Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Author, strategist, virtual world reporter

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Hypnotic Romance, an SL sim with secluded spaces for couples. Click here to teleport.

The Virtual Worlds Museum. Click here to teleport to their Second Life hub with tribute to sunsetted worlds!

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  • Midjourney Tips: How to Get the Best Results from the AI Image Generator

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    SLer Kala Bijoux has been playing around with Midjourney, the AI image generator featured as an art tool here last week, posting many of the most amazing results to her Twitter account. She very helpfully sent along some tips for people getting Castle1started with the platform: 

    1) Troubleshooting: If you are having trouble with the website or Discord log out and log back in again. This has solved 99% of the problems I've had when setting people up.

    2) Check out the community page on the Midjourney website for prompt ideas and for examples of how people are writing their prompts. I find this a very useful way to see what words and phrases people are using to get specific looks. The community is currently a bit divided on people just copying the prompt completely without changing or tweaking it. Some people don't care because they feel it is a recipe (and you will never get the exact same image as the first person), while others feel like they spend a lot of time crafting the perfect prompt and dislike people copying it. I usually change it a bit (or a lot!) to suit my needs.

    3) Play with aspect ratios! The default image is a square, but you can change the image's aspect ratio by adding ' –ar ' and then the aspect ratio at the end of your prompt. One of my favorite aspect ratios is 9:16 so I would write –ar 9:16 at the end of my prompt. For example, one prompt might be "evil queen's castle on a hill, scary, dark, gothic, detailed oil painting –ar 9:16" [pictured at right – WJA]. This website has a long list of aspect ratios that work in Midjourney. 

     
    And yes, you can add images from Second Life (or for that matter, any metaverse platform) to Midjourney:

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  • Get a Free Rainbow from Juicy Bomb, Now In Its 15th Year of SL Blogging!

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

    Gogo over at JuicyBomb blog has one of her EEP sets for free. (I.E., Linden Lab’s Environmental Enhancement Project.) She writes about it in her post, Updated JuicyBomb Rainbow EEP settings. According to her post, the Lindens are using her Cheery Day EEP on the debug regions so she updated her set to include the cardinal directions. You can pick up your free EEP set at Aurelia’s Rainy Cafe. [SLurl here.] If you already have the set, you can get a free update on Marketplace. 

    For a thorough review of Juicy Boobs (no relation), click here:

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  • Watch: SL Machinima With Amazing Framerate & High Quality Visuals — Here’s How Isabelle Cheren Made It!

    This is a fun SL music machinima showcasing choreography originally created for BLACKPINK by dancer Kiel Tutin, which is now available for Second Life avatars. (Info in the YouTube video.)

    It's also among the most high quality Second Life machinima I've ever seen, featuring dynamic shadow and an incredibly high framerate, so the dance moves are crisp and fluid.

    There's an interesting if ironic reason why it looks so great, video creator Isabelle Cheren tells me:  

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  • Fabulously Posed Avatars from Mya Audebarn Show What Fully Articulated Fingers & Limbs Can Do

    "La Petife Fille De La Mer..."

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

    Mya Audebarn’s “La Petife Fille De La Mer” made me think of Alberto Vargas. I had to check to make sure it was Second Life, it looks so much like a painting. I love it when I see someone paying homage to the great artists through Second Life and showing how very versatile Second Life artists are. There is such great variety in how people express their love for Second Life. 

    For more striking portraits, click here:

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  • Watch: Machinima Shot in VRChat Features Amazing Fight Scenes Using a Full Body VR Rig in a Surprising Way

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    S.Y.N.C. is an upcoming machinma shot entirely in VRChat, and it's among the most amazing that I've seen — along with the professional polish, the many fight scenes (via guns, swords, and full contact kung fu) are impressively fluid and articulated. And as befits most metaverse projects with this level of excellence, it's a fully furry production.

    Directed and starring "Legend50210" (let's call him Legend for short), the footage is captured, he tells me, "using the natively supported stream camera function supplied by VRChat. I hold the artificial camera in my hand and move it accordingly like an actual camera minus the weight."

    The action scenes are, as they appear, shot with the actor in a full body rig:

    "Most people on the platform use the standard form of 6 point tracking which accommodates for head, hands, feet and hips.
    Me, I went all out and got added ones that include my chest, knees and elbows, bringing my points of tracking up to 11."

    At first I thought the scenes were shot with actors logged onto VRChat from various parts of the world. But the way these scenes are actually shot is perhaps even more painstakingly impressive:

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  • Rockstar Vet Creating Everywhere, Another Possible “Roblox, But Not for Kids” Platform – Watch the Teaser!

    Despite all the dune buggies in the teaser trailer, it's not There, but Everywhere. However, detailed information about it exists nowhere — except, that is, in the studio of Build A Rocket Boy, founded former Rockstar North head Leslie Benzies. The montage video shows glimpses of many environments and some Fortnite-type combat, and from what a game industry reporter could glean, it's going to be a metaverse-ish platform of some kind: 

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  • Look at How Much Second Life Avatars Have Evolved Through Subtle But Once-Impossible Poses & Gestures

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

    Dia’s pictures catch my eye with the excellent poses and her care in shooting them. Take this untitled picture. Both sneakers are on the floor, no slight hover or subtle sinking into the floor. Her fingers touch her hand, the elbow is behind but not in the leg. 

    Using Bento and HUDs or third party viewers that let people fine tune poses, this kind of excellence is increasingly common. But for someone like me who fought with poses in 2007, it still is wondrous to see. Especially in such a striking picture. There’s something lonely about this pic, perhaps because the light is so dusty. I imagine her waiting for someone who is very, very late, wondering whether she should just give up and go home. 

    For more, click here:

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  • The Mystery of Mark’s Avatar Isn’t Bad Graphics, But Its Mixed Reality Conception

    Zuckerberg Meta Avatars

    Scrambling in response to much Internet snark, Mark Zuckerberg recently updated his Keane-eyed Horizon Worlds avatar that he posted to Facebook last week (above left) with a much more detailed and realistic version (above right).  Writing:

    I know the photo I posted earlier this week was pretty basic — it was taken very quickly to celebrate a launch. The graphics in Horizon are capable of much more — even on headsets — and Horizon is improving very quickly.

    It’s a mystery why his first version was so basic — both the avatar and the user-made Eiffel tower in the background — but even stranger to me is what it implies about Meta’s underlying conception for metaverse platform avatars. Apparently, it includes the premise that avatars should be a mixed reality variation of the real world user, and that consumers even want this.

    For newcomers to metaverse platforms, this is a common assumption — probably because the mainstream press devotes so much coverage to one-off mixed reality events where it makes sense for avatars to somewhat resemble their real owners. In other words, celebrity appearances. For instance, Travis Scott in Fortnite, Lil Nas X in Roblox, or more locally, Matthew Ball in Breakroom. 

    But this is actually the exception. Overwhelmingly, metaverse platform users do not prefer avatars based on their real life appearance, even when the internal tools to customize them that way exist. 

    This is an important distinction to understand, because it reflects both the market preference and the underlying psychological needs which drive it:

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  • Here’s How Color Filters Can Create Powerful Avatar Imagery

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

    Channon’s “It’s Complicated” is a wonderful example of how powerful a duotone can be. They don’t have to be black and white and different colors bring subtly different subtext. Blue is associated with the freedom of the wide open skies. It’s a futuristic color, frequently the color of lighting in space movies and tv series. Think of Tron. [See trailer here.] The bright, blue light of this duotone is the color of the future. 

    To see more examples of Charron’s use of color, click here:

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  • Here’s Why Midjourney-Generated AI Images Can Be Called Art

    Nettrice Gaskins Afrofuturist dancer Midjourney

    Really smart points by reader "Liv", on whether AI generated images like Dr. Nettrice Gaskins' Midjourney-based works can be called art:

    Like all artforms new technology comes along, and equivalent debates arise in different fields. “Is electronic music really music?” Same question.

    Some people will always value craft (or instrumentalism, in the music case) and so for them no it won't be art. And that’s fine.

    For the rest of us art is about ideas. Brian Eno talks at length about how he allows machines (or software) to create sounds. and how his role becomes that of a curator. When the pseudo-random oscillators create a pleasing result only then does he mark that recording as one to keep. And what order does he edit and present them in? That is the art that makes his ambient music interesting.

    Or consider another form of art where it's also possible to cheaply and quickly generate many, many digital images:

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