My Patreon Supporters
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!
“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.
Breedables CoOp, helping the SL pet community grow through shared resources. Go here to get started.
-
- Listen: I Talk About Metaverse Art, AM Radio & Cao Fei For ArtNet's Podcast
- Exclusive: Upland Real Estate Game Quietly Becoming An Immersive Metaverse Platform With Nearly 300K NFT Owners
- Watch: VRChat's Horizon Adjust Feature Used To Recreate David Bowie's Classic Escher Maze Scene From Labyrinth!
- Roblox Hiring Web3 Senior Engineer To Put Virtual World Items & Transactions, Possibly NFTs, On The Blockchain
- Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2022年7月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan
-
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Kid Joe’s blog is called Infinite. That makes sense because his blog defies all fashion blog conventions. .It’s not just that he goes back and forth between male and female avatars and mixes contemporary fashion and roleplay outfits. It’s that his pictures are often very editorial. The possibilities are, in a word, infinite.
Take the post “Awakening” which showcases a makeup set from La Maldita Bruja. It’s a blog post for one item and wow, does it ever make that front and center and so fantastic that even I, a person who dislikes tattoos, started thinking how much I wanted that before I remembered I don’t like tattoos.
- Makeup (with feathers) "Aphophis" by La Maldita Bruja.
Exclusive for Abstrakt event. The event closes today
For a stunning transformation, click here:
- Makeup (with feathers) "Aphophis" by La Maldita Bruja.
-
Yesterday I mentioned that "nearly all" metaverse platforms built around web3 features (blockchain, NFTs, crypto) have little or no active users. I qualified it that way because I recently found out about a possible exception:
Upland, the mixed reality real estate acquisition game (and the first customer for Linden Lab's Tilia payment service), sells NFTs associated with individual plots of land. And so far, the game/metaverse platform has over 285,000 unique Upland NFT owners. (Screengrab above, as shared with me by the Upland team.)
285K might not seem like much, as compared to say Roblox or Fortnite, but it is massive when compared with the current NFT market. As I noted last January, there are roughly 360,000 NFT owners in the entire world across the main blockchains. But Upland's NFTs, as co-founder Dirk Lueth told me recently, aren't tracked by Cryptoslam and most other blockchain analytics firms.
In other words, Upland reportedly has nearly as many unique NFT owners on its own platform as there are NFT owners across all other main blockchains — and far more NFT owners than Axie Infinity, The Sandbox, Decentraland, and other wel-known blockchain-based games/metaverse platforms.
Notably, most Upland NFT owners aren't active NFT speculators on other platforms, as is usually the case. According to an internal survey, 65% of Upland NFTs owners don’t own NFTs outside Upland.
Hopefully regular readers are wondering if Upland is even a metaverse platform at all. What with its flat 2D experience for the web and mobile browsers, it's not a 3D immersive virtual world, which is key to the classic metaverse definition.
That is true. But here's the thing: Now that it has an active user base in the six figures, the company is gradually rolling out immersive virtual world features beneath the Monopoly-esque property game — starting with a casual 3D racing game that's currently in Alpha. Watch:
-
Sanny Yoshikawa が、New World Notesのなかから、毎月おすすめのバーチャルワールドニュースを日本語で紹介します。
Sanny Yoshikawa covers the monthly virtual world highlights from New World Notes for virtual Japan.
-
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Seduce is someone I have featured before back in 2020 but when I saw this shot that could have come straight from one of my brother’s favorite movies For a Few Dollars More [click here] the second in the trilogy with A Fistful of Dollars [click here] and The Good the Bad and the Ugly [click here.] This pic could come straight from the movie poster. All three films have famous theme songs from the composer Ennio Morricone. The song from the third movie is one most of you will have heard as it’s often used in satiric western spoons. Seduce shot this and a few other pics as a tribute to several great Westerns.
For more tributes to the wild, wild, West, click here:
-
I owe finding this current Roblox job listing to the sharp eyes of Roblox_RTC, a Roblox-related news source — the massive metaverse platform is hiring a Senior Software Engineer, Web3 to complete tasks including "develop web3 solutions and integrate them with existing Roblox tech stack across Roblox", and "help decide the future of web3 in Roblox and the nature of our web3 solution". Specifically:
This is an opportunity for you to challenge your engineering talents by building something new, sharing expertise, adopting innovations contributed by other engineering teams and improving our bottom line. As a senior engineer you will help Roblox Marketplace to be web3 ready and support billions of items and transactions to happen both on the blockchain and Roblox.
Virtual items registered on the blockchain are more typically called by another name: Non-fungible tokens, i.e. NFTs. But I wouldn't assume Roblox is about to put out NFTs, because the job description strongly suggests "the future of web3 in Roblox" is still being decided.
Whatever the senior engineer does, it's a pretty mysterious move into web3 for Roblox:
-
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Alma has an intriguing photostream. Take this picture. I knew at first glance it was Bonnie and Clyde and if I didn’t, she confirmed it with her song choice, “The World Will Remember Us.” [Click here.] Everything fits, the clothing, the car, the drawn pistole – all suggest Bonnie and Clyde immediately.
It’s odd how people recall their connections to infamous criminals like Bonnie and Clyde as though they were good people. I knew this old man in real life who gave Clyde an apple. My great-great-grandfather hid the James Brothers in his barn. This very suspect family legend was confirmed by the historical society in Iowa so maybe it’s true. It seems so unlikely. I wish I had a dollar for every time I was told Ma Barker and her gang hid out for the Winter on the big island on the lake where I lived. If that were true, they would have turned themselves in just to warm up.
For more of Alma's stories, click here:
Responding to our question on how many active users on the Quest VR headset there are, a reader points us to a recent market survey which suggests that use is quite tiny, especially among Gen Z:
Piper Sandler completes 43rd semi-annual Generation Z survey of 7,100 U.S. teens…
While 26% of teens own a VR device, just 5% use it daily. 48% of teens are either unsure or not interested in the Metaverse
This prompts reader "lieisacake" (LOL) to observe: