Ready Player One

A Glimpse Of The Metaverse

 

 

 

---

 

As the room around me loaded into view, the rickety wooden stairs moaned under the weight of my descent. With each careful step, the musty air of the basement greeted me among the phosphorescent glow of retro nostalgia against the far wall. Unfinished structure enclosed the space, revealing the studs at a regular interval as if I had wandered into the skeleton of years gone by.

 

Aside from a few worn couches to my right, there was the obligatory shelf containing a plethora of Atari games accompanied by an old CRT television by which was connected to the artificial wood grain and black plastic containment of pixelated wizardry which defined my childhood.

 

This was no ordinary basement in Second Life, but rather it was the Basement from the book Ready Player One, lovingly recreated by the VSTE staff for their book club discussions.

 

Over the summer, they and a handful of students have been reading the novel which is currently in production for a feature length film by none other than Stephen Spielberg.

 

Pulling out my virtual reality copy of the book, I held it in my hand.

 

It was a personal creation of mine, a Universal Book Prop that I thought was relevant for the occasion – borne of my attention to detail in the existence of both the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Complete Sherlock Holmes I had conjured through digital spellcasting, otherwise known as the toolbox.

 

But it was the arcade replicas against the back wall which I felt most proud of for this Basement – Joust, Tempest, and a Pac-Man machine specifically created to have that iconic 1981 US Quarter on the marquee. In this moment, I felt like Halliday, the creator of OASIS and the very same mindset permeated throughout me as I surveyed the room.

 

On August 8th, 2016, I had been invited to attend the final discussion for VSTE for the book club, of which Ready Player One had been chosen, and it was here in this recreation of The Basement that we gathered together. Some wearing outfits inspired by the characters, while others appeared in casual clothes.

 

I was wearing my favorite long coat jacket, a type of Civil War era style (I would imagine) and a simple pair of blue jeans with white sneakers. Of course, I had on my obligatory glasses, which in a virtual world seems like a hipster accessory at best, but I’ve always strived to represent myself in avatar form as closely as possible to my real self.

 

As I greeted everyone in the room, I quietly took a seat at the end of the garishly colored sofa, admiring the decorations in the room and attention to minute details – just as Halliday would have wanted it.

 

And so it began, my foray into the realm of educational inspiration in a virtual world, partaking in an immersive experience straight out of a book that all in the room were familiar with. Participants from around the world, all gathered in this virtual world experience.

 

For a moment, my mind drifted to the OASIS system as I found parallels to Second Life as a sort of pre-cursor. Would something like the OASIS be the revolution we’re waiting for when it comes to a full scale Metaverse?

 

In a way, I believe that to be true. However it comes with a few caveats.

 

---

 

Into the OASIS

 

 

 

While not the highest fidelity attainable, the open sandbox type virtual world model in and of itself happens to be the best choice for underlying mechanic when it comes to the Metaverse. However, that is where things get more muddled in comparison.

 

See, in a construct such as OASIS in Ready Player One, it is explained that making a character is free, but any sort of substantial fast-travel is going to cost you. In effect, a tax on teleportation. There is (of course) the marketplace type system whereby the user generated content, plus system level artifacts (created by Gregarious Systems) and resources could be bought, sold and traded.

 

Sure you can teleport at will, but because it was tied to a scarce resource model (credits or energy) you would notice that other means of hierarchy arose. A long while back, I had proposed a similar type of system as a checklist of what a Metaverse would likely encompass, and while the OASIS in the fictional sense of Ready Player One comes very close, it isn’t spot on.

 

For instance, you would likely have to have a resource mining system in order to facilitate the raw materials needed to create items. This in and of itself helps regulate the prices and availability of items which we can sell, trade, etc. Especially if those items will degrade in some manner during usage or over time.

 

As it stands in Second Life, items simply do not degrade or effectively break. So when you buy something off of marketplace, that item is pretty much infinite and lasts forever (or until you trash it).

 

There is also the underlying idea that virtual worlds should be on spherical planets, with a full “outer space” to explore. Somewhere in the digital universe are other planets, or if you’ve made one (instead of exploring) it would be nestled at a coordinate somewhere in space.

 

This follows the OASIS line of thought. If you build a space faring vehicle, you should be able to launch into outer space and explore other planets.

