Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Author, strategist, virtual world reporter

Making of Second Life

Making a Metaverse That Matters

Contact me — links below!

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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.

  • The Metaverse is Here: Now in Open Beta After 6 Years of Development, Dual Universe’s Lead Creator Speaks

    Just in time for the long weekend, the Metaverse is here: Dual Universe is now available in open beta. A single shard, fully persistent world with user-generated content and an internal economy, many believe Dual Universe is the closest thing we have to a metaverse worth the name, and now it’s open to all. 

    JC Baille Dual Universe MMOReached just a couple hours ago at NovaQuark's studio in Montreal, lead creator J.C. Baillie confirms that the Dual Universe that’s playable now is the Dual Universe that will permanently remain — the key features are activated, the gameplay is locked down, and there are no plans to reset its reality. 

    “It’s been 6 years since we’ve been working non-stop to get this baby out,” Baillie tells me, somehow sounding both haggard and enthused. “It’s very rewarding.”

    Even shortly after launch, gamers are already plowing deeply into it, especially on Twitch, where one player even streamed his Dual Universe experience for 13 hours straight. (While he declines to report total user numbers, J.C. Baille tells me that “thousands [are] connected at any given time.”)

    The fact that it’s persistent has actually created interesting interactions between Dual Universe streamers and players. 

    Unlike a traditional MMO like World of Warcraft, as J.C. points out, “where there’s sort of an invisible wall” of many different shards, someone watching a live Dual Universe stream can log in, travel to the streamer’s in-world destination, and join them on camera. (A feature Second Life users are already quite familiar with, but pretty unique to MMO fans used to sharded worlds.)

    Baillie likens that to watching Game of Thrones and then somehow being able to teleport into the show and become a player in it while it’s still being broadcast. “This is a very powerful thing that’s not been explored.”

    But is this metaverse for you? Here’s some assorted notes — on avatars, system requirements its similarities to Second Life, and tips for getting started from the lead creator himself:

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  • Ananda Heart’s Blog Has SL Shopping Tips for Your Labor Day Weekend

    Screen Shot 2020-09-04 at 11.30.07 AM

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

    I Would Rather Be Overdressed! Is Ananda Heart’s blog about fashion and decor. “Davinia” is her most recent post and is very typical of her fashion posts. She likes more formal wear and is usually shown wearing gowns and avant garde fashions. She creates a composite on Flickr, but you can see the individual pictures at a larger size on her blog. 

    And after the cut, a decor post. 

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  • Test Subjects in VR Recreation of Milgram’s Shock Experiment Still Become Traumatized, Even Knowing Their Electrocuted Victim is Only an Avatar

    Milgram Experiment VRIn the infamous Milgram’s Experiment from the 1960s, test subjects willingly followed an instructor’s orders to apply increasingly lethal shocks on a screaming victim in another room — despite their concern for the person’s welfare, and their own stress over having to do such a horrible thing. (Both the “instructor” and “victim” were only actors, of course, secretly working for Dr. Milgram.) 

    Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco at Microsoft Research and Dr. Mel Slater at the University of Barcelona recently recreated the Milgram Experiment in virtual reality — but this time, instead of ordering their test subjects to shock a human victim in another room, they were instructed to electrocute an avatar displayed right in front of them. And even knowing that the victim was just a simulation, the test subjects were still traumatized:

    Unlike in Milgram’s test, our participants were not deceived regarding the actual harm to the subject when his answers to the memory test were wrong—since he wasn’t a real person. Using this setup, we could ethically test how humans respond to authority.

    The participants in the experiment nevertheless had difficulty with shocking the avatar: Although 85 percent of them completed the task, they exhibited measurable signs of stress. However, when we looked more closely at the actual interactions that people had with the virtual victim, we found that participants were trying to cheat, even if unconsciously, by giving cues to the avatar, signaling the right answers with a louder voice tone.

    These findings were summarized in Scientific American last year, but I’ve since been talking with Dr. Gonzalez-Franco about its extraordinary implications. How is it even possible for people to feel empathy for a digital avatar?

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  • Rita Glad’s Glad-Making Images of An Astronaut in Second Life

    I would love to live in Maud Lewis paintings :)

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

    Rita Glad’s pictures show the same joie de vivre as this delightful astronaut among sunflowers. “I would love to live in Maud Lewis’ paintings” is a whimsical homage to the Canadian folk artist whose beautiful paintings of birds, animals, and flowers showed a spirit that was not brought down by her constant struggle with pain and poverty.  

    Our astronaut has an adventure below…

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  • Watch: Compact But Amazing Cyberpunk Scene in SL — Plus Creator Tips!

    Watch SL cyberpunk doyenne Ayla Pants and her pink particle-spewing pet drone (previously on NWN here) take you on a personal tour of a new scene she recently created. It's mostly cobbled together with existing assets from other vendors, but working with 1400 land impact, she's fashioned a moody cyberpunk environment rich with implicit stories. 

