging/virtual community app for employees, asking users their opinions on the recent whistleblower allegations made against Facebook. About 5,000 responded across many social media companies, with nearly 10% of them (482) staff members at Facebook itself.

Courtesy Team Blind, here's the survey results from Facebook employees only, starting with the question, "Are you convinced by Facebook’s defense to the whistleblower’s allegations?"

Here's how Facebook staffers answered:

Notably, a significant minority of Facebook employees (1 in 4) did not find their own company's defense against the allegations to be credible. 

There was a similar result to another question: "Do you believe Facebook puts profits over user safety?"

Here's how Facebook employees who took the survey replied:

Could You Run Second Life on Steam Deck? Would You Want To?

Interesting new comment from Tad Noodle and Jerom Franzic on an older post on Second Life's upcoming iOS app. How about Second Life on consoles? Specifically, Valve's Steam Deck, set for release this December. (Trailer above.)

As Mr. Noodle wonders aloud:

I wonder if Second Life would run decently on a Steam Deck? I watched a video with my husband and they said you could use 3rd party gaming apps on it, since it's basically a small PC.

 That sounds right. And Mr. Franzic expands:

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.