Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Author, strategist, virtual world reporter

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https://www.reddit.com/user/slhamlet

  • Virtual World Users Hilariously Troll LLM-Powered Bots — And Illustrate the Limits of AI-Based NPCs

    SL Convai bots ChatGPT LLM

    After chatting with Convai's LLM-based NPCs in Second Life last week, some witty SLers amplified the genial trolling even further, going so far as to conduct live on-camera interviews (above, with on-scene reporter Ellie Llewellyn) and engage in some long, hilariously surreal conversations with them (below).

    The explosion of excitement/unsustainable hype around large language models has led many AI boosters to enthuse about how they will transform NPCs in virtual worlds, making them much more believable and human. In the context of a quest-oriented MMORPG, this has problems — as veteran designer Damion Schubert explained:

    If every NPC is talking to the player at this much length about a different problem, the player has trouble focusing on the primary questline. If every quest is important, then none are. [Emph. mine]

    [N]arrative design is an incredibly important and incredibly delicate design field. Because it's about the EXPERIENCE and not the NARRATIVE.

    It's not going to be achievable simply by about firing all your writers and replacing them with robots.

    In an open-ended virtual world, the "quest" and the overall experience is itself about social connection.

    Missing that realization means missing an important point: The humans actually using virtual worlds are vastly more creative and curious than an AI-based NPC could ever be. And will soon get bored with such NPCs once their expressive limits have been reached.

    To see what I mean, read Wendy's chat with the Convai bot "EternalSailor" below:

     

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  • Second Life Overwhelmed By Virtual Fashion Shopping Events & Consumerism, Argues Longtime SL Blogger

    Second Life virtual consumerism mesh

    Longtime SL blogger Prisqua Newall of SLex in the City has a must-read blog post about how rampant virtual world shopping events are choking the creativity and originality from Second Life culture. It was inspired by her own personal moment of clarity as a rampant shopper:

    This journey through Second Life’s marketplace has led me to a significant personal insight regarding digital consumerism. A moment of clarity emerged when I realised my inventory contained at least L$20,000 worth of items I had never unpacked and, as a result, never used. The excitement of events and continuous sales often leads to a pile of unused digital items that remain untouched, forgotten, and, over time, obsolete. This was especially true for me when I switched from the Lara body to Petite and then to PetiteX. Each change made many of my old items useless, likely mirrored in the experiences of others as they navigate the vast array of body options within Second Life.

    Part of the problem, she argues, is that SL sim owners have a strong profit motive to continuously push shopping events hosted on their land:

    With the event hosting 75 stores, this pricing strategy could rake in approximately 675,000L$ (around US$2,700) per event for the organisers. When contrasted with the monthly expense of running a 30k region on Second Life, which is around US$259, the financial allure of organising such events becomes starkly apparent. This juxtaposition suggests that event organising can emerge as a lucrative venture, potentially offering a more appealing profit margin with arguably less effort compared to maintaining an estate or developing products.

    Read the whole thing here, and watch the accompanying video she created for this (below).

    This is a topic I want to delve into more, but my immediate sense is she's roughly right. My social media feeds related to Second Life are almost entirely around shopping events or shopping deals, and the very existence of her blog post about SL culture highlights another trend: The vast vast majority of Second Life-themed blogs are actually (and completely) shopping/fashion blogs. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but there was much more diversity of topics 10-12 years ago or so.

    My own perspective is this rampant consumerism largely became inevitable as Second Life shifted to a mesh-based economy beginning around 2010-2012, creating the ability (and therefore the market, and the promotional push), to create and customize ultra-realistic human avatars. As I wrote in Making a Metaverse That Matters:

     

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  • Today’s SL Flickr Pick: Delightful Roleplay Imagery by Kynne Llewellyn

    Spring


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

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

    Kynne Llewellyn is such an excellent Flickr artist whom I have followed for so long, I thought I had featured her long ago. Last week, Alicia Chenaux asked if I had ever written about Kynne and I started to say yes, but decided I better check. 

    Well, now we’re in Oversight City. I am correcting that today. 

    Kynne dresses her avatar in so many kinds of roleplay avatars it’s a wonder she can keep them straight. She also places them in the perfect settings for their role. Unlike many roleplay bloggers, her avatars are in pacific scenes, no swords and pistols necessary. I love this lovely “Spring” picture she shared recently. The pink and green of the kimono echoes the pink of the cherry tree blossoms and the green grass. Pink and yellow daffodils and green butterflies repeat the color scheme. The cherry tree outside my new apartment is in the exact same stage of bloom, allowing my cat to watch the birds and squirrels on its many branches without the cover of leaves. My cat, however, is not feeling the least pacific. 

    For more or Kynne’s delightful characters, click here:

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  • Best 3D Engine for Creating in Vision Pro? An XR Engineer Compares/Contrasts Unreal to Unity’s PolySpatial

    This is a pretty cool Vision Pro demo built in Unity PolySpatial, a suite of technologies for Apple's headset. "It's basically play-in-reality," as the creator Michael Becker enthuses.

    It's also a glimpse into the state of virtual world/game development on Apple Vision Pro. While Unity seems to be the most powerful engine for Vision Pro, Unreal and the open source Godot engine show promise — though those two don't have mixed reality capabilities.

    I was recently chatting with a colleague who's a developer with a top game publisher, and is experimenting with these engines for projects on the Apple Vision Pro; they have some guarded enthusiasm for Unreal on AVP down the road.

    The basic TL;DR is Unreal has quite a lot of potential, but Unity PolySpatial is the current preference by far for most Vision Pro applications. For the full download, strap in, this gets pretty technical:

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  • ChatGPT Now Freely Available, Still Hilariously Confused About Virtual Worlds & Avatar Identity

    ChatGPT Open AI

    Open AI recently made ChatGPT 3.5 freely available to anyone on the web here. No doubt it's useful for various applications, but as noted last year, it remains comically confused about virtual worlds and avatars — even confusing my name with my avatar's name.

    But it's not just me! Ask ChatGPT, "Who is the SL artist AM Radio?", and you get:

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  • Today’s SL Flickr Pick: Easter-Themed Images for Spring

    Screenshot (815)

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

    Dreams offered “Sending everyone rays of sunshine and warm wishes and Happy Easter” to mark last Easter Sunday with a few pretty eggs hiding in the grass for the Easter Egg Hunt. You might laugh, but at first glance (and second) I thought that center egg was a baseball and was excited to see her not only commemorating Easter but the March 28th Opening Day of baseball season. Then I clicked through and saw it was an egg. That makes it a much more cohesive picture, of course, but I kind of liked my mistake. 

    So what did other folks do for Easter? 

    For the answers, click here:

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  • How AI Can Help Drive Second Life New User Growth — As Explained by a Retired Tech Exec Who Helps New Users Himself.

    SL first time experience bots

    Given the so-so reception to the launch of Convai/Linden Lab's AI NPCs, here's a great reader comment from Lucas Weymann (previously), a retired tech executive who spends much of his retirement hanging out in Second Life — and thus has a uniquely smart perspective on how AI NPCs could help grow the SL user base:

    Over the past twenty years in SL, I've watched out for local avatars near me on their first day. I've tried to help hundreds of them, and years ago, I would blow off all day on a Saturday just dedicated to helping noobies.

    Here are the consistent things I have found that first-day avatars have no idea about:

    First, many don't know that someone locally and directly in IM is trying to chat with them. 

    Secondly, I've seldom met a first-day avatar that knows they can rez a cube or knows what a sandbox is where they can rez a cube. 

    I instruct them on how to teleport, give them a link to a public sandbox, and wait and see if they make it there. Some need help using the link or landmark. 

    Then, after they rez a cube, I tell them about the SL Marketplace, which none know about, and how to search for free clothing and avatar bodies on the market. This is usually a massive revelation for women. 

    Knowing how to rez a cube in a sandbox means they can rez what they get on the SL Marketplace in the sandbox and change outfits there. Most now have something they can do in SL. 

    They can teleport, test out free stuff from the market, go to a landmarked sandbox, rez their stuff, and change their look.

    But that's just the beginning!

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  • How AI Can Help Drive Second Life New User Growth — As Explained by a Retired Tech Exec Who Helps New Users Himself.

    SL first time experience bots

    Given the so-so reception to the launch of Convai/Linden Lab's AI NPCs, here's a great reader comment from Lucas Weymann (previously), a retired tech executive who spends much of his retirement hanging out in Second Life — and thus has a uniquely smart perspective on how AI NPCs could help grow the SL user base:

    Over the past twenty years in SL, I've watched out for local avatars near me on their first day. I've tried to help hundreds of them, and years ago, I would blow off all day on a Saturday just dedicated to helping noobies.

    Here are the consistent things I have found that first-day avatars have no idea about:

    First, many don't know that someone locally and directly in IM is trying to chat with them. 

    Secondly, I've seldom met a first-day avatar that knows they can rez a cube or knows what a sandbox is where they can rez a cube. 

    I instruct them on how to teleport, give them a link to a public sandbox, and wait and see if they make it there. Some need help using the link or landmark. 

    Then, after they rez a cube, I tell them about the SL Marketplace, which none know about, and how to search for free clothing and avatar bodies on the market. This is usually a massive revelation for women. 

    Knowing how to rez a cube in a sandbox means they can rez what they get on the SL Marketplace in the sandbox and change outfits there. Most now have something they can do in SL. 

    They can teleport, test out free stuff from the market, go to a landmarked sandbox, rez their stuff, and change their look.

    But that's just the beginning!

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  • Monday Memory: AI-Based Music Co-Created in 2019 by Robert Thomas from the LA Philharmonic’s Massive Recording Archive

    Similar to how Nettrice Gaskins was creating AI-based visual art years before Midjourney and such, adaptive music/sound artist Robert Thomas was leveraging machine learning last decade, including this amazing 2019 project for the LA Philharmonic:

    "Parag Mital made a browser which let [us] search through hundreds of terabytes of material, to be able to hear different bits of different performances," he says. (Google Arts and Culture provided the technical backing.) Robert and his collaborators then took those clips and created a wealth of new sound files, then ran those through an audio analysis.

    "[We] trained machine learning processes on that audio, and then tried to get it to generate new music." So for instance, in the soundtrack, you'll hear a segment from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. But then, "it turns into a machine learning hallucination of the melody which goes somewhere else that Stravinsky didn't write."

    Read about it here and watch the official video for the project below!

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  • Top 5 Posts Including: Meeting Linden Lab’s AI-Powered NPCs & Untangling Myths of Metaverse Interoperability

    Metaverse painting Jeffrey Lipsky

    Like Talking With ChatGPT In A Tank Top: Convai's AI-Powered Second Life Bots Already Lounging At A Beach — Here's What They Told Me!

    To Find Great Second Life-Based Images On Flickr, Check The Faves Of Great SL Artists On Flickr. Here's Some Of My Favorite Faves!

    VRChat IPhone/IPad App Coming Soon? "IOS" User Recently Spotted Online

    Watch: Why Creating Diverse Communities Make The Metaverse Matter

    Myths Of Metaverse Interoperability — And Why Community Counts More.