New World Notes

Watch: Amazing Second Life Machinima Promotes New Song -- And Helps It Get Real Life Radio Airplay!

This is a beautiful new machinima from auteur Teal Aurelia, but with a special new twist: It's also a promotion for a track from real life pop singer SEMINA, who's had several hits in her home country in the EU, but had her music career undone by the recent pandemic.

"[I] was preparing for a tour when COVID hit and it all went to hell," as she puts it to me. "The tour was cancelled and I thought I'd never do this again."

That led her to performing in Second Life ("it filled somewhat of a emotional void... it was enough for me not to lose my mind during the lockdown") -- and led her to discovering Teal:

Watch How Second Life Footage Can Be Transformed Through AI Enhancement

Aspiring filmmaker Tim Hannan has been experimenting with using generative AI programs lately for an upcoming project he's developing. Hannan also has a background with shooting Second Life machinima back in the day, when he was creating videos for Metaverse TV. (Avatar name: Robustus Hax.) So he's been using raw SL footage as a visual guide for ComfyUI, a free, open source AI image generator.

"The original videos were taken in SL," he tells me, referring to this rather crude dinosaur (above). "The AI just needs a little guidance to do its thing, for example, to create depth."

Here's the footage after being processed through ComfyUI:

Much of the background remains, just with much more detail -- the Second Life footage becomes a rough sketch for AI to fill out:

"You could drop a bunch of blank cubes around like skyscrapers and pan around it and tell the AI it’s a city and it will fill in the detail," as Hannan puts it.  "You just need to give the AI enough of a nudge to get what you want. I can pan around in SL like I can’t in real life. I can film an avatar walking and make it anyone of similar stature size etc. Second Life can be great for long panning shots etc."

Here's another before/after example enhancing SL footage with ComfyUI:

Watch: Epic BattleBots Duel, Fire-Breathing Slapbox vs. SL Fave Sharko!

In case you missed it last week, here's the Discovery Channel's BattleBots fight between SlapBox and Sharko, prototyped in Second Life by Artorius Constantine, owner of SL's Nano Station Technologies store.  Sent to us via BattleBots super-fan Devin Vaughn, it is almost more brutal and merciless as a major fashion drop in SL, which is saying something.

"Overall that was one of the best episodes of BattleBots I have seen in a long time," Devin reports. "Good even matches, much spark and explosions! Sharko had a good match against a rookie bot SlapBox, and a crazy moment: Shark bites down good, but then SlapBox lifted the entire shark, all 250 pounds was lifted into the air, totally inverted and shot flames down the mouth of poor Sharko who refused to let go. Wow."

Watch above to see what happens next! As to why it happened, Constantine and his crew have a good post-mortem in Reddit's /BattleBots community: 

TONIGHT: Inventor Prototypes Battlebot in Second Life -- Then Creates it in Real Life to Fight On Discovery Channel's Battlebots!

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Above: Sharky in SL and in RL (images courtesy Constantine of Nano Station Technologies

Tonight at 8pm on the Discovery Channel (check your local listings!), there's a chance for Second Life users to cheer on a hometown champion: Episode 6, third fight of the night, it's Sharko (woot woot!) versus Slap Box (boo! hiss!) on the popular Battlebots reality TV show. 

Sharko is the creation of Edward Robinson, known in Second Life as Artorius Constantine, owner of the Nano Station Technologies store.  For the last few years, Constantine has not only been making a real life living from his SL inventions (animesh roleplay bots and so on), but taking what he's learned from the battlebots he's made for Second Life fights, and applying what he's learned to design real life battlebots:

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:

Listen Then Donate: "Beacon", a Song Dedicated to March For Our Lives Protesters, Created by Famed SL Musicians Zak Claxton and Mulder Watts

Mulder Watts and Zak Claxton, a couple well-known Second Life-based musicians, were recently in Arizona for a group vacation of fellow SL performers, but their trip was shadowed by horrible news:

"By happenstance," Zak tells me, "it was the day after the shootings at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida." But being musicians, however, they responded in the way you'd expect:

"We sat down together during a quiet evening and created a little song on the spot. Mulder and I both have strong feelings about enacting sensible gun laws, and over the subsequent couple of weeks, he wrote the lyrics about the courageous kids leading the movement. We then recorded it together, and decided that it would be appropriate to donate any proceeds from sales of the song to the March For Our Lives Action Fund." Go here to do just that. 

There have been many tributes to March For Our Lives, but this one may be the most unique:

Will Linden Lab Ban Donald Trump's Racist, Community Standards-Violating Supporters in Second Life?

I told you about the apparent Trump supporter who assaulted Bernie Sanders' fan headquarters in Second Life with Nazi swastikas, now VentureBeat's Jeff Grubb has an in-depth report on Trump's SL supporters, and to nobody's surprise, it's about as offensive as that:

I had no idea what to expect when I downloaded the Second Life launcher. It was pure chance that I clicked on that wall and ended up teleporting to a Trump HQ where a group of his supporters were going on racist tirades. But I could understand their skepticism, and I also remembered how I’m always begging vicious trolls who harass people on behalf of hate groups like Gamergate to remember that they are targeting a human being. And I kinda forced myself to listen to that plea even for some racist Trump supporters.

Jeff even captured some video of the casual racism (below, but not fun to watch). Of course, this runs in clear violation of Linden Lab's Community Service regulations:

The Community Standards sets out [behaviors], that will result in suspension or, with repeated violations, expulsion from the Second Life Community. All Second Life Community Standards apply to all areas of Second Life, the Second Life Forums, and the Second Life Website... Actions that marginalize, belittle, or defame individuals or groups inhibit the satisfying exchange of ideas and diminish the Second Life community as a whole. The use of derogatory or demeaning language or images in reference to another Resident's race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or sexual orientation is never allowed in Second Life.

As with the controversy over virtual versions of the Confederate flag last year, or the firestorm over Front National's official SL HQ in 2007, the Trump community in SL brings up an interesting tension between real world racism and virtual expressions of it. Most agree that Donald Trump expresses racist opinions and policies, but at the same time, he is also a leading candidate for President with a very large following. Despite that fact, should Linden Lab's policies ban expressions of his opinions from SL, and supporters repeating his opinions in SL -- even after he actually became President?

Second Life Medical Simulation Useful for Assessing Surgical Residents - Report

A new report in the latest New Journal of the American College of Surgeons claims that a Second Life simulation helped assess surgical residents effectively. Specifically:

Using an online virtual world called Second Life™, a multidisciplinary team of researchers from Imperial College, St. Mary’s Hospital developed three virtual reality environments—a standard hospital ward, an intensive care unit, and an emergency room... “What we have shown scientifically is that these three simulated scenarios at the three different levels are appropriate for the assessment of interns, junior residents, and senior residents and their management of these cases,” [report co-author Dr. Rajesh] Aggarwal explained.

The full report is here. The study was conducted at Imperial College, which has actually been using Second Life as a research tool for years, so it's quite possible the study's success stems from the students and faculty already being familiar with SL. I'm skeptical this RL application of Second Life could scale to other research facilities less familiar with the platform -- unless, of course, it was integrated with something like the Oculus Rift.

Practice ESL in SL With the Cypris Chat Group

The Cypris Chat Group is an SL community which teaches and learns immersive English as a second language in Second Life. Here's Japanese SLer DJ okapon showing off what he's learned so far:

DJ's off to a great start. (And for all the effort he's making, I wish SL's lip sync would work a lot better.) Ever since VOIP was introduced, I've thought immersive ESL could become a great real world application of SL, so I hope to see groups like Cypris Chat gain more traction.

More info and SLurl after the break:

How Second Life Might Help With Real Life Weight Loss -- It's About the Virtuality, Lead Researcher Suggests

Chances are you've read recent stories that Second Life seems to help maintain real world weight loss, as in this NPR report right here. Basically, a study from the University of Kansas Medical Center found that volunteers who used Second Life to participate in a weight management clinic kept the weight off significantly more than volunteers who participated in a real world, face-to-face version of the same clinic. The average difference was 5%, which may not sound like a lot, but as lead researcher Dr. Debra Sullivan told me, "For a 200 pound person a 14% weight loss would be 28 pounds versus the 9.5% weight loss which would be 19 pounds."

How might this be possible? Since the original press coverage of this study was pretty thin, I asked Dr. Sullivan to tell me more: