New World Notes

Today's Second Life Flickr Pick: Kaze Takeda Photographs the Hilarious Adventures of "Percy & Muriel"

Cajsa Lilliehoak covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Kaze Takeda has a fun and eventful photostream, but I have fallen in love with his album featuring his not-so-great-uncle Percy and the vivacious Muriel. They are adventurous avatars, with lives full of fun. But their adventures generally run to mayhem as in “Getting Away from It All.” Hilarity ensues.  

For more of Percy and Muriel, click here:

New Apple VR Rumors Ignore Small Sales & Insiders Hesitant About VR

I definitely don't want to get into the habit of dunking on seriously questionable Insider articles but, well, here we go again:

The original designer of Meta's VR offering, Oculus, says Apple's much-rumored rival metaverse headset [!!!] is "so good."

Palmer Luckey, a billionaire who cofounded Oculus VR in 2012 and now leads defense-tech startup Anduril, made the bold claim in a tweet on Sunday, suggesting he had tried out the iPhone maker's next-generation hardware...

Industry watchers are expecting the tech giant to debut its metaverse project in June at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), particularly after the company made a quiet announcement about its iPad last week that would typically be saved for the conference.

First off:

A VR headset.

Is not.

The Metaverse.

It is definitely not a "metaverse project".

It's not even a necessary component of the Metaverse. VR HMDs are but one of many devices to access a metaverse platform.

It's like calling a new iPhone with updated 3D graphics a "metaverse project" -- in fact, that would actually be somewhat more accurate, since vastly vastly more people use smartphones to access metaverse platforms, than do so in VR.

Anyway, the real issue here is, first of all, taking away the wrong lesson of the Oculus Quest. As anyone who follows Meta's earnings reports can tell you, Quest sales remain slow -- the install base remains small, not yet even 20 million.

The other problem is putting more stock in what Oculus' founder (who no longer works in VR) says about Apple's VR headset -- while ignoring what people actually working at Apple say. As I blogged a couple months ago, citing a Times report and an insider I interviewed for my book:

Top 3 Posts Including: The Half-Truths of a Metaverse "Obituary" & A Debate on Whether the Metaverse Needs a Blockchain

Above: Insider's attempted Metaverse debunking comes replete with VR headset illustration indicating Insider's editors don't actually understand the concept

• Does The Metaverse Really Need A Blockchain? I Debate That With Devs From Neal Stephenson's Lamina1 Metaverse-As-A-Service Startup
• The Insider & Ed Zitron's "Obituary" To The Metaverse Is Actually A Zombie Horde Of Embarrassing Half-Truths
• The Coming Glut Of AI-Made Content

SL Friday Fashion Finds Both Classy & Sexy from LeYo

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

LeYo [MaziKeenFr] is an unusual blogger in that most of her pictures are in black and white. Not all. Occasionally she does a color picture when it’s important to present the items in color. She is a great blogger who seeks out actual clothes along with the sexy lingerie and clubwear. I love this gorgeous gown with the dramatic collar. It’s from Sascha’s Designs. The lighting emphasizes the contrast between her skin and the gown. 

• Sascha's Designs. Collier Black Gown . Mainstore

For a shocking, but safe club dress, click here:

Does the Metaverse Really Need a Blockchain? I Debate That With Devs from Neal Stephenson's Lamina1 Metaverse-as-a-Service Startup

The Metaverse is very much not dead, but while debunking random hit-and-run diatribes to that effect, I'm in the weird position of also wondering how (or even if) the 600 million+ active users across various metaverse platforms can (or should) somehow be seamlessly unified.

Which paradoxically, means debating the approach taken by Metaverse-as-a-Service-startup Lamin1, co-founded by literal Neal Stephenson.

Last week Lamina1 published a massive white paper on the topic, leading me to debate the value of walled gardens with CPO Tony Parisi.

This week, let's focus on its approach to interoperability based on the blockchain:

Specialized metachains allow for the creation of blockchain-based applications and experiences in ways that overcome the limitations of today’s monolithic chains. Additionally, they allow for a much wider variety of businesses and use cases than today’s metaverse “walled gardens,” empowering the users and the market –– rather than a centralized, risk-averse entity focused on specific business models –– to decide on the value of things that get made.

We also believe that the future metaverse also has to combine the best of immersive computing tech with the best of blockchain to ensure commercial success, longevity, transparency, and privacy online. On-chain rights management, distributed simulation, and storage services would help get us there, in a way that’s accessible to all creators, not just a small club controlled by the few.

OK, but wait: Won't blockchains hurt consumer performance, since they tend to be much more time-consuming to query than a centralized database? In a real time experience, even several seconds of additional wait time can be a deal breaker.

Will Carter, CTO of LAMINA1 and co-author of the white paper, argues not so, but also has some thoughtful qualifiers:

Sneak Book Cover Preview for Making a Metaverse That Matters: From Snow Crash & Second Life to A Virtual World Worth Fighting For

Excited to tease my book cover for "Making a Metaverse That Matters" from Wiley, out next month! Here's how to pre-order:

• On Amazon here
• Or on Barnes & Noble here
• Or on Bookshop.org benefiting indie bookstores here

This isn't the full book cover by the way, because it also has some very flattering blurbs from various tech luminaries. My favorite line: "I only wish Mark Zuckerberg could have read it before changing the name of his company." More soon!

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Mari Seesaw Shoots Picturesque Scenes, Includes Teleport Links... and Hides a Virtual Cat in Each

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Mari Seesaw’s pictures have an element of Where’s Waldo about them because you sometimes have to search for the ubiquitous cat. Exploring Second Life as a feline gives her photos a whimsicality along with the beautiful landscapes she shows us. And she also gives us the sine qua non of any serious SL traveler, the SLURL.  [To visit, click here]

For more, click here:

In Russia, Ukraine News is Censored, But Counter-Strike is Extremely Popular. So Reporters Put the Truth About the Invasion in a Secret Room Players Can Only See When They Die.

Amazing cyberpunk-made-real story of the month, made possible by the fact that Counter-Strike Global Offensive is extremely popular with young gamers in Russia (most of them either in Putin's military or likely to be conscripted into it), but where news of the nation's real invasion of Ukraine is censored.

Here's what Finnish reporters did with a user-made CS:GO map:

When a player’s avatar dies, the game view changes: For a while, the player can go through walls or fly around the map. At this stage, they can also find the secret room hidden underground...

There is a light above the door. This is a hint that taking a closer look at the object may reveal something.

There are stairs leading to an underground room.

First, the player sees a wall with a headline.

Next to the headline, there is a map showing how many civilian targets in Ukraine have been hit by Russians.

Another wall displays a news item on the Bucha massacre. When the player comes close to the images, they hear a Russian voice-over on their radio telling them what the images are about: Ukrainian civilians murdered by Russian soldiers.

Read the English-language story here. The CS:GO map "de-voyna" is available on Steam. Consider giving it a good rating, so that more players will see and experience it.

Some Second Lifers Celebrate the UK's Coronation Day in Style

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Is there anyone in the world unaware that Charles III was crowned on Saturday? Many Second Lifers certainly celebrated. Here is Mrs Sassypants bringing together a group of friends to celebrate. And all decked out in red, white, and blue.  

For more from the coronation, click here:

The Insider & Ed Zitron's "Obituary" to the Metaverse is Actually a Zombie Horde of Embarrassing Half-Truths

Above: Insider's attempted Metaverse debunking comes replete with VR headset illustration indicating Insider's editors don't actually understand the concept

Insider just ran a putative obituary for the Metaverse that's so incandescently wrong, it reminds me of that famous Mary McCarthy line, "every word she writes is false, including ‘and’ and ‘but.'" Obviously I'm somewhat (very) biased on this topic, but seeing as author Ed Zitron's diatribe has gone viral (as he himself boasts), it deserves closer scrutiny. 

The trouble begins right in the third sentence:

The capital-M Metaverse, a descendant of the 1982 movie "Tron" and the 2003 video game "Second Life," was born in 2021 when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of his trillion-dollar company to Meta.

It's mind-boggling how a single sentence of only 35 words can be so redolent of fail. To start:

On a pure factual basis, Zuckerberg changing Facebook's name to Meta in 2021 was not the birth of the Metaverse, even from the skewed perspective of Wall Street. From that vantage, a better date would be late 2020, with Roblox's IPO filing, which literally includes a (pretty good) definition of the Metaverse: