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.

Top 7 Posts Last Week Including Epic’s Metaverse & Multiverse, VRChat Breakthroughs & Updates & the Second Life Scripting That Could Have Been

April 19, 2021
Watch Life 2.0, the Best Documentary on Second Life Now Available on Netflix — And My Interview With the Director Below

April 16, 2021

Click here to watch before Netflix pulls it from the streaming library (as the company often does): Life 2.0, the acclaimed 2010 documentary on virtual world life, love, business, and identity — and how they all bleed over into the real world. And I do mean acclaimed: After premiering at Sundance, the film had a good run in the arthouse circuit, garnered 89% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes*, a great review in the New Yorker, and then Oprah Winfrey picked it up for her new cable network,

I interviewed the director, Jason Spingarn-Koff, when the movie played at South by Southwest — watch below:

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How to Add & Customize an Audio Reactive Display to Your Sinespace Scene

April 16, 2021

Click here to get a free copy of a Sinespace furniture item that shows off a cool feature to the virtual world, a proud sponsoring partner to New World Notes:

An audio reactive display that dynamically responds to music being streamed into a scene. (Watch above for a club scene demo.)

Sinespace staffer Xu (Xulain #4636 on Discord) has some tips for installing the Display in your region:

"Sometimes when you place objects in room edit [mode] the object cannot find a collider to line up against but just place at any rotation and edit after with the "e" key to rotate.

Apart from that you just needs some music a radio or anything that uses an audio source." For instance, this free oldtimey radio, also by Xu.

At the last Sinespace office hours, Xu recently gave an in-depth tutorial for creating and customizing your own audio reactive displays, — watch below:

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SL Fashion Friday: Style Tips from a Glamorously Grumpy Fashionista

April 16, 2021
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Kouralee’s post asks “Where’s the Beach?” and I am here for her grumpy question and very grumpy face. In a world of RBF and FaceApp smiles, it’s wonderful to see someone with a serious grump on. I love her avatar!
- Shiny Stuffs|Underneath it all [bom] LeL|Ebento
- Duckie|Cruel Gacha [bom]|The Epiphany
- Kiru|Baby Shark Gacha|The Epiphany
- Kitcat|Somdae Gacha|The Epiphany
- Sakura|Pastel Dreamer Gacha|The Epiphany
- Marti|Tessa Gacha|The Epiphany
For more frowns and a very cute outfit, click here:

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Mass Effect Fan Community Creating Massive Roleplay Experience in Second Life Inspired by the Game

April 15, 2021

Click here to visit something fairly amazing in Second Life: A massive roleplay game world inspired by Mass Effect. It’s the creation of BluShock, a fan community that’s been creating entire worlds and experiences in Second Life based on the videogame franchise for over a decade. I recently made a small visit to the asteroid base, just a small part of the larger experience, and was duly impressed.

“It’s our largest and most ambitious/compact base of operations yet,” BluShock leader Fazzy Constantine (above) tells me. “We have over 25 rooms and multiple elevators with 8 levels each, a huge arboretum dome, which is inspired to look like the Presidium Commons, on the Citadel, from the Mass Effect games, which our roleplay group has been inspired by, since 2010.”

But the base is only the beginning:

“The asteroid will be our base of operations in our fictional star system. Vanaheim, which is set in the Milky Way galaxy, in what would be known as the Beta Quadrant, if you were into Star Trek. We have three more main worlds we’ll be creating, over the course of 6 to 9 months.” Here’s further details on the group’s in-game news site.

Anyone can visit their worlds, but the group is serious about maintaining their roleplay narrative, even in their Discord server: People can join, he tells me, “Through application, and then we hold an induction. If they have roleplay experience, great. If not then it’s pretty easy to pick up. If they want to just observe and become explorers of the asteroid and worlds then they can choose to do that and still get invited to the Discord server.”

