You probably know already that the visuals for the Disney streaming show The Mandalorian are created in the Unreal 3D engine, but this Vox explainer video shows you how those virtual spaces are integrated with the actual, physical cast: Not through green screen but via giant, curving LED displays, which effectively wrap the actors in a virtual world. Technically more efficient than green screen, another advantage of this approach is that the actors in these shots are illuminated by virtual light. So if the cast is, say, standing there watching a twin star sunset on Tatooine, the warm light on their faces really is cast by the virtual suns. (Also super important when an actor is already wearing a costume with reflective surfaces, as with Mando in the show that bears his name.)
Wagner James Au / New World Notes
Author, strategist, virtual world reporter
Making a Metaverse That Matters
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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.
The Virtual Museum Team hosts several museums in Second Life, Wolf Territories Grid and Roblox. Check out all the teleport links here.
Breedables CoOp, helping the SL pet community grow through shared resources. Go here to get started.
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Nadja Baxter has been blogging since at least 2007; Old Guard, indeed. Her original blog was called GermanStyle but now she has an eponymous blog, Nadja Baxter. It’s important to know that her blog has more pictures than her Flickr stream and her photostream has pictures that never make it to the blog. There are a few candids, shots of friends, and microblogs on her stream. The blog posts have several photos the better demonstrate the outfits. You really need to follow both to see her prodigious output in Second Life. I like the outfit in this recent post.
- Mimikri – Cropped Cardigan / Gloria Fatpack At Uber
- Mimikri – Flared Pants / Gloria Fatpack At Uber
- Mimikri – Fur Scarf / Gloria Fatpack At Uber
This next outfit has a coat for taking names and cashing checks:
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Lumiya, the popular and impressive SL viewer for Android devices, was removed from Google Play last year, apparently due to a change in Google's policy around apps' use of SMS messages, but it's still available on SlideME, a curated market for Android apps. Since I haven't heard from Lumiya creator Alina Lyvette in many years (despite many attempts to reach her), I checked with SlideME that the app is still indeed available in their store. A rep with the company just confirmed with me that Lumiya is currently "active with downloads" on the platform.
You can buy it here, but as with any app, buyer beware. It was last updated in 2017 so that Lumiya supports Bento-based technology and its complex, highly articulated avatars for Second Life.
Official trailer below. And if you do know Alina, let her know that we'd love to hear from her, at least to know she's OK — and to make sure she knows that she's still making money from her app on SlideMe.
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Seraphim, the massive Second Life shopping blog, recently opened a Cuban-themed shopping sim in SL itself — click here to visit. This virtual island is a long time coming since the web site launched in 2011, going on to become the largest user-run SL blog by far. Raking in nearly 61 million reported pageviews since then, currently on track to exceed over 12 million in just this year alone, Seraphim is, as I’ve noted before, more popular than many professionally run MMO news sites. (New World Notes, for instance, has only attracted a distant ~15 million views!) With pageviews like this, it’s likely that well over half of Second Life’s ~600,000 active user base visits Seraphim on a regular basis.
Or to make another comparison: Seraphim SL gets about as many visits as Fashionista, a top real life fashion blog.
Despite this wild popularity, Seraphim founders and co-owners Kess Crystal and Awylder1 still hold full-time jobs in real life — in the healthcare sector, Kess tells me. “So 2020 has been particularly challenging for us,” she notes, “both managing Seraphim and dealing with the ramifications of COVID… we have an amazing management team in place and we simply could not do it without them.”
But if you think those millions of pageviews translate into millions of dollars in profit, you may be mistaken:
“We’re often amused by the wildly optimistic assumptions we’ve read on social media and our reaction is often ‘I WISH!’,” as Kess puts it, when I ask her about Seraphim’s revenue. “We are a cost heavy business in terms of payroll and the amount we have to pay for hosting such a resource heavy site is not insignificant either. As business owners, we reinvest monthly into a fund for new services, scripting, innovation and then draw a salary from the remaining profit.”
Kess shares some Seraphim secrets to becoming so big, and future plans with the sim, after the break:
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Fliegenbeil Resident (aka anc aki) is a creator of dreamy, romantic decor objects. It’s completely fitting that his Second Life images are the dreamiest and most romantic on Flickr. Take “Hydrangea” for example. Doesn’t it look like a watercolor sketch? I love the neutral wall and stairs behind the flowers so the only “color” is the blue of the hydrangeas. It feels more like a painting than a screenshot.
When vendor pictures are art:
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Doesselle Destiny’s picture is emotionally powerful, even though by leaving it titled simply with a number, she leaves its meaning up to us. This is a woman looking forward, with a man in her rear-view mirror. Is she leaving him? Yes, but for the day or forever? We don’t know. If feels like forever to me, the result of the implacable certainty in her forward-looking eye.
This next photo made me think of Goya's La Maja Desnuda:
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"How avatars change who we are" is my new article for Samsung NEXT's Component magazine, exploring some fascinating examples of how avatars (both in VR and on flatscreens) seem to influence the user, as much as the other way around. I talk with several top academics in the field who've been studying this under-appreciated phenomenon years, including one of my favorites:
Post-doc researcher Domna Bankou and her colleagues at the University of Barcelona… recently created a VR simulation where the test subjects would see themselves as Albert Einstein, standing authoritatively in a lab coat. They did this, Bankou says, with assumptions about what would then transpire.
“To be honest with you we weren’t expecting anything to happen,” she said. “But VR changes where you are, [and] it also changes who you are.”
In fact, after volunteers completed the Barcelona VR experiment and took a cognitive performance test, those with lower IQs saw their test scores substantially improve. The act of virtually embodying the smartest human in history apparently made them more intelligent in the real world — at least temporarily.
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
When I wrote to Nath Baxton about SLAUGHTERHOUSE, his recent project, Nath’s response was so honest and generous, I hope I can do him justice. I have featured his earlier work, with a pop art aesthetic, bold deconstruction of his own photos, always filled with bright colors.
His new work shifts to black and white, with splashes and flashes of red that are visually shocking.
The change in virtual aesthetics, he tells me, were inspired by challenges he recently faced in real life:
