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.

  • This New VRChat World is Created by Someone Whose Game Worlds Are So Popular, She Now Makes a Full-Time Living Via Fan Donations

    Kitchen Versus Kitchen is a zany new world game in VRChat (click here to play) from a mysterious developer known only as Jar. Her hit VRChat worlds are so popular, they account for roughly 1 in 10 of the virtual world's total user activity, and are more popular than most VR games made by established game companies. (Seriously: More on that below.)

    This new game, as you might imagine, takes its inspiration from solo/local co-op cooking games which seem ideal when translated into a social VR setting. 

    "I've played games like Overcooked and Diner Dash before and really enjoyed them with friends, and since VRChat is a social game it just seemed like a natural fit to do something similar," she tells me. "Also game mode aside, there was (and still is?) just an overall lack of worlds with cooking activities and everyone loves cooking, myself included."

    As is screamingly apparent from the trailer above, the race to cook the right recipe in time quickly leads to all kinds of culinary mayhem. Getting all that to work in VRChat on a technical level, says Jar, was no easy job:

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  • Great SL Fashion Beautifully Shot With the Black Dragon Viewer

    51365970893_eaaa2f5d37_wCajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

    Val Cloud’s blog Dear Inventory is full of great posts featuring her own products with other people’s creations. I was completely taken by the pose. Look at her hand holding the strap. She didn’t credit the pose, but that is probably because she uses the Black Dragon viewer which has such powerful in-world pose tools. She has a tutorial here but I don’t speak Portuguese. She has a separate blog for her store Guapa, so she does not over-promote in this fashion blog.

    Click through to her post “Sienna” for additional details or below: 

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  • The Metaverse Can’t Develop Like the Internet Since It Doesn’t Have Open Standards — But Metaverse Communities Can Help Change That. My Take On Matthew Ball’s Metaverse Primer, Part 6

    Fortnight Metaverse Crossplatform Play Matthew Ball

    I'm blogging Matthew Ball’s must-read, nine part metaverse primer over the Summer; my take on Part 1 is here,  my coverage of Part 2 is here, with Part 3 coverage here, Part 4 coverage here, and Part 5 here.

    As with previous parts of the Primer, Part 6, "Interchange Tools + Standards and the Metaverse" delves into just how difficult making a Metaverse worth the name will be. Because while many say the Metaverse is the Internet's next generation, the actual Internet was launched by academics and government researchers who valued open standards. But the major companies/platforms which are likely to launch the Metaverse are very much closed, for the most part:

    All of the video games console operating systems, which are required to use console hardware, have chosen not to support open or third-party rendering API collections, such as OpenGL or WebGL. Instead, Microsoft Xbox exclusively uses Microsoft’s DirectX, while Sony uses its GNMX for PlayStation. Mobile devices typically support multiple standards, but they often restrict (or outright block) access to many drivers, which helps drive developers to their proprietary offering. PC and Mac are more open, but they’re optimized for Microsoft’s DirectX and Apple’s Metal APIs. As a result, a developer’s software needs to be written specifically for each platform’s ‘standards’. Fortnite needs to use Microsoft’s DirectX for Xbox, and Sony’s GNMX for PlayStation, Nvidia’s NVM for Nintendo Switch, and Apple’s Metal for iOS. Only Google’s Android has built its solution around OpenGL, but one could argue its dominance with Chrome and Chromium controls these standards for the web.

    GPUs also have their own flavor of these protocols, too. Nvidia’s drivers are effectively a ‘platform’ that developers utilize to access a PC user’s hardware, working in concert with Microsoft’s DirectX, for rendering.

    But if companies like these want to keep their standards closed, their customers, unified, can demand otherwise. As Matthew writes, the runaway success of Fortnite caused gamers to clamor for the chance to play together with their friends on other devices — and their clamor grew so great (as did their threats to take their eyeballs elsewhere), even proprietary AF Sony finally complied:  

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  • Inside Horizon Workrooms: Oculus Vet Jim Purbrick on Mapping Real Offices to Virtual Spaces — and How His Team Used It During the Pandemic For Their Own Meetings

    Oculus Facebook Horizon VR office Jim Purbrick

    Last week's launch of Facebook's Horizon Workrooms garnered a lot of guffaws due to its sheer Zuckerbergian much-ness, but beneath the VR-for-office meetings platform is some impressive tech.

    On his blog, Jim "Babbage" Purbrick (who helped lead development of Workrooms)  goes into detail on a key Workrooms feature — virtual mapping of the user's real meeting location/surroundings:

    [Workrooms] shows you an entirely virtual environment, but asks you to indicate the position of real world objects like your desk in a process which feels like a more detailed guardian setup process. Workrooms then positions your avatar in the virtual world so that your real desktop aligns with your virtual desktop.

    When you reach out and touch the virtual desk your hands touch the real desk. As long as the important virtual objects within arms reach are mapped to real objects, the virtual environment can be much bigger than the available real space while maintaining the illusion that every virtual object can be touched as well as seen.

    Jim (who left Facebook late last year) allows that this is not the type of set-up you want to be strapped into for your entire day: "Currently you wouldn't want to use a Quest all day," as he puts it. "But you could easily attend several typical hour long meetings a day without feeling uncomfortable."

    Throughout the pandemic, the Oculus group developing Workrooms would actually use their own platform to hold meetings:

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  • This Artist Turns Second Life Into Frame-Worthy Art Photos With Witty Titles

    Did you know that? Some unicorns like to dress up as horses

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

    //embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

    Heidi Rewell gives her pictures the best titles on Flickr. I mean, even if they were not good pics, you would want to look just for the titles. But they are good pictures, so bonus! 

    Take “Did you know that? Some unicorns like to dress up as horses.” She sets her horizon one-fifth of the way up, leaving the sky to fill the picture using the unofficial rule of fifths. The horses are nearly hidden by the tall grass but that seems appropriate when they are unicorns disguised as horses. 

    For more beautifully illustrated facts, click here:

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  • Sub-Orbital Galaxy Still Floating Above Second Life After 14 Years, Still Inspiring Virtual & Real Communities

    Inspire Space Park Second Life

    Photo credit: Susietea Resident via Inspire's Flickr Group

    Twelve years ago, Bonny Greenwood was floating in outer space on an asteroid doing tai chi to trance music when she struck up a conversation with a friendly passerby. (As one does.)

    Then again this is a common thing to happen in Inspire Space Park, a suborbital galaxy that’s been floating high above Second Life since at least 2007 — created, as the founders told me back then, “to make the perfect ‘chill’ place in SL that wasn't about sex, or ads”. (Watch me twirl above the galaxy below.)

    It’s still orbiting above the virtual world, I am happy to report, and has very recently expanded to include an earthbound fantasy forest and steampunk-themed park. Click here to visit yourself.

    It was co-created by Earth Primbee, and as a testament to the community that’s developed around Inspire Space Park over its lifespan, he is still after all these years able to cover land tier costs from donations:

    “It is the feeling one gets when the music and scene combines,” Primbee muses to me. “Maybe you are dancing, doing Tai Chi, meditating, or orbiting and find that moment where it all comes together. It is a peaceful feeling. People need that and the people have insured it stayed. Became a home of sorts. A place where many have met for the first time. A shared place for them after.”

    Inspire’s original co-creators have since moved on, and Primbee himself has largely turned over operations to three women. Which brings us back to Bonny, among the triumvirate of the galaxy’s new managers:

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  • Upland Now Attracting Over 100K High Active Unique Players for Its Blockchain/Tilia-Backed Virtual Real Estate MMO

    Upland virtual land purchases

    Last month I estimated that Upland, the blockchain-backed mirror world real estate trading MMO, probably had about low-to-mid six figures of active users; now here's a pretty good data point of users who actually play Upland long enough to buy virtual real estate in it. A very active Upland user sent me the data above,  drawn from up2land.com, a player-driven analytics site.

    "[T]hese numbers reflect only the UNIQUE players making transactions each month," my source tells me, "Either Sales, Accepted Offers, or Minting properties. It does not reflect the total number of players — there are many [who] might go months without making a transaction – and some players may be counted each month. But it does give an indication of the trend of the game."
     
    So unique players defined on those terms have ranged from 54,000 to 102,000 in recent months. My source suspects the dip in May is attributable to less advertising during that month. But these numbers likely do not include a lot of new users just playing around with the free-to-play game's starting money:

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  • This Artist Creates Some of My Very Favorite Second Life-Based Images

    Amrum

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

    Tooku Fadlan’s “Amrun” may end up my favorite picture of the year. When I saw it, I just said, “Wow” before sitting there looking at it for I don’t know how long. I love the moody lighting from the moon through the clouds. Or should I say moony lighting? I love the shadow of the fence creating this parallel set of leading lines diverging as the land rises and falls. It is just magical. 

    For more, click here:

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  • Portrait of the Artist as a Young A.I.: Rude & Pretentious Art Magazine-Style Questions for “Alejandro”

    NFT AI Alejandro August Rosedale neural network GPT 3

    Above: Art created by an AI called "Alejandro", and the AI-generated photo of "Alejandro" 

    I told you last week about "Alejandro", an AI personality who is creating works of art, which entrepreneur August Rosedale is then selling as NFTs.

    But just how much of a personality does Alejandro actually have? Skeptical that the Turing Test pretense would come crashing down pretty quickly, I sent several questions to August for him to ask "Alejandro". But rather than just pose random generic queries, I asked them as if I was a pretentious a-hole freelancer writing for a pompous art magazine, challenging the AI on his authenticity as artist, whether he's an AI sell-out, and, of course, about having sex with his human groupies.

    Here's our unedited Q&A:

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  • Watch: Profound Chat About Living With Cerebral Palsy IRL Via a Wailugi Avatar in VRChat (Syrmor’s Latest)

    "I think of this whole disability as one joke that God put on me… I don't think I would be the person I am now without this disability. It's helped my perspective on the world."

    Here's the latest interview from Syrmor, the Toronto-based embedded reporter in VRChat, in a characteristically surreal and zany yet but also profound interview with someone who speaks about their real life through the safe distance of their avatar — in this case, a wheelchair-bound British guy with cerebral palsy and a Wailugi avatar. After a good natured North American trolling (referring to football as "soccer" never fails to enrage a Brit), Syrmor's questions evoke powerfully honest answers from "benjiboi420" about his life online — questions that would be socially difficult to ask or answer in another context. 

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