New World Notes

How Second Life on Unity Can Improve the Virtual World's User Interface as Well Its Graphics (Comments of the Week)

Above: Current version of Chat/IM user interface on Crystal Frost

Many SLers are excited about Berry Bunny's Crystal Frost, the Second Life-on-Unity project, because of graphics enhancements like physics- enabled water. In Comments, veteran metaverse developer Gwyneth Llewelyn notes how this will also enable the community to improve the user interface:

By pushing the rendering part out of Linden Lab's code, Bunny is also able to tackle the interface part of it — and work on both as separate projects, something which currently cannot be done in the existing codebase.

It'll be interesting to see what her approach will be. Unity, of course, can also handle all the interface bits — but then it's just really replacing one source of trouble with another.

We'll see if Bunny realizes that, and places the UI completely outside the viewer, running separately from it — possibly on a platform-neutral framework which strong support which can easily be expanded with the kind of tools that SL needs: its strong and solid inventory support (I mean, what kind of virtual world platform out there expects users to have hundreds of thousands of items in their inventory, with a complex permission systems on top of each and every one, multiplied by the million active users that SL still has?) but with terminally flawed UI.

The way groups, chats, objects and land management is closely tied together (with the permission system and the group roles!) — making Linden Lab opt to develop everything from scratch and giving us just the bare minimum (chat looks and feels like IRC from the late 1990s at best — I mean, we don't even get emojis and/or bold/italic!).

I actually think improving the UI/UX is even more important than updating the graphics, at least in terms of having any chance at growing SL's user base.

As for the launch of Crystal Frost last weekend, the viewer's Patreon now has over 40 members, and their reaction with the first Alpha is pretty positive, Berry tells me:

"People are amazed, but their expectations have also been pretty well tempered by my being transparent and communicating what to expect... a severe bug has been found but it's already been isolated and will be fixed by the next release." They're planning that release for March 17. 

As for Gwyn's thoughts on the UI, Berry's also replied in Comments, with some hints around how Crystal Frost might work as a mobile/tablet app:

Top 5 Posts: Second Life Finally on Unity, Roblox Usage Grows & Philip Rosedale Warns of a Coming "Ultraviolet Catastrophe" Of AI Deepfakes

• It's Here: Crystal Frost, Second Life's First Viewer Running On Unity, Available Today In Early Alpha Featuring Live Chat/IM & Water Physics
• Roblox Daily Active Users Grow 20% From 2021 -- Average DAU Now 65M
• Meta's New XR Roadmap Confirms Quest 2 Install Base Under 20 Million -- But Little Mention Of The Metaverse (Again)
• Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2023年2月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan
• Philip Rosedale: To Prevent The Coming "Ultraviolet Catastrophe" Of AI Deepfakes, We'll Need To Move Our Social Networks To Nostr

Fun & Spectacular SL Sims to Visit, Selected by Susann DeCuir

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

MEIN ZWEITES LEBEN is a blog by Susann DeCuir whose fabulous picture of flamingos was featured in yesterday’s post. A link from that picture brought me to her blog, which in English is called My Second Life and it’s amazing. Simtip: Happy place by Cica Ghost (Moderate) is a recent post featuring her visit to Happy Place. Her post is thoughtful, asking us to consider what might be the intent behind what seems on the surface happy (happy place) and may, on closer consideration, be melancholy, even disconsolate. [Teleport to Happy Place, click here]

For more about My Second Life, click here:

It's Here: Crystal Frost, Second Life's First Viewer Running on Unity, Available Today in Early Alpha Featuring Live Chat/IM & Water Physics

Starting in a few hours, members of Crystal Frost's Patreon can finally get their hands on Second Life's first viewer running on Unity.

"The project is currently still in Alpha stage," lead creator Berry Bunny (Kallisti#2038 in Discord) warns, "so there are some performance issues, a number of bugs, and other issues. So anybody signing on to the Patreon for early access should know to temper their expectations." (Join at the Jacked In/Snowcrashed level of her Patreon for access to the download.)

That warning aside, this early Alpha comes with some features to play with now:

 

Philip Rosedale: To Prevent the Coming "Ultraviolet Catastrophe" of AI Deepfakes, We'll Need to Move Our Social Networks to Nostr

Nostr is a new-ish social network project and if I’m being honest, I haven’t thought about it much at all except vaguely as that obscure thing Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is backing. But when Philip Rosedale was telling me about FairShare, he mentioned Nostr as "[the other] thing I'm most excited about right now as a concept and also as a code base.”

