Wagner James Au reports on Second Life and other virtual worlds, and related topics, such as virtual goods, next gen gaming, and new immersive technologies (Kinect, iOS, etc.)
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That Time Jon Stewart Gave Second Life the Daily Show Treatment (Without Actually Using Second Life)
Jon Stewart, America's longtime voice of reason,&&to pursue a second life, so let's remember that time back in 2008 :
Get More: ,,
Oh, Glitteractica Cookie, he hardly knew ye. And if you're wondering why The Daily Show segment on Second Life does not actually depict Second Life, there's probably a very good reason for that. (Which come to think of it, is also probably why the segment is more snarky-snarky, than smart-snarky.) Here's the inside story:
Posted at 05:16 PM |
Player Creativity is King in Physics-Based Building Game Besiege, Now in Early Access
Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of&&and&
I've got three words for you: DIY Siege Engines. That's the pitch for , a physics-based medieval destruction sandbox which launched in Steam's Early Access program late last month. Although the game's current version only offers a slice of what will presumably be included in the final release, players are already sharing their own clever, creative constructs like the one above by Besiege player zeroharker.
"I've been working on trying to make the smallest most concealable weapons so far in this," zeroharker wrote in their . "This latest invention," they continued, "Combines my collapsible crossbow with the siege wagon into a tiny terror."
So what exactly does this unassuming little contraption do? Well, just take a look:
Posted at 11:40 AM |
Take This Quiz to Find Out How Much You Know About the History of Second Life
. I only got 82%, even though I actually, you know, wrote a book about the making of Second Life. To prepare for the test, there is, as Canary herself points out, a history of Second Life in Second Life - a year-by-year, first-person, walking tour of the would-be metaverse (made by a guy named Sniper Siemens), which you can visit for a short time by copy/pasting this place in the SL viewer of your choice:
/secondlife/LEA17/26/237/22
I definitely flaked on at least a couple questions, though in my defense, some others are not strictly accurate or open to interpretation. For instance, here's a hint for one of them from my book, which might (or might not!) totally throw you off in this quiz:
Posted at 12:01 AM |
Kids Don't Want Online Pseudonyms (Comment of the Week)
In last week's excellent conversation over Twitter and , an academic who plays Second Life under the name
made this interesting point:
"Most kids today have multiple social media (most media now has some social aspect so...) accounts attached to their real life identities whether formally or informally. It is interesting to note that I find most adults are the ones looking for pseudonyms whereas teens are more willing to put up real info (unless circumstances dictate otherwise). If teens are looking for anonymity it seems largely attached to trolling rather than adopting another hidden identity. While I understand [using one] for things like SL, why would you want to hide? To me that would question people's motives in 'hiding' like the professors and grad students that are venting [on social media]. Once they are found out they have to give up the account."
But hey wait, isn't Kitty Revolver a pseudonym -- so why are you using it? Kitty's reply:
Posted at 04:09 PM |
Want More Clothing Support for Your Favorite Second Life Mesh Bodies? Fill Out This Survey!
Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of&&and&
Mesh bodies and avatar enhancements have been a huge step forward in terms of the way Second Life avatars look, but that advancement hasn't come without a cost. Developing products fitted to all these different add-ons is a time-consuming process for designers, since each individual system will have its own requirements and quirks. And that's not to mention the fact that picking what bodies/enhancements to support involves a fair amount of guess work about their respective popularity.&
That's where SL designer Iki Akiri's survey comes in. Iki
to gauge the level of interest in various mesh bodies so that she can better tailor her releases to them. In her own words:
Posted at 12:00 PM |
Top Six New World Notes Posts from Last Week!
Posted at 12:45 AM |
SL Fashionista Challenge: Shoot Your Avatar Dressed as a Well-Known Movie Character - Including 3 of My Favorites!
Dress up your avatar as a character from a movie. Don’t forget to share the link to your post in the comments and add your pictures to&.
Pictured above: Strawberry herself, evoking Labyrinth with a David Bowie-esque friend, and
by Michely Blogger. In fact, since I'm such a cineaste geek, I'll add to this challenge:
Dress your avatar as characters from three of my favorite films: Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, Terence Malick's Days of Heaven, or Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express. Because if you can pull it off, I will totally blog you.
All of those are on Netflix, in case you haven't seen them already, and here's some trailers to get you started:
Posted at 03:55 PM |
Play it This Weekend: Sunless Sea's Full Release Finally Sees the Light of Day
&Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of&&and&
Lose your mind. Eat your crew. That's the tagline that captured my and many other games writers' imaginations when
launched in Early Access on Steam last year.&Sunless Sea&iterates on the world already thoroughly fleshed out in&&(a popular free-to-play browser game from the same developers) but with a slightly more action-oriented approach to its gameplay.&It's a game that tangles you up in its lush descriptions, its unsettling characters, and its stunningly surreal locations, and after several months in beta the full version has just been released.&
, but plenty has changed since then. The timing based combat system it once had has been replaced with a much more active system that will have you carving wide arcs in the Zee to point your cannons at your foes. The Zee itself, static and predefined when I wrote my review, is now a procedurally-generated enigma, dropping carefully designed sections in at random. They've also invited many guest writers including Meg Jayanth of& fame to fill out the world even more. Sunless Sea&wasn't exactly hurting for great writing even in its beta stages, so this only gives me more to look forward to when I replay it.
If you'd like to read a review of the game in its completed state, swing by Eurogamer for . Otherwise you can pick up a copy for yourself on
for both Mac and Windows. Happy sailing!
Posted at 01:08 PM |
Second Life WWII Roleplay Game Set in Nazi-Occupied French Town is Also Great Idea for a Sandbox MMO
, which has been created to look like Caen, France in 1944, and is the location for a brilliant roleplay game:
You can play Axis, Allies, or even French citizens (as either collaborators or part of the Resistance). [Above] night falls and battle lines are drawn. The Allies maneuver and hide... waiting for their best opportunity to attack the Nazi occupiers.
, so this is straight up combat gaming, and I gotta say: This is a great goddamn idea for a sandbox MMO. Second Life is pretty excellent for prototyping game concepts, but I'd love to see a single-shard, massively multiplayer version of New Bastogne running on the latest game engine. Anyway, if you want to visit the city under siege, here's the SLurl to copy/paste into the Second Life viewer of your choice:
Posted at 11:49 AM |
Kickstart This: Underworld Ascendant, Reboot of Groundbreaking Game Which Inspired Numerous Noteworthy Immersive Worlds - Including Second Life
, and it's a reboot of , a 1992 PC game that's inspired countless game/virtual world developers. Created by Looking Glass Studio, Ultima Underworld was the progenitor (directly or indirectly) of the Thief franchise, the Deus Ex franchise, the BioShock franchise, Skyrim, , Dragon Age, and countless others. (Developers who worked on many of those games are leading development of Underworld Ascendant.) And New World Notes readers will find this particularly interesting: Ultima Underworld even inspired the creation of Second Life.
Yes: As Linden Lab founder and Second Life co-creator , Ultima Underworld is the game that confirmed to him that his vision of being an avatar in an immersive virtual world was technically feasible:
Posted at 02:29 PM |
The Sims 4's First Expansion Could Be Just What the Sim Doctor Ordered... Or Not
Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of&&and&
The first full expansion pack for The Sims 4 was , scheduled for release this April. You could be forgiven for thinking that&Get to Work&is the game's second expansion after the nature-themed&&released last month, however that&was technically a "Game Pack" and not an expansion -- the equivalent of the neighborhood sets sold in The Sims 3 Store. But that's beside the point.
Opinions on what's been shown from the upcoming expansion seem mixed. On the one hand, it's the first major piece of content for a game that could desperately use more major pieces of content (something I gestured at& last fall). On the other, it has some uncanny similarities to expansions released for previous Sims titles, serving as an unpleasant reminder of the repetitive, cyclical, money-draining nature of the franchise.&
But The Sims 4 is a bit of a special case, even compared to its predecessors...
Posted at 01:00 PM |
Twitter CEO Basically Admits Pseudonym Policy a Disaster
Hey remember when Twitter's CEO said this&about running a social network without real names, which we thought seemed super cool?
In a recent open house at the company, CEO Dick Costolo talked about how the service doesn’t really care what your real name is — all it wants to do is connect you to the information that you care about. And if that information happens to come from a “real” person, but if it comes from a pseudonym, then that’s fine too
Well, . Since then, the social network's been inundated by vicious trolls, the worst of whom almost always being pseudonymous users without real names or identifying information attached to their accounts. (GamerGate is just one noteworthy example from thousands which choke Twitter's channels everyday.)&:
We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years. It's no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day... We're going to start kicking these people off right and left and making sure that when they issue their ridiculous attacks, nobody hears them... Costolo's comments came in response to a question on an internal forum about a recent story by Lindy West, a frequent target of harassment on Twitter. Among other things, West's tormentors created a Twitter account for her then recently deceased father and made cruel comments about her on the service.
The thing is, Twitter's already tried protecting
but with hundreds of millions of them, it would take a gargantuan work force to stem the tide. Requiring users to register their real name and real details with the service would help with self-policing quite a bit, because then, other users could hold them accountaable... but the company has defined itself against doing that.
And here's the result from a financial perspective:
Posted at 10:08 AM |
WesterosCraft World Now Bigger Than Second Life?
Philip Rosedale told me in January last year about a handful of Minecraft geeks who were building a jaw-droppingly detailed recreation of Westeros (the world of Game of Thrones, both the original books and the HBO show) on their own server, but that was when they had only recreated the capital city. Come a year later, the handful is now thousands of builders, and the vast continent of Westeros is nearly complete -- watch:
, who notes that
as "currently the size of Los Angeles, about 500 square miles." Interestingly, , the combined continent and island land mass of Second Life (which Philip co-created) was, as a virtual cartographer told me then, "1800 sq.km: this means that is greater than the city area of Los Angeles (1,290 sq.km)." Given the virtual land loss in SL five years later, it's likely this WesterosCraft is now larger. (Which might also make it the largest contiguous virtual land mass on the market.)
Another interesting comparison with Second Life - the WesterosCraft project is so complicated, the members have GoT-related roleplay within it, and to access the world, you need to use a custom Minecraft viewer (so to speak):
Posted at 03:51 PM |
The Case for Clearer Names: Here's Why Second Life Designers Should Keep Things Simple
Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of&&and&
There are a lot of Second Life designers whose creations I just never wear. It's not because I don't like them, it's not because they're not my style, and it's certainly not because I don't buy their releases. Quite simply it's because I can never find their products when I'm looking to fill in a blank in my outfit.&
It's because I'm searching for something pink instead of Peachy Keen.
It's because I'm searching for a skirt, and not&Genevieve.
Straightforward item naming may not be glamorous, but it's important. Here's why:
Posted at 01:00 PM |
Second Life Mesh Heads: Too Much Mouth-Breathing & RBF?
SL mesh heads are here and they look great (), but a fascinating-if-super snarky Tweet just passed through my stream, and wanted to share here:
seems2b sooo many resting-bitch-face and mouth-breather av faces. is it just me? or
— Jane (@cyberfrontier)
Posted at 11:35 AM |
SL Go Teleport Issues Resolved
Good news for users of
(an NWN partner): The issues with teleporting we blogged about
have been fixed (OnLive's Dennis Harper just told me).
I just went in-world with SL Go and teleported smoothly to three randoms places on the global map (both on the mainland and private islands), and can confirm things seem to be copacetic. (At least using SL Go with a low-end PC laptop.) Give it a shot yourself on your own platform of choice, and let us know how it goes with SL Go.
Posted at 12:18 AM |
Iris Wants to Know: How Do You De-Stress in the Virtual World?
Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of&&and&
Family-oriented gaming site Pixelkin.org recently released a list of , and although it includes some of my personal favorite relaxation games (including ) there's one notable absence. Or at least, it's a notable absence for most NWN readers.
This week is a particularly opportune time to ask about relaxation in Second Life, because with the amount of bad weather and the number of snow days so many of us have been experiencing, a lot of Second Life players have probably been able to spend a little more time than usual in the virtual world. Maybe you've been escaping to perma-tropical sims for a digital vacation, or maybe you've been keeping cozy in a snowbound cottage worthy of a Grandma Moses painting. Or perhaps you've been busy making friends in the spirit of hyper-adorable SL photographer Loony Columbia's , embedded above.
So here's what I want to know: What's your favorite way to de-stress in Second Life, or your virtual world of choice?&For me, all I'll say is that it starts with an "S" and rhymes with "hopping", but that's no mystery. Share your own metaverse relaxation secrets in the comments below!
Posted at 12:11 PM |
Good Advice for Second Life Bloggers from a Good Second Life Blogger (Comment of the Week)
Commenting on  last week,  offered some excellent advice for bloggers just starting out. Ms. Beck has been a real life blogger for 5 years and has spent 3 blogging about Second Life, and seeing that she just wrote , it's advice worth highlighting here:
&The toughest time for a new blogger is at the start of their blogging journey. Many will give up after a few posts are received with little more than silence... [I[n fact, sometimes imagining that no one will ever read what your writing can make you a better writer.
&Fortunately, it isn’t only boom or bust. For some, the silence doesn't quench their initial enthusiasm, and these stubborn souls continue to regularly post until they eventually get some kind of following. I’d suggest that any new blogger commit to regularly posting for 3-6 months before expecting to get anything but the feedback of their close friends. Once you get past the ‘lone voice period’, I’d ask, 'Are you willing to post on a regular basis?'& (Emphasis mine, because it bears emphasis.) &There is no doubt that posting frequency impacts views and feedback, and if you’d like to get past the feeling that you’re talking to a handful of your closest friends (regardless of how intrinsically rewarding that may be), then sticking to some kind of reliable schedule should result in some traction.
&I'd add one more comment about competition:
Posted at 02:28 PM |
The Drax Files: There's More to Second Life Supermodel Absinthe Than Meets the Eye
&Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of&&and&
I'm all about the latest episode of Second Life-sponsored mixed-reality documentary series The Drax Files: World Makers. It focusses on the first and second lives of SL supermodel Absinthe, and you'll want to watch even if that doesn't sound like your cup of tea. The fact is she has a wealth of personal wisdom to share that extends well beyond the realm of the runway.
In reality Absinthe works with patients living with HIV/AIDS, so being able to come home to Second Life gives her an outlet for her love of fashion and creativity that she might not necessarily have otherwise. It's a means of exploring not only your interests but your identity, and even seeing intangible things about your personality materialized right in front of you. That's why Absinthe has absolutely no patience for people perpetuating the tired old idea that Second Life's users live lives any less varied or interesting than anyone else's.&
If you want to see more of Absinthe's work in SL then be sure to , a fiercely stylish digital publication that prominently features her work alongside a slew of other talented virtual fashion enthusiasts.&
Posted at 12:15 PM |
Top Seven New World Notes Posts from Last Week!
Posted at 10:52 AM |
Weekend Read: The Four Types of Second Life Places
, based on her 8 years of being an SLer, which she categories in four ways: Real-Fake, Real-Real, Fake-Fake, Fake-Real. , but I wanted to highlight a couple of my favorite insights before you go:
The very most popular SL places in terms of traffic are Fake-Fake:
[F]ake-fake sims are not&what they say they are, and not&true to themselves. Sims like this are harder to find because they tend to not be often photographed, or written about. I believe we&tend to model most simulations on either originals&we have experienced in the real world or build them in ways that are entirely impossible in the real world. Fake-fake sims, however, seem to be a haphazard&mixture of the two.
Self-touted as Second Life’s Premier Dance Venue (to be fair they did win at least one Avi’s Choice award in their category), nearly everyone in Second Life is aware of Frank’s. According to Metaverse Business, Frank’s&currently places as Second Life’s 2nd most popular sim – and its most popularGeneral&sim. The interesting thing about Frank’s (pictured below), is that it’s neither a “ballroom” (as it says in its description), nor&does it really play jazz. What you actually get is a mall leading to a palatial open-air dance floor that bears little resemblance to any jazz music venue I’ve ever seen. It has a formal dress code where men dress in tails and the ladies dress in ball gowns (clothing which isn’t at all associated with most jazz clubs in real life) and instead&of jazz, Frank’s mainly&streams&easy-listening music.
And she gives many other examples in that category. (By the way, she's not saying "Fake-fake" as a value judgement.) She's very astute to note that a popular sim like Frank's Place doesn't, well, feel like an actual place (though clearly, a lot of people love it all the same.) By contrast:
Posted at 04:42 PM |
SL Go Subscribers Get One Month Free Due to Recent Teleport Issues (NWN Partner News)
(an NWN partner), you probably noticed some problems teleporting with the streaming service. (This issue only impacts people using the Linden Lab viewer through SL Go, but not the SL Go through Firestorm, so OnLive is now working with the Lindens to resolve the issue.) In any case, OnLive's Dennis Harper wanted to pass along this nice consolation announcement for existing subscribers:
We understand your frustration and apologize for the inconvenience. We will give all SL Go subscribers a free month of SL Go to make up for time lost. The next time your subscription renews, you will not be charged.
So you got that going for you. And always, feel free to post Comments for the SL Go team below.
Posted at 03:58 PM |
Here's the 13 VR Startups Philip Rosedale & Other Leaders Chose for the 1st Virtual Reality Accelerator
selected to get seed funding and other support in the first venture capitalist accelerator for virtual reality startups. The selections were made by High Fidelity's Philip Rosedale and other leaders in the space, so this is a good survey of where they think VR is going as an industry:
The 13 companies are:
, which is making “the world’s first headset to use eye tracking to create an immersive experience.
, which is developing virtual reality heath care games aimed at relieving pain and assisting with rehabilitation.
, an immersive virtual reality journalism project.
, which is developing VR-based immersion therapy for mental health practitioners helping patients overcome their fears.
, a startup developing industrial training and travel tools in virtual reality.
, a VR education platform for “exploration, discovery, and creativity.”
EmergentVR, which calls itself the “Instagram of VR,” is making an application for making and sharing 360-degree VR experiences.
, which fashions itself the “Ticketmaster for VR events” with a 180-degree concert and live events viewing experience.
, another system for capturing and sharing 360-degree VR imagery.
, a VR game studio.
, which is developing “high quality content focused on artistic and cultural expression.”
, which is working on “immersive learning experiences about exploring the ancient world.”
, a VR game studio.
Posted at 01:59 PM |
Follow a Manta Ray on a Tour of One of Second Life's Most Beautiful Underwater Landscapes
&Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of&&and&
, one of the most disappointing things about exploring Second Life sims is often how little attention is generally given to designing underwater spaces. While the shores and even surface of the water will get the full five-star treatment, what lies below is often left in it's plainest, blandest, most unremarkable state. On the other hand, every so often you'll come across a sim with just as much care given to designing the submerged sections as those on dry land. Those rare locations are perfect for exploring with (or without) your virtual scuba gear.
... Or your mesh manta ray avatar.
is the perfect way to get a taste of that experience. Laurent took to the waters of the AlaFolie sim to record ten minutes of uncut underwater exploration, and the results are a perfectly relaxing virtual tour of the kind of area that most players have never seen unless they've deliberately sought it out.
Of course, if you'd rather experience things first hand you can always swing by AlaFolie [] and dive for yourself.
Posted at 11:00 AM |
DX Exchange Now Open for Selling OpenSim Grid Currency
(a proud NWN partner) has just opened its virtual currency trading service up to OpenSim grids, starting with  (based in France). So now OpenSim grid operators can sell their currency through DX Exchange. (And if you own an OpenSim, and you're interested in using this service on your grid, drop an e-mail to .)
For consumers, the purchase process is pretty simple:
Posted at 11:58 PM |
Rod Humble's Life After Linden Lab: New Multimedia Studio & Ambitious Strategy Game About Religious Cults
is an ambitious new strategy game hitting Steam next February 12, sort of Age of Empires but with religious sects instead of national leaders, and its lead creator is someone New World Notes leaders know well: Rob Humble, a game industry veteran from Electronic Arts (Sims 2 & 3) and Sony Online Entertainment (EverQuest), and most recently, Linden Lab's last CEO, a role which ended . And while Cults & Daggers isn't an open sandbox virtual world like Second Life, Rod tells me there's aspects of it that SLers will find appealing:
"Second Life users are incredibly intellectually curious, particularly about creative and social dynamics," he says, "so I hope they will be interested in the way I have modeled class and power structures within the game!"
The game takes during the birth of Christianity and Buddhism, so I asked Rod if the game might convey anything insightful about actual religion as it's practiced today:
Posted at 03:23 PM |
The Circle of Life: F2P Mobile Game Survive! Mola mola! Turns Cartoonish Death into Satisfying Progress
Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of&&and&
January's been a rough month. I've died a couple dozen times. I've choked on plastic bags, washed up on the shore, had my stomach all clogged up with squid, and stopped breathing while careening wildly towards a scary-looking sea turtle.
I've been playing Survive! Mola mola!, a free game available on
and &from Select Button Inc. It's become a surprise sensation, and from what I've played I'd say their success is well deserved. Why? Well, it all comes down to Death.
Posted at 12:45 PM |
Why We Shouldn't Accept Silicon Valley's Lame Excuses for Not Hiring Enough Women, Expressed in 3 Tweets
Google, FB, MS: &We try to hire women but it's REALLY HARD!& 
Alibaba: &Half our staff is women.& 
& Wagner James Au (@slhamlet)
Which is citing this:
Jack Ma says women are 47% of Alibaba’s employees, 24% of management
& Tech in Asia (@Techinasia)
Which I followed up with this:
Posted at 10:59 AM |
Virtual Reality-Based Assertiveness Training Reportedly Leads to Less Sexual Victimization, Pilot Program Finds
Can virtual reality and 3D gaming help people stand up for themselves in real life? In a pilot study developed by Southern Methodist University, a group of young women practiced assertiveness against male sexual aggression using a modified version of Half-Life 2 and a VR headset. After the training (dubbed "My Voice, My Choice"), , the early results were extremely positive: &“22 percent in the control group reported sexual victimization during the three-month follow-up period, compared to only 10 percent in the 'My Voice, My Choice' group.” (Emphasis mine, because it bears emphasis.) While this is just initial data working from a small sample, the growth of virtual reality makes this study one worth repeating in other pilot programs, so I reached out to the lead researchers, Dr. Lorelei Simpson Rowe and Anthony Cuevas, for more details on their training program:
What were some of the most interesting personal reactions to this simulation?
Dr. Lorelei Simpson Rowe: "Many participants were surprised at how difficult it was to be assertive. They thought of themselves as being able to be assertive, but found it more challenging in the simulations than they expected. At the same time, many of the participants also seemed to feel more confident after they successfully used the skills and got positive feedback from others.
"Most students chose to participate in the study because they were given gift cards to thank them for their time - they weren't initially interested in the program - but afterward, they told us how important it was and that they felt all students should go through MVMC."
What advice would you give other researchers and developers working on similar VR experiences?
Dr. Lorelei Simpson Rowe: "I think important next steps will include developing fully computerized protocols (i.e., those that don't require an actor). Additionally, the simulations need to be realistic and consistent with experiences that participants might actually have."
As I said, they used a variation of Half-Life 2 to create the simulation:&
Posted at 02:58 PM |
5 Questions to Ask Yourself if You Want to Be an SL Blogger
Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of&&and&
Two weeks ago, I laid out something that had been on my mind for awhile.
that I think every aspiring designer should ask themselves before they dig into the world of SL fashion. But there's another side of this equation, a role in the Second Life ecosystem that comes with almost as much idolization as designing:&Blogging.
I'll be the first person to tell you that blogging (fashion or otherwise) is not as glorious and glamorous as it might seem. I'll also be the first person to tell you how rewarding blogging can be, again regardless of the subject... As long as you're doing it for the right reasons.
So if you're thinking of starting your own Second Life blog, here are five questions you absolutely need to answer:
Posted at 12:51 PM |
How to Create Great Virtual Spaces: Design for Feeling, Believability, and Hyper-Realism (Comment of the Week)
the jaw-dropping
as depicted in the machinima below, and fortunately for all of us, the creator of both the machinima and the Manor stopped by NWN to discuss how he created his acclaimed sim. Kaya Angel's comments are such a master class in creating virtual architecture, I'm highlighting them here (with some light editing on my part):
VIRTUAL ARCHITECTURE CHANGES HOW SOCIAL INTERACTION
&I often think and SL structures are used as a means of providing an environment to give a little context to social interaction. So if you go to a ballroom to dance with a friend the ballroom is simply a hint in the back ground for you to then dance and chat. The building its self only plays a small role. I differ from that in that I love the power architecture has to not just provide a context for a social interaction, but if done right a building can enhance social interactions. And bring a whole new level of how you feel in the space. This is my own personal experience. Being a living building that feels real changes how you live in a space and how you use the space when it comes to interacting with people.&
As Kaya goes on to argue, the old prim-based approach to building in Second Life has held back more ambitious builds like his:
Posted at 04:48 PM |
Legendary Architect Frank Gehry Praises Potential of Virtual Reality as a Visualization/Design Tool
Just noticed that
of using Oculus Rift as an architectural tool, and my favorite highlight is when he demonstrated VR to one of the world's greatest living architects:
One of this year’s major highlights for me personally, was having the opportunity to meet and show
the Oculus Rift. His company, Gehry Partners has already been doing a lot of high tech visualization and BIM innovation before this, so it wasn’t necessarily anything new to him, but he immediately recognized the potential for architectural visualization and design in VR.
Jon, by the way, is known as Keystone Bouchard in Second Life, , with his chief innovation being a kind of 3D wiki -- watch:
Posted at 01:29 PM |
Meet Mini Me, Ample Avi's Latest Petite & Curvy SL Avatar Shape (NWN Partner News)
The latest plus-sized shape from NWN sponsoring partner
is something of an anomaly in Second Life. Ample Avi has plenty of curvaceous shapes of course, and quite a few petite ones on top of that, but
(released earlier this month) still manages to be an exception. Why? Her height comes in at around 5'5". That's only an inch shorter than the height of the average woman in reality, but in Second Life--where even more "realistic" avatar shapes share a few digits with pro basketball players--it's an oddity that could even get you booted from certain roleplay sims. No worries, though. Mini Me comes bundled with a 5'8" version for just such occasions, giving you a good compromise between RL and SL size standards.
On a broader note, I think the strongest endorsement I can give Ample Avi shapes is that over the course of working with them for sponsored posts here on NWN they've slowly made their way into my regular avatar rotation. Even though I've never worn plus-sized shapes in SL before, these days I'm almost never out of one (even when I'm ).&
You can snag both the 5'5" and 5'8" versions of Mini Me together&, or swing by Ample Avi in-world [].&I'd also like to give al shout out to Roslin Petion, whose lingerie brand Luxuria has become my go-to for showing off Ample Avi's shapes. .
Posted at 12:30 PM |
From Fixing Valve's Virtual Hat Market to Helping Save the Global Economy
The fate of the Eurozone economy," , "could well be in the hands of a man who once monitored the sales of virtual goods via micro-transactions in video games Dota 2 and Counter-Strike. Yanis Varoufakis was hired by Valve three years ago to oversee the Steam Market and its fledging economy, and now, as confirmed by Sky News political editor Faisal Islam on 27 January, he is Greece's new finance minister."
The EU economy is so large, any changes to it will impact the global market as well, and so Varoufakis' policies will affect the rest of the world. And just two years ago, , Varoufakis' focus was Valve's virtual hat economy:
Posted at 11:13 AM |
Top 6 Virtual Reality & Virtual World Predictions for 2015 from New World Notes
I better post our VR/VW predictions for 2015 before we get any deeper into this year, or for that matter, incoming news () makes them already seem outdated. Here's my favorite from our open forum:
The Oculus Rift will not be made available for general consumer use this year. Instead, they'll expand their beta developer program throughout 2015. (Hamlet Au)
"Second Life 2" and High Fidelity will both be out in Beta this year (RoblemVR)
When it comes to virtual world software, both Linden Lab and High Fidelity will be medium to small players. (Anonymous)
A large chunk of SL users will abandon Second Life for SL2, leading to a loss of 5000 to 7000 regions in the first year of SL 2. (OU812)
"I don't expect to see anything dramatic in terms of virtual worlds this year, it's much too soon." (Ciaran Laval)
Virtual land in SL 2 will be substantially larger ( meters) and substantially cheaper "while the Lab will take 30% cut from content sales". (Cube Republic)
Some of these are mutually exclusive and/or subject to interpretation -- but that just means a fun debate in late December!
Posted at 12:53 PM |
This Second Life B-Boy Battle is a Thirty Second Machinima Master Class
&Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of&&and&
Here's a Second Life machinima posted this past weekend with some serious style.
is brief, but in that brief window of time it demonstrates a lot of powerful techniques.&If you're already about to skip to the comments to deliver some choice zinger about baggy pants and rap music, you can keep your #dadjokes to yourself. Not everyone's going to like Blaq's work, but everyone should still respect it.
Even if you can't appreciate the style, the music, or the seamless b-boy animations on display, you should absolutely be able to appreciate the technique demonstrated in this thirty second slice of a Second Life dance battle.&Here's why it works so well:
Posted at 11:00 AM |
Top Three Posts from New World Notes Last Week!
Posted at 09:27 AM |
SL Go Places: Angel Manor, the Second Life Sim Everyone's Talking About
The moment I saw &this week,&I instantly knew which SL sim I'd visit this week via SL Go (from NWN partner OnLive): Angel Manor, where it's set. Is it as marveous as it appears in the machinima? I fired up my pokey old Dell laptop (which can hardly run any Second Life client without choking and sputtering) and launched SL Go to give it a first-hand look. As you'll see, it really does look like it appears in the video:
In fact, if anything, the island is far more detailed than even the video suggests, boasting broad and beautiful indoor and outdoor areas that flow seamlessly together -- and when you look up close, all the tiny, lovingly wrought elements that add true immersion and personality to a Second Life sim. (Be sure to visit the basement pool.) To go there, just copy/paste this address into SL Go or the Second Life viewer of your choice:
/secondlife/Angel%20Manor%20Park/0/0/0
Used to be, I'd watch a machinima like this and think, "Well, there's another place I won't really be able to visit myself without buying a high-end desktop PC." Indeed, Kaya Angel recently
about his video, and gave the specs he used to make his machinima:
Posted at 04:19 PM |
Weekend Shopping List: This Mesh Head is so Beautiful That it Barely Looks Like an SL Avatar
Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of&&and&
There's a new item at the top of my virtual world shopping list this weekend: The Tia mesh head by VCO, available at The Winter Wonderland event [].&I already have my fair share of mesh heads, and these days the latest from The Sugar Garden has been serving me just fine. So why am I in the market for yet another?&Well, when I first saw the above image of this finely-featured face from VCO I didn't entirely believe they were shot in Second Life.&
I don't mean that Tia looks hyper-realistic, however. Far from it. She looks more like a flawlessly modded Sims 3 character, or even a high-end doll, and to me that's just as appealing as realism would be.
Even if Tia's not to your liking you may want to swing by Winter Wonderland anyway, especially if you're looking for the perfect finishing touch for your virtual home...
Posted at 12:30 PM |
If You Don't Want More Second Life Griefers, Stop Publicly Discussing Second Life Griefers
SLers have been passing around a blog post about a recent Second Life griefer attack, which I'm not going to directly link to or even cite, for a very obvious reason: A core motivation of Second Life griefers is to get Second Life users talking about them - on blogs, on social media, on bulletin boards, on Second Life itself. The attention is their reward. (Hence the classic rule of Internet social interaction: "Don't feed the troll.")
To be clear, I'm not criticizing the blogger who did post about the griefing attack, because it's likely they don't recall or weren't around during the times when Second Life was barraged by griefers on a near daily basis:
Posted at 10:21 AM |
Check the Receipts: Here are 3 Crucial Anti-Scammer Tips for Second Life Designers
&Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of&&and&
A Second Life designer (who asked to remain anonymous) had an interesting experience with a customer recently. Well, maybe I should say this experience was with a 'customer', because their interaction with this designer casts a lot of doubt on whether or not they ever bought a single thing from her in the past. Either way, it led to an amusing story and a few tips that most SL designers will be able to appreciate.
It starts like a lot of customer service encounters in SL start: A notecard with an explanation that an item had been purchased and lost to some technological snafu or another. it happens, and it's usually the truth. This note also came with a snippet from their transaction history to prove the initial purchase:
Septermber 13, 2014Order #Order Status: DeliveredTotal items: 1Order Total: L$39,998[...]