 

In the same manner, you should be able to mine for resources to facilitate the creation of items using an in-world toolbox (user generated content and environment). There should also be a centralized Marketplace for the purchase and sale of those creations.

 

By way of comparison, Second Life isn’t really a Metaverse system. In my original definition, it would look a lot more like OASIS from the book Ready Player One, with the caveat that the planets themselves wouldn’t be a central company (OASIS) importing pre-existing virtual worlds under a single umbrella (World of Warcraft, etc) but instead, a company like OASIS would create the underlying toolkit, SDK and APIs to hook into OASIS and allow those third party systems to participate in a decentralized manner.

 

So maybe Blizzard Entertainment would merely add the APIs and such to the existing World of Warcraft, allowing it to exist in OASIS as a planet, but still housed primarily on Blizzard’s servers for their world.

 

As a result, we would see something like a combination of OSGrid, HighFidelity, and OASIS put together. Recently, I came across a video which highlighted these basic premises together under a single engine – While it is still in early technical alpha phase, I found it quite intriguing.

 

---

 

Dual Universe

 

 

The real life version of OASIS

 

 

 

If I were to build a Metaverse system from the ground up, my first inclination would be to begin with Dual Universe as the underlying engine. In turn, Dual Universe uses CSSC (Continuous Single-Shard Cluster) technology that they have developed themselves, but is along the same lines as how  Improbable works in order to facilitate the massive multi-user scalability which enables them to do a full universe like this on a single shard.

 

---

 

CONTINUOUS SINGLE-SHARD CLUSTER

 

To handle potentially millions of players simultaneously in the same universe at the same time, NovaQuark have developed their own technology, that they call a Continuous Single-shard Cluster. The challenge is to handle situations when thousands of players will gather in tight spaces, like in a city, or a space battle and to do this without interrupting the gameplay. This involves what they call "Dynamic Space Splitting", server nodes are assigned to regions that are more densely populated, and these change the frequency of updates of remote entities to maintain a fluid experience for nearby entities.

 

---

 

Upon reading their definition of CSSC, I’m quite excited because they are essentially putting into practice the very idea that I said would be able to break the concurrency limit for a single shard full universe. When I originally suggested it in the research paper, and later to Linden Lab (who effectively patted me on the head and ignored it), the idea was simply this:

 

If you have many servers running and each server handles a region – why not take the compute power of the entire datacenter and intelligently increase or decrease the processing where it is needed?

 

In effect, all the areas that see low traffic would have tons of compute cycles going to waste, while the high traffic areas are crumbling under the weight of crowds. Why not just assign the extra workload to the unused computer power in the entirety of the datacenter throwing effectively a distributed supercomputer at the areas that required it, taking from the areas that didn’t?

 

As Dr. Gilbert, Dr. Dionisio and I had written in 3D Virtual Worlds and the Metaverse: Current Status and Future Possibilities in 2013:

 

“From the surveyed work, an overall architectural strategy based on DSG (with a high-performance “world state” system like Red Dwarf at its core), peer-to-peer openness as seen in Open Cobalt and Solipsis for broad distribution of load (not an exclusively technological challenge), and reduction/optimization techniques like action-based protocols appears to hold the most promise for massive scaling of an integrated virtual world system.”

 

ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 45, No. 3, Article 34, Page 31

 

 

In the same train of thought, I also suggested that everyone’s cache be part of a redundant, distributed peer-to-peer file storage cluster (much like how Ownerless File Format works). Then you add in the peer-to-peer architecture of something like Solipsis in how your avatar updates in relation to others (cascading information) and you have a very powerful system capable of millions of concurrent users in real time for a persistent contiguous virtual universe. While there is still the underlying centralized computer clusters from the main company (like Linden Lab) a lot of the power ends up being offloaded in high-concurrency areas through the Solipsis methodologies.

 

In contrast, Second Life technology, whether it is represented by Linden Lab or a derivative of OSGrid (OpenSim) uses many shards with a fraction of the concurrency per region. It’s not very efficient as a baseline architecture, but it’s good for what it is considering how long ago it was created.

 

Something that bothers me, though, is how the instances of published spaces are still the normality in new projects (like SANSAR). I wouldn’t expect SANSAR or even hifidelity.io to have a full universe contiguous and single shard like Dual Universe does.

 

So I would be borrowing the mentality of decentralized planets, each maybe owned by a different person or entity and running independently, but all hooked into an OASIS style universe represented accordingly.

 

Of course, the planets are spherical and able to have user-generated content on them, as well as editing the terrain and so forth. This takes care of the age old question: Where will I sail my boat? With this underlying setup, there is no such thing as “region crossing” because it is all entirely contiguous and fluid transition – whether you are moving around a planet or leaving the atmosphere into space.

 

If anything, by structuring a Metaverse like this, we not only allow but create a need for these standard methods of travel. By introducing the resource scarcity and need into the simulation, we organically watch civilizations grow out of necessity. The towns, cities, highways, space ports, airports, and so on. Trade routes arise organically as a result.

 

The thing here is – Dual Universe likely isn’t going to take these latter routes for a Metaverse, but stay a walled garden only.

 

Nonetheless, the potential is already there if it ever wanted to be something bigger like the OASIS system.

 

 

Up close with Dual Universe

 

---

 

The Paradox of Movement

 

Another unanswered question concerning the recreation of the OASIS would simply be “How do we allow people to move freely in this virtual universe?”

 

This is a major question to ask, because as of yet we haven’t really answered it. With Oculus Rift, HTC VIVE and other head mounted displays for virtual reality, the best practices manuals all directly state that allowing free movement of the avatar/character should be avoided or else you’ll cause motion sickness (cybersickness).

 

The solution, as of this moment, isn’t really a solution so much as nerfing the virtual world altogether.

 

Teleport Movement mechanic is the chosen strategy… and I’d like to say that while it does work, I think we can do much better than that. For most of these games and experiences, we’ve taken a highly complex simulation of a 3D world in lush detail and nuance, and then turned it into a point and click adventure.

 

There is only A + B point to point, but nothing in between. With systems like Dual Universe (and Second Life) you need to be able to move around freely and not via point to point teleport. You need to be able to simply walk from one location to another without getting sick.

 

Sadly, the HMD alone can never solve this (no matter what Oculus or HTC tell you). Because at the end of the day, the visual systems might be fixed to reduce or eliminate sickness, but movement hasn’t been fixed. The problem is now down to the visuals telling your brain that you are running or moving, while your inner ear tells your brain that’s a lie.

 

Scenes in Ready Player One where Wade is sitting in the van with the headset on wouldn’t likely be possible for using OASIS because he’d get very sick from doing so.

 

More plausible is when he is later attached to the full haptics rig for OASIS, in which case I’d absolutely agree it was possible. At the very least you need a good omnidirectional treadmill to let your physical body know when you are actually moving around.

 

But I digress (as usual). The point is: The Metaverse is arising out of unrelated parts and projects, and it is now possible to actually build it properly.

 

 

Until then, I guess we’ll just have to use out imagination, read a book, and watch the movie next year when it’s released.

 

---

 

Let the hunt begin!

 

---

The Elegance of Subtlety

How the smallest details make the biggest impact. #SecondLife

 

 

Cinemagraph technique by Jamie Beck: @_frommetoyou on twitter

 

I’ve always been an advocate for the advancement of immersion in virtual environments and, despite appearances, this almost always entails an attention to detail which otherwise go unnoticed in the grand reveal. The question to me isn’t whether or not such subtleties go without recognition, but whether or not the prospect of attention for subconscious inclusions actually make a lasting impact on the user experience. Many times it is not what we see but what we construct within the confines of our own mind which create a total experience.

 

This also extends to the realm of what we do not see or experience as well, since the lack of certain expected details often give focus to what remains, and barring that, leave only the inadequate half-immersion which does more to destroy our immersion than to create it.

 

The subject of this article centers around a photographic technique known as Cinemagraph, in which only certain elements are given motion while the majority of the image remains frozen in time. The brilliance of this technique lay within the notion of selective subtlety in drawing attention to that which would engage the viewer the most in order to tell a deeper story. Remember this as you continue reading.

 

A virtual environment, then, is the construct of the mind in so much as what we experience is not entirely what is directly implied. The mind is a powerful tool, which when engaged will gladly fill in blanks which we did not notice were missing in order to create a more synergistic and harmonious environment of experience. It is when we, as the creators of these immersive environments, forget such large parts of the environment in our design that the mind of the person experiencing our creation falls short and creates a disconnect. One could say that when the expectations of the mind are not met, there becomes a cognitive dissidence whereby the mind, (instead of easily constructing), is instead focused on reconciling the elements which are either missing or out of harmony.

 

A simple example of this can be seen in the way that we handle audio in a virtual environment, wherein the majority of constructs simply do not, instead opting to forego the details in this area with the inclusion of streaming music. While streaming music has a place within a virtual environment, it should never be implemented as a designer’s crutch as many of us already do. As such, we begin with a realistic notion of where to begin for the creation of our virtual environments in that when we are bringing our imagination to fruition, we should be willing to adequately deconstruct all of the elements of immersion for our benefit.

 

While there are quite a lot of examples wherein the concept of complete cognitive immersion has been taken into account, such as the wonderful works of Bryn Oh, we must come to terms with the idea that these examples are shining exceptions to the rule. Too often we create our environments without any further thought into the complexity of immersion or what longer lasting effects the lack thereof will have on our audience. This, to me, is very disconcerting in that what we continually create happens to invoke an experience of repetition or disconnect for the sake of focusing only on one aspect of our environment.

 

If we were to take into account the idea of virtual environment nightclubs, there are few and far between which offer any experience above and beyond that of a cardboard box which happens to have a shoutcast stream. In what can only be construed as a further misunderstanding of the circumstances involved, our notion of what constitutes an “event” has become so horribly warped that there becomes little difference in simply attending versus an evening elsewhere on the grid.

 

Should this be by design or intention matters little in the bigger picture because what we are left with in the long tail are categories of events which are about as exciting as spending a night alone. There are only so many times one can participate in a “hunt” before it becomes old hat, and the same holds true for clubs which promote a contest board, which hardly qualifies as a contest by any means – by which I will say “Best In [Insert Clothes Style]” became overplayed a month after the first club owner decided it was a good idea.

 

An event is much more than this, but we’ve become so accustomed to these lowered expectations that raising the bar at this point would simply be a matter of sitting up from the metaphorical floor.

 

Qualitative Deconstruction

 

At best, one can express our current situation as one by which within the early domain of initial design we make smaller mistakes and assumptions which later culminate into larger disconnects within our end-results. It is our own undoing through bad assumptions early in the process which later become issues that likely contribute to the nonexistence of the venue as a whole. Much like a snowball, what looks and seems inconsequential on the onset quickly forms an avalanche which later becomes unwieldy.

 

Let us focus, then, on the simplicity of audio. For all intents and purposes, this should be the easiest aspect of our environments to master, yet time and again we find that the concept is easier said than done. As a result, most choose to forego the detail of audio immersion altogether and focus on ways to drown out or distract from this glaring metaphor shear. So, too, we see actual environment design without any consideration for the actual environment or the participants within it – focusing only on the predefined goals of the environment intention while giving no second thought, if a first thought at all was given, to what brings it all together.

 

The elegance of simplicity is what drives the virtual environment, not in the aspect of less is more (though this is certainly true), but in choosing what that “less” will be for the highest impact and immersion. The goal of any virtual environment designer should be, from the beginning, to create a space in which your visitors will feel compelled to not only remain but to bring others with them. In order to accomplish this, you must understand immersion.

 

Again, in the aspect of audio, we think of things such as ambient audio. Can we close our eyes and not be taken from your environment? There are, arguably, only two real aspects of immersion available to us in virtual environments, two senses which are the foundation – sight and sound. Very few are capable of uniting both in immersion, and fewer still are capable of doing so convincingly.

 

To elaborate, a shoutcast stream is not your audio immersion - it is supplementary to the audio immersion underlying.

 

If you turn off the music and the world becomes dead silent, you have failed. Furthermore, automated gestures are not a qualifier for your audio immersion either, just in case you were thinking about using that as your crutch as well. The point is this: If you neglect the ambient audio (the simplicity aspects) you are omitting half of your environment up front. Why on earth would you willingly cut out half of your immersion advantage before you bother to start?

 

In the area of design, there are countless items I could focus on for immersion, much of which ask exceedingly dumb questions which should not have to be asked, yet it seems nobody has bothered to actually ask them in the first place. For instance, if you force your visitors to traverse a mall at length prior to actually reaching their intended destination, you have failed to grasp many important things about both design and human nature (Blackhearts Café comes to mind).

 

Blackhearts Café : ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ | How the mighty have fallen… into a pile of spam.

 

 

I can easily think of hundreds of ways to avoid that scenario while drastically improving the return and visitor satisfaction levels. Conversely, does the actual experience itself (your venue) extend past the doors in a believable manner? A lot of times that answer is no. In the case of Blackhearts Café they really don’t have an excuse since the entire sim is under their control. I can give other, smaller, venues a pass simply because they have no control over the rest of the sim they reside on. However, I point the finger at the actual sim owners for not planning and enforcing a total design plan. Something so simple and subtle when ignored turns into a clusterfsk later on. Ask Blackhearts Café.

 

I’d like to point out, however, that while Blackhearts Café seems to have taken a nosedive in quality, (I used to hang out there all the time), there is another club in SecondLife that just goes overboard in the attention to detail. I Love the 80’s wins this hands down and is my new favorite place for the 80’s in SecondLife.

 

 

I Love The 80’s: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ | Clearly they love the 80’s and you.

 

 

In much the same manner, if people are only attending your location for short periods of time, and those times happen to be when you are essentially bribing them with contests or prizes, then you are entirely missing the point. It also means that you have absolutely no idea how to create a long term engagement in a virtual environment, unless you count creating a Pavlovian response mechanism of people expecting free money or prizes every time you ring a bell.

 

I will give a pass to a handful of venues where this is concerned, because they do manage to continually draw a crowd and a DJ in and of itself is not a cause for concern or scorn if you have taken care to actually put thought into the rest of your environment design. Locations such as Fogbound Blues and I Love the 80’s in SecondLife come to mind as an example of design and immersion, although there isn’t much more to be experienced than the staple of dancing, listening to music, and chatting.

 

If we were to break that down further to base components, we’d find that even those are lowering the bar of expectation to something unrecognizable in that chatting isn’t a novel idea, nor is listening to music, and even the notion of “dancing” in SecondLife is really just an excuse to loop an animation and go AFK for awhile. Not terribly exciting. While I’m not entirely against these things, I’d like to point out that certainly we should be holding ourselves to a higher standard than even this. I’m sure I could point out the audio immersion portion and apply it to in-world clubs, and while internally I actually do, externally I am giving them a pass with just a heads up that there needs to be more.

 

 

 

Fogbound Blues: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ | Excellent Design, Great Staff, Definitely Worth a Visit

 

 

 

The question then becomes: “What else is there?”

 

Is the simulation in synergy? That is to say, are there many elements which are unrelated through the simulation space which are tied together in order to create a wider immersive offering? Once again, we are focusing on the overall design aspects as well as attention to the simplicity of certain details which we often overlook.

 

If you own a storefront in the virtual world, the question becomes whether or not you have thought about the totality of the experience that you are creating or if you are relying purely on a DIY experience of automation. If your store has little differentiation to the counterpart available on Marketplace, then we must ask the obvious question of why anyone would bother to visit your store. In limited cases, I have experienced a viable answer to this question in that the customer service aspect becomes the reason for in-world participation, by providing something that the automated catalog online cannot – human interaction.

 

When I visit a storefront, my immediate criteria is usually whether there is an in-store representative during reasonable business hours of operation. Think about your store for a moment and ask yourself that same question realistically. If you were to walk into a store and find that there was a representative but that representative was nonresponsive, or in the case of our beloved SecondLife an automated bot with a canned greeting, does this somehow devalue the experience? The answer is of course, absolutely. It says to your patrons that you cannot be bothered to spend time in your own store, yet somehow expect your customers to do so.

 

Whether you are a busy designer or not isn’t part of the debate, because if you are actually that busy, then you would also understand the concept of micro-management and hiring a staff in order to split the workload appropriately and free up your time personally to focus on the things that only you are capable of doing.

 

 

 

Bax Coen: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★  | Well Designed, Good Products, and Customer Representatives

 

 

For this, I give stores such as Bax Coen my appreciation in that the owner definitely understands the merit of attention to elegant subtlety and provides application of the theory. When you arrive there, not only are you greeted by a well designed store, but you are often times actually greeted by an in-store representative whose sole purpose is to help customers. This is one of those elegant subtleties which often is overlooked when taking into account an entire environment.

