- What Meta's 300,000 Horizon Users Means For The Metaverse
- Watch: Second Life Roleplayer Made This Jaw-Dropping Machinima Tribute To A World Of Warcraft Tavern — Here's How
- VRChat Hires Community Member Who Created Popular Scripting Compiler — UdonSharp Planned To Become Part Of Official SDK
- Super Bowl FOMO Crypto App Ad With Larry David Leads To Little To Actual Downloads, According To App Trackers
- Amazing Tributes To Magritte Paintings & Netflix Queen's Gambit Made In Second Life
- Metaverse Real Estate "Boom" Actually Has All The Makings Of A Bubble
- Watch: Meta's Superbowl Ad Depressingly Promotes Its Metaverse To Lonely Middle Age People
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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.
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The Verge's Alex Heath has a good scoop on Horizon Worlds which finally gives us a concrete number around its Metaverse efforts to date:
[Meta's] chief product officer, Chris Cox, gave employees a previously unreported update on Horizon’s user growth. He said that since Horizon Worlds was rolled out to all Quest users in the US and Canada in early December, its monthly user base has grown by a factor of 10x to 300,000 people, according to an employee who heard the remark. Meta spokesperson Joe Osborne confirmed the stat and said it included users of Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues, a separate app for attending live events in VR that uses the same avatars and basic mechanics.
I confirmed with Alex on Twitter that he's referring to 300,000 monthly active users — which as I also noted there, means that since last December, about as many people have tried Horizon Worlds/Venue as try out Second Life every month. In other words: Horizon usage is comparing well to… a 19 year old metaverse platform.
Five other points worth keeping in mind about this milestone, the first I cannot emphasize enough:
Horizon's success or failure says little about the Metaverse concept itself.
I've seen frequent hot takes that Meta's recent slumping in the stock market suggests that the Metaverse concept itself is in jeopardy. So it's worth emphasizing that Meta is a very recent player to this space, and in terms of active users, is among the smallest. Again, there are at least half a billion active users in metaverse-type platforms.
That's worth keeping in mind when I get to my next four points:
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Ryan Schultz covers the metaverse beat in his self-titled blog. He did an editorial on Valentine’s Day that I like quite a bit and it includes some shopping tips.
In Old Age in Virtual Worlds and Social VR-Why the Representation of Aging Matters in the Metaverse, he argues for more realistic ages for our avatars.
He makes a great case and supports his position by styling three older avatars. Rather than focus on the clothes, I thought I would list his credits for the heads and bodies.
- Mesh Head and Body: the Clodet three-ages mesh body by Altamura comes in three versions in one package: young, middle-aged, and older as shown here
- For the man. Mesh Head, Eyes, and Skin: the Victor head from LOGO allows you to adjust the level of wrinkles from young to old, and anywhere in-between! Very versatile if you’re going for an older gentleman look, and highly recommended.
- For his role-play avatar/ Mesh Head and Skin: Vivien Bento mesh head by LAQ (you can adjust the wrinkles on this as well)
For his coverage of the biggest SL story of the week, click here:
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Mi*To’s untitled pic appeals to the cat lover in me. I also love how beautifully she uses the Rule of Thirds in framing her photo. The cat is the star of the show, as a cat always should be. I also love the subtle framing provided by the trees on both sides of the street. Her cat appears more than once on her stream, as it should.
For more cats, click here:
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Above: Merlin's home office working for VRChat Inc.
Great update to UdonSharp, the hugely popular user-made compiler that converts C# to VRChat's Udon scripting language: Recently, VRChat the company officially hired "Merlin", UdonSharp's creator, to work directly and full-time for the company, and implement his code into the official development software.
"In the near future, yes it will probably be imported automatically with the SDK," as Merlin puts it to me. "I think it will depend on how much the SDK ends up needing to tie into UdonSharp to decide if it'll be included in the main Udon/SDK package at some point down the road rather than as an extra package that's installed automatically. But to the user it should essentially look the same with it being imported automatically with the SDK in versus it being part of the main SDK."
VRChat first hired Merlin to do contract work to support UdonSharp last year, a good thing to benefit the thousands of community creators who already rely on his compiler — not to mention financially supporting Merlin himself, who was unemployed at the time.
“I was living off savings from my prior job and working towards breaking even on living costs for rent/food/etc with Patreon,” he says.
Merlin later saw a need to improve the Udon SDK on a broader level — but only if he were working for the company full-time. So he applied, and joined the team:
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Amazing Tributes to Magritte Paintings & Netflix Queen’s Gambit Made in Second Life by Vrir Resident
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Vrir Resident has done some great homage photos, including this fabulous “Le fils de l’homme” in honor of Rene Magritte. He includes a link to a joyful song by De Nieuwe Snaar called Rene Magritte. [click here] This an extraordinary recreation of Magritte’s most famous painting “The Son of Man” which was a self-portrait as this is.
For more Magritte plus another fabulous homage, click here:
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Here we go again (again) with yet another "metaverse real estate boom" story:
The virtual real estate boom is turning the metaverse into the Wild West…
It wouldn’t be until the modern crypto movement began accelerating in the last few years, with the popularization of NFTs [LOL it's not "popular"— WJA] and more recently the hype around the metaverse, that the concept of investing in virtual land would go from inexplicable to the next big gaming gold rush. In that context, Somnium is just one of a growing number of metaverse platforms that have been making headlines of late because of the mind-boggling amounts of money pouring in. Others include SoftBank-funded The Sandbox, Decentraland and Cryptovoxels, forming what you could think of as a “Big Four” in the metaverse real estate market.
Whenever you read these breathless media reports of a "boom" or a "gold rush", my advice is to immediately check how many actual people these platforms are attracting in terms of monthly active and/or peak concurrent users. Because on those metrics, this "Big Four" is actually quite small:
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Aoi IChibara is a fashion microblogger who creates complete scenes with gorgeous style. I love her commitment to creating the full scenario, so there are the people you will find at a celebrity step and repeat. A police officer and paparazzo and the celebrities they photograph and protect.
For a fun coffee shot pic, click here:
