Month: December 2019

Second Life Steals, Deals, and Freebies: Free Advent Calendar Gifts for December 8th

I hope by now that you have gotten yourselves into some sort of regular rhythm, regularly visiting those stores offering Advent Calendar gifts! Here is a selection of today’s gifts from several stores. All the gifts shown here today are free, and all of them (except for Appliqué Chic) require you to join their store group for free to pick up each day’s gift.

One store that always has lovely gifts for female avatars is Virtue. This rich purple dress is the Advent calendar gift for December 8th:

Here we pair two gifts: the belted wool jacket is the Dec. 8th gift from WellMade’s Advent Calendar, and the leggings are part of the Dec. 8th gift from Appliqué Chic. The WellMade jacket comes with a mini-HUD to change the colour of the jacket and the belt separately to one of three shades: white, black, and red, which makes it an essential winter staple for your wardrobe.

The Dec. 8th Advent calendar gift from Firelight Hair is this lovely long hairstyle in three different shades of red:

And finally we have the Dec. 8th gift from Entice, a daringly low-cut midnight blue silk blouse! Please note a search for Entice under Places lands you in a nearby ravine; please use this SLURL instead to teleport directly to the Advent calendar in-store.

If you are looking for suggestions on where to go hunting for Advent calendars, here is my list of recommended places to go and Advent calendar websites to check. Happy shopping!

HitMotion: Reloaded Is the First Fitness Game Using Pass-Through Mixed Reality on the Vive Focus Plus

If you are interested in following the goings-on in the world of virtual reality, one of blogs you should read regularly is by an Italian guy named Tony Vitillo (a.k.a. SkarredGhost), whose blog, The Ghost Howls, often has reviews of products and interesting news reports about the VR industry. I admire Tony for daring to follow his dream to turn his love for VR into a full-time business!

And recently Tony’s company, New Technology Walkers, announced HitMotion: Reloaded, the first fitness game using pass-through mixed reality on the Vive Focus Plus headset:

New Technology Walkers today announces that its first game “HitMotion: Reloaded” has been released worldwide on Viveport M. This is the first fitness game in pass-through mixed reality ever released and at the beginning will be exclusive for the Vive Focus Plus, the only device offering this functionality in a reliable way. The price is $5.59/€4.99/RMB39.90.

The game had been announced by NTW’s co-founder Antony “Skarredghost” Vitillo during the Vive Ecosystem Conference 2019 in Shenzhen, China as one of the launch titles for the Vive Focus Plus. In these months, the game has gone through a complete overhaul, passing from the free tech demo released in March to a complete game distributed worldwide now.

Here’s a 30-second promotional trailer for the new game:

One advantage of using the Vive Focus Plus wireless headset is that the game can use the pass-through mixed-reality feature to avoid you accidentally punching holes in any of your walls, or breaking any furniture! Given the rise of VR headset accidents (leading to the posting of mishaps to places like the VRtoER subReddit group), this is potentially a major selling point for HitMotion: Reloaded.

However, the Vive Focus Plus is still a newer headset, so not that many people own it yet, and HitMotion is not yet available for any other models of VR headsets. Whether or not it will be appearing on other headsets depends heavily on how much they will be able to improve their pass-through vision. I don’t think we can expect to see this game appearing for the popular Oculus Rift or HTC Vive headsets anytime soon.

This is another example of an expanding market for VR use: personal fitness. Many people are already working out, getting fit, and losing weight using VR apps such as Beat Saber. I wish Tony every success in his endeavour, and I look forward to seeing what other VR/AR/XR fitness apps will be appearing in the future.

If you want more information about HitMotion: Reloaded, here is their website, their Facebook page, and their Instagram. You can also follow Tony on Twitter.

Second Life Steals, Deals, and Freebies: Presents From the December FaMESHed Event (Plus a Few Advent Calendar Gifts)

The December round of the FaMESHed Event in Second Life is upon us, and once again, most of the vendor booths have beautiful Christmas gifts for us! There is some really lovely stuff, both for your avatar and for your home. You do have to join the FaMESHed group for free to pick up all the presents.

Here Vanity Fair is wearing two gifts from vendors at FaMESHed: the Christmas Deer sweater from Just Because and the Hanna red heels by Phedora. (The blue leggings were part of the Dec. 4th Advent calendar gift from Appliqué Chic, and are still available today for free, but they will be L$10 after today):

The red Joy throw pillow and the neon Santa hat on the wall behind Vanity are also gifts from FaMESHED, by Fancy Decor and EQUAL respectively.

Now we have the Merry plaid blue zipper skirt (part of the same Dec. 4th Appliqué Chic Advent calendar gift as the leggings in the previous picture), plus a lovely cropped sweater, the FaMESHed gift from Giz Seorn:

Here we pair the red cable knit mohair sweater by COCO Designs with the sexy red thigh-high Cate boots by Garbaggio (my favourite shoe store!):

Next we have the Shayla robe in green from Ricielli, which comes in both closed and open versions (obviously, I’m not going to show you the open one!):

The Scandalize gift is the Nairi dress in black with a separate black lace bralette:

The gift from Neve is this lovely outfit consisting of two separate pieces, the top and the matching skirt:

This is the Jane sweater by RIOT (which comes in green as shown and also in red), paired with the Adriana red glitter shorts by Bombshell. (The RIOT gift box also includes Jasper sweaters for the men.)

Next up is the Scarlett bra and panties, the gift from Belle Epoque, shown with the Punta Cana shoes by Essenz, which comes with a HUD to change the colour of the shoes themselves (3 options: grey, blue, and red), the sole (4 options), and the tie around the ankle (18 options):

Here’s a closeup on the shoes, which like everything Essenz sells, is wonderfully crafted, with much attention paid to details!

Finally we have the Cindy dress in mint green by Kaithleen’s, paired with the Dec. 5th Advent calendar gift from Essenz, the sand-coloured Honolulu shoes:

Here’s a closeup of the Honolulu shoes, which are bit too frou-frou for my taste, but they might be perfect for you!

You do need to join the Essenz group for L$350 to pick up their daily Advent calendar gifts, but all are beautifully crafted footwear, and I think that L$350 for 24 quality pairs of shoes and boots is a bargain.

The hair used in all these pictures is the Dec. 5th Advent calendar gift from Firelight Hair, a curly hairstyle called Melvena (you will have to join the Firelight group for free to use this calendar). The hair comes with a 3-colour HUD to change it to brown, black, or red:

UPDATED! Editorial: Decentraland Is Paying for Contest Entries (And Why This May Backfire)

On Nov. 8th, I wrote about the Decentraland Builder Contest, which is currently underway and runs until Dec. 15th, 2019. You can refer to my previous blogpost for all the details on the contest, or you can check the Decentraland website.

One thing that I did not know about the contest is that each accepted entry will receive 200 MANA, which works out to about US$5.00 at the current exchange rates. I understand that you can submit up to 20 entries per person, which means that a user who submits the maximum number of entries earns 4,000 MANA, worth about US$100. (This information comes from a recent blogpost on the DCLPlazas blog, which is a good source of news about Decentraland.)

This reminds me of how High Fidelity was offering US$300 per accepted entry to an avatar contest at one of its final big events (this was before its abrupt pivot earlier this year to promote business use of HiFi for remote workteams, and an attempt to rein in runaway costs). For a while there, High Fidelity was spending money like a drunken sailor, and I am starting to wonder if the same thing is starting to happen over at Decentraland, which has been extremely generous with its contest prizes this year.

I have absolutely no problem with large cash prizes for contest winners, and I know that contests encourage the creation of good content, which drives usage of the platform. But in my opinion, paying for every single contest entry is only going to encourage a flood of people gaming the system with the maximum number of contest entries, just to collect the most money they can and then cash it out.

This is essentially bribing people to use your platform, which means that as soon as the money stops flowing, fickle users, who were there only because they were paid, will abandon the platform (which is exactly what happened to High Fidelity).

One of the things that is starting to concern me about blockchain-based virtual worlds like Decentraland is how they seem to encourage a rather mercenary approach to their in-world economy. It doesn’t help matters that land is such an expensive commodity in DCL, which almost makes it imperative to be able to use it to generate revenue. (A year ago, DCL even launched virtual land mortgages, for those who could not afford to pay for their LAND up front.)

Want to play a hunting game? You’ve got to pay for the arrows. Want your choice of avatar username? You’ve got to buy one. One person on the official Decentraland Discord server recently asked whether they would be allowed to erect a paywall in front of a constructed scene, so you couldn’t even look at it without paying. Everybody seems out to make a buck.

The blockchain/cryptocurrency community is a world apart, and most current Decentraland users and investors do not see this sort of setup as strange. But I wonder how well this will play out with the casual, non-crypto visitors which DCL needs to attract in order to survive and thrive long-term. Will potential users be put off by having to pay for everything, even buying their username? I guess we’ll find out once the doors open to the general public.

UPDATE Dec. 6th, 2019: Ari Meilich, the Project Lead at Decentraland, says:

The idea behind subsidizing content creation is trying to crack the chicken and egg problem. A lot of people have been building in the absence of incentives, but other are more likely to create better scenes provided they receive tokens, particularly before we have launched and there isn’t an immediate flux of users. In the previous contests it has worked out great. This contest will be the last one before launch, Ryan. And it’s looking like there’ll be enough interactive content to put us in a good position to open the world publicly soon 🙂

Thanks, Ari!