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- First Look At Life By You From Sims/Second Life Dev Rod Humble — A Simulation/Sandbox Game Of Head-Spinning Ambition
- Top Metaverse Creators Lobby Linden Lab To Update Second Life's "Horribly Dated" Terrain Textures
- New Second Life Sim Inspired By China's "Red Beach" Is So Amazing, There's A Large Flickr Group Devoted To Photographing It
- 4 Reasons To Doubt Generative AI Will Be As Transformative As All Of Silicon Valley Apparently Thinks
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Hypnotic Romance, an SL sim with secluded spaces for couples. Click here to teleport.
“TV POWWW!” by Tom Boellstorff & Braxton Soderman. Read about the first televised videogame here.
The Fitting Room: Try out new SL fits in a secure, private space. Click here to teleport.
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![[Sing with me!]](https://wagnerjamesau.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/52762642182_36f7d2df00_z.jpg?w=640&h=406)
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Sparkly Fly is a kawaii blog by Andyylee. Sing with Me is adorable. Who doesn’t sometimes dream of being a singer? I love this look, especially the tie tucked into the belt. Such a fun little detail. It’s from Niniplanet at The Arcade.
- / NINIPLANET / UNNATURAL RARE @The Arcade
For more kawaii sweetness, click here:
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Is it life or is it Second Life? More and more I wonder. Denny Cioc’s picture “Junction” makes it impossible to tell. Doesn’t it feel like a place you have seen sometimes in your life? Denny has a great eye for landscapes.
For more unique perspectives on landscapes, click here:
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While the coming of physically-based rendering in Second Life (think reflective surfaces) is causing much buzz among SL's creative community, some well-known metaverse content creators are pushing for Linden Lab to improve the virtual world in another key area: Terrain textures.
"The textures are blurry and flat on their own," as veteran 3D artist Max Graf explains in this Plurk thread, "But up against all the newer visual quality they just look out of place, requiring extra effort to hide the ugly. The texturing method itself, for 'blending' the four textures via corner low and highs was fine in 2009, but it is so horribly dated now when there are so many additional ways it could be done better and produce a better visual on par with everything else that has evolved."
This JIRA submission (SL account log-in required to "Watch This Issue"), submitted by fellow 3D artist NeoBokrug Elytis is a bid to encourage Linden Lab to update the system.
As an example for what they're hoping to achieve, Max sent me the mountain image above.
"This is a simple multi-color terrain for viewing from far off, done using a 'splatmap' to define the areas for each color or texture. Even as plain and smooth as this is, it could not be done with the current SL system, the blending would not be possible.
"However," he goes on, "you add a normal map and some parallax occlusion to that same smooth texture and you get this instead:
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Panjin is the first picture in a new Flickr group devoted to pictures taken at a brand new sim of the same name by Jade Koltai, a name familiar to sim connoisseurs. She is a long-time sim designer, working on her own and in collaboration with the late Serene Footman. Panjin has the same spare restraint that makes her work so appealing to Second Life photographers. I love how she uses the foreground to frame the piers in the background.
I love that there are so few colors, yet it is vibrating with color. It is based on the real life Panjin ("Red Beach") in China. The red flower is Suaeda salsa, a member of the Amaranth family.
For more Panjin, click here:
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Interesting Axios story illustrates just how much Silicon Valley has shifted its interest and investment into Generative AI startups like OpenAI and Midjourney, away from metaverse platforms and related technology:
According to PitchBook data compiled by Axios Media Deals' Tim Baysinger, through March 16, 2022, companies that played in the metaverse or web3 space had raised nearly $2 billion in funding.
So far this year, metaverse and web3 companies have raised $586.7 million, a bit more than a quarter of last year's total. The totals for generative AI companies are the inverse: Through March 16, 2022, the generative AI space saw $612.8 million in funding. This year, it's up to $2.3 billion.
Driving the news: In a note Tuesday announcing Meta would lay off 10,000 more employees, Zuckerberg spotlighted AI work and reduced the metaverse to an "also." “Our single largest investment is in advancing AI and building it into every one of our products,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Our leading work building the metaverse and shaping the next generation of computing platforms also remains central to defining the future of social connection.”
As I've explained before, conflating web3 with the Metaverse is a huge mistake, as is assuming Meta leads the metaverse industry. That aside, it's clearly the case that the Valley has shifted its buzz toward generative AI.
Is that smart? Obviously I'm biased when I say this, but there's already 520 million+ active users across many metaverse platforms, while the Metaverse's addressable market is at minimum everyone who regularly enjoys muti-user immersive experiences (i.e. 3D games online), roughly 1-2 billion people.
On the other side, there's several reasons to believe Generative AI is not as transformative as its most bullish boosters assume. For instance:
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Above: Screenshot from Crystal Frost's latest version
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Yurin has a lovely blog called Happy Sigh. Her most recent post 230313 features the ubiquitous fashion passion for mesh. If you checked out the Oscar and Vanity Fair After Party fashions, mesh and illusion was everywhere with over ever shrinking strategic coverage. This is downright modest by comparison.
For more Happy Sighing, click here:
