Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Beuanna Banana’s blog is called “Just Stuff” and it is lovely blog that features great big gorgeous pictures. “The Kind of Woman You Want to Meet” opens with a picture as large as my window, but no larger. It’s perfectly sized for maximum enjoyment with no scrolling. I love her pose, it makes me think of Lauren Bacall, not in appearance, but in attitude.
chair prop & pose – Long Gone Whisper gacha -Hold That Thought -@ Le Poppycock
Control Zee is a game startup which just raised $3 million to develop and launch a platform that deploys "massively interactive swarm games" that 1000s of people can play at the same time:
Creators or livestreamers can use Dot Big Bang to build their own games and play them with their communities during a stream, across any device, simply by sharing a browser link. The company is trying to take the frustration out of getting people to play a co-op game together, which often requires getting everyone to install applications and set up accounts in advance, said ControlZee CEO Rob Anderberg in an interview with GamesBeat.
It was co-founded by Linden Lab veterans Rob Andenberg and Porter Schutz, along with Jon Stockwell and Jacques Menuet. Schutz credits his time as a Linden for inspiring their approach to social game worlds:
"There are a few touchstones from Second Life that are reflected in what we're trying do with dot big bang: Creative immediacy — we want there to be zero barrier to users expressing themselves creatively in multiplayer. No extra tools are needed, everything is available to everyone. Building with your friends is fun and easy — just share a link. With the creator's permission, anything can be remixed by other users in order to provide a starting point for building."
Would that SL itself worked like that (which I guess is the point)!
Another Linden touchstone Porter mentions is a desire to create vibrant online experiences — but with their platform, in a way that's much more accessible to many more people:
For the first time ever, you can experience one of the most iconic British festival destinations from the comfort of your home, all while raising money for two amazing causes – The Big Issue and Amnesty International.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Iwajin Ormega’s “016” shows how he likes to play with color. This picture is all about green. It’s a good picture, adding a bit of interest by making the wall at a diagonal. He’s using the rule of thirds, keeping the picture off center and dynamic.
I have not seen many AR applications recently which struck me as exciting let alone likely to be financially successful, but a recent deal definitely caught my eye:
Pokémon Go creator Niantic Labs is partnering with Punchdrunk, the UK-based production company behind seminal immersive theater piece Sleep No More. The partnership will see both companies work toward “developing multiple projects that will reinvent storytelling for a 21st century audience and further expand the horizon of interactive entertainment.”
Sleep No More, launched in its current iteration in New York City back in 2011, is a landmark immersive theater production that lets audiences walk through a series of rooms and experience various storylines and other elements of the production at their own pace. Influenced in part by haunted houses and other nonlinear live productions, immersive theater sounds like a prime fit for augmented reality because it could allow for Niantic and companies like Punchdrunk to create fantastical virtual worlds that are then overlaid over real spaces.
I never got a chance to experience Sleep (trailer above) but the many colleagues who did consistently described it as a kind of virtual world layered on top the real one. So creatively, Punchdrunk makes a lot of sense as a partner. Interestingly, it's a partnership that might better financial sense for Niantic too:
Sine Wave Entertainment, the studio behind free-to-play MMO sandbox Sinespace, has partnered with Unity to allow Asset Store creators to sell their 3D models to players through the in-game shop. As of today, Unity Asset Store users can opt in to sell their content to a global audience of Sinespace players, and will receive 70 percent of revenue from all sales…
"We’re excited to announce this opportunity both for gamers and our community of content creators, who will now have access to over a million assets through Sinespace, and be able to sell their 3D models directly to consumers," said Unity’s Peter O’Reilly, head of commercialization. "It’s a great opportunity that allows us to develop the huge, fast-growing virtual goods market."
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Daeberethwen Arbenlow creates beautifully done pictures that inhabit a world of blues, pinks, and purples yet never show the world through rose-colored glasses. I love “Universal Flow.” It has a fantastical feeling, you can almost imagine her transforming into a mermaid.
UploadVR has an interesting story on a new prototype created by Facebook’s VR research division which replaces the traditional, totally bulky virtual reality headset with something closer to the sunglasses form factor we've been wanting since Snowcrash:
Facebook Reality Labs’ new approach is a thin film where focusing is done by holographic optics instead of by the bulk of the lens. "Hologram" in this context just means a physical “recording” of how light interacts with an object- in this case a lens rather than a scene.
Facebook claims the research may be able “to deliver a field of view comparable to today’s VR headsets using only a thin film for a thickness of less than 9 mm.” The total weight of the display module is claimed as just 18 grams.
But is this approach viable? I put that question to a colleague who happens to be one of the world's top experts in AR/VR technology (and so prefers to remain anonymous). They read Facebook's research paper associated with this prototype, and came back with this assessment:
"I think the tech is cool and the research is good for longterm innovation but is likely years away from a product. I think the Panasonic and other pancake optics is a bit closer."
What's holding Facebook's approach back?
Here's the deep dive from my expert, citing the research paper:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Gustaf af Ansgarsö has a knack for getting himself into situations. This is just one of the many trying times you will find on his photostream. This was to announce a short break while he recovers from damages sustained in this dilemma.
Gustaf’s photostream is full of humor as you’ll see after the cut.
"Second Life concurrency shows a significant uplift since 10th March 2020," she tells to me. "Underlying trend in Median Daily Concurrency begins to grows from that date and has been 13% higher on average than the previous 9 weeks."
As you can see above, median concurrency reaches up to around 46,000 in mid-April, then starts steadily decreasing to a point where it is now around 41,000.
Which is pretty decent! To put that in modern terms, VRChat is now reaching peak concurrencies of about 15,000 on Steam — so its total is probably 2-3x that number of people launching VRChat from other platforms. I.E. SL concurrency is still competitive with VRChat.
The next question is why usage starts slipping in May:
