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.

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  • The Metaverse Wars Are Here: Epic Gets $1 Billion from Sony & Other Major Players to Build Unreal-Based Metaverse

    Epic Metaverse funding Tim Sweeney

    Remember the browser wars back in olden times (by which I mean 2017)? Massive companies competing to own the dominant platform for streaming content to the 2D web? Welcome to the metaverse wars:

    This round includes an additional $200M strategic investment from Sony Group Corporation, which builds on the already close relationship between the two companies and reinforces their shared mission to advance the state of the art in technology, entertainment, and socially-connected online services. Other investment partners include Appaloosa, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, GIC, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Park West, KKR, AllianceBernstein, Altimeter, Franklin Templeton and Luxor Capital.  Epic continues to have only a single class of common stock outstanding and CEO Tim Sweeney remains the controlling shareholder of the company.

    “We are grateful to our new and existing investors who support our vision for Epic and the Metaverse. Their investment will help accelerate our work around building connected social experiences in Fortnite, Rocket League and Fall Guys, while empowering game developers and creators with Unreal Engine, Epic Online Services and the Epic Games Store,” said Tim Sweeney, CEO and Founder, Epic Games. 

    Epic's vision for the metaverse, of course, is based on its proprietary 3D engine, Unreal. And this comes only a month after ROBLOX, built on the Unity engine, had a massive successful IPO. We are certain to see many more announcements like this in coming months, each a salvo in the battle to win market dominance for the metaverse — even if the concept is still relatively pretty niche, and hasn't yet been clearly defined for a mass consumer audience. You can see that in Dean Takahashi's recent interview with Sweeney:

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  • Today’s Flickr Pick: Avatars in Shock & Ecstasy from a Red Glowing Box

    Shockstasy: Cajsa Lilliehook

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

    I love it when people come up with some photo project that focuses on a novel idea that no one else is doing, and that is what I discovered when I got a FlickMail from Lacie Babenco, asking me to participate in her Shockstasy Project. 

    When I arrived, Lacie was looking quite demonic. She explained that she had summoned the red glowing box from “somewhere deep and dark.” 

    She continued her explanation: “I honestly don't know what it does but it compels me to bring humans to touch it.” And so I did.

    “It radiates an energy but it is so absolutely silent. It draws in mortals to touch it,” she went on. “They each experience something unique to them, I have no idea what they feel, only they know. It's called a mix of Shock and Ecstasy – 'Shockstasy.' So I observe and send you back to your mortal world and someday, hopefully it's revealed what the box is doing….I like to think it's taking into account your soul and who you are.” 

    I am in trouble….

    For more experiments in shockstasy, click here:

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  • Watch: Scripting in Second Life with C#, a Feature Once on Linden Lab’s Roadmap But Apparently Forgotten

    My post on UdonSharp, the user-made C# compiler for VRChat, inspired me to reach out to Jim "Babbage" Purbrick. Because when he worked for Linden Lab, he was aiming to make it possible to script in Second Life with C#. Sad to say that didn't come to pass, and he left the Lindens in 2010. As he wrote on his blog then:

    Alas, tomorrow is my last day at Linden Lab and Babbage Linden will never get to see C# scripts running in the wild in Second Life, but I very much hope that I do. I hope that C# support is eventually added to Second Life and that I don’t have to wait 170 years to turn the handle. As another Babbage said when he failed to build the Difference Engine: “Another age must be the judge”.

    Watch Jim's demo above to see how cool that could have been, with more background on his blog.

    "Supporting C# and other modern languages was always the end goal with the work on Mono and we implemented the Mono scripting engine to be language-independent," he tells me now. "Although in production we only ran LSL scripts compiled to CIL we had development builds which would run C# compiled to CIL with normal C# compilers and then processed to inject microthreading support with the same tools that processed the assemblies produced by the Linden Script Language compiler in production."

    Bringing C# to Second Life, as he explains, would be an enormous modernizing leap for the platform:

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  • If Virtual Worlds Like Decentraland and Second Life Were Cities, Which Would They Be? (Comment of the Week)

    Torley_windlight_pic

    Fun comment from Joey1058, reflecting on the NFT art gold rush, which has led to some NFT art galleries in blockchain-based worlds like Cryptovoxels and Decentraland:

    In terms of broader community, I'm starting to see virtual worlds aligning into classifications. Cryptovoxels and Decentraland are similar to the richer cosmopolises, like New York. Here is where you'll find arts and culture. Museums, theaters, gardens, zoos and other venues. All based on an NFT foundation. Places like IMVU, Sinespace, and Second Life are the equivalent of "working man's" towns. Still cultured, but with an everyday foundation in "getting your hands dirty and doing it yourself". AltspaceVR is a corporate lifeline. And VRChat is pure relaxed social freestyle.

    I get where Joey's going with the New York analogy, though as I noted in the post, both Cryptovoxels and Decentraland have very small resident user populations and seem to be focused more on financial speculation, than the arts. Maybe a better comparison is Dubai? (Then again, New York is also heavy with speculators.)

    Any suggestions for "working man's towns" to compare IMVU, Sinespace, and Second Life?

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  • Top 5 Posts Last Week Including the Post-Gold Rush Future of NFT Art & the Rising Power of the VRChat Creator Community

    Kendrick Lamar NFT Nettrice Gaskins

  • SL Fashion Friday: Style Ideas for Home Décor & Dinosaur Hunting

    Delicate Blooms

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

    Clau Dagger SL is Clau Dagger’s fashion blog, though since she often decorates the scene that provide the backdrop for her fashions, it’s a decor blog, too. I like this picture for 2020 0407 a lot. I especially like the fire hazard decor. I am always conflicted by decor full of piles of books and candles. It looks so romantic and cozy, but having once lost everything but the clothes I had on in a fire, I can’t help but I also think fire hazard. I am obsessive about fire hazards. In real life, this would give me anxiety, but in Second Life, I like it! 

    Scene Item Sources:

    For an exciting role play scene, click here:

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  • Multiplayer Beat Saber Becomes Gesture-Based Social VR Community

    Beat Saber Social VR world

    FlipperPA has a good analysis of multiplayer Beat Saber, which has evolved to become a supportive social VR community that reminds him of Second Life in its early "small town" years — except instead of communicating via text, socialization is through real gestures:

    It may be by complete accident, but it seems like they may have made the friendliest online community I have ever been a part of:

    • All players can create avatars and have a name.
    • Players can gesture with their hands, and you can see their heads move as well.
    • There is no voice interaction
    • There is no chat window.

    This has led to a rich language of gestures evolving: players enthusiastically wave hello when a new player joins the game. It is common to see people clapping to the person who won the round, and the winner graciously taking a “namaste” bow. People wave goodbye, and gesture up to the center board in between songs to encourage a newcomer to select the song they would like to play next. It is incredibly friendly and warm. Has Beat Saber accidentally stumbled on a wonderful way for us to communicate in games? 

    I enjoyed the solo Beat Saber for awhile but after it began to feel repetitive, gave up on it. Clearly a community of players has remained, and evolved:

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  • Where Can NFT Art Go Now That the Gold Rush is Gone?

    Spacial Web Gallery August Rosedale NFT

    Above: The Mirage Gallery's display room in SpatialWeb

    Here’s a question about NFT art that I’ve been thinking about lately, even before the value of the market took a huge hit: 

    What will owners of NFT art actually will do with it, to justify the prices they just paid? 

    With real life art, after all, people hang it in their home so they and their friends/family can enjoy it — or on the high end, lend it out to a gallery or museum to share with the public, either for a fee, or for the kudos for their contribution. The art work is special because it's one of a kind, and people have to go to a specific place, to enjoy it. But because NFT art is usually just a copied digital image like any other copied image on the Internet, what will make it special to their owners over time?

    Come to think of it, the NFT art market probably plummeted in part because that question doesn’t have a great answer. Also, because that market’s been overwhelmed by speculators who don’t really care about art as such — a point made in this excellent essay by technologist Anil Dash, who literally co-invented the NFT.

    Anil isn’t sure there's a way that NFT can remain relevant to artists, as opposed to speculators.  

    “I genuinely don't know, but I hope so,” Anil tells me. “Thing is, if an artist has an audience and interest, they can usually just sell to their fans, regardless of whether the blockchain is involved. It feels like that only adds complexity.”

    There may be a sustainable market for NFT art which better fits the virtual medium. For instance, the virtual portraits of great Black artists that Nettrice Gaskins creates using Deep Dream algorithms as her paintbrush:

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  • Occupy White Walls Adds Music Streaming to Its Real Time, Collaborative Creation Art MMO

    I've only casually followed Occupy White Walls, a sandbox creation MMO for PC and Mac, but now that the platform just added music streaming (trailer above, more on that below), here's a brief snapshot courtesy from Yarden Yaroshevski, CEO of OWW creator StikiPixels, via Mario Gerosa, the company press officer (who was heavily involved in the Second Life art world back in the day):

    People build galleries with over 2,500 architectural building blocks, we don't allow uploading of 3D meshes.
     
    Building galleries is collaborative and in real time, players can invite others to build with them.
     
    We don't have [concurrency] limits 'per room'. Galleries can easily hold up to 100 players simultaneously.
     
    We don't release monthly active user numbers but they are in the tens of thousands range.

    As for my crux question, "Why should someone create in OWW when they could do so on a larger platform like ROBLOX or Fortnite?", Yarden's answer:

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  • Today’s SL Flickr Pick: Stunning Virtual World Landscapes

    49095159312_75817661e7_c

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

    Sometimes just a spot of color can make a good picture amazing. “Even In the Rain You Can See the Colors” is just that sort of picture. The picture itself is good with beautiful clouds, that lovely line of trees and their reflections, the adorable elephants with the umbrella. But Jaguar Black did not just make it black and white. He left that splash of red and amplified everything. 

    For more stunning landscapes, click here:

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