Tag: Virtual Worlds

Utherverse and the Red Light Center: A Brief Introduction

UPDATE July 25th, 2019: This blogpost has been flagged for violations of Google AdSense Program policies, which has led to it being extensively censored. You can Google “Utherverse” to find this virtual world, as I am apparently not allowed to provide a link to it in this blogpost.

In covering as many of the products and platforms as I can for my comprehensive listing of social VR spaces and virtual words, I realized on Saturday that there was still one I had not yet visited, called either Red Light Center or Utherverse. (Yes, I know, it’s very confusing! I had thought they were two separate products, and I didn’t realize they were the same platform until someone told me in-world.)

The emphasis in Utherverse/RLC is pretty much squarely on relationships and sexual roleplay.

Utherverse 1 26 May 2018

(Note that afterwards, I discovered there was a PG version of Utherverse/RLC called WebWorlds, which I did not investigate.)

Billing itself as “the first adult massive[ly] multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG)”, Utherverse/RLC feels like a low-rent version of Second Life, with rather dated-looking avatars giving me flashbacks to the Second Life of 2007.

Here are a few (safe for work) screenshots I took of my travels:

Utherverse 9 26 May 2018Utherverse 8 26 May 2018Utherverse 6 26 May 2018Utherverse 5 26 May 2018Utherverse 4 26 May 2018

As you can see, there is no shortage of avatars online in some places like the Pulse nightclub in the topmost picture. (Or were most of them bots? When I came back the next day, the nightclub was empty, which leads me to believe they were all real users, not bots.) The first time I tried to enter the Pulse nightclub experience in the top photo above, my computer crashed. I was luckier the second time around.

One aspect of Utherverse/RLC which I found rather disconcerting was that the avatars would load in greyscale first, then in colour. (It reminded me a bit of the science fiction novel Snow Crash, where the poorer avatars could only afford to be seen in low-resolution in the metaverse, compared to the richer ones.)

And also, sometimes other avatars, and even your own avatar, would appear see-through, like a ghost. You can see that a little bit in the bottommost picture, where I wandered around a medieval market. You can barely see the cobblestones through my torso!

So, I can now check RLC/Utherverse off my list of virtual worlds to visit. Unless you are really into adult content, I would advise you to steer clear. And if you really were that much into adult content, why you would choose Utherverse/RLC’s unappealing, 2007-era avatars over the much more modern and aesthetic mesh avatars that Second Life offers, is a mystery to me.

But obviously, there’s enough people using Red Light Center/Utherverse to keep it going. They do seem to have regular, well-attended events, like this Sunday morning dance I attended:

Utherverse 11 27 May 2018.png

UPDATED! Editorial: So, What Is It Going to Take to Get People to Visit Sansar—And Keep Them Coming Back?

Star Trek Mission Log 22 May 2018

At this week’s Star Trek Mission Log Live event, something was nagging me in the back of my mind while I was mingling and chatting with the other people present, and watching the broadcast.

It was the thought that this event, as fun as it was, was probably not getting the attention—or the audience—that Linden Lab was hoping for. The number of people present was less than 30, if I remember correctly. (I must confess that I got bored, and I left the event early, before the podcast hosts showed up in Sansar’s recreation of the bridge from the original Star Trek.)

And the deal to set up game-watching experiences within Sansar for the Overwatch League appears to have fallen through. Wagner James Au of the blog New World Notes was the first to report the bad news:

Thanks to a sharp reader, I just noted a belated (and curious) update to the original VentureBeat post announcing the Overwatch team partnership:

Update: Sansar does not have a formal partnership with the teams or the Overwatch League. Sansar conducted preliminary discussions with the San Francisco Shock and Houston Outlaws to create VR watch spaces, but the previously announced activities are not moving forward at this time as there was a misunderstanding.

Hat tip: Wurfi. Apparently something fell apart after the press release was published…

In the same blogpost, Wagner notes that user concurrency figures for Sansar have only gone up very slightly from before, citing the statistics that Gindipple keeps:

At best we can probably say there’s been a very small growth in usage since these gamer outreaches. I’m personally surprised by this, because I expected growth of at least a few hundred. That may still happen if the gamer personalities do more to ramp their fans into Sansar, but so far, sadly, that’s not happening.

I’ve also had some misgivings about Linden Lab’s deal with UmiNoKaiju, which I doubt has had much impact so far on user concurrency figures, either. And the Ready Player One movie tie-in did little to nothing to attract new users, from what I can tell.

