Month: April 2018

A First Look at the Creator Toolset in Virtual Universe

I recently wrote about a new blockchain-based virtual world called Virtual Universe (VU for short). In a recent blogpost, VU Chief Creative Officer and co-founder Jeroen Van den Bosch gives us a sneak peek of the creator toolset prototype:

I find it very interesting that you can easily add AI-enabled wildlife like birds to your VU experience. A rather intriguing approach, to do all the VR worldbuilding within VR! (The in-world object positioning tools do remind me of those in the Scene Editor in Sansar.)

VU is selling cryptocurrency tokens for use in their virtual world. Note that it says in bold letters right across the top of their website:

VU TOKENS ARE NOT FOR SALE TO CHINA, THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, SINGAPORE AND CANADA.

Obviously, they don’t wish to run afoul of cryptocurrency regulations in those four countries. As I said before, I would strongly caution potential investors in VU to investigate extremely carefully before they leap on board this project. Cool product demo videos are one thing; an actual visitable, viable social VR space/virtual world is another.

Second Life Infographic: Some Statistics from 15 Years of SL

Both Daniel Voyager and Wagner James Au have posted an infographic that Linden Lab shared with them, giving some statistics on the occasion of Second Life’s upcoming 15th anniversary. (Somehow, I seem to have been left off the list of bloggers to receive this graphic…. hello, Ebbe? Remember me? I’m over here! *waves frantically* I know you read this blog! Could you pull some strings and get me on the secret blogger mailing list?)

Anyway, I thought I would share it, and a similar graphic from SL’s 10th anniversary for comparison purposes (both of which I took from Daniel Voyager’s blog, which I do recommend you follow):

sl15b_infographic

Keep in mind that of those 57 million accounts created since 2003, Wagner James Au estimates that only about half a million accounts are active users. He says:

Despite 57,000,000 total accounts and 350,000 new registrations per month, the active Second Life userbase remains around 500,000-600,000:  Over 10 years ago, SL’s active userbase reached a plateau of around 500,000 monthly active users, and despite continued new user sign-ups of around 350,000 every month, the number of returning users stubbornly refuses to grow much more than that — and just as mysteriously, stubbornly refuses to shrink much, either.

And here’s the infographic from the tenth anniversary of Second Life:

sl10b_infographic

HoverDerby, Week 4!

HoverDerby 22 Apr 2018.png

Another fun tournament day for HoverDerby! Congratulations to this week’s winners, SaintOfMirren and Syn!

Here’s a group photo taken in the VIP Lounge after the games:

HoverDerby 2 22 Apr 2018.png

LivCloser: A Look at the Avatar Customization Features

LivCloser is now in alpha version 0.33, and for a one-person company, the product is actually surprisingly fully featured (it’s currently based on the Unity game engine, although the developer is planning to move the virtual world to the Unreal engine).

I decided to take a three-minute video (no sound) of the female avatar customization features in LivCloser, so you can get a better feel for how it looks and how it works:

The avatar actually looks pretty good. However, there are still lots of bugs (for example, you can see that the focus doesn’t shift to the foot area when choosing shoes). But it is an intriguing platform. It will be interesting to see how it develops over time!