Using Second Life As My Radio Station

Over the past several years I have noticed myself using Second Life for a particular, rather peculiar purpose, one that I certainly didn’t intend to use it for at first, and one that I’m sure Linden Lab didn’t forsee either. I find myself dressing up my avatar, visiting a club, turning up the sound on my speakers, and then heading for the sofa to put my feet up with my iPad to read or browse Reddit and simply listen to some music. In other words, Second Life has become my radio station!

Sometimes I’m in the mood for some classic, romantic standards, and so I throw on an elegant ballgown and some expensive-looking jewelry, and strike a pose at the side of the dancefloor at Frank’s Place Jazz Club (despite the name, they don’t play jazz that often). I never go to Frank’s to dance; I go to listen to the music. I don’t need to be sitting at my computer to do that. As long as I meet their formal dress code, I can stand there and listen as long as I want; sometimes I plant myself there all day while I am doing other things!

Vanity Fair at Frank's Jazz Club 2 4 Apr 2018_001.png

Other times, I’ll decide to throw on a daring little minidress and visit FMD to listen to a stream of music that would not be out of place in a hip, fashionable modern club scene. It’s not music I would listen to on a regular radio station at all, but sometimes I’m in the mood for something different.

And on another day, and I’ll be in jeans and a leather jacket at Big Daddy’s 80’s Club or Muddy’s Music Café, listening to the music stream there.

Do you use Second Life as a radio station too? Leave a comment to let me know where you like to listen. I’m always open to new suggestions!

Sinespace Is a Social VR Space/Virtual World to Watch

Screenshot 2018-4-08-05-07-53

You know, Sinespace is really starting to grow on me.

I’m starting to think that Adam Frisby was smart to build his virtual world on top of the Unity game engine, because he can leverage off all the development work that has taken place on that platform. For example, he already has great in-world vehicle physics for things like dune buggies and race cars.

And Adam can take advantage of all those cool Unity building tools. Of course, there’s a lot of work to integrate such tools with Sinespace, but the payoffs could be big. In the official Sansar Discord channel, creator Agustine shared with me a promotional video of a Unity building tool called ProBuilder. It reminds me of the Second Life in-world build tools, but on steroids!

Pretty impressive! Can you imagine having the ability to build so easily in a virtual world? And can you imagine how popular Sinespace could be if they could integrate such a tool? The Second Life crowd would be all over it!

And you can already build some truly beautiful experiences within Sinespace. I’ve already blogged about a few. Take a look at these pictures I took of the Sinespace region I am currently in. Trees swaying gently in the breeze, grassy rolling hills… it makes me want to explore!

And Agustine told me about a new enticement to explore: gifts! Hidden away in some of the Sinespace regions are gift boxes like the one in the picture above. Find them and click on them, and you win a small amount of in-game currency! I’m not going to tell you in which region I found this particular gift; come to Sinespace and explore for yourself 😉

Gifts in Sinespace 8 Apr 2018

And there are some very nice touches to Sinespace, like the built-in Snapshot tool, which I have already talked about, which are fun and easy to use.

Now, Sinespace is not perfect. For example, I still cannot get the new VR client to work with my Oculus Rift setup, even after several attempts (other people have been luckier than me). And, annoyingly, now when I launch the new Sinespace client in desktop (non-VR) mode, it also loads SteamVR and Oculus Home automatically, which means I have to work around the rather annoying SteamVR “Headset not tracking” pop-up window. But this is a minor complaint, and one that I’m sure will be fixed in time.

The fact is, Sinespace should be getting a lot more press attention than it has been to date. Yesterday I was talking with Andrew, the producer of my upcoming show Metaverse Newscast (hopefully launching later this year), and we agree: Sinespace is one of the “Big Four” where some of the most interesting developments are happening in the metaverse (the other three are High Fidelity, Sansar, and VRChat).

Atlas Hopping, Episode 32!

Aech's Garage 7 Apr 2018.png

Today we visited the following three experiences:

I noticed a few new touches to the Aech’s Garage experience: audio commentary by Aech on each of the 1980s items in the garage, and the automated mechanical arms on a conveyor track, passing a barrel back and forth at the ceiling near the windows!

And Alfy’s experience is huge, with a city and a separate beach where dolphins are frolicking! Very nicely done!

Here’s Drax livestream of today’s Atlas Hopping:

And here’s Strawberry’s livestream:

Once again, it was a lot of fun!

The Rise and Fall of Internet Communities: Lessons for Social VR Spaces and Virtual Worlds

One of the subReddits I follow is called Data is Beautiful, where a user named splittyoassintwo (?!) posted the following chart which interested me:

Internet COmmunities Popularity Chart 7 Apr 2018.png

This picture is a bit too small to read properly, so here’s a link to the original.

I had a good laugh at the rapid rise and equally rapid fall of Google+ (green line). That is EXACTLY how I remembered it, too. Google did their best to destroy something that was initially wonderful, popular and heavily used, through their sheer ineptitude.

This diagram illustrates something I have always thought about Internet communities, which I feel also applies to social VR spaces/virtual worlds. And that is: you might be on top now, but there’s no guarantee that you’re gonna stay there. Second Life has actually had an extraordinarily long run as the most popular virtual world, and still has a significant number of people logging in regularly (according to this recent article in The Atlantic, 600,000 users). But that number has been slowly declining over time. And a number of newer virtual worlds (among them, Sansar by the same company as Second Life) are working hard towards snatching that crown in the era of virtual reality.

VRChat is currently the most popular social VR platform, largely due to the livestreamers on YouTube and Twitch who have profiled the platform. But their user concurrency numbers are still pretty low compared to Second Life, and have gone down from their peak in January of this year.

Moral of the story: you never know what’s going to happen.