This is one of those surprised/not surprised news items:
Microsoft Corp. plans to acquire Activision Blizzard Inc. in its largest deal yet as it looks to boost its gaming business and capture opportunities in the metaverse... “Gaming is the most dynamic and exciting category in entertainment across all platforms today and will play a key role in the development of metaverse platforms,” Chief Executive Satya Nadella said in the release.
The deal definitely makes sense for Microsoft's gaming war chest, but talk of the metaverse makes me wonder if Microsoft actually grasps the concept. (I mean if I were head of Microsoft's metaverse strategy, I'd spend less time trying to acquire legacy old school game companies, and more time updating and rebooting Microsoft's Minecraft into a full-fledged metaverse.)
And yes yes, Activision Blizzard has a great track record of creating hugely successful mass market games (good relations with its employees, not so much) with highly polished UX and deep narrative/world building. What Activision Blizzard is not especially well known for is the key feature that comprises any metaverse platform worth the name:
Unfortunately today's newsfeed is all about Facebook and the metaverse:
Facebook spending over $10 billion developing the metaverse this year:
"I recognize the magnitude of this bet," Zuckerberg said [in an earnings call]. "This is not an investment that will be profitable for us any time in the near future."
Zuckerberg argued that Facebook had to build out a lot of fundamental technology first before it can rake in any meaningful returns with AR and VR. "Our goal is to help the metaverse reach a billion people," he said, adding that he hoped to reach that goal by the end of the decade. That's when it could also become "a real business story," Zuckerberg said.
This is a tad bit more than the $5 billion over 5 years that Facebook recently announced (scroll down), but I guess that was only referencing EU-based employees. Again it's a mystery how Facebook plans to "help" make a billion people strong metaverse when its VR headset install base is so small, as is its erstwhile metaverse platform. More on that here.
Facebook whistleblower "shocked" by Facebook's metaverse investment:
Frances Haugen was “shocked” when she heard the company planned to hire 10,000 engineers in Europe to work on the “metaverse,” a version of the internet based on virtual and augmented reality, when its money would be better spent on safety, she told British lawmakers Monday.
“I was shocked to hear that Facebook wants to double down on the metaverse and that they’re going to hire 10,000 engineers in Europe to work on the metaverse,” she said. “Because I was like, ‘Wow, do you know what we could have done with safety if we had 10,000 more engineers?’ It would have been amazing.”
The irony is, by spending so much on the metaverse which could have instead been spent on engineers who could help make Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp much safer, the entire company is in an extreme PR crisis and faces imminent government regulation. What happens if US regulators demand that Facebook sell off Oculus and its other arms, or at minimum, orders the company to remove mandatory Facebook ID log-in from its Quest devices?
Video purporting to be Quest 3 and upcoming avatar/metaverse/mixed reality applications from Facebook leaked. Originally via "Bastian", while Tom's Hardware has a good in-depth write-up. All of this or none of this could be announced at Facebook Connect this Thursday, but it definitely seems premature to announce a new HMD when the Quest 1 and 2 are only a couple years old. Check back on the 28th!
Thanks to Patrick Di Justo of the New Yorker and Steve Silberman at Wired, the update enjoyed a mini-burst of virality. Maybe I've been writing journalistically about virtual reality and gaming for far too long, because often when I try to follow the latest current events, the surreal, sci-fi, cyberpunk aspects are all I can notice. But it may be that that's the most accurate approach to covering the news right now, anyway.
Today's Los Angeles Times has a long profile of Second Life's live music scene, which will not come as news to New World Notes readers, but is pretty good nonetheless. Much of it features LA-based performer Craig Lyons, whose music has been licensed by MTV and Universal Music, and who regularly performs in Second Life as the avatar known as Craiglyons Writer (a name the Times story failed to mention.) Here he is performing in-world at the POP ART LAB sim for Treet TV, in an impromptu show arranged for the LA Times reporter:
Excellent stuff. And according to the Times, Lyons makes $100-200 in Linden Dollar tips per gig, often performing three shows a day.
Which helps answer a question another writer just asked me last week: Can you make a living as a musician performing in Second Life? I answered that the top performers can definitely make a decent side income, but unlike real estate barons and top fashion designers, they probably can't do it full time. But assuming Lyons performed 8 gigs a week and averaged $150 in tips per show, that'd come out to $4800 a month, a pretty good living for an artist. (To be sure, that's assuming Second Life's market is large enough to sustain enough foot traffic to the same performer for that many shows.) Geek rock superstar Jonathan Coulton made around that amount selling his music online before going bigtime, and it's nice to know some of SL's top musicians can also reach close to that level even now.
