Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Author, strategist, virtual world reporter

Making of Second Life

Making a Metaverse That Matters

Contact me — links below!

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.

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.

Friday Fashion Blog: SL Fantasy Style from Devin Vaughn’s Bishie Style

August 14, 2020
Devin Vaughn’s blog is called Bishie Style and is rich in story and creativity. His most recent post is Mainframe: The Shipping Drones.The post made me laugh as it lightly touched on current events in an oblique way.

STORYLINE: The Wasp Virus was raging in the Mainframe. Highly developed Cyborgs were locked in hibernation mode. How would the mail get through? Enter an unexpected hero… an old series Solares Cargo Drone. It would be up to little drones to keep things running until the contagion could be purged from the system.

When the mail service in the United States is being eaten away from within, with massive delays in delivery of prescriptions and other mail. I have not even received junk mail since last Friday. But it is good to get a little satirical commentary with a very light touch. Most everything is at the Mainframe event, so the shopping will be easy.

On him, Shipping Drone Hydra:
- Helmet: LANEVO HYDRA MASK fatpack [mesh](Mainframe)(780L)
- Waist: Wicca's Originals Cryo Chest Maitreya [mesh](Mainframe)(599L)
- Powerchip: Astara Chip-n0Mix Power Chip, gacha [mesh](Mainframe)(25L)
- Necklace: L'Emporio&PL Bionic Necklace Male [mesh](Mainframe)(350L)
- Armbands: A&Y Cyber Bunke Arm Booster Male[mesh](390L)
- Muffler: KROVA Muffler [mesh](150L)
- Body, skin: TheShops [BODY] Athletic Meshbody (Legacy)(m) (1.0) [mesh](5000L)
Setting:
- Pod: Cerridwens Cauldron [CC] XB Pod White/Low Res Textures [mesh](Mainframe)(250L)
- Cargo Drone & Crates: Solares Cargo Drone, Crates animated [mesh](Mainframe)(409L)
Location:
- Horizons – stage 5
And for an adventure under the sea, click below:

(more…)
Launching Today in VRChat: “The Devouring”, a Horror Survival Game Made From Scratch (Including Music!) By a 4 Person Team

August 13, 2020

VRChat's creative community continues to impress. This is the trailer to a new survival horror game in VRChat that was co-developed by Lakuza, who also created a VRChat game with bullet-time effects earlier this year.

“It’s a 5-6 hour horror game essentially and we've modelled everything from scratch, including the music,” he tells me.

While the game is technically launching tomorrow, the lobby area is open now. They're even going to have a Hollywood-style launch party at 8pm PT today. If you already have VRChat installed, click the link here to join the fun.

"The Devouring" was created over the course of nearly a year by a four member team, who collaborated together in VRChat from around the world. (Lakuza doesn't remember exactly where in the real world his team is located.)

Finally opening to the public, Lakuza’s main feeling is “a massive relief”.

“At some points it felt like it was stuck in the ‘1 more month’ phase," as he puts it to me, "and definitely had stressful/burnout points throughout, since it’s a world we all worked on in our spare time after our real life jobs.” (So basically it sounds like crunchtime at an actual game studio, except without that little "getting paid to work" part.)

Developing it was no easy task — and some potential game spoilers ahead:

(more…)
Is SL’s Move to the Amazon Cloud Really Improving Sim Crossing, Or Is It Just a Temporary, Unintentional Side Effect?

August 13, 2020

Update, 8/14: Linden Lab confirms some recent code changes have improved sim crossing.

Virtual world explorer Luca is the latest to stress test the new deployment of Second Life running on the Amazon Web Services cloud, which seems to make region crossing near seamless. Though as you'll see above, region crossing delays vary by vehicle, being near-instantaneous with a World War II-era fighter, but being pretty muddy via, say, submarine.

"Maybe it depends on the amount of linksets now more than ever (the sub and steamboat have a lot of them)," Luca theorizes, "but I might need to do further testing to verify that!"

Luca adds that he got pretty good performance with more than one vehicle too: "I was able to do some sort of formation flying around Bay City with my friend earlier in our planes, which would've been a lot more difficult with the old crossing performance." I'm curious if performance would remain decent with many more vehicles.

