Category: Metaverse (General)

Relm: A Brief Introduction

Describing itself as “a tiny metaverse for life coaches and other transformation facilitators”, Relm (sic; there’s no “a”) is a browser-based virtual world for support groups, team meetings, and life coaches. Here’s a twenty-second teaser:

Here’s a longer, one-minute video, showing you some of the avatar customization options:

Relm’s avatars are disconcertingly blank-faced, but you can use your computer’s webcam to provide a face for other avatars to see:

Duane Johnson, the Canadian CEO and co-founder of Relm, tells me that it is possible to do collaborative editing of the worlds you create in Relm (called “relms”). In relms where you have edit rights, just hit Tab to pull up a menu on the left-hand-side of your screen:

You can also edit objects in Relm in a similar way to the prim-editing tools in Second Life, such as this vase:

As an example use case, an association of non-profit organizations in Lyon, France called UniVers-K uses Relm to assist cancer patients and their families by meeting with coaches, planning events together, and organizing fundraisers.

One thing I found heartwarming about the small team building Relm is that, even at this early stage of development, they have posted an Online Social Universe Manifesto:

Human beings are fundamentally social creatures. But the world wide web was not designed to meet our social needs. When we look around at the networks we’ve created online, we see a travesty of real connection with each other—sometimes an emotional wasteland filled with failed efforts to see and to be seen, to be with and to belong.

Today, we have Facebook “friends”, Instagram influencers, LinkedIn connections, and Twitter mobs. In addition, we see more depression, anxiety, and loneliness in our society than ever before.

But if we can re-imagine the web the way it should be—not as an inter-linked store of hypertext documents, but as a place to work together and build community together—why not fashion for ourselves an online universe that is pro-social and social-first?

We evolved in a spatial world, and we thrive in 3 dimensions. Video games and MMO worlds have led the way in showing us how to build trust and culture online—and we should take their lessons seriously enough to integrate the experience they offer in fields as far away as remote teamwork and business meetings.

Our surroundings tell us about ourselves, and hold us in relationship to one another. As we work, create, and collaborate together, we need a virtual world in which to do it—not necessarily because it’s efficient, but because it’s the most human way we know to be online together.

We believe that the architecture of the web experience needs to be re-designed for online teams and communities. A healthy online universe for human beings prioritizes:

• Belonging over status updates
• Visual and auditory communication over textual communication
• Real-time interactions over asynchronous requests/responses
• Rootedness in community over fast network growth
• Hospitality over bureaucracy (e.g. log-in forms)
• Opportunity for human connection (and serendipity) over efficiency
• Socially meaningful surroundings over missing context or sterile environments
• Representing ourselves as avatars over having little to no representation of “me”
• Fun throughout!

The next version of the web experience should be a social universe—a place where we can see, be seen, and belong—just like our ancestors’ communities, but online.

An online friend shared this image taken from their blog, telling me, “They have a really nice ethos,” and I must agree! In the current metaverse season, which has so many blockchain, crypto, and NFT-based platforms operating on a purely mercantile basis, these people certainly have their hearts in the right place. Relm is intended to be, first and foremost, a human (and humane) place for people to meet.

If you are intrigued and want to learn more about Relm, you can check out their website, read their blog, check out their YouTube channel, or join their Discord server. And, of course, I will add Relm to my ever-expanding, comprehensive list of social VR, virtual worlds, and metaverse platforms.

UPDATED WITH AUDIO LINKS! Philip Rosedale: Second Life Stories, and Designing the Metaverse—Some Notes from a Wide-Ranging Conversation Multicast on Twitter Spaces, Clubhouse, Callin and Second Life

Today at 11:00 a.m. CST, Philip Rosedale (the founder and former CEO of Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life, and the current CEO of High Fidelity) hosted a discussion titled Second Life Stories, and Designing the Metaverse, where people had an opportunity to ask him questions. Dr. Fran Babcock and Dr. Hayman Buwaneswaran Buwan from the MetaWhat? The Metaverse Show were key organizers. Philip is always an engaged, articulate, and informed speaker, and if you missed this event, I will update this blogpost with links to an archived version which you can listen to via Twitter Spaces, Clubhouse, and Callin. UPDATE 7:14 p.m.: Links are at the end of this blogpost.

Philip was on Twitter Spaces, with well over 100 listeners in the room, but the conversation was also extended to the social audio apps Clubhouse and Callin, plus there was a virtual auditorium set up in Second Life, with almost 50 avatars present! Participants in all four spaces could both hear and ask questions. To my knowledge, this is the first time something like this set-up had been attempted.

Philip shared a couple of “first stories” from his experience with Second Life, real stories from the early years of the company, both pre- and post-launch in 2003, e.g. Steller Sunshine’s beanstalk. He talked about how it was a challenge to provide backwards-compatibility, and how this affected the design of SL over time (for example, changing the friction elements would affect how people could climb the beanstalk). He talked about how he was able to drop a virtual pebble into the virtual water to create ripples (something which was later taken out because it was so computationally expensive!).

When asked why Second Life did not create mobile apps, Philip says that SL, when launched in 2003, predated mobile devices like the iPhone (introduced in 2007) and apps like Facebook (launched in 2004). While Philip is an advisor to Linden Lab, he is not a member of the executive team running the company day-to-day. He says that running SL on a mobile app is a “hard problem” to solve (I agree).

I asked Philip about his opinions regarding Meta’s surveillance system to enforce good behaviour, which includes constantly recording what happens in Horizon Worlds in case someone wants to send an abuse report to the moderators to act upon. Philip talked about his misgivings about AI-based surveillance and targeting systems in the metaverse, and how they could be used to gather information about us in new and disturbing ways, such as using how we are feeling to decide what ads to show us.

Philip has grave concerns about a business model of metaverse designed around advertising and surveillance. Talking about moderation, Philip wants the metaverse to be designed largely driven by the actions of the (human) people who are there, rather than implementing an automated behavioural surveillance and reporting system.

In answering a follow-up question, Philip said he felt that it it is indeed possible to have a metaverse with consequences for trolls and griefers, while still building strong social connections between people, citing as an example banning a person from a public place such as a restaurant where they were misbehaving.

Philip mentioned, in an interview he gave to a media outlet earlier today, that Second Life still has a higher revenue per person per year than YouTube does, with most of that income coming from fees: fees on sales and fees for virtual land (tier). He feels that a business based on fees (as opposed to surveillance advertising) is most definitely scalable, citing the approximately one million users in Second Life.

Philip talked about how presence can change communication dynamics, such as how how walking up to another avatar, and being physically near another avatar, triggers a response where people tended to be more civil than they might be in a text-only environment like a chatroom, and how quickly such presence could help defuse potentially negative communications.

Among the speakers present were Avi Bar-Zeev, the person who created SL’s primitive system, the digital atoms used for building anything and everything in the early days of Second Life! In fact, many content creators in the metaverse got their start by prim-building in SL. (One SL historian remarked that today was the 20th anniversary of the first-ever created prim in Second Life, made on January 25th, 2002.) Philip talked about how Second Life’s prim permission system could be seen as a forerunner of newer digital asset systems being considered for the metaverse.

Avi also talked about the necessity to design the metaverse to be human spaces, a place to rehumanize rather than dehumanize those who participate.

Philip talked about how VR headsets are still not affordable and accessible enough (i.e. uncomfortable if you have to wear them all day), to be able to have the kind of social community that we experience in virtual worlds like Second Life. He said (and I was transcribing madly while he spoke, so this is a paraphrase!):

It’s difficult to get people to communicate normally in a virtual world. It’s easy to forget that this is an experience that most people would not be comfortable with, yet. We’re not there yet, and the way we get there is to make avatars more visually expressive, which is a tough problem to solve.

—Philip Rosedale

Philip talked about spatialized audio products such as High Fidelity’s 3D audio as an aid to community-building, but adds that we still need to work on nonverbal communications (the listener leaning in to the speaker to indicate engagement, etc.).

There was a lot more discussed, including Philip Rosedale’s thoughts about virtual economies and NFT real estate, which unfortunately I did not have a chance to transcribe. Philip is always an articulate and informative speaker, so you will want to listen to the recording if you missed this event.

I will, however, provide a link to an archive of this wide-ranging and fascinating discussion on Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, and Callin, once Dr. Hayman posts it! He is to be thanked for juggling everything in order to make this multicast such as success.

UPDATE 7:14 p.m.: Here, as promised, are links to the recordings made:

Twitter Spaces recording 1:43:44 (Dr. Hayman tells me, “this recording has less of the interruptions from Second Life, as I muted the mic when feedback and keyboard noises were present in SL”)

Callin recording 1:40:08

Enjoy! I know I will be relistening to portions of this.

NEXT: Beyond the Metaverse Virtual Conference—A Free, Daylong Event Hosted by Lethbridge College, February 17th, 2022

Lethbridge College, a Lethbridge, Alberta-based college which was among the first post-secondary institutions in Canada to offer a Virtual and Augmented Reality program, is hosting a free, daylong virtual conference on February 17th, 2022, titled NEXT: Beyond the Metaverse. The event runs from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (in what I assume is Lethbridge time, Mountain Time Zone).

According to a press release issued by Lethbridge College today:

As the reality of an evolving Internet becomes more mainstream, so does interest in the metaverse – a network of spaces where you can create a virtual world parallel to your physical one.

Just as the Internet revolutionized how we communicate, learn, play and do business, spatial computing, by way of the metaverse, is transforming those everyday interactions yet again.

Lethbridge College is bringing together some of the world’s leading voices on this computing revolution for NEXT: Beyond the Metaverse, a free, virtual conference presented by Lethbridge College’s Spatial Technologies Applied Research & Training (START) centre on Feb. 17. Hosted on the AltspaceVR and Classy Live platforms, the conference connects the best virtual and augmented reality experts with industry and individuals alike.

Emceed by Kent Bye, producer of the Voices of VR Podcast, the full-day event features presentations by April Speight, Spatial Computing Technology team leader, Microsoft Cloud Advocacy; Matt Todd, historian for game design, Ubisoft Quebec City; Antonia Forster, senior technical specialist, Unity Technologies; and George Bloom, executive producer Visual Effects, Metaverse and Innovation Lab, CBS Television Studios. Join them as they explore the complex topic of the metaverse, where it’s at, where it’s headed and why it’s important.

You can read more detailed speaker bios and register for this event on this page. It looks to be an interesting virtual conference. See you there!

The Fabricant: A Brief Introduction to a Digital Fashion House for the Metaverse

The Fabricant describes itself as “a digital fashion house leading the fashion industry towards a new sector of digital-only clothing”. The team of artists, technologists, and executives certainly aspire to some very lofty-sounding goals:

ALWAYS DIGITAL, NEVER PHYSICAL. 

We waste nothing but data and exploit nothing but our imagination. Operating at the intersection of fashion and technology fabricating digital couture and fashion experiences.

CREATIVE EXECUTION: We develop end-to-end 3D narratives for customers and consumers, from concept to implementation.

PHYGITAL EXPERIENCES: We merge physical and digital capabilities to create interactive brand experiences.

DIGITAL COUTURE: We create digital-only fashion that can be used and traded in virtual realities.

An article on the blog Portion includes an interview with Michaela Larosse, the Head of Content at The Fabricant:

The Fabricant is the world’s first digital-only fashion house. Its’ community of creators combines 3-D fashion design, cutting-edge visual effects animation, and technology to build the future of fashion. Their bespoke designs garments only exist digitally and collectors’ avatars can “wear” the items on social media platforms, in gaming environments, and in virtual worlds (“the metaverse”)….

Q: When you talk about your practice you sometimes refer to it as “thought couture.” Can you elaborate on what that term means for you and how it ties in with your practice?

A: The Fabricant has always believed that clothing does not have to be physical to exist, but it can be quite a challenging concept for people hearing it for the first time. We’re used to such an intimate relationship with garments because we have traditionally worn them against our skin, so the idea that this is no longer necessary requires a mindset shift in what fashion can be. We use the term ‘Thought Couture’ to describe our pieces to enable people to comprehend the concept of non-physicality. It’s couture that exists beyond the physical, just like a thought. We can collectively agree that thoughts exist even though they don’t take physical form, so it’s that idea translated to fashion.

Here is one of their first projects, described as “the world’s first digital-only dress”, and sold on the blockchain for $9,500. It was designed by The Fabricant, and “worn” by model Johanna Jaskowska in collaboration with Dapper Labs. Here’s the 8-second video:

The Fabricant has launched something called the Fabricant Studio. Michaela Larosse says:

The Fabricant Studio is an open invitation for anyone to become a digital fashion creator, without any software knowledge, and participate in co-creating their own digital fashion NFTs to be worn, collected and traded. Users get to customise garments to their own preferences using limited edition digital-only fabrics, trims and accessories. The master silhouettes are dropped into the environment by big brands and boutique digital creators, so they can be played with and customised before users mint their own entirely individual fashion NFTs.

All the garments can be traded in the Studio’s in-platform marketplace, launching 15th October [2021], and have multiple utilities in environment such as The Sandbox and Ready Player Me, so they can be worn on avatars in virtual spaces.

A Google search for the “Fabricant Studio” brought forth the following clever 404 page:

It turns out that the Fabricant Studio moved to a completely separate website, here.

My take on all this? In the same Portion interview, Michaela claims, “We didn’t end up in this industry [digital fashion], we created it.” Oh, really?

Well, there would be a lot of virtual fashion designers in Second Life, Sinespace, Sansar, and dozens of other social VR platforms and virtual worlds who would likely beg to differ with The Fabricant’s claim to be “the world’s first digital-only fashion house”. I have interviewed them, reported on many of their stories, and showcased their creations on this blog.

Digital fashion is not a new concept, people. What perhaps is new, is the creation of Instagram-like “filters” so that people can see digital garments on real-life people (and once again, I’m pretty sure that others have done this before The Fabricant). I am starting to get tired of being the only person in the room who keeps pointing out that what everybody keeps trumpeting as “new” in this season of NFT and metaverse hype, really isn’t. It’s becoming tiring, and frankly, I’m starting to get cranky.

If you wish to learn more about The Fabricant and its work, you can visit their website, join their Discord server, or follow them on social media: Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. They also have a YouTube channel with a lot of CLO3D tutorials, as well as the ones I shared here with you.