New World Notes

Survey: What's Your Impression of PBR Graphics in Second Life So Far?

 

It's been a week since PBR was launched in the official Second Life viewer, but so far its impact on the user community seems to be all over the place. So here's a survey to collect user reactions (take on a laptop/PC for best results)!

On the one hand, we have creators like Walton Wainwright enraptured by the graphic improvements:

 

Generative AI Survey Results: Overwhelming Majority Say It Won't Radically Change Culture, Just Be Another Creative Tool

Here's the results of last week's survey, asking how much generative AI will change movies, music, and metaverse platforms. By and overwhelming 65%, the majority opinion is that AI's impact will be nominal, and that generative AI programs like ChatGPT and Midjourney will just become one of many other high tech tools in our creative tool chest. Less than 1 in 4 said AI's impact will be "radical".

So I guess that settles it!

Though in fairness, with just 26 responses, this is a pretty small data sample -- most other New World Notes surveys get 200-500 responses. So maybe these results indicate most readers are very unsure on the topic. (Or maybe don't really care either way?)

Survey: How Much Will Generative AI Change Movies, Music, and Metaverse Culture? Read the Debate, Take the Survey!

Here's a survey on how much generative AI will change important parts of human culture, inspired by a debate posted last week. In case you missed it, read the different perspectives below here:

• How Artificial Intelligence May Change Metaverse Platforms.
• How AI May Change Movies and Music. 

Roughly summarized, one argument suggests AI will totally remake our conception of movies and other culture, replacing many or most creative humans along the way. Another argument suggests AI will become just one tool, much like programs like Photoshop did in previous years -- and humans will still be central to creating culture.

Read the debate summary after the break, take the survey, and expand the conversation in Comments below!

Take a Short Academic Survey on SL Identity & Virtual Goods -- Results Shared Soon!

This is an interesting and short survey (should take less than 10 minutes) for a master's thesis on Second Life avatar identity and virtual items. It's overseen by Professor Diana Falcão of Oporto University in Portugal. "The survey aims to assess buying behaviours of identity items in SL, namely avatars, clothing and accessories. This is for a master thesis of a student that I supervise."

Best of all (for you, dear reader), she's agreed to share the survey results with me, which should give us some valuable insights into the Second Life economy around avatar identity. Take by July 20!

SL Name Survey Results: 75% Wouldn't Pay to Change Their Avatar Name

What's the value of an avatar name? With 138 responses, here's the results to our survey, "Will you spend $15 to $50 to change your Second Life account name?" (Which is how much it costs to do just that, via a new Linden Lab offer.) Nearly 75% answered No.

In Comments to the survey post, readers were mostly not impressed:

"I really don't understand why this needs to cost money. There is no justification for this... why does it cost money? It's not like the Labs are employing someone to sit there and mash through a pile of paperwork forms."

Then again, the results also show that over 1 in 10 respondents are so interested in changing their avatar name, which when you think about, is quite a lot:

Survey: Will You Pay $15-50 to Change Your Second Life Account Name?

New Linden Lab offer, new SL user survey (above, take on laptop/desktop for best results):

That’s right, as [last week] everyone can change their avatar name regardless of their subscription level. Not just the Premium subscribers that have always been able to do so, but all of our Basic accounts as well! This is something we’ve been trying to offer for a long time, and something that we get requests for on a consistent basis, so we couldn’t be more pleased to finally be able to announce it.

As an exciting new option for Basic accounts, here’s what it looks like today. Not only do you have the option to change your avatar’s first name to anything you can imagine, but we also offer a rotating list of last names to give your avatar (even if you don’t already have one) that are updated on a regular basis. We will continue to make updates to the available last name pool, so if these options aren’t for you, stay tuned for future updates. You can also suggest your favorite name on our suggestion form, new names are chosen from there!

Will be interesting to compare/contrast the results with our resent survey on Premium+ upgrades.

SLer Survey: Will You Upgrade Your Account to Premium Plus?

Note: For best results, take survey on a laptop/desktop!

Now that we've had a week to digest the new Premium Plus offering (details infograpic-ed below), here's a survey for the money question: Will you as an SL user actually upgrade?

Surprising SL Economy Survey: While Most Creators Get a Better Revenue Split Than Competing Platforms, Most Pay Linden Lab a Lot

Of all the metaverse platforms active on the Internet today, Second Life by far offers the best overall revenue share to user creators on the platform. As a whole, the creator community makes about as much revenue from Second Life as the company itself, and 1,600 user creators earn over $10,000 a year -- a higher number than ROBLOX, even though ROBLOX has vastly more users.

Speaking of which, ROBLOX takes an eye-punching 70% cut of revenue from its creators, while recent entry Core boasted that its cut is only... 50%. By contrast, an SL creator could sell goods and services in the virtual world, and only pay the 5% fee for cashing out Linden Dollars into US dollars.

But the story of Second Life's economy is more complicated than that.

To get a clearer picture, I recently surveyed SL content creators on two questions: How much of their revenue is absorbed by Linden Lab through additional costs, for listing products on the web-based Marketplace, for renting virtual storefront land from Linden Lab, and so on -- and how that translated into real dollars.

Here's the results:

SL Content Creators: Last Chance to Take My Survey on Your Revenue Share With Linden Lab!

Click here to take by tomorrow Noon PT. (Use a laptop/desktop for best results.) Details published and discussed soon after!

SL Content Creators: How much of your income does Linden Lab take?

With so much online conversation over hat's a fair revenue split between a metaverse platform and content creators on it -- thanks to Meta and its just-announced 47.5% cut for Horizon -- I'm curious what the share is for Second Life. It can be as little as the L$ cash-out processing fee, or as much as monthly tier to rent a whole private island (or several).

Two survey questions below. (Use a desktop/laptop for best performance.)