Philip being Philip, his interest isn’t exactly about Nostr becoming an alternative to Facebook or whatever, but being a solution to a completely different but equally concerning problem in technology: The growing power of AI programs to spoof or deep fake real people.

“I think that stuff is going to become an ultraviolet catastrophe in the next year,” he tells me. “Maybe less than a year because of the AIs.”

You’ve probably seen audio recordings like this, where a deep fake is able to imitate Obama and other public figures. That’s all fun and games at the moment, but what happens when that same technology is used to initiate a good friend of yours -- and then that “friend” calls you up, telling you they’re stranded in a foreign country, and they need you to wire them $2500?

“I think one of the things that's going to happen with AI is that all our messages are gonna become [spoofable by AI deep fakes]-- we can't trust them anymore,” as Philip Rosedale puts it.

“I think that we are about to enter into, in some ways, actually a very good time, where all the messages on the public Internet are just presumably bullshit; they're more likely to be garbage than not. And so everybody's just gonna have to stop [using existing social media] and use signed messages.

“I think we're gonna have to move to a new system. And that's going to be really disruptive. But I think it's kinda good because we'll get less nonsense messages.”

That said, here’s an introduction to Nostr from Philip, and why he believes it’s also better than blockchain:

Second Life Bird Photography is So Popular There's a Whole Flickr Group for It! Here's Some Favorites

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

Yesterday’s post sent me off to Second Life Avians, a Flickr group devoted to our feathered friends. This was the first picture and what a picture. Taken by Susann DeCuir it is vibrant and colorful. Her description links to more information and a SLURL. [To teleport to sim, click here] I love that she shot this from above so you don’t just see the birds, but you see them as a swath of color over the landscape, almost like flowers. 

For more amazing birds, click here:

Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2023年2月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan

Sanny Yoshikawa が、New World Notesのなかから、毎月おすすめのバーチャルワールドニュースを日本語で紹介します

Sanny Yoshikawa covers the monthly virtual world highlights from New World Notes for virtual Japan.

 

 

 

Meta's New XR Roadmap Confirms Quest 2 Install Base Under 20 Million -- But Little Mention of the Metaverse (Again)

Great scoop from The Verge's Alex Heath, laying out Meta's new XR roadmap, with lots of interesting nuggets on new VR headsets and also AR glasses. Most relevant to what I've been writing about recently, it confirms my forecast last month, that Quest 2's install base is still below 20 million:

With regards to the VR roadmap, employees were told that Meta’s flagship Quest 3 headset coming later this year will be two times thinner, at least twice as powerful, and cost slightly more than the $400 Quest 2. Like the recently announced Quest Pro, it will prominently feature mixed reality experiences that don’t fully immerse the wearer, thanks to front-facing cameras that pass through video of the real world. Meta has sold nearly 20 million Quest headsets to date, Mark Rabkin, the company’s vice president for VR, told employees during the presentation.

On February 3, I put the Quest 2's install base closer to 18 million:

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Delightful Flora & Fauna Photos from Bo Zano

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

Bo Zano’s “Rockmead” is named after the sim where it was shot and he provides a handy SLurl so you, too, can enjoy these playful otters. [To teleport to RockMead, click here] I love how he used the rule of thirds to place the horizon and the more prominent otter on the left. It’s a model of composition. 

For more SL fauna, click here:

Roblox Daily Active Users Grow 20% from 2021 -- Average DAU Now 65M

Roblox just sent me some key data from Q4 2022 for the metaverse platform:

58.8 million average daily active users in Q4 2022.

Year-over-year growth in DAUs: Europe up 24%, APAC up 21%, and US/Canada up 19%. 

Year-over-year growth across all age groups. Highest growth reportedly among users 17-24 year olds, "who comprise 31% who accounted for 22% of all DAUs in the quarter."

In other words, overall growth in daily active Roblox users in key regions is now up over 20% from 2021. That's quite decent. Also, average DAU last month (according to this summary on the Roblox site) is 65 million.

As I just wrote, rumors of the Metaverse's death are greatly exaggerated.

There's also growth among adult-age users, which remains Roblox's crucial challenge -- or what I call "the Metaverse Age Cliff":