But is this performance improvement real, and lasting? Reddit's /SecondLife co-host "0xc0ffea" makes a very good case that it's not:

(more…)
SL Flickr Pick: Verona Lauria Creates Both Dramatic & Delightful Pics

August 13, 2020

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

If you spend any serious time in Minnesota you will hear the ubiquitous “Oh, for cute.” This is not pronounced as though it is three separate words, though. “Oh, for” is pronounced as gopher without the g. “Cute” on the other hand has a long tripthong, as in kew-yew-oot. Any other pronunciation is wrong. And the moment I saw this untitled photo from Verona Lauria, I said “opher kew-yew-oot.” I love how they mirror each other and how their pairing is offset by the owl. I love the lush sky and the willows in silhouette with the field of wildflowers. I just love it all.

The reign of kew-yew-oot continues.

(more…)
Watch: Light Show in Virtual Club Synced to Light Show in Real Life Club

August 12, 2020

This is a crazy cool project that links up the lighting system in a real life venue (San Francisco's venerable DNA Lounge, in this case) to the lighting system in a virtual world. As creator James Baicoianu explains:

Controlling lights in a WebXR night club using Chamsys MagicQ, a professional lighting control suite. This lets us configure a full digital twin of the real-life night club, where the light show running in the virtual world is driven by the same controller as [the real world club], and thus synced.

It's the brainchild of James Baicoianu, formerly lead engineer for the late-lamented WebXR metaverse startup called Janus VR, who tells me the system can probably work with non-WebXR worlds. As James explains to me:

(more…)
SL Flickr Pick: Gustavo Fredrickson, Virtual Nature Photographer

August 12, 2020

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

“Fields of Gold” by Gus (Gustavo Fredrickson) is a beautiful landscape. I love the color story, blue and yellow are complementary and look so good together. I like how he frames it with wheat and the brightness of the sun through the trees setting the wheat fields ablaze.

More beautiful Second Life simscapes ahead.

(more…)
This Artist Uses Depth-of-Field & Lighting to Turn Second Life Screenshots Into Mysterious, Cinematic Stories

August 11, 2020

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

Oram Solis’ “Kindly Brutal” is an epic illustration of the dramatic story-telling power of depth-of-field. Usually, the subject, the person, is the focus in sharp detail and the rest is obscured, but in this picture, the gas pump is in detail and the person is blurred as they enter the store, presumably to pay. But why is he blurred? We could be seeing from the point of view of a getaway car driver as their accomplice goes in to rob the store, and the blurred vision represents the anxiety of not knowing what will happen in the next few minutes. Perhaps we see with a passenger’s eyes while their friend goes in just before something happens that they will not witness, we see their ineffective testimony. We don’t know what is going to happen, but the change in focus evokes many more ideas than if the focus was on the avatar.

More from Oram’s stream of mysteries after the cut.

(more…)
The Metaverse Needs a Unique User Identifier (Comment of the Week)

August 11, 2020

Pictured: Jeff "AM Radio" Berg's famed Second Life art recreated by his son in Fortnite

Good conversation responding to Tim Sweeney's belief that there should be many competing metaverses rather than just one world that's The Metaverse. My response to that was calling for shared standards for 3D content that enable virtual goods and other creations to freely move from one metaverse to another.

Reader "irihapeti" argues otherwise, calling for a unique identifier across metaverses as the more important first step:

(more…)
Does Second Life Have Way More Player Drama Than Traditional MMOs?

August 10, 2020

Bugs in Second Life may be less annoying than they are in structured, standard MMOs like Elder Scrolls Online, but here's something that does bug some SLers — the open-ended virtual world seems to have way more player-to-player drama.

At least reader Alicia, a veteran of both MMOs and SL, makes that case:

There is drama in every MMO, no questions about that one. Drama can be created from the devs not fixing bugs that should've been fixed, the players' own whining that the game is too difficult, and so on.

Now, where it pertains to SL, the drama is amplified a thousand fold as people can become "keyboard warriors" or even spread rumors to ruin a person. Just like RL, right?

So, is SL a way to escape RL?

That really depends, Alicia argues:

(more…)
Top 6 Posts Last Week, Including A Virtual Food Blog & A VR Rift In Reality

August 10, 2020