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.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
“Taming the Wolf” from Isabel reminds me of “The Little Prince” with its simplicity. The similarity is augmented by the wolf being a silhouette and the ladder looking like an illustration rather than an actual ladder. I love the idea of it.
Ahead, an amazing album exploring virtual skin.
I recently received interesting new survey results from the development team of Blind, an anonymous messaging app for company staffers. When employees at top tech companies were anonymously asked whether they supported Trump or Biden in the upcoming election, the results were often more evenly split than Silicon Valley's reputation as a liberal bastion might suggest.
Here's the results from over 6000 respondents, divided according to their company affiliation:
"In a virtual world," SL/High Fidelity founder Philip Rosedale recently asked on Twitter, "is showing tenure (age of account) bad or good?"
Which is an interesting thing to ask, and becomes even more intriguing when, after one follower wonders why Philip himself isn't answering his own question, he replies apologetically, "I don't want to dominate the conversation. Yes, designing for a new world."
So that's worth noting! I asked Philip for more details and will update this post if I get a reply. As for "new world" he may just be referring to the recent 3D audio-centric relaunch of High Fidelity. Or perhaps another world entirely? In any case, the thread is worth a read, here's some answers to his question:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Jupiter Firelyte created a stunning homage to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, recreating the famed “Notorious RBG” in Second Life. She gives great detail on all the elements that went into it and I love her for it. She includes the original screenshot in the description as well.
This is not her only political interest…
Pictured: In-game shot of an Elder Scrolls Online avatar from 2013 (video below)
Adeon Writer puts it succinctly:
For what it's worth, VRChat has a rating system of "Excellent, Good, Medium, Poor, Horrible"
Any avatar above 70,000 triangles is considered Horrible.
For reference, most Second Life avatars are about 200,000 to 300,000 triangles.
Many Second Life avatars use more triangles in a single shoe that most AAA games use for an entire map.
People wonder why 20 FPS in SL is sometimes considered unusually smooth.
20 FPS is laughably bad. Compare with, say, Elder Scrolls Online, which has high quality avatars (see above and below) that are also highly optimized, so the MMO seems to be in the 40-60 FPS range. More from Adeon:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Live, Love, Laugh is MetteKenzo Nagy’s blog. She focuses on fashion and I was drawn to her work by her colorful, bright pictures. “Ooh Na-Na” really appealed because it was a successful example of turning a picture on its side. She didn’t do a full horizontal. Even though the diagonal is very acute, it still allows us to make sense of the picture without turning our laptop on the side. I have been baffled by these pictures for quite some time, but Gogo explained the rationale and now it makes sense. Many of today’s blogs have such big pictures they fill more than the screen, by going diagonal, they can get the whole picture in your window without scrolling. Now it seems obvious. I like the dress, though it’s only for the body made by the same creator.
A bit of rockabilly in the next post — along with my personal advice for fashion bloggers:
The University Of Western Australia's virtual campus in Second Life has been among the most active and longest lasting educational presences, hosting regular art festivals like this one featuring cinema great Peter Greenaway But after years of hanging on, I'm told the UWA regions are finally being closed at the end of this year.
That's disappointing news. The good news is UWA is going out with a digital bang, hosting a huge final art festival on a massive platform above the campus. Curated by longtime virtual art advocate Chuck Clip (above) and Mariposa Upshaw, with the blessing of UWA's Jay Jay Zifanwe, this is meant to be, as Clip calls it, "one last thank you to the men and women of the institution that touched all of our lives."
If you're a 2D or 3D artist who wants to feature your work in this space, the submission details from Mr. Clip are below. And I do mean "massive", take a lot at its scale:
Bloomberg News has a great long feature on the rise and fall of Magic Leap, which raised $3.5 billion on the prospect of transformative AR technology, only to lose nearly all of that money in the fires of hubris. The company is still operating, but mainly now as an also-ran competitor to Microsoft's HoloLens/AR for enterprise use business. The hubris of Magic Leap's founders is not surprising — it's pretty much par for the course for any startup that attracts that much funding so fast — but the story doesn't cover another variation of hubris.
Specifically: Why did so many major tech companies and VCs invest so much money on a product — i.e., a head-mounted display — with no successful track record whatsoever? Especially when one of the Internet's largest companies (Google) recently demonstrated the social disasters inherent in AR glasses — i.e. "Glassholes"?
But invest they did, and took great pains to do so:
