New World Notes

VRChat Reports 50,000 In Its Discord -- Good Estimate of Its Active User Base

VRChat recently announced it has 50,000 subscribers in its Discord server... which also gives us a pretty good estimate of VRChat's active userbase of people who log into the world at least once a month. Up until now, we've only had some insight on the social VR world's daily average concurrency rates (via Steam), which hover somewhere between the 6000s and 7000s every day. The fact that there's 50,000 just in VRChat's Discord server alone (you're not likely to join unless you're actively engaged with the community) suggests monthly active usage of the world itself runs between 50,000-75,000. (As a rough estimate, but this also fits an industry rule of thumb that active users are 10x the daily average concurrency.)

So until the company reports otherwise, I'd say 50,000-75,000 users is an educated guess -- among them, a shy German anime dancer and a small Korean bird who's a military vet and a Kanye fan.

Cassie's Clips: Exploring Somewhere in Time, a Magical, Snow-Covered Second Life Sim for Winter Holiday Roleplay & Photographic Fun

Today New World Notes' YouTube correspondent Cassie Middles visits a new Second Life sim called Somewhere in Time, which is opening just in time for holiday season-themed photos, roleplay, and group fun.

"This place is a sim that has had so much hard work and love poured into it," Cassie tells me. Created by Chelsea Rae, Quinn Holsworthy, and Sylvia Olivier, she says it's a sim full of picture-perfect settings:  

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:

Avatars Against Trump: Disgorging Trump Bots at Second LIfe's Burning Man

Alex Avion submitted this rather brilliant Avatars Against Trump image to the Flickr group, illustrating the tendency of Trump supporters to robotically repeat his catchphrases -- or if you prefer, the tendency of many or even most of his supporters online to be actual bots. (For instance, about 60 percent of the conversation on Twitter around Trump's rants about the Latin American migrant "caravan" last week were bots, much of that likely emanating from Russia.) 

The installation is now being showcased on Burn 2, Second Life's official Burning Man event, -- i.e., it's sanctioned by the actual Burning Man organization. Avion's photo doesn't quite show it, but the bots are wielding tiki torches, the same kind wielded by Trump's openly racist supporters -- another smart touch.

More Avatars Against Trump pics here -- submit your own image or video here. As for this Burning Man installation, click here to teleport to it. I just did, and took a pic of my own -- see below!

Kaoruco City, Jaw-Dropping Second Life Sim Inspired by Blade Runner and Other Cyberpunk Classic, Opens -- Watch the Trailer!

Watch this machinima trailer directed by master SL creator Eripom Moonwall, premiering Kaoruco City, a new Second Life sim inspired by Blade Runner, Altered Carbon, and William Gibson's Neuromancer, along with SL-based cities of the past, most especially Insilico and District 18.

Lead developed by Kaoruco Resident and a team of fellow Japanese SLers, it evokes a neo-Tokyo type vibe. Kaoruco and team re-purposed many pre-existing cypberpunk-themed assets for much of it ("Second Life has enough contents to build sci-fi scene," he notes), and were able to assemble them over a week of work. They paid special attention to the small details that make up a living city:

"We focused on making roads, avenues, and small paths," he explains, "Because in many movies, there's attractive scenes like Deckard eating at a noodle bar downtown."

 

You may be surprised it only took five days to build what you're seeing, but Kaoruco says it worked because the team had the same basic vision in their heads:

Social VR Halloween: Explore a Creepy AF Hotel in Sansar

If you're looking for a scary social VR experience today, the aptly named Scary Game Squad Hub by Sergio Delacruz is open for visits in Sansar, evoking the creepy hotels of The Shining and other classics. Intrepid virtual world explorer Eve Kazan made a recent visit, somehow survived, and came back with some suitably creepy images featured here. (Also, unlike other Sansar experiences, it's a relatively small download -- Eve estimates 5 minutes or so.)

As to the experience itself -- possible spoilers and definite video from Eve below:

Black Dragon Update: Control Multiple Animated Avatars at the Same Time

Black Dragon, the third party Second Life viewer with a cult following among hardcore graphics fans (developer NiranV estimates about 3000+ downloads), has a new version available for download: "Animating Dragon".

As that suggests, the latest updates enables this: "The ability to use poses to animate not just yourself but also Animesh now. Previously I added posing for Animesh but you could still only animate either you or them [Animesh-based NPCs) and only one at a time," as he explains to me. "Now you can animate everyone independently and/or at the same time."

So basically, this is a major boon for machinima makers and fashionistas who want to take supermodel shots where they want to control the supermodel too. (Just for starters.)

Video of Animating Dragon in action below. More about it on NiranV's blog (where you can also get the download link). 

Niran, by the way, has a Patreon for developing Black Dragon, and donations sure seem well-deserved. I mean, just look at what he's doing all by himself on his viewer:

Sansar to Close Sandex, Move Platform to Steam in Search of VR Users

Well this is quite a virtual shoe to drop -- the end of Sansar's virtual currency to US$ exchange (called the Sandex), and a transition to  publishing the social VR platform on Steam:

The cornerstone of our growth effort will be to put Sansar on Steam. Steam is where more than half of the VR market goes to find software. It also is a huge pool of users who are interested in our space and are likely to have the hardware required to run Sansar. We anticipate being able to get onto Steam by the end of this year... n order to do this, we are obligated to make significant changes to how Sansar works, especially in how the Sansar Dollar and process credit system work. These changes, will also make the credit process for Creators far more consistent and predictable. The first change is that we will be discontinuing the Sandex as of December 4, 2018.

Sometimes I feel like Linden Lab's strategy is to do the direct opposite of what New World Notes just reported, because as I posted yesterday, Oculus and Vive usage appears to be flat or declining on Steam. And also, early this year: That only twelve of all the thousands of compatible games have attracted meaningful sales on Steam. And that when it comes to social VR on Steam, only VRChat has a (relatively) large user base, with the rest struggling with concurrencies in the two to three figures. But all that to one side, you can't blame Linden Lab for making what seems to be a hail Mary pass in the face of low user numbers.

Then again -- and this was years before Ebbe Altberg became CEO, and I'm not sure any executive from 2012 is still there, to tell him -- Linden Lab unsuccessfully attempted a similar strategy with Second Life: 

Oculus & Vive Usage Appears to Be Flat or Declining, According to Steam Stats, Sales Estimates

Active VR owners on Steam in September 2018, via Road to VR's estimate

Road to VR has an interesting report which combines usage rates of Steam, the largest platform for computer and VR games, with Steam's monthly Hardware & Software Survey, then came up with this estimate (above) for active VR owners on Steam.

"[I]t would be more accurate to call the figures above ‘Monthly Attached VR Headsets on Steam’ rather than ‘Monthly Active VR Users on Steam’," reporter Ben Lang allows, "though this is the closest indicator we’ve got to the latter." Fair enough. Based on that calculation, Oculus usage is somewhat ahead of Vive, and -- subtracting the smattering of Windows Mixed Reality headset owners -- there's a total of 600,000 active Oculus and Vive users total for September 2018 on Steam.

This number is pretty perplexing, because it's significantly lower than the estimated number of total Oculus and Vive sales at the beginning of 2017:

Creative User Hacks to Second Life Appearance Make Avatar Customization Incredibly Difficult for New Users (Comment of the Week)

Pictured: User-Made Mesh Head Heads-Up Display (reviewed by Cassie here)

Commenting on the appearance of professional makeover agencies in Second Life, reader "Pulsar" points out this is partly the outcome of innovation among the user community, as users came up with creative ways to improve avatar appearance options beyond what the default viewer offered:

And to think that once you could create your own hair style straight from the viewer sliders, as well as everything else (you still can, but it's outdated).

Creative users took advantage of each update and new feature to improve their avatar looks, sometimes even with hacks like the "invisiprim". Avatars became prettier and prettier, even incomparably better, but on the other hand fashion became more and more complex.

Instead of sliders, you had to edit your prim or sculpt attachments, then you had to use alpha layers, then merchants would sell their rigged mesh without setting the attachment point, so you have to carefully "add" it (or add to another attachment point) instead of "wearing" it, in order to not end up naked, just because you grabbed an ice cream. Then appliers, various HUDs, then you have a bunch of products from different brands and that aren't compatible with each other, as well as legacy content, so you have to know what's compatible with.

In other words, with every creative workaround the Second Life community added, avatars became more and more difficult to customize -- and became near impossible for new users: