Sanny’s Recommended Virtual World News: February 2024 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan

Sanny YoshikawaBut New World NotesAmong them, we recommend virtual wars every month.rood newsDaymain languageIntroduction from cityall

SAnnie Yoshikawa covers the virtual world monthly.Highlights of New World Notes for Virtual Japan.

 

 

★New World Notes is recruiting Japanese brands that want to expand their customer base to become advertisers. For metaverse-related brands, platforms such as Second life, VRC, Cluster, etc. are not asked. If you are interested, please feel free to contact us! ★

 

Join Philip Rosedale’s FairShare Discord and let’s talk about digital currencies and UBI! You can receive FairShare’s basic incom.

Philip Rosedale is starting to roll out his FairShare digital currency Universal Basic Income project (interview for 2023 here) with meetings using Second Life and a very active Discord.

Since the FairShare servers are already pretty active and the chat is lively, Philip recommends introducing yourself to new users. You can then join the Talk Group by asking another member to be your sponsor. (For this, in the Intros channel"/join "Enter . )

By becoming a member of a currency group, you will receive the default inca of the FairShare currency – this currency has already begun to be used.

“It’s still experimental at the moment,” says Philip. “People vote for each other, earn income, trade with other servers, and the unique idea design is driven by raising money from everyone else at once.”

Although still experimental, FairShare is currently already being used to purchase goods and services.

“A few things have been purchased, including old laptops and consulting time,” says Philip Rosedale.

This is also the place to talk to Philip about the broader economic thinking behind FairShare. In a recent #General chat he says:

If you try to create a society without currency, it seems that dark markets, where currency is invented and used, often occur. I believe this is because the free market can distribute resources much more efficiently than central planning. Because in a market-based system (everyone) has greater computational power available.

The idea of ​​FairShare is to counter the tendency of the rich to become richer by recirculating fees/revenues, as I explained in my presentation, while respecting that markets matter. I don’t think there is any historical example of a large, complex resource pool being managed effectively by central planning.

We agree that future forms of money will require a specific decentralized ledger to avoid the risk of harm being done by a central actor. But you also need a means to continuously print new currency and distribute it evenly, and commodity currencies (gold, Bitcoin, Ethereum) do not support that. So I am proposing to add that mechanism in FairShare. I disagree with the idea that backing Bitcoin (or any other commodity) is desirable. In other words, inequality cannot be improved by using a reserve currency whose distribution is already unequal.

At a very high level, one can imagine a future where the world’s reserve currency (currently the US dollar) gradually replaces fixed-supply digital tokens like BTC. And individuals or communities must choose whether to use the base currency directly (e.g., trade directly with something like the Lightning Network) or create something like a pair/share currency. In a fair shared currency, mutual credit and trust between smaller groups are used to pool risk and collectively create a currency of value without the need to borrow fiat currency to obtain trading tokens. .

Participation in the party starts here.

Join Philip Rosedale’s FairShare Discord to discuss digital currencies and UBI, and earn basic income in FairShare currency!

 

Philip Rosedale, Vision Pro demo. It was judged to be too heavy for the mainstream and thus isolated. What do you think?

Philip Rosedale has written a hands-on review of the Apple Vision Pro based on a demo that will leave you with a headache, both technically and experientially.

There was a time when I had my elbows on the table and my chin on my palms. That too…is that heavy. I’m a big, strong human being, so I’m used to learning things like this. However, this is too heavy for long-term use. Since there is only one strap, it needs to be tightened tightly to the face, and there was a feeling of discomfort in the part that came into contact with the face compared to the Qusest.

The problem is that if you mount the Vision Pro too tightly, you are likely to damage your hair. Additionally, the Vision Pro’s branding says it’s meant for professional use, i.e. 8 hours a day.

“Like other devices such as Quest, Magic Leap and Varjo, we predict it will be used in narrow areas such as industrial training,” concludes Philip.

It’s the same! And Wagner also says: And it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which Apple could quickly create a lighter, cheaper headset device.

What about you, readers? If you’ve tried (or bought) Vision Pro, please tell us what you think in the comments field. I’m particularly interested in whether you can imagine using Vision Pro in existing virtual worlds and new virtual worlds built around Vision Pro.

Philip Rosedale Demo I think the Vision Pro is too heavy and isolated for the mainstream. What about you?

 

Disney and Epic’s New Fortnite: Interoperable Universes Are On-Ramp to the Mass Market in Need of a Metaverse

Last December, Wagner predicted that a major Metaverse platform would be acquired in 2024. The news was announced soon after, and Disney now owns at least 10% of it.

The Walt Disney Company and Epic Games are teaming up on a whole new world of games and entertainment that further expands the reach of beloved Disney stories and experiences. Disney will also invest $1.5 billion to acquire shares of Epic Games in parallel with this multi-year project.

