Day: February 28, 2020

The VRChat Community Mourns the Loss of 1001, Creator of Treehouse in the Shade and Many Other Innovative Worlds

(“We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming…”  If you are looking for my blogposts about the Wuhan coronavirus/2019-nCoV/SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19, please click here. Thanks!)

Back in January 2019, I wrote about an amazing world in VRChat created by two users named 1001 and SCRN, called Treehouse in the Shade, which featured a user-operated control panel with dozens of shaders to control the environment around a treehouse:

Today, Ron Millar, the Chief Creative Officer of VRChat, wrote in an official blogpost:

Recently, VRChat lost one of its most prolific and talented creators. Earlier this week we were informed that 1001 had passed away. Needless to say we were all in shock and deeply saddened by the news. It hit me pretty hard. He was a close friend and someone I enjoyed spending time with in VRChat or chatting to on Discord.

1001 is best known as the creator/co-creator (along with SCRN) of Treehouse in the Shade, Bamboo Temple, Fluid Flow Studio, Music Visualizer, and other worlds. They have many friends in our community, and expressed their talent by creating amazing things in VRChat.

I met 1001 and SCRN shortly after they released “Treehouse in the Shade’’ in July of 2018. It was a collaborative effort and maybe one of the most startling worlds VRChat had ever seen — definitely at that time. It immediately blew my mind and I even made it my home. Not only can you change the shaders on the fly, but you can control them with an X,Y pad up in the treehouse! There’s also a jetpack that lets you fly through the raymarched shaders in real-time. So wild! I finally met 1001 and SCRN about a month later, in August of 2018. SCRN and 1001 had these incredible shader “creatures” they could manipulate in front of them as part of their avatars.

I can’t tell you how many people I took to that world. I spent a lot of good times there with friends, family, streamers, VRChat team, partner companies, and famous people. Deadmau5 hung out there with me a few times. One of his streams is 1001, mau5 and myself hanging out and talking about the world, flying around on the jetpacks, and chatting about maybe getting some of 1001’s shaders onto the mau5cube. I took investors and various VIPs in to see worlds he and SCRN had worked on. Everyone that saw it had the same reaction — they were blown away, and it would leave a lasting impression. It showed them what was possible. We even chose to use Treehouse in the Shade in our trailer and in our main marketing images.

…

I hope you will take a little time to go explore worlds he had a hand in creating with his close friend and creative partner SCRN. We’ll be setting up a world row for a little while up at the top of the VRChat Worlds menu for everyone to have a chance to go experience for themselves. As a forewarning, some of the worlds are quite CPU/GPU intensive, and do not have Quest versions. However, if you can check them out, you will not be disappointed. We’ll also list all the world links below.

Here are the links to 1001’s worlds in VRChat from Ron’s blogpost:

Note that this is only an excerpt of everything that Ron has written about 1001; please go over to the official blogpost to read the whole thing, thanks!

Second Life Lab Gab with Patch Linden and the Moles (Plus a Look at the New Log Cabin Linden Homes!)

(“We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming…”  If you are looking for my blogposts about the Wuhan coronavirus/2019-nCoV/SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19, please click here. Thanks!)

In today’s episode of the Lab Gab talk show in Second Life, host Strawberry Linden interviewed Patch Linden (Vice President of Product Operations at Linden Lab) and several members of his team of Moles (contract employees) about the upcoming plans for the 17th Birthday Celebrations in Second Life, as well as various other topics.

During this broadcast, Patch announced that the fifth kind of Linden Homes would be log cabins, in four different styles. According to the Second Life American Cancer Society website:

The American Cancer Society is excited to host the 5th Linden Home Reveal as part of the 2020 SL Home & Garden Expo. Residents are welcome to take a tour of the new Linden Home theme that will become available at 10am SLT on Friday, February 28, 2020. Residents can land on the American Cancer Society Island and walk to the Reveal region following the directional signs from there.

Here’s the SLURL; just follow the signs to the display of new homes.

A first look at the various styles of log cabin Linden Homes

Here’s the complete episode of Lab Gab if you want to watch the whole thing:

The Decentraland Conference Center Has Its Grand Opening This Weekend, Feb. 29th and March 1st, 2020

(“We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming…”  If you are looking for my blogposts about the Wuhan coronavirus/2019-nCoV/SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19, please click here. Thanks!)

The Decentraland Conference Center

Carl Fravel, who from the very beginning of the Decentraland project has been a tireless evangelist for the blockchain-based platform, announced today that one of his key projects, the Decentraland Conference Center, is having a grand opening celebration this weekend:

Come see the Grand Opening of the Decentraland Conference Center!

• Live Music with DJ Rosa
• Guided tours of the facilities
• Office Hours, door prizes raffle

Welcome Party, Live DJ Music at the Cafe
(Turn on your audio for the music)
Sat 10am-Noon PST =  Noon-2PM CST = 6-8PM UTC
Sun 3-5pm PST = 5=7pm CST = 11pm-1am UTC

(A tech note: we’ll be using &realm=hermes-xanthic)

Tours of the Conference Center
 • Saturday Noon PST = 2pm CST = 8pm UTC
• Sunday 5pm PST = 7pm CST = 1am UTC

Locations:

Decentraland Conference Center
Main Entrance if you arrive here, walk north and north east to get to the Patio and Cafe
Unity Café Patio, direct link to the opening party.  Live DJ Music sessions
Conference Center Information Office
Conference Center Map and teleport links

Other locations:

• Information Center
• Unity Museum 
• Commercial Facilities demo
• Corporate Complex
• Small Amphitheater
• Grand Theater
• Meeting and Expo Center
• Meditation Garden 
• Large Amphitheater
• CyberMike’s Showcase
• Lotus Temple
• Back to the Café

 Office Hours – Facilities, Capabilities, Rentals, Q&A
At the Conference Center Information Center
Sat 2-4pm PST = 4-6pm CST = 10pm-Midnight UTC
Sun 7-9pm PST = 9-11pm CST = 3am-5am UTC Mon

If you are interested in learning more about the vision and mission of the Decentraland Conference Center, you can start here.

Decentraland opened its doors to the general public on Feb. 20th, 2020. If you need step-by-step instructions on how to get started in Decentraland, here they are. See you there this weekend!

UPDATED! Coronavirus Versus Influenza: Why SARS-CoV-2 is Not Just “the Flu” (With Sources)

Many people are saying that we should be paying attention to the regular seasonal influenza, which kills so many more people than the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has. U.S. Presdient Donald Trump, in his most recent news conference, kept saying “It’s the flu”.

However, as this poster from the Coronavirus subReddit explains in detail (complete with sources), SARS-CoV-2 is not just “the flu”:

  1. The virulence (R0) of SARS-CoV-2 is estimated between 1.4-6.49, with a mean estimate of 3.28 (source) . This mean estimate is much higher than the seasonal flu, which has an R0 of 1.3 (source) . What this means is that SARS-CoV-2 spreads significantly faster than the seasonal flu.
  2. The Case Fatality Rate (CFR) of SARS-CoV-2 is at least 2-3% (source) . This is 20-30 times higher than the CFR of the season flu, which is around .1% (source).
  3. SARS-CoV-2 can be transmitted without the infected showing any symptoms (source) . This makes it much more difficult to control.
  4. Roughly 20% of SARS-CoV-2 infections result in serious symptoms that require medical intervention (source) . This is more than 10 times the hospitalization rate of the seasonal flu (source).
  5. Symptoms from SARS-CoV-2 can persist over a month (source) compared to the seasonal flu where symptoms typically tend to clear after five days (source) .
  6. There is no vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 (source), whereas people regularly get annual flu shots.
  7. There is no herd immunity for SARS-CoV-2 which means that it can theoretically infect the entire population. See, for example, a Korean psychiatric department where the virus infected 99/102 people.

Now, consider the multiplicative effect that all of these attributes have for the virus. Compared to the seasonal flu, SARS-CoV-2 (1) spreads faster; (2) kills far more; (3) is harder to control; (4) requires use of far more medical resources; (5) for far longer a period of time; (6) has no effective treatment; and (7) can infect entire populations at the same time.

These factors mean that SARS-CoV-2, if left unchecked, is far more likely to overwhelm a country’s medical infrastructure. Additionally, when medical infrastructure is overwhelmed, the CFR will skyrocket because we know that 20% of cases require medical intervention.

To summarize, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is potentially devastating if containment measures fail. This is far worse than the seasonal flu. This is why governments around the world are pulling out all the stops in order to try and contain outbreaks of COVID-19 disease caused by this coronavirus.

So the next time somebody who is ill-informed tries to argue with you that this is “just the flu”, please share this information with them.

Thank you to the person who originally compiled this information, u/Hafomeng, and posted it to the r/Coronavirus community on Reddit!

Coronavirus Versus Influenza (infographic from the Boston Herald)

UPDATE 2:25 p.m.: The Guardian newspaper reports today:

Many individuals who get coronavirus will experience nothing worse than seasonal flu symptoms, but the overall profile of the disease, including its mortality rate, looks more serious. At the start of an outbreak the apparent mortality rate can be an overestimate if a lot of mild cases are being missed. But this week, a WHO expert suggested that this has not been the case with COVID-19. Bruce Aylward, who led an international mission to China to learn about the virus and the country’s response, said the evidence did not suggest that we were only seeing the tip of the iceberg. If borne out by further testing, this could mean that current estimates of a roughly 1% fatality rate are accurate. This would make COVID-19 about 10 times more deadly than seasonal flu, which is estimated to kill between 290,000 and 650,000 people a year globally.

UPDATE 4:16 p.m.: The credible, authoritative Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) has just published an up-to-date summary of everything we know so far about SARS-CoV-2: COVID-19—New Insights on a Rapidly Changing Epidemic.