You’ve probably heard of it, but what does the metaverse mean for us? CNN’s Anna Stewart takes a deep dive into this immersive virtual universe.
The idea of the metaverse is getting more buzz than ever. I gave a speech on it yesterday to Sharad Devarajan’s class of MBA students at the Columbia Business School at Columbia University. (I advised them to buy Bitcoin.)
In my research for the class, I checked the metaverse’s status on Google Trends, which measures the number of searches on different subjects, and I saw an explosion in the past year or so. Big companies such as Facebook, Roblox, and Epic Games are jockeying to be the arbiter of the metaverse, and many companies are talking about their metaverse strategies.
But one 18-year-old virtual world called Second Life had everybody talking about it being a metaverse long before we entered this modern epoch. Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life (the virtual world that debuted way back in 2003) is still going strong. And it plans to play a role in the modern metaverse, thanks in part to a cross-platform payment system called Tilia Pay that enables people to cash out the virtual currency they earn in Second Life and convert it to U.S. dollars. That’s something that is critical for the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One.
Above: Metaverse mentions in Google Trends.
In this age when we’re celebrating the “new” metaverse companies like Roblox, which has 43 million daily active users, it’s easy to forget that Second Life is still around. It has a $600 million annual gross domestic product (GDP). More than 2 billion user-generated assets have been created to date. It has 200,000 daily active users, and it processes more than 345 million annual transactions. It pays more than $80.4 million to creators annually. This is a remarkable achievement, as it’s very hard for companies that rule in one technology epoch to succeed in another, and Second Life has managed to thrive through multiple eras.
“If you look at Second Life, what it did 18 years ago and what it’s doing now, the world has kind of come back to Second Life,” said Brad Oberwager, the executive chairman of Linden Lab, in an interview with GamesBeat. “Everybody is trying to be Second Life. And it’s a pretty interesting time. When you think of creators in the creator economy, Second Life is still the leader and people are getting direct payments from each other. We’re a true economy.”
Above: Second Life has a big economy.
But Second Life, for all of its endurance and persistence, has never really become as mainstream as it could be. It has gone through multiple leaders. Philip Rosedale started Linden Lab in 1999 during the dotcom boom. And in the aftermath of the dotcom bust, he managed to launch Second Life in 2003. He stepped down in 2008, and Linden Lab went through a series of caretaker CEOs in the form of Mark Kingdon, Rosedale (who returned as CEO for just four months), and Bob Komin. In 2010, the company had some big layoffs.
Starting in 2010, Rod Humble, a former EA executive, tried to take some of the magic of Second Life and bring it into new applications on mobile and other platforms. But that didn’t work out so well, and Humble left in 2014. Ebbe Altberg took over in 2014 and helped get Second Life in good stead. He tried to create a VR version of Second Life, dubbed Sansar, but it didn’t get the intended traction. I met with Altberg several times, and he was a big advocate for how people needed to remember how successful Second Life still was.
But Altberg suffered from a long illness. He managed to get through some big shifts, like deploying Second Life to the Amazon Cloud, cutting back the staff, selling off Sansar, and eventually selling off Linden Lab to an investor group led by Oberwager and Randy Waterfield in July 2020.
Sadly, Altberg passed away from his illness in June. Obewager took over as executive chairman and noted that Altberg left the company in excellent shape. Second Life remains solid in its 18th year, with the best financial performance in the first half of the year in more than a decade.
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The idea of the metaverse is getting more buzz than ever. I gave a speech on it yesterday to Sharad Devarajan’s class of MBA students at the Columbia Business School at Columbia University. (I advised them to buy Bitcoin.)
In my research for the class, I checked the metaverse’s status on Google Trends, which measures the number of searches on different subjects, and I saw an explosion in the past year or so. Big companies such as Facebook, Roblox, and Epic Games are jockeying to be the arbiter of the metaverse, and many companies are talking about their metaverse strategies.
But one 18-year-old virtual world called Second Life had everybody talking about it being a metaverse long before we entered this modern epoch. Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life (the virtual world that debuted way back in 2003) is still going strong. And it plans to play a role in the modern metaverse, thanks in part to a cross-platform payment system called Tilia Pay that enables people to cash out the virtual currency they earn in Second Life and convert it to U.S. dollars. That’s something that is critical for the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One.
Above: Metaverse mentions in Google Trends.
In this age when we’re celebrating the “new” metaverse companies like Roblox, which has 43 million daily active users, it’s easy to forget that Second Life is still around. It has a $600 million annual gross domestic product (GDP). More than 2 billion user-generated assets have been created to date. It has 200,000 daily active users, and it processes more than 345 million annual transactions. It pays more than $80.4 million to creators annually. This is a remarkable achievement, as it’s very hard for companies that rule in one technology epoch to succeed in another, and Second Life has managed to thrive through multiple eras.
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“If you look at Second Life, what it did 18 years ago and what it’s doing now, the world has kind of come back to Second Life,” said Brad Oberwager, the executive chairman of Linden Lab, in an interview with GamesBeat. “Everybody is trying to be Second Life. And it’s a pretty interesting time. When you think of creators in the creator economy, Second Life is still the leader and people are getting direct payments from each other. We’re a true economy.”
Above: Second Life is 18 years old.
Second Life has benefited from the pandemic, just like most games, as more users are coming into virtual worlds to socialize because they aren’t so sure about meeting in real life.
“Second Life is back because it never went anywhere. Just 3.5 years ago, we were the same size as Roblox,” he said. “We’re starting to grow again. Now more people are, are interacting. It’s a re-engagement strategy.”
This has potential, since more than 70 million users have created their own accounts during the history of Second Life.
“We’re not starting Second Life again. We’re just improving, we’re just focusing,” Oberwager said. “Because of all the conversations about the metaverse, our name is coming up again as the pioneer. And so our conversion rates are going up. We are a $600 million a year economy. We are supporting creators in ways that allow them to make money. Our goal is to be the least-expensive place to be a creator.”
The company supports streaming live video inside Second Life, and it has virtual cinemas where people can watch shows together. And the company has long-established practices for dealing with problems.
Linden Lab supports free speech, but it has also figured out how to deal with lawless metaverse citizens.
Second Life has long had to deal with problems like rogue user-generated content and copycats. It has its own Second Life Patent and Trademark Office that functions much the way the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office does. It uses AI to stop such theft and it honors Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests from brands. It has undercover avatars to police bad behavior.
“We do have rules. If you break our rules, you have a problem,” Oberwager said. “It’s called the social contract. If you harass someone, you’re gonna get booted from the system.”
Above: Upland is using Linden Lab’s Tilia for money transactions.
Under Altberg, Linden Lab also invested $30 million in Tilia Pay, Linden Lab’s payment system, over seven years to acquire all of the necessary state licenses in the U.S. in needs to run it.
Oberwager said that Tilia Pay could power virtual economies at other companies as they try to get users to come inside and spend money in their version of the metaverse, and then enable people to take their digital earnings and cash them out. It’s a basic function of the metaverse, and Second Life has been doing this for a long time, Oberwager said.
This is not as easy as it seems. For creators to get paid for their virtual content, platform publishers must first comply with money transmission regulations. That’s because when money is being exchanged for virtual goods and cashed out by creators, the platform publisher becomes a money transmitter and must be licensed in all 50 states. This holds true for exchanges trading nonfungible tokens (NFTs) as well.
Oberwager said that Tilia is the only fully licensed money transmitter focused on the virtual currency, gaming, and NFT opportunities. The Tilia Pay service acts as a combination of PayPal and Coinbase for virtual worlds and gaming platforms by providing the “financial rails” for publishers. Using the Tilia wallet, virtual worlds, games, publishers, and NFT exchanges can legally allow creators and others to transfer virtual currencies into fiat.
One of the new Tilia users is Upland, which is an NFT-based virtual property trading ecosystem, where players can play a kind of Monopoly by buying, selling, and trading virtual properties mapped to real world addresses. Prior to its partnership with Tilia, Upland players could not sell their virtual properties to other players for U.S. dollars, because facilitating funds transfers from one user to another requires money transmitter licenses in the U.S. and other jurisdictions. Tilia came to the rescue, and Upland has more than 100,000 monthly active users.
Above: The Zenescope Metaverse is new in Second Life.
Second Life has other things going on as well to try to juice user interest. It cut a deal with comic book publisher Zenescope Entertainment and licensing agency Epik to bring the dark and twisted Grimm’s Universe to life as the Zenescope Metaverse inside Second Life.
Fans can interact with and play as some of the classic fairytale characters popularized by Zenescope’s comic books and graphic novels, acting out scenarios and following different storylines. The virtual experience features Cinderella (aka Cindy): Serial Killer Princess — the main character of a six-issue mini-series of the same name. Also on hand are Belle: the Beast Hunter; the Mad Hatter, and Jabberwocky. Fans of Zenescope number around 70 million, and they now have 50 different digital items they can buy inside the Second Life location.
Oberwager said this was the beginning of many new brand and entertainment partner collaborations in Second Life. And he wants to start making some noise about it.
“Metaverses are the hot thing right now. Second Life was a pioneer, but a lot of people don’t know that it is still alive and thriving,” Oberwager said. “We had the COVID bump, like every game company. But now, we’re going up again at exactly the time when we’re getting out of the COVID bump. That’s quite compelling in our mind.”
Have a great week from all of us at Zoha Islands and Fruit Islands
Greetings Second Lifers!
Today is a really big day for all of us together and we are excited to share that the Second Life portion of CasperTech is being acquired by Linden Research, Inc.
CasperTech has provided various business related services within Second Life for 13 years. Over that time, CaperTech has proudly provided continuous service for tens of thousands of Second Life businesses, and it has remained steadfast in its commitment to the merchants who have depended on those services.
This acquisition will ensure that all of the existing CasperTech services in Second Life will continue to operate without interruption into the foreseeable future, but it also opens up brand new opportunities to vastly improve the experience for our users as our next step in the CasperTech and Second Life journey.
You can expect to see the same great services that you know and love continue on, with all of the same functionality you enjoy today, but with closer integration into the Second Life ecosystem – and as such, an even more reliable and convenient experience.
We wouldn’t have gone forward with this move if we weren’t absolutely confident that it will be a positive change for all Residents and CasperTech customers.
We hope that you are as excited about this change as we are, and we thank you for your continued support as we all step boldly into the future together!
We have started a forum discussion here for anyone interested in participating with questions.
You can also watch Casper and I on a special pre-recorded Lab Gab today at 10:30am SLT!
The Second Life Team
and Casper Warden, CasperTech LTD
Have a great week from all of us at Zoha Islands and Fruit Islands
As news of Queen Elizabeth’s death spreads across the globe, mourners in the virtual world of Second Life have been converging into London City, a sprawling island devoted to the UK’s capital. I have tried over the last hour to take photos of the impromptu memorial, but as avatars keep teleporting into London, the surroundings continue to be a blurry as actual London in the worst fog imaginable.
You can see them in the screenshot here, green dots indicating users from around the world, piling into the town square, where the British flag has been lowered to half-mast, and the audio stream has been changed from the usual Britpop music to somber songs played on piano and pan flute.
“May she be in God’s arms half hour before the devil knows she’s gone,” announces a mourner in chat.
“There is music on the stream now,” says someone who helps manage London. “I hope it is fitting. I’m raising a glass to Her Majesty The Queen!”
As is often the case, the serendipitous mourning is basically SLers gathering and chatting together in the wake of monumental offline news at a virtual world location with some mirror relationship to that news. (See also: Mourners outside the virtual recreation of the Eiffel Tower, after a terrorist attack in Paris.)
And as also befits Second Life, the arriving mourners include Superman in a Batman helmet, a sentient dog, and a humanoid fox (not to be confused), along with various supermodels. Many or most are from the UK, but mourners and well-wishers from outside Britain are arriving too:
“My condolences for your loss from Germany,” says one.
“Even here in Switzerland they cancelled the normal programming,” says another, standing next to an angel and a dragon in knight’s armor. “It’s surreal.”
More images when (if?) the lag ebbs!
Update: Cajsa just sent me this somber image by Dazler Resident — “RIP Queen Elizabeth II”, shot in St Alban’s Church in Alba:
Also this one via Cajsa by Calamity Clowie — “I Rather It Were Coronation Day”:
Our thoughts are with the UK
Impressive unveiling by Linden Lab just now — real time puppetry for Second Life avatars:
We have been working on this feature for some time and now we are ready to open it up to the Second Life community for further development and to find out what amazing things our creators will do with this new technology… The codebase is alpha level and does contain its share of rough edges that need refinement, however the project is functionally complete and it is possible for the scriptors and creators of Second Life to start to try it out.
This is not just a lightweight “wave into your webcam and your avatar waves too” technology (which has existed for many years) but is meant to integrate much more devices — and the whole avatar:
We are excited about Puppetry’s potential to change the way we interact inside Second Life. For example, using a webcam to track your face and hands could allow your avatar to mimic your face animations and finger movement, or more natural positioning of the avatar’s hands and feet against in-world objects might also be possible. Alternative hardware could be used to feed information into Second Life to animate your avatar – a game controller or mocap equipment. There’s a lot to explore and try, and we invite the Second Life community to be involved in exploring the direction of this feature.
What’s even more exciting is that Second Life avatars recently got a Bento skeleton update, which makes them extremely articulate. You can see that in recent SL pics featured by Cajsa, where an avatar’s fingers down to individual joints are highly expressive.
Read about the announcement here,
Photo by Alexa Linden
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could animate your avatar in real time? What if you could wave your arm and your avatar could mimic your motions? Or imagine if your avatar could reach out and touch something inworld or perform animations? Linden Lab is exploring these possibilities with an experimental feature called “Puppetry.”
We have been working on this feature for some time and now we are ready to open it up to the Second Life community for further development and to find out what amazing things our creators will do with this new technology.
The codebase is alpha level and does contain its share of rough edges that need refinement, however the project is functionally complete and it is possible for the scriptors and creators of Second Life to start to try it out.
See the section below “How to participate” to learn how to use Puppetry yourself.
We have some basic things working with a webcam and Second Life but there’s more to do before it’s as animated as we want.
Puppetry accepts target transforms for avatar skeleton bones and uses inverse kinematics (IK) to place the connecting bones in order for the specified bones to reach their targets. For example the position and orientation “goal” of the hand could be specified and IK would be used to compute how the forearm, elbow, upper arm, and shoulder should be positioned to achieve it. The IK calculation can be tricky to get right and is a work in progress.
The target data is supplied by a plug-in that runs as a separate process and communicates with the viewer through the LLSD Event API Plug-in (LEAP) system. This is a lesser known functionality of the Viewer which has been around for a while but has, until now, only been used for automated test and update purposes.
The Viewer transmits the Puppetry data to the region server, which broadcasts it to other Puppetry capable Viewers nearby. The receiving Viewers use the same IK calculations to animate avatars in view.
For more details about the Puppetry technology, take a look at the Knowledge Base article Puppetry : How it Works
We are excited about Puppetry’s potential to change the way we interact inside Second Life. For example, using a webcam to track your face and hands could allow your avatar to mimic your face animations and finger movement, or more natural positioning of the avatar’s hands and feet against in-world objects might also be possible. Alternative hardware could be used to feed information into Second Life to animate your avatar – a game controller or mocap equipment. There’s a lot to explore and try, and we invite the Second Life community to be involved in exploring the direction of this feature.