Thanks to Claus Uriza of POP ART LAB for link to and background on the Treet video! Photo credit: Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times
Hot Tub Time Machine, the wacky John Cusack comedy opening tomorrow, has a lead character who's a Second Life aficionado named Jacob (played by Clark Duke). Or as reviews describe him, "a basement-dwelling Second Life aficionado", or less charitably, "a kid who would rather play hours of Second Life than talk to actual humans." And only last week, I was talking about the ingrained nature of the "guy in a basement playing Second Life" meme, though at least here he's also not notably fat or naked. (Then again, you never know.) Ironically, I'm writing this post next door to a Second Life aficionado who doesn't log in from a basement, but near Albert Einstein's old office in Princeton, and given that he's an acclaimed astrophysicist, could probably help John Cusack and friends with the time travel troubles which send them back to the 80s. (But if that's the case, shouldn't the Second Life kid wind up back in Habitat?)
Anyway, it actually looks like a pretty good movie if you're into that kind of thing (and I often am) -- if you catch it in the next few days, report back here. Photo: UA/MGM.
Aleks tells me there's not much of Second Life in the BBC series, except indirectly via an interview she does with early SL investor Mitch Kapor, but that's fine; as you watch her crisscross the globe explaining the Web, it's still nice knowing that one of her many key stopping points was this 3D node in the larger net.
*Note to BBC executives: Don't you think it's immensely silly to produce an online program claiming that the Internet has transformed the world... then prevent almost everyone in the world from viewing it on the Internet?
Based on what Steve Job says in his announcement, both will be compatible with iPad. What's more, it's now feasible to incorporate the 3D graphics elements of Second Life into those apps and others sure to come.
But that's only the beginning. Because at least two companies (that I'm aware of) have already developed touch screen user interfaces for Second Life. Here's one:
Read more about it here. Then imagine a similar display running Second Life on the iPad. The near future of the metaverse may not be in desktops or laptops or game consoles (not portable enough) or mobile phones (too portable). For today at least, it seems like the metaverse is moving toward a time when we hold it in both hands.
Jobs photo credit: Ryan Anson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Here's the first reviews of "Life 2.0", the full-length Second Life documentary which just premiered last weekend at Sundance, by credentialed movie geeks Peter Sciretta of Slashfilm, Laremy Legel of Film.com, and Brandon Tenney of First Showing. They all have positive things to say about elements of the movie, with the segment about content creator Asri Falcone and her war with content theft generating the most praise. They're less enthused (to the point of being unsettled) by the other two segments featuring an adulterous relationship unfolding in Second Life, and an ageplayer who in real life is a man about to be married. Most curious to me, they wanted more of an editorial voice and broad overview of Second Life, perhaps because they had little background with SL beforehand. In any case, not having seen the movie myself, it's difficult to review their reviews, but their take may influence the fate of "Life 2.0" far as acquisition offers and distribution deals.
Update 2, 12:15pm: The Onion AV Club's Nathan Rabin gives Life 2.0 a B, but ironically, that seems to partly stem from a negative bias against Second Life going in. (Changing post title to reflect broader gamut of reactions.) Excerpt after the break:
CNN reports that many people have become so besotted by the beauty of the planet Pandora in Avatar, they're leaving theaters depressed, noting "[s]uggestions for battling feelings of depression after seeing the movie include things like playing 'Avatar' video games." Or perhaps explore a virtual world made to look like the planet, for as it happens, there's an island in Second Life dubbed Pandora Magic, and as you might expect, it's already inhabited by Na'vi-like avatars, and offers a pretty good facsimile of the place depicted by the movie (at many many times less its production budget):
This is very cool: the story of KallfuNahuel Matador, the Green Lantern avatar who went from roleplaying as a superhero defending a virtual Darfur genocide awareness site in Second Life to helping with relief efforts in actual Africa, is a featured subject in "Can Video Games Save the World?", a Time Magazine article by Stephan Faris. I talked with Stephan for the story, because Faris first read about Mr. Matador in my post about him last year, but the seasoned reporter had already taken the time to log into SL and connect the Green Lantern Core member directly in-world. You can see the quality of that reportage in the substance of his writing -- especially in the final quote from KallfuNahuel.
