Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Lally O’Leary is a fun account to follow, in part because you never know what she will do next. I said something similar four years ago when I wrote about her back when she called herself Lally Starsparkle. Whatever her last name, Lally is sure to please. I love “The Photographer” where she makes the intriguing decision to leave a lot of space bin the field before the subject. It creates a sense of vastness that would be lost if her subject were up close in the foreground.
Last week's post on Second Life's huge geographic size as a unique selling point brought up some interesting points. Technically SL is probably not the "largest" if we're only talking about geographic size, but I think the apples to apples comparison question is precisely this:
What is the Geographically Largest, Contiguous, Multi-User, Fully Explorable, Online Virtual World?
By "contiguous", I mean there are no load screens in between areas, and by "fully explorable" I mean just that: Some online worlds like Eve Online, MS Flight Simulator, or even single-player worlds like Starfield are extremely large, yes, if judged only by map size. But the actual user explorable part of the map size is much less than that. I.E., MSFS basically models the entire world, but you can't, say, land your plane and walk into a nearby diner.
Video (also) via @brainthink.bsky.social, who has also happened to explore Second Life, and found it technically wanting: "The SL mainland is geographically large," they explain, "but the rendering times of structures and objects is absurdly slow. As a real life sailor, I tried sailing in SL once on a rezzed sailboat and quickly gave up. It wasn’t enjoyable at all, sadly."
That has at least somewhat improved since the SL grid moved to the Amazon Cloud in 2020. And while there are thousands of private sims that are not generally accessible, or require a load screen when teleporting there, the major mainland areas, as reader Kaylee West argues, makes for some sprawling, serendipitous adventures — notwithstanding property owner ban lines:
Since Quest headsets and Horizon Worlds cannot succeed on the scale of Meta's ambitions (and certainly not in 2025), I'm reading [Meta CTO's internal memo] as a preparation for a major shift of focus away from mixed reality and Horizon Worlds towards augmented reality +AI glasses (at the end of this year or in 2026). (And I'm sure that Meta will find a way to describe this new focus as an evolution of their vision of the Metaverse. Maybe the new/true/real Metaverse or whatever. They'll come up with something.)
If this shift of focus towards AR glasses and AI is already planned, why not just announce it? I assume the purpose of this whole exercise (and its predictable outcome) is to rationalize the scaling down of the MR and Horizon Worlds teams, prevent or shut down internal discussions about this change, and give some employees a chance to leave or switch teams before they are fired.
But I'm biased because Meta's VR strategy never made much sense to me. Thus, I guess, I'll just wait, watch, and limit my engagement with the Quest platform.
"Despite the reductions," MSN reports, "Meta still has around 1,000 job openings in California, with hiring efforts focused on AI and other business-critical roles." So, yes, I agree with Martin that limiting engagement with the Quest is probably a good idea.
As for my original rant about Bosworth's memo, there's a pretty good conversation on it on LinkedIn, where it went mini-viral.
I joined Wagner James Au’s Patreon at the “Metaverse partner” level in October 2024, when I started work on my book about Second Life, since James’s New World Notes blog and Patreon user posts seemed the perfect place to publicize my project.
In the four months since, I’ve been both impressed and delighted by the results…
The most fascinating story about next gen AI in technology may not be about DeepSeek or whatever OpenAI is announcing, but reside in a 21 year old metaverse platform which has something no LLM can boast about: A simulated virtual world with terabytes of meta-tagged data constantly evolving.
That's my take, at least, talking with Linden Lab heads Brad Oberwager and Philip Rosedale recently. And while the company has added its own official AI-powered characters last year, the user community has been creating them for many years, even long before OpenAI existed. They recently got a demo from an SL community creator who connected LLMs to an upcoming RPG that blew their minds:
"The whole experience that he had built using AI was really very strong," Philip tells me. "And I think that's one of those cases where, if we can just get people to him, the ones that want to [play his role playing game] it was just awesome." (More on that game later.)
They also thought, he added: "Okay, let's modernize this and make it easily expand upon this stuff."
But doing that means taking incredible caution: "We're running a lot of tests on characters that are infused with AI personalities," Oberwager explains. "They're sort of next gen NPCs. We ran a test, we got feedback, we took the test down. It's not like it went sideways, but some people didn't like some things, but that's the point of the test."
"Using Runway ML is actually straightforward," he tells me, explaining the platform/technical process and artistic approach. "You start by uploading an image and describing what you want to see happen in the video. Then you wait to see how the output aligns with your vision. Personally, I’d estimate my success rate is about 25%. I define success as the output effectively conveying the emotion or sensation I’m trying to communicate.
"To make the process more efficient, I take notes on the wording and syntax that lead to favorable results for my specific goals. I’m mindful of the carbon footprint of this technology, so I prioritize producing meaningful, impactful results. If the outputs don’t show promise quickly, I end the session and reconsider the prompts or the source image. It’s easy to approach the tool like a hammer and just keep hitting anything and everything, relying on it to generate something interesting without much progress towards the original vision.
"With my paintings, for example, I was inspired by one of the more thrilling sensations in Second Life: the feeling of hopping just off the ground, hovering, and zooming closely over the landscape. I wanted to capture that same energy in my real-life paintings, so I tailored my prompts in that direction.
"Once the painting is adjusted in Photoshop, I upload it to Runway, add a text prompt I think will work, and wait for the render. It’s a bit like baking a soufflé—you hope it rises but prepare for the possibility of collapse."
"The resulting output was exciting enough to explore further. It sparked a realization about AI’s potential in art. The experience reminded me of when I first started building with prims in Second Life: the thrill of exploring a new medium of expression with an incredibly low barrier to entry.
"For me it’s a precision thing. Creating felt more precise in Second Life than painting on a canvas. Creating with AI feels more vague than painting, blurry in a way that’s difficult to focus. But this is temporary. We’re in the Daguerreotype era of AI."
All of this, of course, brings up numerous thorny topics about the clash between traditional art and gen AI. Berg is one of the few people highly qualified in both fields to discuss it with nuance. (Along with his SL art, he's an academically trained painter; on the tech side, he was a designer at IBM and more recently, worked on a visualization project for NASA, among other coolness.)
So Berg has some solid back to consider, for instance, the future of traditional art in the AI era, especially as it evolves:
"Although we might view the introduction of AI media through the lens of anti-AI sentiment as many do, that very sentiment could instead be viewed as a renewed appreciation of handcrafted works," he argues. "Regardless of one’s opinion of AI art, it has people talking about art and human agency in ways we haven’t in a very long time.
"The shaman who told stories by the community fire as the shadows dances on the cave walls may have taken exception to written glyphs, wondering how the human experience would be retained on cold stones. Despite the spectacle of AI, these themes and concerns are ancient. I’d be more worried if we looked at AI and rejected it wholesale than having the courage to see what it means to be human in a world in constant tension with the technology we invent."
Does that imply he plans to use gen AI in his own "official" works of art? In other words, works he'd show to the general public in a gallery setting, or even a platform like SL?
Background: Historically we mostly only feature images from SL's Flickr community for various reasons (longevity, embed features, etc.), but we also want to highlight the Primfeed's fairly large virtual world community as much as possible.
In any case, please tag your favorites Primfeed artists in comments so we can follow and/or feature them!
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Cursiichella recently posted this delightful picture and I immediately thought she’s Pippi Longstocking all grown up. I love the mischievous spirit she portrays. Definitely, she would lead an expedition to a circus.
For more of Cursichella’s spirited pictures, click here:
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 