Month: January 2020

UPDATED! Second Life Steals, Deals, and Freebies: Two Free L$1,000 Gift Cards!

Even though the Christmas/Advent season is now over, there are still a couple of stores that are being very generous with their group gifts to customers! Did you know that there are two stores in Second Life, where you can pick up a L$1,000 gift card as a free group gift—and that you can join their store groups for free? That’s free money, people!

The first store is one where I routinely ransacked their Advent calendar over the holidays, called Le Fashion Whore. Join the Le Fashion Whore group for free (there are 4 white group join panels shown in the picture below) and simply click on the gift-wrapped box on the small table indicated below with the red arrow, to get your free gift card:

The L$1,000 gift card attaches to the lower-right hand corner of your screen, and works with any store vendor. (If you wish, you can rezz the gift card to the ground on any land with rezz rights, and then it becomes transferable to another avatar!)

The gift card for Le Fashion Whore should enable you to pick up four regular-priced women’s outfits. It’s a super deal you should not pass up!

The second store to offer a L$1,000 gift card is Blossom, a store conveniently located right next door, which sells mostly women’s footwear and a few outfits.

I found it difficult to find the store group searching under Groups in Search (it’s spelled .::* BloSSoM *::., and I just hate it when stores do that), but luckily there is also a black-bordered, light-blue group join panel attached to the side of the reception desk (see below)!

Join the Blossom group (but make sure it’s the right one, there appear to be several called “Blossom”!) and then click on the opened gift box on the reception desk as shown by the red arrow:

The Blossom gift card should be enough for you to get at least four pair of regular-priced shoes (and even more, if you happen to pick some more inexpensively-priced items, as I did). And I assume that you can also rezz that gift card to make it transferable, as well.

Oh, and apparently both these gift cards are available until January 31st, 2020, so you’ve got the rest of this month to pick them up. The gift cards are not time limited, so you can use them anytime you like.

Happy shopping!

UPDATE Jan. 11th, 2020: I wanted to show you what you can get for your gift cards, putting together this delightful retro 1950s outfit!

The Betty dress from Le Fashion Whore comes with a HUD with twelve different patterns for both the top and skirt, plus twelve coordinating colours for the belt—very versatile! And the Minnie pumps from Blossom come in six different colours as shown. This entire outfit was free, using the two L$1,000 gift cards, and there’s much more to see and buy in both stores.

The Le Fashion Whore gift card is only available until Jan. 31st, 2020, and I assume the same is true for the Blossom one, so hurry down!

Interaction Designer Alan Chao Writes About Lessons Learned Building Successful Worlds in AltspaceVR

Alan Chao (website, Twitter) describes himself as:

I’m an interaction designer in NYC, currently a Senior UX (User eXperience) Designer at Storefront. I have over 6 years of experience in UX and product. I’m also doing work in virtual reality.

Alan has written a post on Medium—the first of a planned series—where he talks about the lessons he has learned from building successful, popular worlds on the social VR platform AltspaceVR. His first post, whimsically titled Don’t Get Stuck in the Hot Tub, is absolutely required reading for anybody who is at all interested in social VR.

I’m just going to quote a few choice bits here because I want you to go over there and read the whole thing. I’m serious; it’s that good. And it’s not that long. Go. Read.

*sigh* Are you still here? O.K., fine, here’s my quote…

People in VR love their Starbucks. This was one of the first lessons I learned with my first attempt at building worlds in Altspace. It was mostly a naive experiment to bring 3D models into VR, which I had never done before. However, the first two worlds I made taught me a lot. The first was a Starbucks.

Something is amusing about bringing a mundane place like a Starbucks into VR. The building was a boxy structure modeled in Sketchup with wood textured walls and white signage. Inside, I included the glass pastry display, refrigerator case, cash registers, several coffee-related props, the drink pickup area, and the little bins with sugar packets and straws. To my surprise, when I teleported a group of users into the world, some immediately assumed positions behind the cash registers, and a line of customers formed and started ordering drinks. There were even roleplayed arguments about the drink orders being too complicated. For whatever reason, everyone in the space bought into this “game” and maintained character. As the creator of the world, I was even named the General Manager of the store.

Alan Chao’s Starbucks Coffee in AltspaceVR

Here is a short summary of the lessons Alan learned while building this and many other worlds in AltspaceVR:

  • Spaces shape behaviour: nowhere is this better illustrated by the visitors to the Starbucks Coffee, who automatically began roleplaying!
  • Start with a feeling: “To achieve immersion, start with the feelings you want a world to convey.” This does not necessarily mean increased photorealism:

I’ve found that in Social VR specifically, photorealism doesn’t mean it feels more realistic. Too real, and it sort of falls into the uncanny valley, primarily in stark contrast to the style of avatars. High poly counts can also be detrimental to performance on mobile headsets. The key is to find the balance between just enough geometry, materials, and lighting consideration to support a real feeling.

I am quite looking forward to reading the rest of this series!

A Special Thank You to My Patreon Supporters—And How You Can Become One (Or Just Buy Me a Coffee!)

You can show your support by something as simple as buying me a coffee!
(Photo by Mike Kenneally on Unsplash)

On November 22nd, 2018, emulating a couple of bloggers whom I admired, I set up a Patreon page to support my work on this blog and on the Metaverse Newscast show on YouTube.

Well, today I just checked my Patreon page and I was happy to discover that I have reached my first Patreon goal: $30 per month, which almost exactly meets my blog hosting costs on WordPress!

I want to take this opportunity to publicly thank all of my Patreon supporters, both past and present, both those named on my Patreon patrons list and those who wish to remain anonymous. Your support means the world to me, and it is very much appreciated!

I know that I need to rack my brains to come up with even more perks and benefits for my wonderful Patreon supporters—a new project for a new decade! And I will always welcome anybody who wants to support my work via Patreon.

A tech blogger whom I recently have started following, Lily Snyder, has set up something I had not seen before. At the end of her blogposts (like this one, which mentions one of my recent editorials), she mentions that the reader can buy her a coffee!

You can buy Lily Snyder a coffee!

How it works is, you can set it up to use either PayPal, Stripe, or both, to allow users to make a single, one-time donation of $3.00—just enough to cover the cost of a coffee! I think this is a great idea, so I went and set one up for myself (although you can certainly make a one-time donation through my Patreon page, if you wish). Coffee is always greatly appreciated!

Between my Patreon supporters, my advertising, and becoming a paid embedded reporter for Sinespace, 2020 is shaping up nicely!

Thanks again for all your support—and all the coffee!

Photo by Hanny Naibaho on Unsplash

Editorial: Missing

Photo by Ehimetalor Unuabona on Unsplash

I don’t know what is wrong with me today. I am back at my paying job after a two-week Christmas vacation, and believe me, I’ve got plenty to keep me busy over the next few weeks! Lots of requests from professors for student training on how to use my university’s library system efficiently and effectively. Lots of committees to sit on. Lots of stuff to do. I feel needed, and that feels good.

And I am starting off 2020 where I am actually getting paid to do what I love, which is write about social VR, virtual worlds, and the metaverse (which reminds me, I need to email an invoice over to Sinespace today). My boss at work was tickled pink by my recent mention in Patty Marx’s New Yorker article about virtual reality. And to top it all off, I even got an award for my blogging from the Virtual Existence Society! I am certainly getting lots of external validation (and personal satisfaction) from what I do in my off-hours.

So I should be happy, right? Right?

So, why do I feel like something is missing?

And no, it’s not Sansar that is missing from my life. It’s truly a blessed relief to take a break from the bickering, politics and drama over there. I wish Linden Lab staff and all the Sansar users my very heartfelt wishes for the best to happen in 2020, and I vow that I will be back—someday. But not right now. I’m just so burned out on Sansar, and it’s going to take some time and space to heal before I come back. And it was a valuable lesson learned: not to let myself get so emotionally invested in any single platform in the first place. My infatuation, my honeymoon period, with Sansar is well and truly over.

Perhaps that’s what is missing from my life: a sense of optimism. The world suddenly seems to be a much more precarious place at the start of 2020, with an American president using Twitter to issue threats to bomb an enemy’s cultural sites (a war crime), and Australia ablaze due to continued inaction on climate change and global warming by global politicians. It all just seems so hopeless, so dire.

So, what do you do when what you’re missing is a sense of hope about the future, a sense of optimism? I already know that I suffer from clinical depression, a battle which I do not shy away from sharing here on this blog. But what if there’s actually good reason to feel depressed about society and the world?

I don’t have any easy answers, for myself or for anyone else. But I do think that taking the initiative to make small, practical improvements in your life can make a difference.

For example, this year I have made a pact with a coworker to go for regular cardiovascular exercise a few times a week: walking the length and width of the university’s extensive tunnel system connecting the various buildings on campus, during what can be a long, bitterly cold Canadian prairie winter. (We like to joke that there are still stoned-out students from the 1960s wandering around lost in the tunnels!)

And I can haul my raggedy ass back to Weight Watchers tomorrow, to reset myself on the path toward making healthier, more informed food choices.

Sometimes all it takes is small steps, opportunities to reassert some small portion of personal control over situations that feel hopeless in our lives, that make all the difference. It’s not a panacea, but it’s a start. Sometimes it takes a collection of a lot of little things, to tip the balance in our favour, and rediscover what’s missing in our lives.