 

To a lesser extent, Lapointe and Bastchild offers similar treatment in that there are representatives on duty to help you with your shopping or questions sometimes. I am not certain if this is ongoing or whether the times I happened to be there that there were representatives, but the idea is sound. Revisiting the main store, I found it to be completely devoid, so I can only assume it was a fluke.

 

On the polar opposite end of the spectrum, we see large name such as Blacklace and Alphamale wherein, while the store and selection are top notch, offer nothing in the manner of differentiation for why using an automated DIY Marketplace to shop for their products would be less beneficial to actually attending their in-world store.

 

The same can be stated concerning [hoorenbeek] with the exception that the sole benefit seems to be that the marketplace offering is limited compared to the in-world store, although the product displays in-world are excellent, I find the lack of actual customer service representatives in a large brand name store like [hoorenbeek] to be somewhat disturbing. There is definitely room for improvement, despite their products being great.

 

 

Alphamale & Blacklace: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ | Excellent design, clothing is top notch. No staff.

 

Epilogue

 

Generally speaking, we can focus on any number of things having to do with our virtual environments, but the biggest game changers are often the smallest and most subtle ones. Ambient audio changes everything around you, attention to details when designing and building shows a level of caring usually not given, and actually thinking in advance how to make your environment work in synergy goes a long way to a successful virtual space.

 

You’ll know you’ve gotten it right when you can take away the contest boards and stupid gimmicks only to find that people continue to stick around for many hours – even when you aren’t there to watch over your own place.

 

If you have to force people to do something or invoke gimmicks or bribery to attract a crowd, you’re going down the wrong path.

 

Just remember… The Elegance of Subtlety.

 

 

 

 

 

Something I've been working on :)

Hey, just another day here at VR5 Online... drink some Coca Cola, watch some TV, play some video games, and make some custom photo realistic heads for use in the AW browser.

Oh wait.. that last one isn't so normal. Well, anyway - that is something that has been occupying my time along with the Prometheus project. I was set out on the task of figuring out how to make realistic avatar heads. So my inspiration to start were the heads used in Active Worlds and Second Life shown below (respectively).

The first is obviously the best example of a Second Life avatar face I could find off hand (though there are undoubtedly others). The next in line is the latest incarnation of avatar style from Active Worlds Inc (though there are working on avs that at least look as good as Second Life). And last but not least is my entry into this forum of 3D Modeling, as taken from the Active Worlds environment (all snapshots of my head are taken live from the AW environment).

Here are a few more pictures at different angles so you can get a better look, click each for the full size image:

The head itself is using a 512x512 texture map custom made by me, and the actual 3D model of the head is also custom made using specialized software which I will leave unnamed for the time being. The total number of polygons for the head itself is about 3,000 - although I am sure it could be optimized a bit more if needed.

The obvious lack of hair on the head (other than the texture map) is due to a lack of a separate layer added over top the head for hair to blend into the underlying texture map on the skull. Remember, this is a base head and not the finished deal.

Ambient is set to 0.5 on the head in order to give it a nice self shadowing effect in the light. Also, turned the culling on in the model itself so the inside would not display (which prolly ups the frame rate a bit in light of the 3,000 polygons). All in all, I believe that the face of an avatar is what people are paying attention to most of the time, so why not focus most of the detail there and skimp on the rest of the body if you need to?

There are two ways I'm thinking I could go for the hair, but I believe I will be testing out the usage of Shader 2.0 effects for dynamic and flowing hair on these heads (yes I made more than one, I'm just showing you this one) and yes I am really enjoying these HDR Lighting and Shaders lately... too bad neither AW nor Second Life have HDRI or Shaders... oh well.

Well, thats about it for now -

In Other News

Will be starting a project with Digitell Incorporated in New York State in the next few weeks. Working on a new Galaxy server with them for Expos and Conferences. I think I am the BASF guy involved (meaning I don't make a lot of the things you use, I make them better). Or in other words, I'm technical consultant, designer and all around creative solutions guy.

Hence the Photo heads, by the way. Clients of Digitell Inc will more than likely want the ability to have their avatars look exactly like them in real life - so I figured I would start with a test using my own face. The head was made using 2 photos and roughly 3 hours of modeling (which is why it's not *exactly* right).

Anyway, aside from Prometheus (which is coming along nice, by the way), this is what will be occupying most of my time here at VR5 Online. So busy, busy, busy....

Well, back to work :)

Looking for LOLCats - William Burns