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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.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
I love this picture. It’s good to see more women in leadership, behind the lectern, even in Second Life. I also love how natural this looks, one hand resting on the mic while she makes her point. This would have been great for International Women’s Day, but she posted it last May.
For more great portraits, click here:
Well this is the most expressive I’ve ever seen my avatar or for that many any other avatar in the virtual world (don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me):
This thanks to Wombo.AI, a new smartphone app that’s designed to convert a RL selfie photo into a lip-syncing popstar via some pretty impressive deep fake machine learning algorithms. But my first thought when seeing it, of course, was: What will it do to my avatar? (And frankly I might not recommend using this on photos of real life people, for security reasons.)
After fiddling around with it last night and getting some bizarre results, this video above is my best version so far.
Tips to getting your own avatar properly Wombo-fied? So far, I’d suggest these:
Above: Image from ROBLOX's stock filing, data from the first 9 months of 2020
As expected, Roblox's IPO today was massive:
What makes Roblox different from other online game platforms is that it lets users create their own games on the platform. Developers receive 30% of the proceeds generated from a game, such as the sale of virtual outfits and avatars… As trading began Roblox stock shot up 63%, trading near 73.50, during afternoon action on the stock market today. That accelerated its market value to $47 billion.
Explicitly designed to be a metaverse, Roblox's valuation so far proves the market validity of user-generated content where user-made games (often made by teens still living at home!) are often more popular than the most popular professional games on Steam. Now with this IPO, you can see the dominance of Roblox and its grassroots content as compared to some of the very top traditional game companies. For instance:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Monday was International Women’s Day and I checked to see if Second Lifers were honoring the day. Sure enough there are several women noting the day. I enjoyed Silivren Atheria’s “Just a (Not So) Simple Girl” to which she adds a little about herself in all her complexities and contradictions. It’s beautifully done with a simplicity that adds to its intensity.
For more International Women’s Day pictures, click here:
Update 3/11: Time has been changed to 3pm PT based on this announcement.
This coming Thursday at 4pm PT, Sinespace is hosting an in-world fireside chat with co-founder Adam Frisby and Adam Goodrich, founder of Procedural Worlds, creator of the powerful Unity terrain tool Gaia, which can be used in Sinespace to build massive, highly detailed worlds — see video below.
Sinespace (a proud media partner to New World Notes!) is holding the event on their World Stream technology, which enables you to stream the 3D virtual world from a Chrome browser on any computer, even low-end laptops. I’ll post the link right before the scheduled time, which you can just click to enter the virtual world. If you want a reminder, follow me on Twitter or join the Sinespace Discord.
There will be a Q&A session during the chat, so get your questions about creating and scaling huge virtual worlds ready. After that, the team is planning to take a tour of Archipelago, the new Sinespace vehicle sim region that’s 20 square miles large and built, in part, with Gaia.
Up to now, by the way, World Streaming has only been available in Breakroom, Sinespace’s virtual world for live events and conferences. So this Thursday‘s event is the first open invitation to try out this technology directly in Sinespace.
Pictured: Chatting in New York's Guggenheim art gallery via Google Street View & High Fidelity
Want to instantly teleport anywhere in the world to chat with friends or friendly strangers? Of course you would. And now you can:
[High Fidelity has] released a whole host of sample applications that we built during a week-long internal team hackathon, and all of them are available for you to use in your own work.
Street Meet . This experimental sample app uses Google's Street View so you can have a meeting almost anywhere in the world!
As that suggests, this is one of many demo apps using High Fidelity's 3D spatial audio. Personally I think Street Meet has the most potential for immediate and multiple applications. Just off the top of my head: teaching geography to remote students, giving real estate customers a "walking" tour of the neighborhood they're interested in, or simply having a drink with remote friends while enjoying various views of the world.
Speaking of High Fidelity, CEO and founder Philip Rosedale is talking social audio on Clubhouse right now (if you have an account):
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Eyes Kirschtaria is new to me and I am excited by what I see. He creates scenes from Second Life that are rich in character and vitality. “Go Change Your Clothes” is a great example. There are the two men whose outfits are featured in the microblog in the Flickr description, but then there are the men in the background and the man walking into the frame. There are unmentioned bystanders in a story full of movement and energy.
His take on New Year’s in Japan is next, click here:
What went wrong with Second Life? Bryan Ogden has an intriguing take in that post of the same name last week:
The thing that killed SL IMHO wasn't a specific technical feature… It was web-based shopping for stuff. And point-to-point teleportation. It was an attempt to make SL convenient and consumer friendly.
Why? When I first got to SL it was mostly new adopters and mall-based shopping – in order to find new content you had to move an avatar in the world.
I built a theme-based store and a community formed around the items I sold. For a time I was in the top sales categories. I advertised using the in-world ad system.
But then the entire ecosystem and economics changed from immersive in-world participation — to buying stuff on the web devoid of community, or an engagement with creators.
Bryan relates what happened next to what's happened when small local businesses in the real world were forced to compete with Internet-based retail giants:
Yesterday's blockbuster Oprah Winfrey interview with Meghan and Harry, in which the Duke and Duchess of Sussex revealed the rampant racism she suffered that led them to leave Britain, also led to the most unlikely overlap with Second Life. The couple first moved to the British Commonwealth of Canada, a bid to continue representing the royal family while escaping the gravitational pull of the bigoted UK tabloids (and at least one racist member of the royal family itself). Which is why one of their first public tours was a visit to the native artist Skawennati, who uses Second Life as her medium:
That her work is being seen by a couple from the royal family of a country that once dominated indigenous people across the globe, in the very moment that they are seeking independence from that family, partly motivated by that country's prejudice against the wife, who hails from a former colony… could inspire a new work of art in itself.
More here when it happened, in January of last year. Good video documenting the SL-based art of Skawennati below:
