Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Author, strategist, virtual world reporter

Contact me!

Bio / CV

My Patreon Supporters

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.

New Philip Rosedale Simulation Suggests Limits of UBI On Rich/Poor Divide

February 15, 2021

What you're looking at above is a follow-up simulation of wealth inequity by Philip Rosedale, who recently created a simulation which showed how a divide between rich and poor will emerge even when everyone starts at a hypothetically equal state, income-wise.

This new simulation basically models the injection of universal basic income — a solution to the rich/poor divide recently popularized by Presidential candidate Andrew Yang. But as Philip writes, while UBI helps in the short term, his new simulation suggests that the wealth gap quickly starts growing, even with UBI:

(more…)
Virtual World Location Of The Week: Golgothica In Second Life

February 15, 2021

Courtesy Caitlin Tobias, this week's virtual world location gracing New World Notes' banner is Golgothica in Second Life, a roleplay storytelling region inspired by Game of Thrones and other fantasy classics. As Caitlin writes on her blog:

Golgothica is for role-play and upon arrival you are supposed to dress to theme. A broad theme, as described above, and since I am an Elf I didn’t find it to hard to find an appropriate outfit for exploring… [Lead creator] Golgothica is a cool place, you should go and have a look! And I suggest you don’t wait too long, Hera’s regions usually do not have a long lifespan.

Know about another great virtual world location? Click here to submit an image, background info, and a link for readers to visit.

(more…)
Top 7 Posts Last Week Including: Challenges of Unreal’s MetaHuman in VR, and Teaching 150 Quarantined Students in a Virtual World Instead of Zoom

February 15, 2021
Survey: Would You Pay $5/Month for a Special New World Notes Newsletter?

February 12, 2021

Loading…

Quick favor, excellent readers: Let me know if you're interested in a New World Notes newsletter, where subscribers will get special articles and other content. While I plan to always post to New World Notes the blog you're reading now, a subscription-based newsletter (if there's enough interest!) would give me a chance to devote more time to writing richer, more in-depth, news-you-can-use stories — something I've wanting to do for years.

Hope enough of you agree. But even if you don't, I'd love your opinion. Much mahalo!

(more…)
The Black Dragon SL Viewer Has a New Update So Watch This Photography & In-Game Poser Tutorial For Adjusting Your Avatar’s 130+ Bones

February 12, 2021

There's a new update to Black Dragon, the SL viewer with a cult following for making Second Life look like a AAA game and for giving users great features for virtual photography and machinima.

Speaking of which, here's a new Black Dragon photography tutorial from SL YouTuber and apparent Fleabag cast member Boston Blaisdale. It comes to me via NiranV, the tireless sole creator of Black Dragon who has a Patreon for developing the viewer that could seriously use more patronage for all the work he does on it. Niran recently added a $10/month Patreon level for store owners who want a link to their shop — an extremely good deal, seeing as Black Dragon has roughly 5000 active users.

Niran gives this tutorial a thumbs-up, especially the part around 4:00 minutes in, when Blaisdale gets into using Black Dragon's highly valuable in-game poser:

(more…)
Bored With Zoom, Professor Teaches Computer Programming in a Virtual World, And Streams It To Her Twitch — Here’s Her Advice for Other Educators

February 11, 2021

Starting at 12:30pm PT today, you can watch this Twitch channel to see yet another clever solution to teaching a large group of students in quarantine times: UC Irvine computer scientist Crista Lopes, being "sick and tired of teaching in Zoom", moved her class of 150 students to OpenSimulator, an open source virtual world. And not just to stream a video lecture to an assembly of avatars, but using OpenSim's scripting functionality so students could actually learn programming by using the virtual world's language, and building applications within it:

"The course is ICS10, a General Education course in the spirit of CS Principles," she recently reported. "There's 150 students enrolled. So far, the students have programmed in assembly on a simulated computer, used various tile walls with assorted encodings, and are now deploying and configuring a simulated Internet inside the simulated world.

"So far, everyone seems to be turning in their projects on time, and engaging. And a curious side effect has emerged of a student creating YouTube video tutorials showing how to do the projects." (See below.)

As regular readers know, Professor Lopes isn't just an OpenSim user, but one of its early pioneering lead developers. So I was curious how she customized OpenSim for her class, and how challenging it was for students to use. OpenSimulator is basically a reverse engineered version of Second Life, with a notoriously difficult UI and old graphics; Fortnite or ROBLOX it is not. (In fact, her class uses Firestorm, a viewer for accessing both Second Life and OpenSim.)

"I was expecting it to be problematic," she tells me, "and I was ready to spend many hours doing tech support, but it was surprisingly easy. There was no major hurdle, shockingly!" However, having no hurdles required a fair amount of preparation on her part, which you can read about below.

Challenges aside, she recommends OpenSim as a teaching platform to other teachers, if their course work is enhanced by a 3D immersive space and simulations — my conversation with her below:

(more…)
Cajsa’s Thursday Flickr Pick: Arrestingly Noir-ish Images of Male Avatars

February 11, 2021

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

“Darkest Hours” is a clever visual metaphor of how our thoughts can consume us, particularly if those thoughts are motivated by anger or resentment. It reveals how circular and repetitive those thoughts can be while they completely overwhelm our minds. I think it works well to convey that concept. It is one of just many excellent self-portraits by Creep Wolff.

A rare color picture from Creep’s stream is next:

(more…)
As Unreal Unveils MetaHuman, Oculus/Linden Lab Vet Jim Purbrick Has Advice on Bringing Ultra-Realistic Avatars Into a Social VR World

February 10, 2021

As Unreal unveiled its new MetaHuman system for highly detailed ultra-realistic avatars, I happened to be chatting with Oculus / Linden Lab veteran Jim Purbrick, who's been thinking quite a lot about the best avatars to use in a social VR space.

"Increasing the visual fidelity of avatars raises the expectations for realistic motion to make those realistic features look alive," Jim notes about MetaHuman. "The more realistic the avatars look the better you have to be at tracking facial movement in VR to avoid the avatars looking dead. If you can't capture sufficient movement you have to instead be good at synthesizing it based on the social context, but if you get that wrong the avatars look creepy not because they look dead, but because they don't respond in a natural way given the social context."

Realism in social VR introduces a new challenge:

"Most of the current attention is on improving motion capture by the headset," as Purbrick puts it, "but the better that gets the harder it becomes to escape your real identity: all of your habits and movements are transferred faithfully to your avatar whether you like it or not… Short version: people don't want creepy avatars more than they want realistic avatars and it's a lot more work to make realistic avatars not feel creepy in VR."

These points are a good place to introduce a recent talk Jim Purbrick featured on his blog, largely drawing on his experiences developing avatars for Second Life:

(more…)
High Fidelity Launches API for Its Spatial 3D Audio — But Where’s the World?

February 10, 2021

High Fidelity just launched the Alpha program for its API to deliver 3D spatial real time audio to many people in the same virtual space, with an SDK for Unity and iOS coming soon. (Speaking of which, the company's hiring an iOS developer.) The roadmap is pretty exciting:

(more…)
This Artist Uses Amazing After-Effects to Make SL Screenshots Come Alive

February 10, 2021

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

Tiago’s “Ma part d’ombre” was inspired by “My Dark Place” a stunning memoir by James Ellroy, an American author who invents language anew while he writes. I wonder how the magic of his language translates. I think this picture beautifully captures the multiple layers of meaning in the book’s title as well as the complexity of the book — apparently using layers of after-effects to give the avatar added realism.

A remarkable seascape is right after this.

(more…)