Providing your transaction history, essentially a receipt, right when you contact a designer is a thoughtful thing to do since it saves you both time. Unfortunately it's easy enough to fake one end of this receipt, and not every designer will bother digging through their own records to confirm that a transaction is legitimate. That said, maybe you've already caught the most obvious clue that this 'customer' was trying to take our anonymous designer for a ride, and that brings me to the first tip:
Posted at 12:00 PM |
Microsoft HoloLens Likely Won't Go Mass Market When Smartphones Already Work So Well (Comment of the Week)
There's a great NWN reader discussion in the post around , and a reader called , who's writing a Master's thesis on smartphones, made some very good points:
If Google Glass couldn't sell a set of "glasses", then how is Microsoft going to sell this? I like the idea of augmented reality, but honestly, how do you sell to a mass market that 1) looks goofy (and you are going to wear it in everyday life to really use it) 2) actually creates the need to be more connected when we have Facebook, Dropbox, LinkedIn, smartphones, etc and 3) the concept comes with 3D design tools? I realize I found the flaw of Second Life and perhaps people will comment on this, but it doesn't strike me as a "need" quite yet. Smartwatches and smartphones keep everything in your pocket/wrist, why add more hardware for everyday?
Which brings Kitty to her big point of augmented reality systems like this one, versus smartphones or VR platforms like Oculus Rift:
Posted at 10:54 AM |
SL Go Places: Watch 742 WindLight Settings in 5 Minutes!
As I mentioned , one of my favorite things about Firestorm is just how many bells and whistles it has, all easily surfaced for the user. For that matter being able to swap between the viewers through SL Go depending on what I need (and without having to juggle multiple installs and updates) has been a lot handier than expected. While the vanilla Second Life viewer allows you to play with your Windlight settings as much as you like, Firestorm comes pre-loaded with hundreds of interesting presets--from the practical to the unbelievable--made and shared by fellow residents.&
There are so many interesting presets in Firestorm that going through them to talk about each one would take hours. Instead, I've cut together a five minute long video so you can see what they each have to offer, or maybe even stumble onto something that sparks your imagination. Firestorm and SL Go are an ideal combination for virtual photographers because, while Firestorm gives you have access to loads of user-made lighting and water presets, SL Go lets you crank up your graphics settings well beyond what your own computer (or tablet) may be able to handle.&
If you'd like to visit the beautifully mountainous Kekeland sim where I recorded this video, just copy the URL below into your viewer of choice:
Posted at 02:00 PM |
Google Glass is Dead, Long Live (Die?) Microsoft HoloLens
Augmented reality meets the big MS:
First take: Somehow, a major tech company managed to make a pair of smart glasses look even lamer than Google Glass. Second take: Microsoft will struggle with most or all of the social stigmas that made Glass such a Daily Show-worthy laughing stock that it was recently taken out in back and put down.
Third take: Maybe I'm being cynical and jaded and NWN readers can convince me otherwise. Can you?
Posted at 01:49 PM |
You Stream/Record Second Life via Steam, Apparently
"Steam has just added the broadcast feature that lets your friends watch you play," , "if you add your choice of Second Life viewer to your steam games then others can watch. This works with all SL clients." I haven't tried it out yet, but after you've added Second Life (under Games, select "Add Non-Steam Game"), you can access those options via View & Settings, as above. I will try it, because I want to try Hamlet's hand at Let's Go-style videos. If you have already, please share your experience in Comments!
Posted at 12:50 PM |
Harrods Listing Actual Real Estate With Virtual Reality
Harrods becomes first department store to sell property using 
 
 & Roblem VR (@RoblemVR)
... which could be a silly gimmick () but is also a good potential real world application of VR that might actually work.
Posted at 11:43 AM |
What Second Life Looks Like With Features on Full (Even If Few Outside Second Life Any Longer Care)
An SLer named Kaya Angel got sick of the poor portrayal of Second Life as depicted in so many of the badly shot SL videos he'd seen lately (the kind that typically show up in troll-ish Let's Play YouTube videos, I'm guessing), and so he shot this machinima, which you should watch right now:
The video is pretty much a promo for Kaya's Angel Manor Estate private Second Life sim, but since it's so beautifully done (both the video and the sim), I say: . In fact: .
The video's YouTube comments are interesting, because they show a key problem Second Life faces now: No matter how great the graphics have gotten over the years, the poor perception of SL having bad graphics is so deeply rooted among hardcore gamers, it's near impossible to refute outside of established SL users. Take this comment from a core graphics geek:
Posted at 02:25 PM |
Facebook Still Doesn't Want Your Virtual World Account, but it Does Want Your Deceptive VW Ads
Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of&&and&
Second Life user and virtual fashion photographer extraordinaire Xantheanne () noticed something unusual on her Facebook feed earlier this month. A promoted post from something called "I Love New Year Club" was advertising something rather unclear with some truly original copywriting and a picture clearly taken from Second Life.&
"Your Own Virtual Baby! Meet husband, new comrades, have virtual baby, create your super look and more. Play Now!" My super look? Who could resist a pitch like that?
Of course when Xantheanne clicked the post, it shuttled her straight through to IMVU, a platform that most avid SL users have little love for (though it's provided us with more than a few trained, talented virtual fashion designers over the years.)
As , the URL given at the bottom of the post? Well...
Posted at 12:30 PM |
Top Four New World Notes Posts from Last Week
Posted at 09:52 AM |