The Puppetry feature requires a project viewer and can only be used on supporting Regions. Download the project Viewer at the Alternate Viewers page. Regions with Puppetry support exist on the Second Life Preview Grid and are named: Bunraku, Marionette, and Castelet.
When using the Puppetry Viewer in one of those regions, if someone there is sending Puppetry data you should see their avatar animated accordingly. To control your own avatar with Puppetry it’s a bit more work to set up the system. You need: a working Python3 installation, a plug-in script to run, and any Python modules it requires. If you are interested and adventurous: please give it a try. More detailed instructions can be found on the Puppetry Development page.
We look forward to seeing what our creators do with the new Puppetry technology. Compared to other features we have introduced, it’s quite experimental and rough around the edges, so please be patient! We will keep refining it, but before we go further we wanted to get our residents’ thoughts.
We will be hosting an open discussion inworld on Thursday, Sept 8 1:00PM SLT at the Bunraku, Marionette, and Castelet regions on the Preview Grid. We’re also happy to talk about this at the upcoming Server User Group or Content Creator meetings. Come by, let us know what you think, and hear about our future plans!
and compare/contrast with VRChat’s recently launched Avatar Dynamics project.
My immediate guess is that most Second Life users won’t use avatar puppetry for most occasions — after all, gesticulating into your webcam or with a mocap suit quickly gets exhausting — but it will still be a huge breakthrough for live performers at music/dance/theater shows, along with conference presenters. And yes, for that other use case you thought of first.
Have a great week from all of us at Zoha Islands/Fruit Islands
Photo (c) Peter Dazeley – Getty ImagesIn its latest trend report, the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) says that for victims of identity crimes and compromises, fraud and scams have reached levels that haven’t been seen in the last 20 years.
The ITRC said the biggest increases in the last year shook out like this:
Reports from victims of non-financial account takeover (235% increase over 2020)
Social media account takeover (1,044% increase over 2020)
Identity misuse involving government credentials or accounts (154% increase from 2019-2020 and 7% increase from 2020 to 2021)
When it comes to the targets identity thieves are looking for, the three largest are public agency information such as unemployment, SBA/PPP Loan, IRS info; financial info like checking/savings accounts, credit cards; and, thirdly, medical accounts.
“When we look back on 2021, it was a record-breaking year in so many different areas,” said Eva Velasquez, President and CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center. “We saw many different forms of identity crimes reach levels we have not seen since we were founded in 1999. With high water marks for identity fraud, compromises, and misuse, it’s important to take protective measures.”
The stories that the ITRC told in its report are pretty sad. One tale of woe came from a victim who said someone tried to apply for a credit card with his child’s personal information.
Another said they received a letter from the unemployment office under her deceased husband’s name – and her husband had passed away nine years earlier.
And ID thieves know no limits, either. An example of that, the ITRC said, came from a representative of a homeless shelter who called on a client’s behalf – a client who was applying for food stamps but was denied because the unemployment office said they had received $10,000 in unemployment funds.
With all that people have to do in their daily lives, the last thing they probably want to spend time on is being vigilant. To help readers focus on a manageable list of items, Consumer Affairs reached out to identity experts. To start, we asked ITRC Chief Victims Officer Mona Terry for her number one recommendation.
Keep your personal info to yourself. “Do not share your personal information, particularly with someone you do not know well,” Terry said. “Personal information includes your username and password, debit/credit card numbers, identification documents, and even one-time passcodes.”
Be careful about public wi-fi. “Be careful utilizing public Wi-Fi at coffee shops and public places, utilize a Virtual Private Network (VPN) on all your devices to make you a harder target,” suggested Christopher Sanders, president of the Palatin Group, a global intelligence and security firm.
Use multi-factor authentication. “The single most important way to protect against cyber threats is to use multi-factor authentication (MFA),” Daniel J. Siegel, secretary in the Law Practice Division at the American Bar Association, said.
“By requiring users to not only login, but also verify their identity by a second separate method, such as a texted code number, you will eliminate the overwhelming majority of threats. Many businesses, such as banks, will allow customers to create a code word for access. Studies show that MFA is the most effective means to protect your information.”
Monitor your credit score frequently. Daniel Markuson, digital privacy expert at NordVPN, gave Consumer Affairs this tip: “Monitor your credit score and use services that allow you to track different factors that influence your score over time. For example, when a scammer steals your identity to open new cards or loans in your name, and there is lack of payment, your credit score will likely drop even when you have not made any credit errors yourself.”
Consider opting out of most prescreened credit offers. ConsumerAffairs credits Texas’ Attorney General Ken Paxton for this. He suggests consumers who are tired of getting unsolicited credit or insurance offers – some of which may be identity thieves who steal mail – they can opt out of those mailings by calling 1-888-567-8688 or going to OptOutPreScreen, the official Consumer Credit Reporting Industry website to accept and process those requests.
Keep an eye out for Google Voice/Insta account takeover scams. “Don’t give verifications codes out to anyone, unless you specifically requested it through a login or other action,” Joshua Pardhe, a cybersecurity researcher at Arizona State University, said. “If anyone sends you a code from their side and asks you to read/send it back, it is an immediate scam.”
Don’t be shy about freezing your credit reports. Hari Ravichandran, founder and CEO at Aura, an online privacy safety service, offered this nugget when it came to credit reports: “One of the best ways to protect against this form of identity theft and protect your financial stability is to lock your credit to prevent criminals from using your stolen personal information against you,” Ravichandran said.
“This is offered through all three major credit bureaus and certain software and can conveniently be switched on and off in order to allow approved third-parties to access reports when needed. If you suspect that your personal information has been compromised in a data breach or otherwise, seriously consider freezing your credit in order to prevent bad actors from opening accounts or taking out loans in your name.”
Stop using weak passwords – like your dog’s name! Naftali Harris, Founder & CEO at SentiLink, said that “Even though a lot of the responsibility for preventing account takeovers and financial crimes lies with financial institutions, the public has to pull its share of the load, too. Using strong, unique passwords for all important services online such as bank accounts, email, and social media, ideally using a password manager.” The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) offers an excellent primer on how to create good passwords.
Don’t just focus on money-related accounts. “In addition to considering financial implications, you may want to review other types of accounts for misuse or misappropriation,” suggested Jenn Behrens, partner and executive vice president of Privacy and Security at Kuma LLC. “This can include government identities like Social Security numbers, drivers’ license numbers, phone accounts, and benefits. Medical identity theft and child identity theft are different types of fraud that can occur when your identity is stolen and require additional consideration for how to reduce potential negative impacts.”
Resist the click. “When you receive a suspicious email, text, or call, you may be the target of fraud,” suggests Carey O’Connor Kolaja is the CEO of AU10TIX, a provider of fully automated identity verification technology. “Don’t click, respond to or share the message. Screen for inconsistencies such as inaccurate or false information. Instead, reach out to the company or individual that contacted you to confirm their legitimacy.”
Act quickly if your accounts are compromised. Finally, this suggestion from Jim Van Dyke, senior vice president of Innovation at Sontiq, a TransUnion Company: “One of the most important things consumers can do to protect themselves against financial fraud is to take appropriate action when their information is compromised in a data breach. As someone uniquely interested in data breaches, I monitor newly reported data breaches and trends. Recent observation shows the number, and severity, of data breaches has spiked. Previously the average was 5-7 breaches today, and more recently it’s over 30.”
“In light of recent trends, one uncommon piece of advice for consumers who have had their medical account or patient data exposed is to review the safety of their medical information with the Medical Insurance Bureau. Similar to a credit report, consumers can verify the veracity of medical services provided, which may reveal medical ID crimes,” he said.
The ITRC offers both consumers and victims free support and guidance from a knowledgeable live advisor. That assistance is available by calling 888.400.5530 or visiting its live chat page.
Have A Fun And Safe Week From All Of Us At Zoha Islands/Fruit Islands
