Ryan Schultz – Page 39 – News and Views on Social VR, Virtual Worlds, and the Metaverse, plus Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI's Impact on the Metaverse
I got the news over lunch at work, directly from the BBC website, that Queen Elizabeth II passed away. It is truly the end of an era.
I had known from the very first reports this morning, that this was possible, of course. However, it seems almost unreal to me that, a mere two days earlier, she was standing in Balmoral castle in Scotland, welcoming her fifteenth U.K. prime minister.
The BBC reported:
Queen Elizabeth II’s tenure as head of state spanned post-war austerity, the transition from empire to Commonwealth, the end of the Cold War and the U.K.’s entry into – and withdrawal from – the European Union.
Her reign spanned 15 prime ministers starting with Winston Churchill, born in 1874, and including Liz Truss, born 101 years later in 1975, and appointed by the Queen earlier this week.
She held weekly audiences with her prime minister throughout her reign.
She made a famous promise in 1947 that her life would be spent in service to her nation and the Commonwealth, and she kept that vow until her dying day. She was not born to be queen; it was the unexpected abdication of her uncle David that jerked her family into the limelight, and she never really spent another day out of the spotlight. She served with honour and dignity, and never publicly complained.
“There is a motto which has been borne by many of my ancestors—a noble motto, ‘I serve'” (image from The Globe and Mail website)“…I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.” (image from The Globe and Mail website)
Throughout her reign, the Queen spent an average of three hours a day “doing the boxes,” which meant reading the official documents sent to her by various government and state offices. She also met weekly with the British prime minister when Parliament was sitting. She knew better than anybody the progress of public affairs and how individual prime ministers had responded to particular situations and crises.
“Anyone who imagines that [these meetings] are a mere formality or confined to social niceties is quite wrong; they are quietly businesslike and Her Majesty brings to bear a formidable grasp of current issues and breadth of experience,” former prime minister Margaret Thatcher wrote in her memoirs. Those views were echoed by the late Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who wrote in his memoirs that he “was always impressed not only by the grace she displayed in public at all times, but the wisdom she showed in private conversation.”
Queen Elizabeth II’s life is a model of service and attention to duty. We shall not see her like again, I fear.
I have been trying (dear Lord, how I try!) to stay away from what seems to be an unending litany of bad news lately, but last night I slipped up and opened the Apple News app on my trusty iPad, which promptly spit up the article which is the topic of today’s cranky editorial. (It’s a bit old now, but it’s the first time I read it.)
The piece, written by Katie Underwood on July 7th, 2022, for Canadian Business magazine, is the perfect example of metaverse bullshit that is currently circulating in the news and social media, and I have had it up to here with what passes for accurate reporting on the topic. Honestly, I swear, if this keeps up, I fear that the word metaverse itself will become so tainted that the general public will run the other way when it is mentioned! (And Mark Zuckerberg and his many missteps trying to pivot Meta into a metaverse company are not helping, either.)
The title of the article is Your Next Home May Be in the Metaverse (although the web page itself is actually titled Buying Real Estate in the Metaverse Isn’t Cheap; if you should hit a paywall, here is an archived version). The article starts with a profile of digital artist Krista Kim, who built the home of her dreams—and then apparently promptly minted an NFT of it and sold it:
“I imagined creating a house that would heal me,” she says. She also hoped she’d find a buyer. “The question was: Would anyone else understand what I was selling?”
As it turns out, someone did. Kim’s futuristic dreamscape sold for approximately US$512,000 in March of 2021. The metaverse is a loosely but increasingly understood shared virtual space, accessible via smartphone, goggles or headset—and it’s the newest frontier in the global real estate blitz. The sale of Mars House, a 3-D file rendered using the video game software Unreal Engine, marked the metaverse’s first-ever NFT-based residential transaction.
Already, at the very beginning of the article, I am ready to tear my hair out. First, THIS IS NOT THE METAVERSE! The artist built a home using Unreal engine, but it is simply a three-dimensional object, which needs to be imported into an actual metaverse platform (e.g. VRChat) in order to be used! A CNN article about this transaction correctly reported:
The new owner paid digital artist Krista Kim 288 Ether — a cryptocurrency that is equivalent to $514,557.79 — for the virtual property.
In exchange, the buyer will receive 3D files to upload to his or her “Metaverse.”
So yeah, the fool who paid half a million U.S. dollars for this house still has to find a place to park it before inviting his or her friends over for a virtual barbecue.
Second, it is far from “the first NFT-based residential transaction”, which Katie Underwood would have known if she had bothered to do a little research before writing this article. Blockchain-based metaverse platforms have been buying and selling NFT-based virtual land parcels for years now! Decentraland, for one, began selling land back in 2017, and yes, some people have built virtual homes on that land.
With my teeth firmly set on edge, I continued reading, to find yet another section of Katie’s article which raised my blood pressure a notch:
Like terrestrial homebuyers, users keen to buy or sell real estate in the metaverse will have to go through a rigmarole not unlike the one for bricks and mortar. Right now, land sales in the metaverse are typically concentrated within the “Big Four” platforms—Decentraland, The Sandbox, Somnium Space and Cryptovoxels—which are developed and owned by users. (To date, their combined total of virtual plots is just under 300,000.)
Even in the metaverse, location is everything. In Decentraland, neighbourhoods are designated for specific activities; for example, there’s Festival Land (for live music events), University (for education) and District X (for clandestine dating adventures and adult-themed e-stores). Its fashion district is of particular interest to the Metaverse Group, a Toronto-based virtual-real-estate company that scooped up more than 100 of the area’s 16-by-16-metre parcels for US$2.4 million last November.
Also, “last December, one of Snoop Dogg’s most ardent fans dropped US$450,000 for a plot next to the rapper’s mansion in The Sandbox, a popular gaming platform.” Again, these quotes make me want to tear my hair out! Listen to me, people: LOCATION IS NOT EVERYTHING. For example, in Decentraland you can click on a URL with the exact coordinates of the parcel of land that you want to visit, which will take you directly there. Any metaverse platform worth its salt offers you some form of teleporting from place to place.
The idea of one virtual piece of land being “worth” more than another due to its location is patently absurd, an idea first brought you by the NFT-based metaverse companies who were only too eager to incite FOMO-driven bidding wars during the crypto bull market which has now cratered so spectacularly!
I could go on, citing other parts of the Canadian Business article that drive me insane, but I’m done enough ranting for today, and you get my drift (you can go read the rest of the article yourself if you want). I need to go put my feet up and listen to some Enya to calm down. If I sound absolutely and completely fed up about all this, it’s because I am. THE METAVERSE BULLSHIT HAS GOT TO STOP, NOW.
Look, I have no problem with the idea of a blockchain-based metaverse, but the entire ecosystem and environment around it have now become a toxic cesspool of scams, frauds, and rugpulls. And all that negative attention is dragging down even the legitimate players in the metaverse space. Frankly, things are now getting to the point that whenever the general public hears the words crypto, NFT—even metaverse—they start gingerly backing towards the exit door, because so many scammers and other bad actors in the blockchain space have tainted the concepts themselves!
It doesn’t matter if there are actually working blockchain-based metaverse platforms out there, like Cryptovoxels, Decentraland, and Somnium Space (soon to be joined by The Sandbox)…the bad actors are like a pervasive rot that has set in, damaging their credibility merely by association, and potentially negatively impacting their future operations. (And God help those companies who are trying to set up new blockchain-based metaverse platforms during this crypto winter!)
For example, NeosVR is the perfect example of a truly wonderful, cutting-edge metaverse platform that has been effectively hamstrung by what happened to Neos credits (NCR), NeosVR’s associated cryptocurrency.† The resulting deluge of attention of the cryptobros earlier this year completely changed the tenor of the Neos community, causing great divisiveness and conflict, and finally, a cynical pump-and-dump by a cadre of investors (who were impatient for profits) eventually led to NCR becoming near-worthless. I had started what was intended to be a multi-part series of blogposts to cover the entire sad saga at length, but unfortunately I got too busy to complete it in a timely way.
However, the prolific VR YouTuber ThrillSeeker has done an excellent 20-minute overview video, which does a much better job than I could do to explain what befell Neos:
See what I mean? I swear, between what’s been going on in the crypto crash, and companies like Meta stumbling around trying to build the metaverse and getting roundly criticized for not getting it, I’m afraid that the term metaverse is going to get an extremely negative connotation…and then all of us will be the poorer for it.
Think about it—what do you want the average person to think of when you talk to them about the metaverse? Because I can tell you, pieces like this article from Canadian Business are not helping matters out there, in the general public’s minds. More and more people are starting to ridicule the entire concept of the metaverse, either ignorantly equating it with Meta’s soulless Horizon Worlds platform, or else associating it only with the NFT metaverse platforms, many of which are now facing tougher times as greedy speculators (who thought they could make a quick buck) get burned and flee the market, never to come back.
And, ultimately, those people (Joe or Jane Average on the street) are the people we are going to need to the sell the metaverse to in order for it to eventually take root, and take off, in any way beyond existing uptake.
Feh, enough bullshit! Time for some Enya…
† UPDATE Sept. 7th, 2022: I had originally written that Neos credits had not even been implemented yet as an in-world currency in NeosVR, but I have been told that this is not strictly true. Apparently, Neos credits, while underused, had been implemented and usable for user-to-user transactions (e.g. tipping) for years, and a bit more recently Neos had added features like buying and gifting storage space using Neos credits. So I stand corrected! Thank you to the person who reached out to me to correct my mistake.
The Phoenix Firestorm Project Inc. is a non-profit, incorporated organization whose mandate is to improve the user experience in Second Life and other virtual worlds by providing an advanced open source viewer with greater features, options and interface flexibility than the standard offering by Linden Lab. The project has approximately 80 volunteers working for it and are managed through departments divided up as Development, Support, Quality Assurance and Gateway. We provide live support 24/7 in nine different languages inside of Second Life through our support groups and on the web via our issue tracker.
And to celebrate its 12 anniversary, Firestorm threw a big party yesterday, Saturday, September 3rd. And in a circle around the four-sim event stage are free gifts from Firestorm and other Second Life vendors for you! All gifts are free and you do not need to join a group to pick them up.
The present from Firelight Hair is a new unisex fatpack of hair called Glen/Gwyn, which comes in both male and female versions, rigged and unrigged, plus a HUD with 32 different textures:
Firelight is also generously giving out the same gift to SL users that it put out a year ago, for Firestorm’s 11th anniversary! This shorter unisex hairstyle is called David/Davina, and also comes in male and female versions, both rigged and unrigged, with a texture HUD as shown below:
Next up we have a casual outfit featuring three more free gifts:
The T-shirt is the present from Addams, and it comes in a wide variety of sizes to fit most female mesh bodies, and in two colours: white as shown above, and black. (Note that there is also a men’s T-shirt gift, which also comes in black and white!)
The gift from Firestorm is a fatpack of this unisex baseball cap featuring the distinctive Firestorm phoenix logo, with comes the the HUD shown below, where you can mix and match the colours of the cap and the logo as you please. There are two versions of the baseball cap, one for smaller heads and one for larger heads, and both can be resized simply by clicking on them, which pulls up a menu. It’s the perfect accessory for any fan of the Firestorm viewer as your avatar strolls the grid!
Finally, there’s a very nice gift from virtual shoemaker Versov, these wonderfully detailed sneakers, which comes in sizes to fit men and women! These special-edition Firestov sneakers come in sizes to fit feet for the following mesh bodies: Maitreya Lara, Signature Gianni and Geralt, Legacy (male and female), Belleza (male and female), and Slink (male and female). There’s also an unrigged pair in the folder, which you can adjust and resize to fit other brands of feet. They are a keeper!
There are also many gifts for you fans of breedables (which I am not). Here’s the blogpost on the official Firestorm blog listing all the free gifts. I’m not sure how long all these gifts will be available, but I seem to remember that the Firestorm 11th anniversary gifts were available to pick up for at least a month after the events held at the stage. As I said, the event stage is a circle covering four adjoining sims, with the same gifts available around the perimeter of the stage in each sim. According to the event listing:
Since the big party was yesterday, you could choose any of these SLURLs and you shouldn’t have any problem getting in! I wouldn’t wait too long to pick these wonderful presents up, though.
PRO TIP: Did you know that you can pick up many other free gifts at the VERSOV main store, including three fatpacks of high-quality unisex sneakers of various designs and colours? Join the VERSOV group for free to pick up the fabulous freebies, which are located on panels at the front counter of the store…here’s your taxi!
The social VR/virtual world platform Sinespace is going to be throwing a zoo-themed party on Saturday evening, September 3rd, 2022, at 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time/8:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Residents are encouraged to dress up as animals, and there are some serious prizes for the top two winners of the costume contest!
The Zoo with its amazing show of dozens of animals! Best dressed in created animal: first place 2000 Gold, second place 500 Gold (contest board). Live music with DJ Les spinning the tunes!
…
24 Hour Scavenger Hunt! Four frogs have escaped the Amphibian House and the zookeeper needs help finding them. Go to The Zoo between 8:00 p.m. EDT Sept. 3rd and 8:00 p.m. EDT Sept. 4th, find a frog, and take your picture with the frog. Post it to Sinespace Discord events, on fansite, or the Welcome Centre Flickr board. Tag Mimi, send help and receive 100 Gold! One frog per person, please!
The location of the party will be the Zoo world, but it will not be open until just before the event starts. Just click on the Explore button in the bottom row of blue buttons on your Sinespace client, search for “Zoo”, and you’ll easily find it!
