Ryan Schultz – Page 191 – News and Views on Social VR, Virtual Worlds, and the Metaverse, plus Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI's Impact on the Metaverse
I picked up a tip from the Second Life – FREE Free and Low-Cost Items group on vKontakte (the Russian version of Facebook; I use the automatic Russian-to-English translate feature on my Chrome browser): the Genus Project store has reopened! According to a notice sent out to the GenusProject store group (which is free to join):
Dear friends! Finally we will be able to open the store again, we have received a response from Linden lab. Unfortunately, we do not know who sent the complaint, but I will deal with this issue. While we were discussing this issue with LL, at the same time we’ve been upgrading and bug fixing for [our] heads.
So it would appear that the DMCA complaint issued has (at least for now) been settled in The Genus Project’s favour. We (and they) still don’t know who issued it, though.
And, if you missed your opportunity to pick up the free group gift of the Strong Face female Bento mesh head, it is once again available! This time around, it is not in the group notices, so you will have to visit the store to pick one up (here’s the SLURL):
The Strong Face group gift from The Genus Project (picture source)
In addition, all heads in the store are now on sale for L$3,300! Obviously, the store in inundated with avatars, so I would advise you to either wait a while for the crowds to die down a bit, or use a tool like the handy free Teleport Hammer to fight your way in. (If you are a Premium member, you get priority access to overcrowded sims.)
In another group notice, the product team informs us:
Please do not teleport to the store for redelivery. It is broken. Please stay tuned to notices when it’s fixed.
While reading through all the ways that you could watch and listen to the Lost Horizon virtual music festival in Sansar, I learned that there are now mobile apps, for both iOS and Android devices!
Once again, the branding is squarely on attending live events in Sansar. The events listing includes this weekend’s Lost Horizon Festival, plus a number of other live music events taking place later on this month, such as Monstercat: Call of the Wild. Because it would appear that Wookey staff need to place cameras in place before the event, not every event from the Sansar Events Calendar is available to view using these new mobile apps (perhaps Wookey charges clients extra for this service?).
The only stage I could visit on the iPhone app was the Gas Tower stage, and the only views I could get were a direct view of the DJ on stage, or a birds-eye view of the event, seeing the avatars of the people who were there in person as tiny figures below me:
The sound quality was not great, and I was unable to visit any of the other music stages. The first set of reviewers on the App Store were not that impressed:
However, it is still a significant step for Wookey-run Sansar to have mobile apps, which dramatically opens the door to a much broader potential audience. I’m also quite sure that they are using these new apps as part of their product pitch to other music industry executives, to offer more live music performers in future! Let’s hope that this new feature will help to reel in a few new customers and events.
This morning, I paid a long-overdue return visit to Sansar, to check out both of the two-day music festivals that are taking place on the platform this weekend (July 3rd and 4th, 2020):
The Lost World event, held by an organization called Global Music Festivals, is being held in a specially-created world called Lost World, based the Incan architecture of Machu Picchu in Peru (here’s the entry in the Sansar Atlas):
The Lost Horizon Festival, which is associated with the real-world Shangri-La event at the Glastonbury Festival, a five-day festival of contemporary performing arts that takes place in Pilton, Somerset, in England every year (which, like many other events, was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic):
Two days. Four stages. Fifty-plus performances from a star-studded global lineup, including Fatboy Slim, Carl Cox, Jamie Jones and more. Welcome to Lost Horizon, from the team behind Glastonbury’s Shangri-La – the world’s biggest music and arts festival in virtual reality! Join us from wherever you live, across desktop PC and VR here at Sansar.
These are extraordinary times, and we know fans everywhere are hurting. Which is why we’re thrilled to offer a FREE TICKET to any and all affected by this current crisis.
If you can contribute, we’re also offering a PREMIUM TICKET that helps benefit two important causes – Amnesty International and the Big Issue – and includes some amazing goodies: an exclusive piece of art from Lost Horizon creatives, Instruct Studio; a virtual shirt from Instruct Studio; and more.
While you have to buy a ticket (a free one, or the US$10.00 Premium ticket) to get into the Lost Horizon events, anybody can pop in to visit the Lost World event, which is smaller and feels more intimate.
Lost World (by Global Music Festivals)
The Lost World event features more than 20 live DJs performing sets over two days. The two 12-hour streams will be live broadcast on Twitch and into the Lost World in Sansar especially built for this event. Deejays will play EDM, Trance, Goa, Techno, Psy, House, and Nu Jazz.
When I dropped by this morning there was an appreciative crowd of about 20 avatars gathered, dancing in lockstep to the light show. I found that if I stopped playing my own dance animations and stood still, eventually I, too, would start dancing with the rest of the crowd! I’m not sure how comfortable I feel about a world imposing its dance moves on me, though. (I would have preferred a choice!)
Saturday Night Fever moves in front of an Inca God!
Lost Horizon Festival (by Glastonbury’s Shangri-La)
It’s clear that most people in Sansar this weekend are here for this festival, as this snapshot of the attendance figures (taken from the in-world Codex) indicates:
When I visited, the Gas Tower had over 100 avatars present, while the Freedom Stage and the Landing Zone had about 60 each, and the Nomad Stage about 40.
The Landing Zone makes a great first impression
This being Sansar, I expected the visuals would be top-notch, and they certainly are! You can use your Codex to hop from stage to stage, or start off at the Landing Zone, which features teleporters to take you to the various stages and exhibits:
The Info Booth at the Lost Horizon Festival’s Landing Zone (I think the woman in the pink fringe boots is trying to steal my wallet!)
In addition to the stages, there is an art exhibit called ShangrilART, and a television studio called SHITV, broadcasting films and videos relating to the event. Both spaces were less crowded, giving you the opportunity to take a breather from the much busier music stages.
A documentary on transgenderism at the SHITV studio
At the Freedom Stage, the performers were a flat projection onto the stage rather than embodied avatars (the organizers used a green screen to erase the background). While I was a bit disappointed (I was really hoping for some sort of full-body tracking suits on the performers, like the one that electronic violinist Lindsey Stirling wore to animate her avatar in her awesome concert in Wave last August!), I do think that this was a best choice under the circumstances, and it worked well, especially when viewing the show from the back to the middle of the room:
It was only when you got right up to the stage that the illusion was shattered, as you can see from this shot I took of the deejays behind the booth at the Nomad Stage:
The only problem I encountered was the audio quality, which was consistently choppy and extremely poor while using a VR headset, and better but still a bit choppy while in desktop. I left and revisited several Lost Horizon stages where musical performances were taking place, listening while wearing my Oculus Rift and just on desktop, and there were definitely problems with the sound quality, especially in the Rift. If you are planning to participate in this festival, you might be better off setting your VR headset aside and just using desktop.
One very odd thing that I noticed was the dozens of animated bots that were placed in various spots near the periphery of all three music stages, or under the raised platforms provided for better viewing. You could tell they weren’t other “real” avatars because when you clicked the trigger on your hand controller and looked at them, an avatar name did not appear over them. Most were uniformly dressed in drab, grey colours, and they all cycled through the same dances. It was strange, to say the least.
Lots of animated bots under a viewing platform at the Freedom Stage…but why?
In an event that was already packed full of avatars, why did the organizers feel that they needed to add dancing bots to pad the audience? Were these bots included in the user concurrency figures in the Codex listings? I found myself wondering if the poor audio quality would be improved a bit if they were shut down and removed (I mean, having to render all the real avatars in a crowded world is adding enough to the load on my computer’s graphics card as it is; why on earth would you deliberately choose to increase that load by doing something like this?).
So, if you attend either or both virtual music festivals this weekend, be advised that you might have some sound problems (which will be more likely if you are using a VR headset). These are likely not events that users on lower-end hardware, or more restricted internet bandwidth, will enjoy.
The schedule of performers at the Lost Horizon Festival’s Freedom Stage
Aside from the sometimes-poor audio quality and the creepy dancing bots, I’d encourage you to pay a visit to Sansar this weekend (perhaps your first ever?) to check out the dueling music festivals and experience the platform yourself. Sansar is, still, the most beautiful social VR platform in my opinion, and it lends itself well to events such as this. I’m quite sure that Wookey (the company now running Sansar) wants these festivals to bring many more new users to Sansar—and entice them to pay return visits.
Have fun! I will be popping in an out of these two music festivals in Sansar all weekend, so say hello if you see me!
UPDATE 1:52 p.m.: Well, I signed out of Sansar and signed back in again, and there is a crowd of 188 avatars at the Lost Horizon Festival’s Gas Tower Stage:
While it is so good to see such a large crowd in Sansar having fun (I assume they are spread among multiple instances of the stage), the audio quality is still very poor, especially in VR, but also on desktop at times. For a music festival, I consider this to be a pretty serious problem. Let’s hope that Wookey can find a way to fix this before the Lost Horizon Festival ends tomorrow!
UPDATE 2:08 p.m.: There are now a total of 287 avatars at the Gas Tower Stage, and the sound on desktop is still choppy (I have given up trying to listen in VR). And just now, my Sansar client crashed completely. It would appear that the Sansar platform is experiencing some serious scaling-up problems as more and more people join (it’s evening now in the U.K., where I would expect the bulk of the audience is from). Signing in again, crossing my fingers…
UPDATE 2:21 p.m. Back in again, and I do have one piece of advice for people experiencing audio and/or visual glitches in Sansar: make sure that the Sansar client is the only thing that is running on your computer! I just checked and it is using well over 90% of my CPU just to render the Gas Tower stage and process the sound. Normally I have WordPress open in a browser window, but even something as simple as that brings the whole experience to a crawl, and garbles the music stream.
Now at 315 avatars at the Gas Tower Stage for Fatboy Slim‘s set, and rising…
UPDATE 6:41 p.m.: Well, I decided to pay one last visit today to all three music stages at the Lost Horizon Festival, and I am very happy to report that the music stream quality is much better in my VR headset! I’m not sure what Wookey did (or even if they did anything), but for the first time, I could stand in the middle of a virtual mosh pit in the front of the stage, feel fully immersed in the colorfully and creatively-dressed crowd in my Oculus Rift, and actually enjoy the music.
However, it’s clear that other people are encountering audio problems too. One person in the crowd near me posted to the chat at the Freedom stage:
Is there a www audio stream? I’m still clipping, even in desktop mode and low render; I’ve been trying for over 2 hours now.
Once again, the minute I opened up WordPress in a browser tab to report on this, everything went bad again. (So even if that person were to open up a livestream of the concert to get better audio, his performance in Sansar would take a hit.) It would appear your sound quality is a factor of three variables: how fast your internet connection is, how powerful your computer is, and what other programs you may have running simultaneously.
Your best bet might be to catch the Lost Horizon Festival via Twitch: the Beatport Twitch channel (which gives an overview of several stages at once), or the Lost Horizon Festival channel (which was offline when I checked this evening). There are also, new mobile apps for Sansar, which I will be writing about in another blogpost.
And, as I said before, it just felt right to see so many people in Sansar. Here’s hoping that the attendance at the music festivals this weekend met Wookey’s expectations, and that there are more such events in future.
It’s important to take time to stop and reflect on where you’ve been and where you’re going (Photo by Elijah Hiett on Unsplash)
My goal with this blog has always been to turn it into a paying side-gig when I finally take my retirement from my full-time job with the University of Manitoba (at the moment, I am planning to retire in three and half years, when I turn 60 years old). I can think of nothing that would please me more than being able to work in social VR, virtual worlds, and the metaverse full time!
I do earn a small amount from my sponsored blogposts, advertising on my blog, and from my wonderful Patreon supporters (thank you so much!). Whether or not you are a patron, thank you for your continued readership and support! It means the world to me.
But every so often, I have to hit pause and ask myself: should I write about something if what I have to say is negative? This happened most recently when I wrote an unfavourable review of Forbes VR writer Charlie Fink’s latest publication, Remote Collaboration and Virtual Conferences: The Future of Work. This is a book which I feel was rushed through the proofreading process, and was filled with typesetting problems throughout. I also had problems with the selected content, notably how poorly it was organized.
After writing and publishing my negative review, I went back and reread it and thought: Damn, that’s harsh. And I asked myself: how would I feel if I had written this book and got this kind of review? Not great. So much for the Golden Rule.
So it comes down to this: do I hold back when I have negative things to say about a product (or a platform), or really tell people how I feel about it? Up until now, the answer has always been easy: tell people exactly how I feel, and why.
But, as my blog becomes more popular, and as more people begin to approach me with sponsorship and other business opportunities (or just to pick my brains), I am starting to wonder if that is indeed the wisest approach going forward. As I said, I hope to make this a more lucrative full-time job, after I retire from the library.
And a lot of that business relies on positive word of mouth. Charlie Fink is considered a heavyweight in the world of writing about VR/AR/XR, well regarded for his wide-ranging, continuing coverage of this continually-evolving marketplace, and I’m quite sure he is not happy with my book review. Should I be holding my tongue more often, and keeping my opinions to myself, now that I am starting to establish a name for myself, and to build a brand?
I have no end to the number of people and platforms who feel that I have been less than fair to their products on my blog, or who feel slighted in some why by what I have written here. (I’m not going to bother naming them; in most cases, they already know who they are, and what their complaints are with me.)
You should know that I do have an agreement with my major sponsor, Sinespace, that I can maintain my editorial independence on the RyanSchultz.com blog, while writing sponsored blogposts for Sinespace. I have criticized Sinespace in the past (yes, it has happened!), and I still reserve the right to do so in future if I think they are screwing up. (I am also currently also writing blogposts for the official Sinespace blog, filling in for someone on maternity leave. Obviously, the rules there are completely different. I make requested adjustments to those blogposts all the time. Their blog, their rules.)
Another complicating factor is my overall emotional makeup. Compared to other, calmer bloggers like Inara Pey (whom I admire a great deal), I am a pitchy blogger: sometimes I write things when I am in a bad mood, and it shows. I have sometimes wondered if I should institute a 24-hour cool-down period after any blogpost I write, just to give myself time to review it for tone and mood (and possible bias), before I hit the Publish button.
And yet another factor is that many of my readers have taken time out to tell me that they value the unfiltered, unvarnished, calling-a-spade-a-spade approach I have taken on my blog. (Of course, I hear far less often from the people who wish I was more polite, measured, and circumspect in my approach.)
This is just something that I have been pondering today, as I enjoy my continuing vacation from the blog—the first real vacation I have allowed myself in nearly three years. I still haven’t come to any firm conclusions or resolutions as to what I should do going forward, but I aware of this particular issue, and the role which I play as an increasingly popular social VR and virtual worlds blogger, and my responsibilities as a journalist.
I’ve been doing some thinking about all the crazy things that have happened this week on various social VR platforms and virtual worlds, and in the communities that spring up around them. And about how I have covered them here on this blog. Sometimes you have to take time to reflect on what you’re doing, and how you’re doing it. Otherwise, you are blundering on, making the same mistakes over and over again.
Trying to find balance as a blogger is difficult. You can write something that, to your eyes, looks like it’s a balanced treatment of something, and be criticized by someone who thinks it’s unbalanced, biased, and unfair. You can quote somebody, and then be accused of spreading misinformation by someone, because that’s not how they see things!
Look, people. The best I can do is my best, and that will almost certainly fall short of somebody’s expectations. I’m only human, I have my own set of biases, and when I f*** up, I own it, I admit it, and I apologize to the person or people I have offended, and move on.
And this still holds as true today as it did when I first wrote it. So, I ask you to please bear with me as I continue to ask myself these kinds of questions, processing both the informal and formal feedback I have received to date. I plan to use this time off to reflect and make some decisions. What started off as a hobby blog almost three years ago has evolved over time, and I find that I need to evolve with it.
Thank you, as always, for your readership, your feedback, and your support.