    Click here to teleport and visit yourself (until end of September).

    Her favorite element is something that's often missing from SL builds: Ambient sound.

    Specifically, as she tells me, "[T]he music I was able to have playing in the little bar. I really liked the idea of localizing the music without having to separate that square of the parcel from everything else. Also being able to hear the music grow louder as you approached the bar was a really important element of realism I was trying to attain.  You can't get that by having streaming music on the parcel, or separated square. The best you get there is silence to full volume once you cross that border."

    Hopefully other SL creators are inspired by this to add more ambient sound. Speaking of which, here is Ms. Pants' general advice to builders on creating a great scene while working within land impact limits:

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  • Will The EU Protect Virtual Reality from Personal Data Scraping By Facebook?

    Oculus Facebook Germany EU

    News on the future VR from Germany to keep an eye on, albeit poorly translated via Google:

    Oculus glasses: Facebook stops sales in Germany

    The VR data from Oculus would add a new data dimension to the aforementioned super profiles – further problems with the cartel office and European data protection would be inevitable.

    In addition, there is a coupling ban in Germany, which means that the use of one product must not be coupled with the use of another product from the same company if this is already dominant in the market. In the above-mentioned judgment of the BGH, the court also confirmed Facebook's dominant position in Germany. In this context, the German market for Facebook has a unique selling point in Europe.

    This in contrast to the recent news that Facebook will soon require Facebook identity-based log-ins to use its VR devices, a sharp body blow to the future of virtual reality in general, not to mention extreme personal security concerns. But now, apparently, regulators in Germany (the European Union's wealthiest and most populous country) are putting the kibosh on that. 

    If the EU as a whole follows suit, imposing similar protections on data usage on its half a billion citizens, I don't see how Oculus could sustain its Facebook log-in requirement. 

    That might seem far-fetched, but have you noticed how, when you visit a website, you now have to click Accept to share your personal data? Even if you're in the United States, and even if it's a US-owned website? That's due to recently imposed EU regulations.

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  • This Artist Turns Second Life Screenshots Into Color-Saturated Pop Art

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    Siobhan Muintir’s photostream is a pop art lover’s delight. I guess I have to check out Misfits Dance Company and the Kul Katz. Siobhan uses layers, filters and color balancing to turn this into fabulous pop art.  

    More pop art pictures ahead.

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  • Second Life Bans Political Billboards from Public Lands After Pro-Trump & Anti-Trump Signs Choke the Virtual Sky

    Second Life Political Billboards TrumpPhoto credit: Animats

    Another US Presidential election year, another clash of ideas in Second Life. As has been the case since 2004, the virtual world has recently been festooned with political billboards, much or most of them pro-Trump or anti-Trump — though as with Facebook, it seems like the pro-Trump forces have had the upper hand.

    "There was a couple of people setting up lots of mini ad farms for Trump and some places had been plastered in far right slogans and adverts," SL veteran "0xc0ffea" tells me. 

    Some commonly trafficked areas in Second Life have devolved into a veritable battle of billboards, with "Re-elect Trump" and other Trump friendly signs such as "Police Lives Matter" having to share the same space with snarky rejoinders like: "Trump/Putin – Make America Hate Again". 

    This time, however, Second Life owner Linden Lab responded, updating its policy on virtual world advertising to prohibit ad content that are "political in nature" from the SL mainland, which the company maintains. (This policy does not apply to privately-owned regions and continents.)

    I've contacted Linden Lab for an official reply and will update this post if I receive one. It is a marked departure from Second Life during the 2016 election, when a skyscraper-sized Trump billboard spewing fireworks freely loomed in the sky, while Bernie Sanders' unofficial campaign headquarters in SL was invaded by swastikas and literal pro-Trump gargoyles.

    To judge by user reaction in the official community forum and Second Life's subreddit, most seem agreeable to the banning of political ads — both for being an eyesore, and reflecting their desire for a place online that's free from election news:

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  • Are You Interested in Exploring Facebook Horizons, Despite Facebook?

    Released last week in invite-only, I should be covering Facebook Horizons, because it's the kind of world that New World Notes was launched to cover — a would-be metaverse with a heavy emphasis on user-generated content and virtual community, user-friendly avatars/UI, and games that should help it attract a crossover audience. Just look at the feature set:

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  • These Serene Still Life Images Actually Started as Second Life Screenshots

    Bisou Dexler SL still life Flickr

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

    With the unrelenting chaos and controversy in the daily news, sometimes we just need to center ourselves and find some moment of peace. You could do some deep breathing, take a walk, or you could go to Bisou Dexler’s photostream and turn on the slideshow and wait for the peace and serenity that permeates his worldview as expressed in his photos to bring you calm. This picture of a pocket watch laying on a bed of miner’s lettuce buds has such rich colors with the signature sprinkles of light that make his work so pacific and tranquil. 

    Around the corner, a conversation of chairs:

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