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!

“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.

  • Now Open: The Fifty, Second Life Sales Extravaganza Featuring Ukrainian Creator Loki & Other SL Stars

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    Click here (or the logo at right) to teleport into The Fifty, a new month-long event from Barb*, founder of the legendary Fifty Linden Friday group. (Back-up sim here.)

    While FLF is built around deep discounts on SL style and housewares  — here's my post on its fascinating economics — The Fifty is focused on premium content from star creators at regular prices.

    "FLF Events has several fun, seasonal events where everything is L$50," as Barb puts it to me.  "The bargains are awesome, but I wanted to try something at regular prices, with a really tightly, thoughtfully curated lineup."

    Those celebrity creators include Loki, who is also among this list of Ukrainian citizens that the SL community is rushing to support during their time of crisis. (Loki's Marketplace page here.)

    There's many other stars on hand, Barb adds, some of whom don't usually do events like this:

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  • Friday Fashion Blog: Nattie Features Her Unique Style on Flickr

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

    Nattie is a microblogger who posts her credits on Flickr and in the pictures themselves. I love her style and love how she has this consistent look to her blog pics. She always has a pastel square or a square and rectangle with a trail of dots bisecting the page. Above the square, she places the title. Below the square, she writes the credits directly on the pic. Everything is pastel. I love the style. Sometimes she just has the dots trailing across. There is consistency in the variations. 

    • [Gild] Fur Bucket hat_Leopard by Ǥɐṙṙёţє (garrete.moonkill)
    • tram K0310 hair by moca loup
    • * SORGO – YAUNG Shades / BLACK by Arscene Dubrovna
      Inworld store will reopen soon.
    • [Dope+Mercy]Warm Sweatshirt_J by The77Sim3
    • BTTB huvud jeans – bleached by Jack Valentine
    • SEMLLER & Hiemal Sporty Platforms WHITE by SEMLLER
    • BTTB hej shoulder bag – blue by Jack Valentine

    For more fab style, click here:

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  • Watch: Meta’s Voice-Activated Builder Bot Reeks of the Sci-Fi UI Fallacy

    Here's Meta's latest Metaverse technology announcements dealing with AI solutions. To no one's surprise, the company is fully open about their plans to leverage highly personal data of what people see how and they use their bodies while in their metaverse platform. (A coming crisis people like Avi Bar-Zeev have been screaming about for years.)

    What's somewhat surprising (at least to me) is the company's voice-controlled Builder Bot prototype. (Watch above at around 3:10 minutes in.) It painfully, cringefully has all the markings of the sci-fi UI fallacy:

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  • Anaya Oneiro’s Stunning Second Life Black & White Screenshot Art

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

    Anaya Oneiro’s untitled picture is so chic. The earring is the focal point, of course, but the casual draping of the pearl necklace over her mock turtleneck just elevates it so much with dramatic contrast with the baroque formality of the earrings. 

    For another striking, chic, and artful avatar nude, click here:

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  • Second Life Finally Adds Game-Like Achievement Scores — And E-mails Them to Users!

    Second Life game achievement notices

    Apparently it's my 16th Rez Day in Second Life today, because I just got this nice e-mail from Linden Lab:

    Second Life is fun, weird, and always evolving, but the magic ingredient is YOU. The vibrant worlds you build and the sense of community you provide for others is simply priceless. Here's to another year of imagination and experiencing the impossible. -The Second Life Team

    Even more notable, however, is the infographic at the bottom of that e-mail — see at upper right, click to embiggenate.

    Yes: User achievement scores. Comparing my usage milestones in terms of total log-ins, teleports taken, and days logged in within the last year, to that of the average SL user.

    Or to put all that in virtual world terminology: Game mechanics.

    Not sure when Linden Lab started sending these e-mails out, but this is something I've been writing about and advocating, for well-over a decade: Game mechanics that subtly nudge players to be more regularly active in the virtual world. I just mentioned this today to Parmy Olson of Bloomberg as a feature that Second Life sorely needed (but didn't yet have) to grow out of its niche.

    This is a solid first step, and "Regions visited" and "Teleports" are great metrics to start with, as they'll encourage SLers to explore the world more. (Most long-time users don't even do that much anymore.)

    Next updates to this? A couple jump right out at me:

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  • ROBLOX’s Weekend Downtime Caused Rec Room Usage to Spike

    Rec Room ROBLOX concurrency

    Rec Room's Shawn Whiting tweeted this tantalizing (and teasingly unmarked) concurrency chart as a response to ROBLOX's extended downtime last weekend, saying: "@Roblox goes down, @RecRoom concurrent players goes up." And quite a lot, to judge by that hockey stick! 

    "Mostly mobile [users] but also console and Steam/PC," Shawn told me today, "not as much of a spike on VR."

    I'm somewhat surprised, because experientially, ROBLOX and Rec Room are pretty different, the former featuring LEGO-like avatars and an over-the-shoulder avatar view, the latter with hand-puppet avatars, VR optimization, and a first-person point of view.

    This suggests to me that there's a heavy overlap of usage (or interest) of Rec Room among active ROBLOX users. That also suggests to me that many of ROBLOX users are up for grabs by other metaverse platforms, especially during crashy periods.

    As for how many more concurrent users this is, I'll make an educated guess just for fun:

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  • Cajsa Choices: Lily Lovelace Shoots Second Life in Gorgeous Black & White

    SL fashion photos

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

    I love Lily Lovelace’s “I Turn My Camera On” and not just because I love that tune. [Listen Here] She’s using leading lines to help us follow the avatar’s line of sight. I should note the avatar is in the middle of the street which is not recommended in real life. I kind of love how her avatar is all in black so she is this “absence” of sorts in front of the streetscape. 

    For what may or may not be a tribute to the show Ozark, click here:

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  • Listen: Parmy Olson & Me on Bloomberg Spaces Chatting About the Metaverse — Links to Stories We Cover Below!

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    Update, 10:55AM: Click through to hear our recorded chat above, chat starts about 5 minutes after some technical issues on my side — links to the stories we discuss below!

    Live tomorrow (February 23rd) at 9am PT, join me on Bloomberg Opinion's Twitter Space for a chat with Bloomberg's Parmy Olson (author of the seminal book, We Are Anonymous) Here's some of the recent topics/articles we'll probably be covering:

    And hopefully many more topics. Hope you join in!

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  • Veteran Metaverse Analyst Gwyneth Llewelyn on Meta’s Horizon Woes — And How They Might Be Improved

    Gwyneth Llewelyn SL metaverse Horizon Meta

    Longtime metaverse analyst and developer Gwyneth Llewelyn recently posted a good reader comment analyzing Meta's early efforts in the space. And I do mean "longtime" — this is her avatar from 2006 when she was in a trademark dispute over a collectivist utopia in Second Life. (Yes, that's a thing.)

    Leaping off from my observation that Meta's Horizon Worlds ad for the Super Bowl seems depressingly targeted at middle age people who feel washed up, she dives right in:

    Actually, let me play Devil's Advocate here. What's so wrong about targeting GenXers with a depressing video? Most of them are on Facebook anyway, and already depressed (and getting worse). So that's Meta's target audience — trying to recapture those GenXers who finally gave up on Facebook and are ready to try the Next Best Thing.

    Interestingly, the best part of that ad is the most depressing one — the one that uses real life action with CGI for the animatronics. That's the bit where the director's got creative.

    The worst bit is, well, Horizon. I'm sorry, but shelling out a small fortune for a VR headset to get legless, low-polygon avatars that seem to do little more than crowd around you, having a weird minimalistic almost-wireframe-y background of speeding flying cars… I don't know, but the appeal is simply not there.

    Unless things start to improve soon and fast, I'm not really sure that Horizon will last long as a Meta product…

    However, I'm not saying that Meta will move out of VR gadgets and games. These are lucrative businesses by themselves, with strong, well-proven business models. And with hundreds of millions of computer game players world-wide, that's not a niche market. What Meta could attempt to do is a long-running series of (independent) games that use the same avatar technology, and capitalize on the ability of players to personalize them (even outside of the game itself) on a 'social' VR platform where outfits and props for avatars are for sale — a bit like the old PlayStation Home, which has been resurrected by the fan base, and, looking at their Git repository, it's being actively maintained.

    Now, I never owned a game console (I have no time for that!), so I cannot tell how much interest PlayStation Home has (or had). There is clearly a reason for why Sony abandoned it in 2015 (I just don't know what reason was given at the time). Nevertheless, the notion that a fan base can resurrect such a project shows that there is some interest in such a product. How 'niche' it will ever be is anyone's question. But I'd say that Horizon could become the next 'PlayStation Home' for the Oculus ecosystem.

    Ah, PlayStation Home. Remember when Second Life had so much industry buzz, one of the top console manufacturers in the world launched a (poorly executed) alternative? Pepperidge Hamlet remembers.

    Gwyn, who's led development on metaverse projects for major companies through her firm Beta Technologies, goes on to analyze Meta and Horizon's future prospects, and has some good advice for Meta going forward:

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  • Fascinating Flamingo Photos from Artist Focused on the Virtual Birds of Second Life

    SL bird photos

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

    Siobhan Muintir is someone who experiments all the time, shooting pics that illustrate songs, characters, and ideas. One of her obsessions, though, is photographing birds. She recently did a study of Flamingos with musical accompaniment by The Flamingos’ 1959 song, “I Only Have Eyes for You.” [click here] This small study enchanted me. Perhaps because flamingos are such recognizable birds, she went in a very abstract direction that is very much about color and inference. Look at this picture, we don’t see the birds clearly, but is there any doubt what they are?

    For more flamingos, click here:

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