More from Fuzzy below, and some pics from BlueShock’s Flickr group:

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Today’s SL Flickr Pick: Perfectly Photographed Virtual Coffee & Other Images of Minimalist Masterpieces

April 15, 2021

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

My best friend’s husband is a coffee perfectionist. He has a thermometer to measure the temp of the coffee to ensure it’s 180° when poured into the Aeropress. He measures meticulously. I recently found an Aeropress attachment that requires 210° water and more fussiness and sent my friend the link, suggesting it is the perfect birthday gift for him. It really is. So when I saw this picture from catNap, I had to laugh. Now this is the set up he needs.

I love the delightful minimalism of the catNap photos, for more, click here:

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Core Games Joins Epic’s Store — But Not Necessarily Epic’s Metaverse

April 15, 2021

Core, the ROBLOX-meets-Unreal "multiverse" funded in part by Epic is now, to no one's surprise, now available in Epic's store. Trailer above, announcement snip below:

By combining the power of Epic’s Unreal Engine with accessible tools that require no coding experience in a single platform, Core makes game creation, publishing and play available to everyone for free. Core also offers the most creator-friendly economy of any gaming UGC-platform with a 50% revenue share, allowing creators to make money and build businesses on Core.

I got early word that this would happen right about when I was writing about Epic's new $100 million funding deal with Sony and other partners to build a metaverse, and assumed Core Games would be an integral part of that project.

But not necessarily: When I asked Core CEO Frederic Descamps how does Core Games fit in with Epic's just-announced metaverse plans, he answered with this Delphic statement:

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VRChat Announces User Monetization, Enhanced Avatar-to-Avatar Dynamics, Webcam/Mobile Face Tracking, and Many More Upgrades Coming Soon-ish

April 14, 2021

VRChat devs just dropped a ridonkulously huge grab bag of announcements on Twitch, both upcoming and experimental; I pulled some highlights onto my YouTube, and my VRC correspondent Adeon Writer watched live and took copious notes. Most exciting to the user community was probably what's featured above: Avatar-to-avtar dynamics, which enable users to "physically" interact and even manipulate each others' bodies — that's on the company's roadmap for this Summer.

Also coming out starting this Summer: User monetization options and, finally, a full creator economy:

"User-to-user subscriptions is the first thing they are adding," Adeon reports, "basically Patreon except in-game directly, and Udon and scripting can react to it." (I.E., monetization options can be embedded directly into interactive experiences.) And while the ability to sell content in-world is on VRChat's roadmap, virtual currency is notably not: "[VRChat devs] specifically said they won't be doing a fake currency; real money only for anything they make."

Maybe most interesting from a cross-platform point of view are upcoming/experimental features that track body and facial movement via webcams and mobile devices:

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Today’s Flickr Pick: Ms. Nakamori Makes Even a Nuclear Power Plant Pretty

April 14, 2021

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

I know I featured Nekonuko Nakamori just a little over a year ago in this post but there are just so many great pictures. When I saw Wandering World 1220, though, I just had to share it. Perhaps it is because Fukushima is in the news again with the announcement that they will begin releasing the water in the cooling tanks into the ocean. Nekonuko’s picture with the orange and yellow sky and the twin nuclear power plant chimneys has that foreboding feeling that captured my own emotion reading the news about the Fukushima water. Her avatar is there in the picture, so small and fragile. This also captures that feeling of there being no good solutions, no safety.

For a more personal picture, click here:

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Watch: Juggling VRChat-Based Objects from Real Life Via Motion Tracking!

April 13, 2021

If I'm describing this video accurately, it's mind-boggling: VRChat YouTuber Mitama Sakumaru (known as "390_JUGGLER" in VRC) is juggling in real life — but the objects he's juggling only exist in VRChat.

Yes: The juggled objects in VRChat are physics-enabled and respond to his real life juggling movement via the motion tracking of his VR rig, he tells me.

In a tweet, he reports that juggling virtual objects with no mass is harder than it might seem: "The weight and lack of finger sensation are quite severe, and it is about three times more difficult to do with normal gravity! "

It's part of his effort, Mitama tells me, to create a new kind of virtual performance, where "the border between props and bodies are more ambiguous":

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