In addition to world-class gaming experiences and interoperability with “Fortnite,” the new persistent world will allow consumers to play, watch, and shop with content, characters, and stories from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar, and more. We offer many opportunities to get involved.

“Disney was one of the first companies to believe in the potential of fusing their worlds with ours in Fortnite and is using Unreal Engine across its portfolio,” said Tim Sweeney, CEO and Founding Person of Epic Games. “Now we’re doing something completely new to build a permanent, open, and interoperable ecosystem that connects the Disney and Fortnite communities.”

The word interoperable feels like a strong indication that Fortnite’s existing 100 million+ players will be able to jump into this new Disney/Epic universe fairly seamlessly. In addition to this news, Epic recently announced a partnership with Harmonix, creators of LEGO, Rocket League, and Rockband.

Wagner responded to the news by saying he was worried that the weirdness of the metaverse and the grassroots spirit of indie would be diminished on various platforms. For example, as Disney becomes directly involved in the metaverse platform business, works created by users for fans of the work may soon be erased.

But beyond that, the metaverse will actually become more popular.

Roblox and Fortnite are huge, and their user bases are overwhelmingly made up of young, immersive 3D gamers. The Disney brand universe built on Fortnite is broad and engaging, capturing a larger audience of both more casual gamers and die-hard fans of Disney’s vast library of IP/content.

We hope this popularization will encourage support from indie creators already active on the Fortnite platform.

Disney & Epic’s new Fortnite interoperable universe is entering the mass market. Metaverse Requirements

Tutorial How to Make Your Second Life Avatar “Real” in Leonardo AI

The woman in this photo does not exist, but her embedded Second Life avatar does. SL’s fashionista, Juicy Bomb’s Gogo, created an identical simulacra based on this avatar.

To create this image, Gogo uploaded screenshots from SecondLife to Leonardo.AI.

“It’s easy to use and with your free daily credits you can create 3-4 images,” she explained in a recent post on Plrk.

The steps are as follows:

• Under Image Generation, go to Image Guidance and drop your photos into the program.
• At the top of Type, write what kind of image you want to use. Something as simple as “pretty brunette” is fine, but you can also go into more detail.
• We scale the intensity to tell Leonardo.AI how far to move from the original image.
• You can also check the iteration process using the Generation History option.

Other SL users are also experimenting with using AI in their avatars. Interestingly, the avatar side of Second Life may look realistic. Gogo’s tutorial is for avatars in Second Life, but you can get interesting results with avatars on other platforms as well.

Tutorial: How to Create a Second Life Avatar "really" With Leonardo AI

 

‘The metaverse is dead’ Seol is officially dead

This is Business Insider’s delightfully surprising “obituary” for May 2023.

It’s been less than 12 months since Business Insider published Metaverse’s ‘obituary’, but here’s a look back.

• Roblox presented itself as a metaverse in its IPO application documents, but recently acquired more than 350 million monthly active users.
• Epic Games, led by CEO Tim Sweeney, who has wanted to build a metaverse since the 90s, reported that Fortnite has reached 100 million monthly active users. Additionally, Disney recently acquired close to 10% of the company in order to build an interoperable universe that integrates the IPs of media giants (Marvel, Star Wars, Disney/Fixer movies, etc.).
• Apple announced Vision Pro in partnership with Rec Room, the top metaverse platform.
• VRChat, a metaverse platform, exceeded 100,000 concurrently connected users at its peak, increasing from 40,000 at its peak in 2021.
• Even in a meta that was struggling with a flawed strategy, Horizon Worlds on the Metaverse platform became a top 10 popular app on the Quest platform. ).

Ironically, in Silicon Valley, “AI” will be the only major buzz word. But the problem is here:

With little understanding of basic technology, Buzzword is doomed to betray expectations. The metaverse was declared “dead” by those who held the straw doll concept. But even after the buzz faded, the platform and those who found value in it continued to prosper.

In case you missed it "The metaverse is dead" officially dead

A mixed reality project that uses multiple Kinects to transform humans into volumetric avatars and “teleport” them into virtual worlds.

At JMoF2024, we did Kiguru MixedReality, a project to connect real kigurumi with the world of VR using 3D video technology! !
It was an unprecedented attempt and there were many trials and errors, but the atmosphere also increased in the VR world and it was the best! !

Anyone who came and played, thank you so much! ! ! ! !#JMoF #VR_JMoF #resonate pic.twitter.com/NZpRaZBcDU

— Totegamma (@totegamma) January 10, 2024

In this demo video, most of the characters appearing are Parry and it is on a Japanese site, so it may be a little difficult for English speakers to understand. This is a mixtriality project that uses the batteries of a Kinect motion detector to transform real-life people into volumetric avatars and ‘teleport’ them into a virtual world. (This virtual world is Resonaite).

Introducing a description of this project called Kiguru MixedReality.

＊In the original text, the English translation of the blog translated by DeepL is cited, but here, the Japanese article is quoted directly from Gammalab.

Kiguru MixedReality is a 3D video call plan that delivers a three-dimensional view of Kigurumi in the VR world by transmitting camera footage with depth from three AzureKinect units in real time.

Now, even in the world of VR, you can enjoy binging, saying hello, no aero, and taking pictures with your VR avatar!

Recent growth of Generative AI, etc. Technology has already been developed to capture and playback higher-quality volumetric videos, but viewing them inevitably requires dedicated software. The good thing about Spatial Clip is that although the quality is not that high, you can experience it right away with Resonite, a software that many people already have installed and use on their PCs.

Spatial Clip uses Azure Kinect, also used by TFPortal, for video recording. This will allow you to get depth videos with a very accurate depth camera.

However, if there is only one camera, only a small part of the Kurumi will be illuminated. From there, Kiguru MixedReality used three Kinect cameras to combine each video.

It’s not necessarily for the average consumer since it requires three Kinect devices, but for someone who’s attending a real-world conference and wants to “visit” a virtual world, it looks like (as the video suggests) pretty fun.

The mixed reality project uses multiple Kinects to transform people into volumetric avatars and "Teleport" into the virtual world

Niceaunties from Auntieverse: Singaporean artists playfully visualize family and culture with AI programs like Dalle3

NWN solicited fine art works using AI (other than Nettrice Gaskins), and although there were not many, some great artists were discovered. Niceaunties represent her family composition and Singapore/Chinese culture through various artificial intelligence programs. Like “We Are Good” above:

‘We are Good’ is set in the ‘Auntieverse’ and is a story about two lonely characters finding companionship within each other. In a crowded street reminiscent of Hong Kong, an encounter between a woman with a cat’s face and a cat with a woman’s face occurs. The story explores themes of identity, connection, joy, and peace. This AI movie was created, animated, and edited by Niceaunties in Dalle3, Magnific.ai, and Runwayml programs.

Wagner, who grew up in a large Chinese-American family whose father lives in Hawaii, immediately resonated deeply with the video’s imagery on a cultural level and said he found it funny anyway.

From the artist website:

Born during Singapore’s nation-building period in the 1980s, the ‘Niceaunties’ artist experienced a childhood shaped by influential women in her family. From infancy until the age of nine she lived with her grandparents, aunts, and uncles while her parents worked.

“Ajumma” in this context refers to an older woman and often has the characteristics of being resourceful, following rules, being traditionalist, and being easy to give opinions. This ‘survival mechanism’, which probably stems from the fiscal austerity of the pioneer era, often paints ‘ajumma’ in an image that is not even flattering. However, this writer recognizes that inherent unfairness, and sees her aunt as someone who does her best in an intimate way and sometimes gives advice freely, in good faith.

Wagner says this is an artistic ambition and execution worthy of being exhibited regularly at MOMA, and comments that if there were more such examples, it would go from being an AI art skeptic to a fervent defender.

Niceaunties from Auntieverse: Singaporean Artists Delightfully Visualize Family and Culture with Dalle3 and Other AI Programs

Research suggests that emotions and player agency are more important than high-end graphics in virtual experiences

This is quite an important study by the University of Bath and adds academic weight to what we see in the market. The player’s emotions and agency (i.e. their ability to interact meaningfully with the world) are important.

Field of view and visual realism, usually achieved with cutting-edge graphics and high-end headsets, may be relatively unimportant in creating a credit-worthy VR experience. What’s even more important, the study found, is how users feel within the virtual environment (e.g. enjoyable or scary). Dr Crescent Jicol, lead researcher on the study, said: “But we need to do more to improve users’ emotional experience.”

This particular study was conducted in VR with over 300 volunteers, but the results would probably apply equally to 3D experiences on a flat screen. And we already know that the realism of immersive graphics does not itself lead to the most popular games/virtual worlds.

This is one of the reasons why Roblox and Minecraft are so popular and easier to beat than high-end graphics AAA games. The AAA gaming industry usually denies this by saying “because it’s a cheap/free game for kids”, but that’s because it’s missing the importance of player agency and emotions.

The same is true in VR, but many of the most popular games (almost all of them) focus on player engagement and emotions rather than high-end graphics.

For example, many in the VR industry were surprised when the relatively low-end graphics multiplayer game ‘Gorilla Tag’ became a hit. But it’s a given: you get to be a gorilla (and have fun)! Because it is a ghost (subjectivity)!

Research suggests that emotions and player agency are more important than high-end graphics in virtual experiences.