New World Notes

Poignant Images of Sadness Created from Virtual World Screenshots

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

“I Was Just a Bad Dream” is such an emotionally affecting snapshot. His shoulders are slumped, his hands are clasped, and he looks down in deep reflection. The title comes from a line in the song he links to, “Goodbye” by Apparat:

“Fold out your hands/Give me a sign/Hold down your lies/Lay down next to me/Don't listen when I scream/Bury your thoughts (doubts)/And fall asleep/Find out/I was just a bad dream.” 

As you browse Freakshow Zsun’s stream, there is a strong thematic focus on heartbreak and despair. One thing about art, it is a powerful way to express and process your emotions. 

A great example of music and photography complementing each other next. 

Survey: Most Facebook Employees Don't Believe Company is Responsible for Preventing Misinformation About US Election on Platform

A majority of Facebook employees do not believe the company is responsible for preventing misinformation about the US election on its platform. That's at least according to an anonymous survey launched last week by the development team of Blind, an anonymous messaging app for tech company staffers. With about 1500 replies registered by employees across many technology companies (100 from the social network), an overwhelming majority of 68% placed the responsibility on Facebook. But only 47% of Facebook employees placed the responsibility on their own company.

While the survey sample size is small, the response is consistent with recent reports that Facebook staff are largely not responsive to election interference on its platform unless it becomes a major PR issue:

Watch: Half-Life Alyx Running in an Open Source AR Headset (Kinda Sorta)

Half-life Alyx running on #ProjectNorthstar,

Lots of improvements to do with the steamVR driver itself, but it's so cool seeing it progress this far. pic.twitter.com/BP9QtFxLSq

— Bryan Chris Brown 🚀 (@BryanChrisBrown) September 12, 2020

One moment you're in your apartment, and then the next, boom, your reality gets merged with City 17. This clever hack from Bryan Chris Brown, community manager at North Star, an open source AR HMD from Leap Motion.

"Lots of improvements to do with the SteamVR driver itself," he reports, "but it's so cool seeing it progress this far."

And yes, you can even control Alyx with hand gestures.

Scylla Rhiadra Uses Virtual Light & Shadow To Turn SL Screenshots Into Art

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

Scylla Rhiadra’s “Queen of May” is a lovely example of light creating mood. I love how she divides the picture into three diagonals with projected  light and shadow. The background is simple and abstracted into black and white so the focus is on her and the colors. It’s really a great fashion photo.

Wow! The next picture is a stunner:

The Promise and Perils of Adding Social Networks to Virtual Worlds

Good comment from Alicia, responding to Jim "Babbage" Purbrick's thoughts on the importance of bringing social networks in to virtual worlds and vice versa:

Honestly, keep social networks and virtual worlds separate. People want to keep their social networking/RL private for personal reasons while losing themselves in virtual worlds for a few hours a day/night depending on where one lives. Remember that there are people who have been stalked online by naively giving out personal info about themselves; or have been doxxed by a vengeful person seeking to create trouble for their victim(s) wherever they are.

I can attest to that last point, having interacted with several people (all women, actually) who've been stalked in virtual worlds by men who figure out their account name. Always important to remember.

However, a social network doesn't necessarily have to be a real name-driven one like Facebook -- in many case, it's better that the social network just be avatar name-driven, a great way to drive and maintain user activity.

When he was still at Linden Lab, as Jim told me recently, "The friends online page on SecondLife.com was the most visited by orders of magnitude." That is probably one of the reasons, by the way, that Facebook is integrating Oculus with its social network -- so people can tell when their friends are online in VR. (I.E. it's not just about personal data mining.)

