Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Author, strategist, virtual world reporter

  • The Scary Problem With Virtual World Fashion Creators Putting RL Fashion Brand Logos on Their Products (Guest Post by Alicia Chenaux)

    IP problem with RL brand on SL products Alicia Chenaux
     
    With Linden Lab just announcing they plan to be much more aggressive around IP violations in Second Life, this great social media post on a related topic from famed SLer Alicia Chenaux is worth highlighting in full:
     
    I keep being shown a viral Instagram post about someone tagging major real world logos that are showing up unauthorized in Second Life.  So let's talk about it.
     
    Will anything happen because of this one post tagging RL brands? Debatable. However, if someone were to professionally write to the legal teams at Chanel, Balenciaga, Kellogg's, McDonald's, etc., yes. Something could happen.
     
    Only not in the way they think.
     
    When you sign into Second Life for the first time, or whenever Linden Lab updates the Terms of Service, you have to agree before proceeding. Does anyone really sit and read the whole ToS? Probably not. But let me hit you with a couple of lines from section 6:
     
    Linden Lab encourages the creation of original content in Second Life. You should not use copyrighted, trademarked, or celebrity material in Second Life.
     
    So those items I showed you the past couple of months with Versace and Vuitton on them? You guessed it. They're breaking ToS.
     
    "But, Ali. Fashion can't be copyrighted!"
     
    No, it can't, for the most part. You can absolutely recreate a pair of Alice+Olivia jeans in the cut, style, and shape. What you can't do is take one of their embellished jeans and recreate them down to the EXACT graphic design down the legs. You could recreate them and put flowers down the legs, just not the exact ones that are designed specifically for Alice+Olivia.
     
    You can recreate a Juicy tracksuit. You cannot put the exact Juicy logo on the butt.
     
    Now here's where it gets a little iffy:
     

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  • These Six Amazing Second Life-Based Tributes to Don Quixote Totally Don’t Tilt at Windmills

    Windmills Sancho? I see Giants!


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

    Langstrath Valley shot “Windmills, Sancho? I see Giants!” which portrays the most famous scene from Don Quixote… I loved the book when I read it in high school Spanish and dragged my friend to see the statue at Plaza de España. I love the book far more than “Man of La Mancha,” the musical. 

    Why did I decide to hunt for Don Quixote in Second Life? Chatting on the phone with a friend, I characterized a mutual friend’s action as quixotic. I then wondered why we pronounced quixotic so differently from Quixote. I had my stream choosing music for me based on a Ben Webster tune and, rudely, The Impossible Dream began to play. I have never liked that song. The algorithmic overlords should have chosen Dulcinea. Anyway, it made me wonder about Don Quixote in Second Life. There were some lovely surprises such as Langstrath’s picture that is so true to the story. 

    For more of Don Quixote in the Metaverse, click here:

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  • New on My Patreon: Philip Rosedale & Brad Oberwager’s Strategy for Bringing Next Gen AI-Powered NPCs into Second Life

    SL NPC AI Philip Patreon Au

    Join my Patreon for free to read first: My in-depth conversation with Philip Rosedale and Brad Oberwager on the challenges of bringing AI-powered NPCs into Second Life.

    Or I should say, adding next gen AI-powered NPCs, because as Brad notes, "the horse has been out of the barn" for years. But the promise and peril is far greater, now they can be more powerful than ever before:

    "What we're trying to figure out is," he tells, "how do we give people the opportunity to have these NPCs, to build these characters, without all of a sudden, you know — the classic one that everyone says is, 'Without a bunch of Nazis running around.'"

    Read it all here, and don't miss the fascinating (if a little creepy!) story of the LLM-powered surfer NPC that Brad once met — it's totally gnarly.

  • Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2025年1月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan

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    Sanny Yoshikawa が、New World Notesのなかから、毎月おすすめのバーチャルワールドニュースを日本語で紹介します

    Sanny Yoshikawa covers the monthly virtual world highlights from New World Notes for virtual Japan.

     

     

     

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  • Meta Leadership Warns Staff to Start Succeeding Or Else On Its Long, Foreseeably Misguided Metaverse Strategy

    Bosworth Meta Metaverse analysis memo

    Here we go with another "leaked" Meta/Reality Labs memo from CTO / Zuckerberg right-hand-man Andrew Bosworth, though unlike last week's happy jazz hands, this one has a more dire angle:

    2025: The Year of Greatness

    … We need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR. And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance. If you don't feel the weight of history on you then you aren't paying attention. This year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure…

    You don't need big teams to do great work. In fact, it may make it harder. One trend I've observed the last couple of years is that our smaller teams often go faster and achieve better results than our more generously funded teams. Not only that, they are much happier! In small teams there is no risk of falling into bad habits like design by committee.

    You can read the whole thing below (via Business Insider's Jyoti Mann) but my strong interpretation to all this wording is:

    Start strongly boosting our metaverse KPIs or get fired this year.

    … because the only time the leaders of a large company talk about the value of small teams is when a huge staff is about to become a tinier one. Also, I've personally heard multiple insiders talk about a coming cut, recently — and have been hearing about Reality Labs' "design by committee" problem since roughly 2019. 

    It's tragic that Meta's staff is now bearing the brunt of the very fundamental mistakes that Zuckerberg and Bosworth themselves made over the last 10 years — especially when these were foreseeable errors at the time.

    To highlight just a few I've followed closely:

    Zuckerberg/Bosworth spent billions to mass market VR, without researching (or knowing) why VR tends to make females literally vomit:

    [Microsoft's] danah boyd is not an obscure researcher, but frequently cited in mainstream media and tech news sites. So when she ended her 2014 essay with a call for researchers across Silicon Valley to follow up on her initial findings, I assumed this would immediately happen.

    It did not.

    Reached while writing Making a Metaverse That Matters, she told me that few if any VR industry members contacted her after the essay was published. Neither did they even follow up with her in 2017, when a study published in Experimental Brain Research found that when women volunteers played a game in an Oculus VR headset, 78 percent of them experienced nausea. “To my knowledge,” she told me, “[Oculus and Meta] did not pursue any of those research questions.”

    Over the years, I’ve asked several senior Meta staffers about this, [including Zuckerberg/Bosworth's PR team] and have received no adequate reply.

    Read more here.

    Zuckerberg/Bosworth did not follow the advice of former Facebook VP / Second Life co-founder Cory Ondrejka, Jim Purbrick, and other virtual world veterans they hired.

    If you've been following the news about Facebook/Meta's metaverse project lately, you'll recall the slew of bad press when a female user was sexually assaulted in Horizon Worlds, leading the company to hastily add an avatar "boundary" system…

    "I was literally banging the drum at Oculus Connect two years in a row," Jim Purbrick tells me, with evident frustration, even sending along the talk he gave on the subject at Facebook's own conference back in 2016. "I also told every new Oculus employee I met to read My Tiny Life in addition to Ready Player One, but the message didn't reach every part of the organization, sadly."

    Read more here, and, of course, on Ondrejka in great detail, in my book.

    Zuckerberg/Bosworth did not clearly define the Metaverse, or explain their conception to their own employees.

    According to a survey conducted last month by Blind, the popular anonymous messaging app for company staff, confidence in the Metaverse and Meta's efforts dropped sharply last year [2022]. That's compared to a November 2021 Blind survey where the very same questions were asked:

    Blind - Mark Zuckerberg

    To the statement, "I believe Meta will successfully build the metaverse" (above), only 50% of employees answered yes. In November 2021, 77% of staff answered in the affirmative… 56% say their own CEO has not explained the metaverse clearly.

    Read more here.

    Or, you know, read Snow Crash, which defines the Metaverse with biblical specificity.  

    In a funny irony, Bosworth pinged me on Twitter when I pointed out that Meta seemed to be walking away from the Metaverse… in a statement he wrote that actually shows little knowledge about the concept. The painful irony is his own employees will now have to labor under the gun of that misapprehension.

    Anyway, read his whole statement below.

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  • Cajsa Choices: See Why Maloe Vansant is Among My Favorite SL Artists

    sweet dreams are made of this

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

    Maloe Vansant has been a favorite artist of mine for years, something I said the last time I wrote about her. It’s as true now as then. Pictures like this are the reason why. The woman’s face is so beautiful, but in the texture of the skin we see the breakdown and deterioration. There are scratches and breaks in the surface and there is a growth of gold daubs of paint, flecks that fleck off, a kind of beautiful decay. The title is “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This” and it immediately reminds me of that video that frequently zoomed in on Annie Lennox and her castmates’ faces, but most often on her face. Even without the Eurythmics connection, though, this picture is extraordinary. 

    For more of the breathtaking imagery from Maloe Vansant, click here:

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  • Dear Linden Lab: Advertise Second Life’s Huge Geography Compared to Most (All?) Online Games — Comment of the Week

    Blake Sea Second Life Marketing

    The new test ad for Second Life attracted quite a bit of opinions from longtime SL users, including some on-brand snark — and this smart suggest from longtime virtual world explorer Kaylee West:

    As a regular user of both SL (17 years) and VRChat (6 years), one of the big things that keeps me in SL and frustrates me with VRC is how much easier it is the change up my avis look and wardrobe in SL than VRC.

    I also feel, strangely, that the continents are a big selling point. Many AAA games boast about how big their maps are, how you can endlessly explore every corner of their maps. [Emphasis mine! -WJA]

    VRC has some biggish worlds, but nothing like SL’s continents and Blake Sea. Only in SL can you buy a luxury yacht and sail for hours on end, stopping at different port and explore the surrounds, or jump in a car of your choice and drive around an extensive road network.

    From another perspective, there appears to be a growing number of people looking for AI companions. I have made one for myself so that I have “intelligent” company when I travel around SL (not all of us are good at the socialising thing). Maybe making the creation of AI companions (actual avatars not animesh which can’t be rezzed) easier and highlighting this as a feature of SL (as against Replika or Kindred) might draw these users in? 

    I believe something like those AI companions are coming soon, so set that aside. The map size point is a very good one, especially since SL is a single-shard virtual world with truly massive areas that are contiguous by land, air, or sea. (Yes, region crossings usually involve hiccups, but still.) It’s a key differentiating feature of Second Life!

    Consider: Currently Second Life’s size is roughly that of Los Angeles (as Philip Rosedale recently noted in an interview), i.e. 1300 square kilometers.

    Contrast that with some leading AAA online game worlds:

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  • Top 5 Posts, Including: A Look at Second Life’s First Marketing Campaign in Years, and SimThings, a New Life Sim Integrated with Top SL Brand Content

    Simthing Gizem life sim SL Blueberry KiwiCo

  • Cajsa’s Choices: This Artist Turns Second Life Screenshots Into Exciting Pop Art / Gothic Baroque Imagery

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

    Damien Father (Father Daddy) has an exciting photostream. Regular readers will know I am a huge fan of pop art. I cannot resist pictures like this. Really, all they did was create a duotone in red with their snap and make a few repeats. But the idea is always what makes pop art special. I mean, most anyone could paint a Campbell’s Tomato Soup Can, but no one thought of doing that until Andy Warhol in 1961. I’ve seen the soup cans arrayed in a long line from one room to another and they are overwhelming and far more interesting and imposing than you might think. 

    I also have to point out the subtle cleverness of choosing that shade so that the face seems also a repeat of the background. I love everything about this pic. This is titled “Super Villain” which is also kind of clever as there is no outward manifestation of villainy, but that is the point, villainy comes from within not without. 

    For more SL-becomes-pop art perfection, click here:

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  • Should I Stay or Should I Go: The Insidious Problem of Purpose in Second Life — And a Way to Help Solve It. (Guest Post)

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    Hari Sutherland is a longtime SLer and author of the new book, SECOND LIFE: The First, Best Metaverse in Words and Pictures

    There’s been a lot of discussion lately on the problem of retention of new users in Second Life. While the focus has largely been on the daunting UI and learning curve, along with common 30-day prohibitions, I think there’s a more salient issue which makes the majority of new signups give up within minutes or hours, never to return.

    I believe the fundamental reason Second Life has a historic retention problem is simple: people have no idea what to do once they’re here.

    In the course of researching my book, it became clear to me that after an initial period of acclimation and discovery in SL, the majority of residents usually find something to do and keep them engaged — they find, or create, meaning and purpose in their second lives.

    This shouldn’t surprise us: after all, isn’t RL like that? Children daydream about what they want to be when they grow up; we have goals, dreams, aspirations. Yet when someone first logs in to SL, they have absolutely no idea what they want to do. You could argue their first task is to learn how to get around, dress, and so on, but this is hardly stuff to grab our interest. And when you consider we’re trying to breathe new life into our world by recruiting Gen Z and younger Gen Yers whose brains are wired for ten- to thirty-second videos, expecting them to take time to read all the 1950s-style educational signage on Welcome Island is kinda unrealistic.

    In the course of taking new photographs for my book, I’d enlisted some friends to pose for a pair of interior shots. Anyone who takes photos in SL knows that setting up a shot can be very time-consuming and, one would think, pretty boring for the draftees. Yet when I apologized to my models for what should have been a one-hour session turning into three, they all said they were enjoying it. How, I wondered, could anyone enjoy sitting around and occasionally being asked to trigger an expression or assume a new pose for three hours? I realized people like to do stuff, to be part of something. To belong.

    One of the most engaged people I know in SL is my friend Rachel Blat. Here’s what she has to say:

    "I have been in Second Life for almost 6 years. During this time I’ve learned many things, some of which keep me very busy. I am a professional surfer for the SLSA, the Second Life Surfing Association, which has two sessions per year. To participate in the competitions, a lot of training and knowledge of the different boards available in Second Life is necessary. I usually start my training with the board chosen by the SLSA on the beach where the competition will take place 15 days in advance, for 1 to 2 hours per day.

    “When I’m not surfing, I am a photographic model and also co-owner of a modeling agency and producer of a story magazine. I divide my time photographing models and building scenarios where the stories take place. We have done Wild West, Cleopatra, Star Wars, and several other themes. There are 8 studios measuring 64×64 meters that are constantly being modified. When I have some free time, I usually brave the winds by sailing on the Blake Sea. I am also a mother in SL and my baby needs daily care. All these together make my SL happy and fulfilling.”

    This dovetails with my own experience that some of the happiest people in SL are those whose SL is full and busy, whether it’s with DJing, participating in SL sports, fundraising, helping admin a sim, or running their own club, art gallery, cafe, etc. In the process, residents widen their connections and build meaningful relationships, in contrast to the sense of isolation and loneliness one can feel if one just hangs out alone in places where half the avatars are AFK. If you’re already lonely in RL (and so many are), the last thing you need is to reinforce that in SL!

    So, imagine this as a new feature to the first-time SL user experience:

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