So, what is it going to take to get people to come visit Sansar? I honestly don’t know. I wish I knew. Frankly, I am starting to get worried. I’ve already been prodding Linden Lab to think outside the box in terms of promoting Sansar. But I don’t have any new ideas myself as to how they should go about doing what appears to be an increasingly difficult task: attracting new users to Sansar and keeping them coming back for more.

And I worry: what happens, if another year goes by and the user concurrency figures for Sansar have not budged? Will Linden Lab decide to pull the plug, and refocus on Second Life, which is the cash cow that is currently funding Sansar’s development? How long will Linden Lab continue to plough money into a project with (so far) limited success? Is there some future date in Ebbe Altberg’s mind when, if usage figures do not improve, he’s going to cease development on Sansar, some point where he decides that he’s simply throwing good money after bad? The thought terrifies me.

There’s a small, but highly active and engaged user community already in Sansar, which is a joy and a delight to me. But it doesn’t seem to me that we are attracting a lot of new people to Sansar events and experiences. Yes, there’s usually one or two new faces every Saturday at Atlas Hopping. But so far, there hasn’t been a flood of new users, despite efforts to create engaging new in-world games like the Combat Zone and HoverDerby.

We might—just maybe—have to steel ourselves to the possibility that Sansar will not be a success on the same level as Second Life. And that’s a highly unpleasant thought to me.

What do you think? Please sound off in the comments…let me know what you think.

UPDATE May 25th: I cross-posted this blogpost to various VR-themed groups on Facebook, and I got quite a few comments back. Summarized, they fall into three broad categories:

  • Make Sansar available via Steam or Oculus Home: “How about starting by putting it in a store people actually shop at, like Steam or Oculus for one. Many probably don’t know it exists or what it is.”
  • Make Sansar run faster/better: “It takes forever to download a world, and half the time it either crashes or just says it can’t join while loading. They need to fix those bugs.”
  • Allow adult content: “Adult content. That’s the only way it’ll have a shot. SL would’ve been 6 feet under years ago without the adult stuff.”

2nd UPDATE, May 25th 3:37 p.m.: Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab, left this comment on the official Sansar Discord channel:

And, we are still in beta. We are trying things with various partners and learn and iterate. We are not yet piling on for growth. But each revolution things get better. But we also discover issues and iterate again.

Drax’s Our Digital Selves Documentary is Now Available to Watch on YouTube

Cody and Donna at Linden Lab
Cody Lascala and Donna Davis at Linden Lab headquarters in San Francisco (still from the documentary Out Digital Selves)

Earlier this month, I had written about Draxtor Despres (a.k.a Bernhard Drax) and his documentary on the experiences of people with disabilities in virtual worlds, titled Our Digital Selves: My Avatar Is Me. Drax interviewed 13 people with a variety of disabilities for this film. Among the locations which Drax visited for this documentary were the corporate offices of High Fidelity and Linden Lab (the latter is the company behind the Second Life and Sansar platforms).

Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day,  the purpose of which is to is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital (web, software, mobile, etc.) access/inclusion and people with different disabilities. So Drac decided to release his documentary today, instead of tomorrow as he had originally intended!

ODS POSTER us_686x1020_final_preview.jpg

I was able to watch a preview of this documentary, and I enjoyed it very much! I think you will too.

Universal Translators in Virtual Worlds and Social VR Spaces

welcome-905562_1920.png
Image by Tumisu on Pixabay

你好! What language has the most irregular verbs?

I’ll answer that at the end of this blogpost, but first I wanted to talk a bit about languages and virtual worlds.

Virtual worlds such as Second Life attract people from all around the world, who might not speak the same language as each other. (The Second Life website itself is available in English, Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Turkish and Russian.) Automatic translator software (such as this popular item on the SL Marketplace, which works with Google Translate) is often used to bridge the language gap between users chatting in Second Life.

But text chat is not used as often as voice chat in the newer social VR spaces such as Sansar and High Fidelity. Waverly Labs has already created an earpiece called the Pilot, which fits inside your ear to translate foreign languages in real-time, much like the babel fish in Douglas Adams’ science fiction novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In my opinion, it’s really only a matter of time until this sort of technology makes it into social VR platforms.

(A related challenge is to provide voice-to-text conversion so that, for instance, a deaf person can participate in social VR discussions. Thankfully, this is already commonly available using software such as the Dragon line of products. It just needs to be integrated with the various client software used to navigate the newer metaverse products.)

Seamless communication between people of all languages may be coming sooner than you think! 再见!

And now the answer to the question I posted at the start of this blogpost: according to this discussion thread on the WordReference forums, the language with the highest number of irregular verbs is Latin—or perhaps Portuguese.