In any case, Alicia agrees with Babbage's point that virtual world companies need to focus on player-to-player communication, if only because players tend to consume the game content incredibly quickly:

Top 3 Posts Last Week, Including: Teaching Industrial Design in a Virtual World, And a Linden Alum Leaves Oculus to Do Indie XR Projects

• Industrial Design Students Still In COVID Quarantine Learn How To Prototype Real Chairs In A Virtual World
• Babbage Is Back: Linden Lab Vet Jim Purbrick Leaves Oculus, Starts Sharing His Wisdom On Creating Virtual Worlds
• Artist Turns Second Life Screenshots Into Powerfully Cinematic Imagery

Weekend Shopping Tips from Fun SL Blog, Just Be You

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

“She’s the Most” is a recent post in the Just Be You blog from Romanthomas.I love how he gave it that retro look that totally suits the style. His blog is very visual with several photos including a hilarious 1950 calendar, just in case you didn’t catch his message. He also includes lyrics to a song that suits his theme and a YouTube video embedded. In an unusual but clever move, he adds vendor pics of the items he highlighted. 

• ::Fatal Fashion:: by Stefhany Ruby - Outfit 126: 
• Famous: by Sal0mea - Retro Car Chair, Gas Station Backdrop, Retro Table & Clock (gift) 

For a truly playful post, click on:

Industrial Design Students Still in COVID Quarantine Learn How to Prototype Real Chairs in a Virtual World

Gargoyle presents his chair design to students and instructors

Industrial designer Robb Godshaw was recently set to co-teach a class in rapid prototyping at San Francisco State University, when a somewhat inconvenient global pandemic broke out.

As originally planned, students would first learn how to use CAD software, and then learn how to use to computer-aided manufacturing software to actually create a full-size wooden chair via 3D printing and CNC machining. So at the end, each student would literally get to leave class with the chair they’d created from start to finish.  

That was supposed to be the “satisfying and empowering” portion of the semester, as Godshaw puts it to me, but the problem was, the university was (back last May) still in lockdown. “This made COVID especially frustrating,” he goes on. “I thought hard of what lessons students had learned in the previous semesters, and tried to find a way that some of those lessons could be learned virtually.” 

But where Zoom or another online video conferencing platform might work for most other subjects, his class needed some level of in-person teaching:

“There are students whose chairs suffered from serious structural issues, craft issues, aesthetic issues, ergonomic issues, and simple scale issues, as it is very difficult to know how large the chair you are designing on a computer screen is.”

That meant “finding a tool that would allow people to move in real space with human sized avatars that would allow for sitting and chatting”, but also didn’t necessarily require a new gaming PC or a VR headset. 

The online learning alternative he ultimately landed on, as you can see below, just turned 17 years old:

This Amazing Image Actually Started as Some Second Life Screenshots -- Here's How the Artist Transformed Them!

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

Siobhan Muintir recently created “Dancing With Herself” from a picture she took at a Moulin Rouge dance performance. When I highlighted her work last week, I asked how she did it. Siobhan did keep track of her steps in making it to share with readers. This was all done using the online photo editor at Ribbet.com. Siobhan does not usually track her steps. In fact, she describes her process as “oh, I’m in a rabbit hole, let’s see where this one leads.”

Her explanation is after the cut:

Babbage is Back: Linden Lab Vet Jim Purbrick Leaves Oculus, Starts Sharing His Wisdom on Creating Virtual Worlds

"The Conversation Around Content" is a new blog post from Linden Lab veteran Jim "Babbage" Purbrick, who recently left a leadership role at Oculus to spend more time supporting XR, along with many other personal pursuits. Lucky for us, he's also publishing a series of blog posts that crystalize what he's learned over the last 14 or so years, developing virtual worlds. (Including a stint consulting with CCP, the developers of Eve Online.)

This new post, he tells me, is "inspired by conversations at Facebook about how to bring virtual worlds in to social networks and by conversations at CCP and Linden Lab about how to bring social networks in to virtual worlds. The same conversation, but starting at opposite ends."

For instance, here's Babbage on the importance of player-to-player conversation in MMOs, a feature that's often overshadowed by graphics, gameplay features, and so on: