Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Author, strategist, virtual world reporter

  • Linden Lab Alpha Launches AI-Powered Character Designer for Second Life — Community Concerned About Impact on Virtual World, User Accounts

    SL Convai AI NPCs

    Linden Lab just Alpha launched an AI/NPC character builder for Premium Plus Second Life users in collaboration with Convai, the startup that tested out some NPCs in SL earlier this year (to somewhat dubious if comical results). Now they're rolling out an entire toolkit:

    The Character Designer provides a solid foundation for immersive roleplay, offering a range of features that let you shape and refine the personalities and behaviors of your inworld characters. Current capabilities include:

    Early-Stage Roleplay Support – Characters respond intelligently through IM, adapting and evolving as you interact.

    Custom Personalities and Backstories – Define unique histories, preferences, and communication styles to bring your characters to life.

    Integration with Existing SL Systems – Connect through a dedicated alt account, set arrival points, and fine-tune behavior filters for a seamless inworld experience.

    As this is an alpha release, several improvements are planned:

    Expanded Communication – Beyond IM-based interactions, future updates will include local and group chat support.

    Voice Integration – Upcoming versions will allow characters to speak, enhancing immersion.

    Contextual Awareness – Characters will gain awareness of nearby objects and avatars, enabling more relevant responses.

    Advanced Actions – Over time, characters may perform tasks like exchanging inventory items or changing outfits.

    Extended Configuration Options – Additional LLM models and Character Designer APIs will provide greater customization and integration possibilities.

    More here. To judge by early community response as here on /SecondLife, there's much more consternation, than enthusiasm. 

    "We already have a problem with a LOT of residents staying logged in and being AFK a majority of the time," as SL author Hari Sutherland just put it to me. "Sim owners place animesh faux people in sims already. Add in NPCs, and the chances of human-to-human interaction, growing community, and forging friendships plummets… it's just statistics."

    This is an Alpha launch available only to a few thousand Premium+ users, so we may see these concerns addressed before the official launch.

    In the meantime, if you are planning to play with these tools, be careful with what the AI characters you create say. Reddit host Coffee Pancake points out a pretty perilous warning in the documentation, if you uncheck the subject matter filter:

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  • Cajsa’s Choices: Beautifully Icy Photographs of Virtual Winter in Second Life

    " The light of winter is the poetry of patience."

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

    Maka Orion’s picture “The light of winter is the poetry of patience” struck a chord with me. I immediately recognized the COLD he is portraying. It’s not just his breath condensing in the cold. It’s the way his shoulders hunch forward, how he brings his hands up to warm them despite the gloves, and it’s the effect of black and white. It feels colder. The only thing is he really should unroll his cap and pull it down over his ears. You know it’s cold from the way he holds his body. It’s not below zero (-18 C), though, or the snow flakes would not be so big and soft. 

    This got me wondering. There are thousands of winter pictures taken by Second Life residents, but how many capture the COLD of winter? After all, in Second Life we have people posing on frozen lakes in bikinis or even less. Most of the snow in Second Life is the soft, fluffy snow of warmer winter days, not the hard dry pellets of a COLD snowy day. I wanted to see the kind of COLD where it has to warm up enough to snow. 

    To see some real virtual COLD, click here:

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  • Amazing User-Created VRChat Adventure Game World Gets 200,000+ Visits / Favorites… But Only 29 People Paying to Play. Here’s Why.

    Bullet Time Agent, as we covered here, is a VRChat-based, free-to-play adventure game (trailer above) created over several years as a one person labor of love by longtime community creator "Lakuza". Near pro quality in polish, ambition, and gameplay, Lakuza even hired voice actors for Bullet Time Agent, which takes up to ten hours to complete; VRChat the company helped him stage and promote it.

    Launched last month, it's earned some… interesting user stats since then:

    • Here's how many times VRChat players have visited it: 168,445+
    • Here's how many times VRChat players have favorited it: 31,914+
    • Here's how many tips VRChat players have given him through several tip jars located throughout the game world: Twenty-nine.

    Yes, only 29:

    "A world that took 3 years+ to make and so far it has had 29 tip jar donations (roughly $291, which I believe Tilia takes a portion of too when cashed out)," as Lakuza explains on X/Twitter. "So this is 29 people supporting out of somewhere between 32,000 to 100,000 people."

    This is a painful case study on what kind of worlds monetize on VRChat, and which decidedly do not:

     

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  • Watch: Machinima Artist Shows How Hand-Made Visuals Are Better Than AI

    Remember Teal Aurelia's Second Life-based machinima promoting real life pop singer SEMINA, which led to a radio station picking up the song? Here's Teal's behind-the-scenes video, showing how she manually, painstakingly integrates SL footage with her post-production editing and artistry.  

    On her social media, Teal's bio reads: "I make videos. I don't use any AI."

    This production video visually expresses that statement:

    "I just prefer transparency in art," she tells me. "Especially in a community where people are trying to learn from each other. I post editing videos so people can see how much work is involved in what I do. I'm never going to believe that AI is more valuable than actual skill."

    You can not only see that technical skill here, but the personal artistic touches she brings to the task, giving the video a hand-made feel.  (For instance, how the butterfly and shooting star travel between paintings, or the blink-and-you'll-miss-it rotating stars in the diorama.) While it's heavily post-processed machinima, flourishes like these make it distinctly recognizable as a Teal Aurelia production. 

    Saying "I don't use any AI" is now also necessary to distinguish what she's doing here from the torrent of flashy but mediocre AI slop now choking our social media feeds:

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  • Subscribe to My Patreon on the Supporter/Creator/Partner Level, Get an Ad for Your Virtual World Brand on New World Notes

    Patreon supporter ads

    Starting this week, my Patreon subscribers on the Supporter level* get an additional benefit option that'll show up here on New World Notes: A 300 x 150 permanent ad to your virtual world brand! (Subscribers can also gift their ad to a friend with a brand!) I just added my first ads for Rapture, a long-time SL mesh fashion brand, and the new book by Tom Boellstoff, and will be adding others soon.

    With about 100,000 monthly pageviews (give or take), this is a cost-effective way to reach readers of Second Life's most-read news/culture blog, which also draws thousands of readers interested in VRChat, Roblox, and other metaverse platforms/immersive games. It's also a good way of helping New World Notes keep on noting!

    Speaking of which, Patreon subscribers on the Creator or Metaverse partner get another NWN-based benefit:

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  • Cajsa’s Choices: Leloo Ulf Whimsically Depicts the Animals of Second Life

    Screenshot (1320)Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

    Leloo Ulf captured a small scene at Cica Ghost’s fantastical Spring creation. If you go now, you can see her Snowflake world, just as fun and whimsical. Cica’s work often makes me feel like I am visiting a Dr. Seuss world. I love how Leloo composed the pic. We get the feeling he’s looking at us and holding back a chuckle at how silly we humans are. Others have shared their photos in Cica’s Flickr group but only Leloo has captured this expression. It’s quite amazing because it’s not like he has a Bento head. 

    For more of Leloo’s whimsical pics, click here:

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  • Kickstart This: Trip the Light, a VR Game That Teaches Hand-in-Hand Partner Dancing!

    Trip the Light is a new VR game on Kickstarter that’s now painfully close to meeting its target, and that’s no surprise: It’s one of the most innovative virtual reality projects I’ve come across in some time. It leverages the VR motion controllers and sensors to… teach players how to ballroom dance with someone else.

    Yes:

    TRIP THE LIGHT is a fully immersive dance game that brings the connection of partner dancing to life. Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned dancer, you can experience authentic salsa, swing, hip hop, and line dancing in stunning environments or in your own living room. Dance hand-in-hand with virtual AI partners and instructors in real time, learning techniques while unlocking new levels, dance styles, outfits, accessories and more. Perfect for fitness, fun, and improving your real life dance skills.

    There’s been a slew of club-style dancing video games, where the solo partners don’t touch, but this must be the first that simulates true couples dancing. It’s lead developed by Patrick Ascolese, a veteran of both VR and AAA games.

    “My wife and I were at a wedding dancing together and at that moment I just knew,” he tells me, about the moment of inspiration. “I have the technical skills to pull this off and just happen to be competent enough at salsa and partner dancing to lead it. As it moved along we enlisted the help of professional dancers / choreographers.” 

    The game simulates touching and directly interacting with an NPC partner through a complex system that accounts for player motion and physics:

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  • Seven Stunning Second Life Avatar Depictions of Shakespeare’s Ophelia

    Ophelia (Millais)-Amlet

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

    Blaire Naverre created this marvelous homage to John Everett Millais’ portrait of Shakespeare’s Ophelia. She has the flowers, the dark blue of the stream, all the details are so well done. Lizzie Siddal, an artist’s model who went on to be an artist in her own right, got very sick while modeling for this picture, because she was laying in a bathtub full of cold water. Millais ended up paying her doctor bills. Blaire’s recreation is free of colds and flus and is a stunning achievement. Millais’ Ophelia is certainly the most well known of the multitude of artworks depicting this tragic character. (Though if you think artists have it bad for Ophelia, you should see the scholars.)

    Perhaps Ophelia fascinates because she went mad and killed herself and we’re not sure why. Was she the despairing woman who loved someone who did not love her back or the disillusioned daughter mourning the murder of her father by the man she loved? Whatever the reason, she is a popular subject in art. I am not exempt from the impulse to portray her. 

    Here’s my SL-based “Ophelia at Versaille” from 2008. 


    //embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

    Paper Couture Rosette 17

    For more Second Life-based Ophelias, click here:

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  • Why Linden Lab Struggles to Communicate to the Second Life Community at Large (Comment of the Week)

    SL communication announcements
    Above: The default viewer's log-in announcement message… if you can click it in time

    While last Tuesday's main post was mostly about Linden Lab's upcoming features to the SL mobile app, it also noted why Linden Lab is now making such announcements through group video calls:

    I was on the Zoom call with dozens (hundreds?) of fellow bloggers, YouTubers, and assorted SL influencers calling in from around the globe. Which led to one of them asking a question that came up after the last Zoom call: Why not just announce everything on the website, rather than do group calls like this?

    Oberwager (who has a gravelly voice eerily resembling California governor Gavin Newsom) acknowledged that the company hasn't been great at communicating with the community in the past — and also noted that official announcements posted on the site aren't seen by many SLers overall.

    So rather than just post on the site, the Linden Lab team decided it's better that they also reach out to as many community media figures as possible. 

    Prompting author Hari Sutherland to observe:

    Balkanization and fragmentation of communication channels (as well as communities within SL) is a core problem, and getting worse…many residents (likely a majority) never visit the SL forum, if they even know it exists; maybe they use the SL site occasionally to check account data, but how many pull down the Community submenu?
     
    Discord has replaced IM for many, and now we have Primfeed as well; oh, and Reddit.
     
    I can't imagine that you can get news to even 20% of residents with a single platform. So how do you get announcements and important info out? I'm guessing push announcements on the mobile app may be one way.  

     

    Welcome to yet another challenge to growing the Second Life user base beyond marketing:

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  • Top 8 Posts Including an SL Mobile Milestone, a New World from PLAYERUNKNOWN, and the Problem with Marketing Second Life

    Second Life Beatles Google Trends

    53482944188_931c992a7f_c Cajsa's Choices: Utterly Stunning Second Life Screenshots by Heloise