Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Nora’s untitled picture is a fabulous naturalistic self-portrait. I love how comfortable and at-ease her avatar seems. She is kind enough to include the pose in the description. The pose is very appealing. Add to that, her use of black and white makes it all about light and dark, about shadows and contrasts, and she uses them brilliantly.
Nora really explores the different between pretty and beautiful, click here:
Rec Room recently reported over 1 million monthly users and a higher peak concurrency than VRChat. But when it comes to the two leading social VR worlds, VRChat seems to have a crucial edge: A far more active and ambitious creative community.
That statement is my personal estimation, to be sure. And to be fair, Rec Room does have some interesting user-made projects. But I follow both worlds pretty closely, and VRChat’s user-driven worlds and innovations consistently seem to hit on a completely different, higher level. Just in the last few months, for example, I’ve written about*:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Kimberlyann’s photostream is full of striking images. “Lone Wolf'' seems just terrifying to me and I love it. It makes me think of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, ostensibly the most haunted forest in the world. You don’t have to go out west to find ghost towns. There’s also this “Blair Witch Project” vibe, the blurred and ever-expanded trees.
Good conversation by readers around last week's post about a universal metaverse protocol, and whether we really need it. One reader was skeptical when I described Steam as basically "[A] metaverse portal, taking you from VRChat to Rec Room and beyond with a few clicks and several minutes of wait time", asking:
Are you serious when you're suggesting to readers of this post that we should be content with "a few clicks and several minutes of wait time" for hopping between destinations in the "worlds-wide meta-metaverse"… rather than striving for the simplicity (and instant transportation) of links between websites?
As broadband improves, I suspect we'll get to several seconds of wait time by this decade. But it's hard to see the clicks going away. Metaverse or not, we'll probably always need to go through some opt-in steps when going from one experience/IP realm to the next. Or as reader Adeon Writer puts it:
VRChat requires you opt-in to visiting any world it has not greenlit – so the idea of going from one experiences to [another] without clicks is a pipe dream. Even websites warn you when you are about to leave.
This points to a fundamental challenge to the Metaverse ideal, which typically describes a seamless immersive experience that is also open like the web:
This Saturday Night Live segment pretty much reminds me of every conversation I've had with a crypto-evangelist except the question I keep asking him (and it's always a him) is, "OK if it's so important how come hardly anyone is using it to buy goods and services?" over and over again until the crypto-evangelist casually mentions that they personally have made a lot of money from crypto. (You know — actual money, the kind Michael Che holds up.)
I suppose we should credit Elon for being self-effacing, but on the other hand — or maybe not:
Even more pertinent, a senior designer of Scavengers is Ben Batstone, a longtime Linden Lab veteran who got his start as a Second Life user known as Buhbuhcuh Fairchild. And he credits his work in SL for his design approach to Scavengers:
"I made my first shooter games in SL – those watermelon guns that griefers would use were using my scripts. Being able to iterate quickly and get instant community feedback was amazing as a novice designer.
"As far as what I am doing with [Scavenger developer] Midwinter, a lot of my efforts are around long term player engagement. I think I could view that very narrowly with a 'game designer' role: just game features, content and mechanics, but my time as a Linden made my belief that the stickiest content is other people, and the more we can get players interacting in positive ways, the more those players will return. So I'm pushing hard for driving social features and strong community programs, and trying to integrate that with gameplay. We're less than a week into Early Access so a lot of that is still in the foundational steps, but we've got some cool stuff on the way."
Their vision seems to be a game that makes a conceptual leap up hits like Fortnite and League of Legends, while incorporating virtual world-ish, persistent action:
As you can see from the video above and my dialog below, Mr. Bones himself makes for a friendly virtual companion in SL (he can even follow you on command!), but he’s also meant to show off Really Useful Script Corner’s feature set for customizable NPCs (Non-Player Characters).
“My basic chatbot has two functions – Chat and Responses,” lead developer Grace7 Ling explains, “Chat includes the bot being able to greet visitors and greet its owner. The bot can also remember who it has met before as well.” Her chatbot can also spout random things as a way of encouraging nearby SLers to reply.
As for responses, Grace means more than simple text-based replies. Responses include “doing something in response to a keyword or key phrase it hears, like giving a landmark or SLurl, or playing a sound or animation.”
Ms. Ling’s more advanced chatbot comes with a third feature: Chatter, which enables owners to specify multiple possible answers to a statement, with different probabilities for each. You can even expand your bot’s phrase recognition range by adding “brain-files” (i.e. notecards) to its database.
While Mr. Bones comes with the new Animesh Pro Edition chatbot script, Grace’s chatbot series includes a mesh human, a French bulldog, a parrot, and a mirror.
Her customers, she tells me, are already using them for a wide variety of NPCs in their own projects:
The Dirty Mind blog is by Taker Belmont. I got a kick out of post #41 with the banana swing. The banana outfit is such a clever choice. It has a sort of mod meets camp feeling. The gold pillars are too much which makes them perfectly campy.
Important comment/update to last week's post, when I cautioned against creating NFT from Second Life images. When the EFF lawyer I quoted referred to the "dark interesting mysteries" around IP ownership of user-created content in SL, Linden Lab had not addressed derivative works in its Terms of Service. Since then (in 2017, it looks like), the company has:
2.5 You also grant Linden Lab and other users of the Service a license to use your Content in snapshots and machinima that is displayed in publicly accessible areas of the Service.
You agree that by uploading, publishing, or submitting any Content to or through the Servers for display in any publicly accessible area of the Service, you hereby grant other users a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to photograph, capture an image of, film, and record a video of the Content, and to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the resulting photograph, image, film, or video in any current or future media as provided in and subject to the restrictions and requirements of an applicable Product Policy or other policy.
Reader irihapeti noted this clause, which effectively requires content creators to opt out from people using their content in an SL screenshot for commercial or other purposes:
