New World Notes

New York Times Features Creator of Second Life's Famed Tesseract House. Who Wants to Help Rebuilt It?

"A New Puzzle Turns Earth Into a Rubik’s Cube, but More Complex" is a fascinating New York Times story about Professor Henry Segerman, who's been creating fun and mind-bending mathematical sculptures and 3D puzzles for years. I've featured several of them on New World Notes (see below), but the Times missed what could be Segerman's most brain-melting sculpture ever:

The "Crooked House" in Second Life, inspired by a classic science fiction novel about a tesseract house with infinite rooms (watch above). 

Sad to say, the Crooked House no longer exists in the virtual world, but reached on social media, Henry tells me he'd be happy to help rebuild it.

So: Anyone have room to host a tesseract house? Let us know in Comments, and let's try to make it happen.

As for how the house has infinite rooms, here's what it looks like when you pull the camera back:

Second Life Avatar Featured in Legendary Opera House -- On The Continued Cultural Reach of the Virtual World

In case you missed it over the holidays, the New York Times' story on the use of contemporary art displayed in major opera houses casually mentions that "the Chinese-born multimedia artist Cao Fei is showing a female avatar — a dystopian, pale-white head so imposing that signs have been put up all over the [Vienna] opera house to alert spectators to its presence."

That avatar is actually China Tracy from Second Life -- she still has an active account in SL, look her up! -- who's been showing up in Cao Fei's art projects since 2007:

In a really great early machinima (watch below):

Listen: Part 4 Of The WSJ's Podcast, "How To Build A Metaverse", On the Dwight Schrute Fallacy & Why Second Life Really Matters

"Second Life's vision of the Metaverse has endured..." Listen to the latest and final episode in the Wall Street Journal's episode on the rise and fall (and rise) of Second Life:

• Stream on Spotify here
• Get it on Apple Podcasts here
• Stream on the web and read the transcript here
• Links to Part 3 here

Telling the story of Linden Lab's disastrous attempt to turn Second Life into a space for corporate meetings and my post-mortem for that, the episode (and series) somewhat ends on a rather abbreviated and ambiguous note, with Philip Rosedale acknowledging the real world as being more irreplaceable than he originally suggested, and host Annie Minoff finding value in its power for people to explore their identity and alternate lives. That last point is true (and moving), but I do think it misses the many other applications of the metaverse beyond "having a second life".  (Again, the name Second Life itself continues to frame things that can be more limiting than enlightening.)

Many of the episode's highlights were featured in New World Notes stories over years; here's some resources for more reading:

Listen: Second Life Tries to Go Mainstream in Part 3 Of The WSJ's Podcast, "How To Build A Metaverse" -- And What I Wrote at the Time

Streamable above or at the links below, part 3 of The Wall Street Journal's "How to Build a Metaverse" podcast mini-series just went up. Featuring Jeska, Daniel, and Yoz Linden, along with Electric Sheep Company founder Giff Constable, it tells the story of Second Life's entrance into mainstream awareness, with a whole episode on CSI: New York, major companies entering the world, and the every-recurring problem: How do I use this thing anyway, and what's even in the point? 

• Stream on Spotify here
• Get it on Apple Podcasts here
• Stream on the web and read the transcript here
• Links to Part 2 here

At the time, my concern wasn't so much on scalability, but that marketing campaigns and big brands. were overshadowing the grassroots creative community. Which as I wrote on GigaOM at the time, defeated the purpose of big brands even being there:

To play in Second Life, corporations must first come to a humbling realization: in the context of the fantastic, their brands as they exist in the real world are boring, banal, and unimaginative. Car companies are trying to compete with college kids who turn a virtual automotive showroom into a 24/7 hiphop dance party, and create lovingly designed muscle cars that fly, and auction off for $2000 in real dollars at charity auctions.

Fashion companies have it even harder. A thriving homegrown industry of avatar clothing design (free of production costs and overseas mass production) already exists, largely ruled by housewives with astounding talent and copious amounts of time, and since the designers are popular personalities in Second Life (whose avatars become their brand), they enjoy– and frankly deserve– the home team advantage.

Faced with such talented competition, smart marketers should concede defeat, and hire these college kids and housewives to create concept designs and prototypes that re-imagine their brands merged to existing SL-based brands which have already proved themselves in a world of infinite possibility.

There is of course much more to the story behind the episode, some of which was featured here at the time:

I Tell CNN Why Realistic Avatars Bring Real Prejudice to the Virtual World

"Virtual body-shaming: Why the metaverse won't fix our IRL beauty standards" is a thoughtful CNN article partly inspired by a New World Notes story from 2017, about full-figured avatars protesting a fat-shaming Second Life store. I largely lay the blame on the arrival of mesh-based avatar enhancements, which placed a premium on realistic human appearances. Because the more realistic human avatars become, the more our offline prejudices around physical appearance are provoked. As I told reporter Oscar Holland:

"Up until then, there was definitely much more tolerance for diversity of avatar types... But putting a premium on highly realistic, beautiful avatars amplified existing prejudices that we took from the real world into the virtual world." For those users whose avatars fall "outside the norm," incidents of harassment still happen "all the time," Au added. "Anyone with a large avatar is going to get at least a few nasty comments."

It's the reverse side of the "Proteus effect" first observed and coined by researcher Nick Yee: The more attractive our avatars, the more confident the avatar's owner becomes. But by the same token, the more those attractive avatars are realistic, the more our real world biases can come roaring into the virtual world.

 

Here's the full article I wrote back in 2017, excerpted below:

Listen: Wall Street Journal Launches Epic Four Part Series on Second Life!

Been looking forward to this for months (it's been that long in the making, I did my 2 hour recording with the podcast team in July) -- The Wall Street Journal's podcast on the founding of Second Life:

We’re in a metaverse déjà vu moment. Companies are spending billions of dollars creating new metaverses, imagining a 3D virtual future. But there’s a metaverse that’s already been around for decades. In this world, people have started businesses, built homes and fallen in love as avatars. In a new four-part series from The Journal, producer Annie Minoff heads back into that largely forgotten metaverse – Second Life – to tell the story of the metaverse we already have and what it can reveal about the one that’s coming.

Stream on Spotify above, or listen or read the transcript for Part 1 here; also available on Apple Podcasts here.  

France's Le Monde Remembers the Fall of Second Life's Biggest User-Run Bank & The Limits of Virtual World Libertarianism

French-fluent readers, the great Le Monde of France has a new article on a famous old story from the virtual world economy, part of a larger series on the topic: Comment Ginko Financial, la plus célèbre banque de « Second Life », s’est écroulée -- i.e. "How Ginko Financial, the most famous bank in “Second Life”, collapsed".

Ginko, as longtime readers may remember, was an SL-based financial service offering incredibly high interest rates to users, attracting high skepticism over its management and cash liquidity, not to mention allegations that it was a Ponzi scheme, until Linden Lab finally shut it down.

As I discuss with Le Monde reporter Florian Reynaud, the Ginko case was another lesson for Linden Lab on the limits of libertarianism. Florian also managed to get an official statement on Ginko from Linden Lab, but it's very broad -- because,  he tells me, the Lindens don't have anyone still employed there who even remembers that far back.

Read the Linden Lab statement below along with an English excerpt (albeit with a mediocre translation from Google):

What The Sandbox & Snoop Dogg Could Learn from Second Life

Anthropologist Tom Boellstorff has a new thought-provoking essay on The Conversation, pointing out the importance of learning from metaverse/virtual world history. For instance, what Second Life's real estate management policies can teach new metaverse platforms like The Sandbox:

Second Life originally had “point-to-point teleportation” (P2P). You could arrive anywhere in an instant. But in 2003 Linden Lab, the company that owns Second Life, disabled P2P. Residents trying to reach a destination would appear at the nearest “telehub.”

This had implications for real estate. Valuable for businesses and entertainment, plots of land near telehubs sold for top dollar — until 2005, when Linden Lab suddenly announced the end of telehubs and the return of P2P.

Land near former telehubs no longer had special value; some people lost thousands of dollars. The most powerful landlord can’t change the laws of physics, but Linden Lab could literally recode scarcity out of existence.

Fast-forward almost 20 years. Land next to Snoop Dogg’s virtual mansion is scarce: A plot could cost $450,000 because The Sandbox doesn’t have P2P. But were the company to suddenly add P2P, that $450,000 investment could become nearly worthless. 

The thing is, The Sandbox's actual user growth is tiny, so the value of Snoop's Sandbox property is negligible. By implementing P2P, Linden Lab created universal inherent value in Second Life real estate, no matter the specific location in Second Life. Partly for that reason, unsurprisingly, there are far more active users in SL than in The Sandbox.

I Talk About the Depiction of the Metaverse in Movies/TV on the CBC -- What Are Your Favorite Versions?

Pretty fun article. Unfortunately, my favorite metaverse-meets-the-movies story didn't make the cut: When a rising tech CTO watched The Matrix for the first time in 1999 with his friends, he left the theater somewhat bummed.

"That," he told them, "is what I wanted to make."

And that man's name? Philip Rosedale.

My favorite lines for the CBC article:

Watch: Second Life Land Baron Who Hates Evicting Tenants Featured on HBO's How To With John Wilson

How To with John Wilson is an acclaimed and quirky quasi-documentary comedy series on HBO -- think a handheld video version of This American Life, but even more nasally -- where John explores New York, attempting to accomplish various everyday tasks. (Not always an easy or non-ridiculous goal, since this is after all New York). In the first episode of Season 2 which recently premiered, we find John trying to buy a house in New York, opening up the zany hellscape that is real estate in that merciless metropolis.

Which is why John also pays a visit to a New York-based landlord also named John -- who as it happens, manages real estate in an even more expensive and wacky market: Second Life: