Spun fantasy: The Metaverse Broadcasting Company

There's a new sim on the grid featuring lacy, gossamer-like buildings that almost defy description. The structures are somewhat Moorish, highly articulated, and futuristic, too, thanks to their aqua-tinted bubble windows. You will recognize the style if you were familiar with Planet Mongo which, by the way, is gone! The sim is still there, but it seems that new plans for it are in the works.



Lumiere Noir has made a virtual career of teaching others to create in Second Life® via his self-guided, self-paced, hands-on tutorials of the in-world building tools at his Ivory Tower of Prims, but he didn't stop there. His vehicles are fantastical and incredibly fun, and his Flash Gordon-inspired sim was one of my favorite creations on the grid.

Robustus Hax and Dousa Dragonash of the Metaverse Broadcasting Company (MBC) commissioned Lumiere to create this spun fantasy, which he accomplished with less than 6,000 prims. Look for the pinneapple! The saxophone! The turtle head! Look up through the inside of buildings, and down at them from above. Exquisite, precision detailing.



Lumiere is planning a suspension bridge between this sim and another that will have a conference center. He says he's never had more fun doing a build. Teleport directly from here.

See also:

• The best teacher you never knew you had
• The city that glows
• Greetings from Planet Mongo!
• Lumiere Noir's personal tour of Planet Mongo
• How to visit the Garden of NPIRL Delights
• A run-in with a rocket scooter

Lumiere Noir's personal tour of Planet Mongo - It's the next stop on the Koinup-NPIRL Safari

Combine Antoni Gaudí and Paulo Portoghesi's architectural styles with a handful of The Jetsons' flair and a sprinkle of kitch, and voila! You have Planet Mongo, the one-of-a-kind, always changing, fantastical Flash Gordon-inspired sim created by the master of building himself... Lumiere Noir.



"Howdy, howdy!"
This Saturday, October 18 at 11:30am SLT, and waiting on the other side of your teleport (Planet Mongo slurl) will be Lumiere Noir (aka Vince Frost; rez 12/24/2003), there to give you a personal tour of one of the most photogenic sims on the grid: Planet Mongo.



Among many other things, he is the creator of the Ivory Tower of Prims where most everyone has learned to build, and also many of the most imaginative and fanciful vehicles in Second Life®.



The event will be the second in a series as part of the Not Possible IRL and Impossible IRL groups' partnership with Koinup - an inclusive social networking site for all Virtual Worlds that permits storage and sharing of imagery: photography, Machinima, and "storyboards." Among the Virtual Worlds you'll find images of on Koinup: Second Life®, World of Warcraft, Lively, The Sims, IMVU, vSide, Kaneva, There, and more.

Planet Mongo has its own page on Koinup, which you will find here.



Once a month, NPIRL and Koinup are offering tours - the NPIRL Safaris - with many of Second Life's best content creators, exposing the participants to new sims, new content, and new ideas that are leaving the old world behind and breaching the future. See you there!

The Not Possible IRL (NPIRL) and Impossible IRL (ImpIRL) groups are dedicated to identifying and sharing well conceived and realized content creation in Virtual Worlds which would not be possible in Real Life: architecture, landscaping, art, animations, fashion, particle effects, building tools and scripts... show me, I'll show you.

The city that glows

If you are a fan of Flash Gordon, then you know that all the action takes place on Planet Mongo, a kingdom ruled by the evil Ming the Merciless. And if you follow the story in the newest Flash Gordon series produced by the SciFi Channel, then you are also aware that Mongo was once an exquisite blue and green planet until a tragic accident caused a poisonous gas to be released into the atmosphere that very nearly destroyed it.

There is a person among us who knows all these things about Flash Gordon and more. So ingrained is his affection for the science fiction hero and his planet, in fact, that he has envisioned and fashioned his own Mongo in Second Life®: a glowy, art deco-ish extravaganza of a place.

It is hard to believe that we visited it just five months ago (teleport directly from here)... it is quite, quite different.



Some people are devoted learners and lucky for us, some are devoted teachers, but Lumiere Noir, creator of the Ivory Tower of Prims, happens to be both. Lumiere also has a predilection for things kitsch and camp, and he absolutely, unqualifiably delights in all things Flash Gordon, especially the 80s movie.

Combine all his passion with incandescent opalescent glow, toss in the architecture of a genie's bottle, erect a modernized Chrysler Building, recreate the sweeping stairways of a 30's movie and voila! Planet Mongo!




And it's a shopping mall! Lumiere's Planet Mongo was destined to become a retail venue for his vehicles, furniture by Red Randt (including the best bookshelves I've ever seen on the grid), and some upcoming surprises by Avi Arrow.




Larry Pixel, CEO of the New Media Consortium has this to say about Lumiere Noir: (He) represents the best of Second Life -- he communicates an excitement around the possible, is engaged in continuous exploration of it, and shares everything he learns selflessly. I wish more of the residents of Second Life understood its ethos as well as Lumiere. He is one of those rare people who make Second Life a better place simply because they are part of it.

Lumiere Noir - The best teacher you never knew you had

If Second Life® has an aristocracy... meaning an elite group of people who act behind the scenes with an interest in benefiting the entire population, then Lumiere Noir is a true aristocrat. Yes, there are people who are perhaps better known... limelight-happy, if you will... but I've come to think that many of them reflect rather than generate light.

He didn't invent the tools, but Lumiere (who's name means "light" in French) has single-handedly taught thousands upon thousands of Second Life's residents (and probably you, dear Reader) how to build via his Ivory Tower of Prims (teleport directly from here).



A model of the first Ivory Tower of Prims above; and below, the actual Tower
The trouble with interviewing Lumiere Noir is that he is too good a conversationalist, and so our talks, which spread out over a number of days, strayed off to many unrelated and engrossing topics. To give you some idea, I have over 50 pages of logged conversations and notes! He is - at once - fascinating and fascinated with all worlds, both virtual and real, and well read, and curious as all get out.



Tell us about the man behind your avatar.
Lumiere Noir: I'm Vince Frost, I live in Plano, Texas, which is close to Dallas. I'm an English-as-a-Second-Language teacher at a high school in Plano. I teach 12th graders world literature, and I've done that for about 11 years now. My background is in art, but I discovered teaching after I graduated. I love teaching.

What is your favorite book to share with them?
Lumiere Noir: Pygmalion... I see them all as Eliza Doolittle! Their story is a little similar and language is what holds them back in this country, just as Eliza's accent holds her back, but I don't see myself as Henry Higgins! They are mostly Spanish speakers, from Central and South America, as well as a lot of Chinese. I specialize in the Chinese, and Mandarin is my second language. I mastered in art, and when I was about to graduate, I fell in with the Chinese community at my university. Through them, I got some connections, and went to Taiwan. I had planned to go for a year and learn the language and culture, and wound up staying almost four. I taught English to support myself and studied Chinese, and traveled a lot in Asia. This was between 1988 and 1991.

How did a man with this background end up in Second Life, on… Christmas eve! (Rez: 12/24/2003)
Lumiere Noir: I came here via The Sims Online, which I liked but it was so limited, and later There.com. What I loved about that world is that there was so much to explore, but most of it was made by the creators of There. One could create things but it was expensive. I hated being nickel-and-dimed to death... How do you say that in the U.K.? I made several things in There, mostly clothes… very eccentric things. Then I started hearing about this place. I tried Second Life in early Beta but I'm afraid to say I hated it. It was just so awkward, so I stayed in There until late 2003.

You were in Second Life earlier then?
Lumiere Noir: That was as a different avatar. SwenKong Wu I think... I can't remember the password :-) Probably no longer exists. (Note: It doesn’t). I was Swen_Wu_Kong in There, and Wu was available here at that time.


The Ivory Tower of Primitives today

How did the Ivory Tower of Prims come about?
Lumiere Noir: I love to make things, and I love to teach. Making the Tower was a natural thing for me as a teacher. I taught myself to build, and my first impulse was to turn around and teach it to others, but I quickly found that I didn't like teaching in-world very much.

So you created the tutorials instead! Have you held anniversary parties at the Tower?
Lumiere Noir: I have....I used to do a lot of things here. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I'm on to other projects at the moment. I tend to work on the Tower in the summers. It sort of lies fallow, except for maintenance work until the summer, and then I go through and add new things, and revise.

In an interview with Hamlet Au, back in June 2004, Lumiere described the Ivory Tower by saying, "[T]his is a user interface about a user interface. I like it when there are layers of reality and simulated reality that go in layers like this... I've interviewed a lot of master builders to get tips and tricks and experience and building methods that go beyond my own."

Lumiere Noir: It’s now pretty current, except it doesn't cover sculpties. That's okay with me on the whole because you have to learn about sculpties in conjunction with the 3D modeler you use and there's no way for me to cover all of them. Sculpties are a lot like scripting. It's best learned on the web. I can't cover Blender, Maya, Studio 3D Max and all the others :-)

Featuring a series of self-taught, self-paced lessons on how to build with prims, the Tower, is a lively place filled with newbies, doing what newbies do. Some are lost in concentration, while others are discovering gestures or editing their appearance.



It must take incredible patience to be Lumiere Noir. While standing at the Ivory Tower for about 20 minutes the other day, I was offered unsolicited, undiscussed friendship twice, and asked for help another three.



Earlier this month, Torley Linden made another one of his terrific videos, this time featuring a tour of the Ivory Tower of Prims and its sandbox.



Lumiere Noir: I got hooked on Second Life when I rezzed my first prim. Up until then I thought the world was interesting, but chaotic and a bit trashy. Then one day I accidentally rezzed a prim and I was amazed.

Accidentally?
Lumiere Noir: Yes! I was trying to ride a motorcycle away, missed hitting “ride,” and hit “create” instead. Newbie me! I became so fascinated with that prim. I learned everything you can do with it. I think I still have it somewhere, but I did so many things with it, and began learning about scripting with it.

That same prim???
Lumiere Noir: Yes, for two weeks it was me and my prim! Not long after that I met Starax. We started about the same time, and we both worked in Morris, the greeting area at that time. We were friends and friendly rivals. We took very different directions over time, and don't talk as much as I'd like to, but he's one of my dearest friends here. He'll hate me for saying this, but under all that crust beats a heart of gold. The crust is there to protect it.

So you and Starax were working at Morris, and you were with this one poor prim…
Lumiere Noir: Yes, I saw all these crazy things he was doing, and I was learning and experimenting. He'd build something, and sometimes I'd build my own and he'd get mad because at that time mine was better. Except maybe he did his in an hour and I'd spend a couple of weeks on mine. But he's really the genius of this place!

I was playing with architecture, virtual of course. My style was always pretty weird. The thing that always distresses me about this place is that we have so much available to us to create with, but most people seem to make the same everyday airplanes, cars and buildings. I realize that a lot of that has to do with comfort level. We like what's familiar, but we can do so much more.


The first dome for the Tower


The second dome

Lumiere Noir: Back then land was very cheap and I got all the land I could in one of the last landgrabs. The Lindens used to release land for a $1L per m2. I don't think there were more than 20 or 30 sims when I first arrived and, oddly enough, that seemed large. (I) got most of Natoma over time, and started getting land in Noyo. Noyo was a busy sim because it had a telehub - back when we had to travel telehub to telehub - so I first built the library there.

Do you pay tier for this land that the Tower sits on?
Lumiere Noir: No, but I had the pleasure of paying a lot of money for a couple of years. The Lindens now sponsor it, and I'm very thankful for that.

As well they should! It would be a scandal otherwise.
Lumiere Noir: I've never asked for contributions. Most of the people that use the place are newbies. Word got out that I'd only ever had two supporters in the history of the Tower, about the time I put up the new Tower, maybe two years ago. They posted that on forums, and people started contributing a lot. A while after that the Lindens became sponsors. I gave over all my land here in Natoma and they left me in control of it.



How closely do you work with the Lindens? An official FIC, huh?
Lumiere Noir: Lol....screw the FIC and the anti FIC! I just do my work... hang out with close friends; I really don't care about the rest. Truthfully, (the Lindens) are like silent partners. I almost never hear a thing from them. I know they keep an eye on the place. I've got to tell you about my partner in crime here, Avi Arrow. She helps a ton with this place.

She never said a word about it! What is her role?
Lumiere Noir: I don't see how I could do what I do without her. Avi heads up the group Ivory Tower Dwellers, which she keeps running smoothly, and they help us keep watch over it. I mostly keep my nose down and make things. I have my own way of looking (after) them, but Avi keeps it together.

“Lumiere is a dear and trusted friend - my best friend in here, really. I've known Lumi for 23 months, yet much of what I know about him, I've been told by others (usually in the form of how much Lumi had influenced them). Lumi is a very innovative builder, primarily through his modular building exercises at the Ivory Tower. He has helped many residents who have gone on to do great things in here... from architectural building to making avatar attachments. His legacy in-world is one of being generous and tirelessly fun.” – Avi Arrow

The Ivory Tower is just one of the many projects that Lumiere has up his sleeve. There are his mostly extra-terrestial vehicles, which you can read about here and here, and his Planet Mongo, a Flash Gordon-inspired sim which we'll be talking about again soon... and his avatars...

Five Tips: How to visit the Garden of NPIRL Delights

The most frequent comment I hear from visitors to the Garden of NPIRL Delights is that they are "overwhelmed." I understand this. Four sims filled with the works of over 110 content creators - many of them quite complex - can have that effect. I worked alongside the artists for weeks, and I am still discovering new things. The good news is that there are several fantastic tools to make this easier for you.

If I were to take you by the hand and show you the Garden myself, here is how I would do it:

1) Arrival and Preparation: Take the HUD and Info
Teleport to the Garden from here. Beatrix Newt created a tranquil path at the entrance to the Garden with signage that invites you to "take" the HUD and info offered there. Please do!



2) Take the Tour
Just to your right as you exit the pathway, you will see the Tour area. Hop on the gorgeous Fleur de Lys-shaped vehicle, especially created for the Garden by famed vehicle maker (and founder/owner of the Ivory Tower of Prims), Lumiere Noir. The Fleur de Lys was scripted by Darek Deluca, the creator of XIDD Particles and Gadgets and the fabulous Particle Theatre, as well as a four layer installation at 3000m above the Garden that spans all four sims.



And off you go!



The ride is surprisingly smooth and pleasant, especially considering that you are crossing four sims.



You'll fly over many installations you might not have known about, otherwise.



There are many wonders in the sky. Having seen them, you will be able to plan your visits with a better idea of what is in store for you.



3) Wear the HUD
They said it couldn't be done. Really! Many expert coders warned me that we were going down the path of disaster, but Master Scripter Miki Gymnast pulled it off.

Look in your inventory for a folder called "Garden of NPIRL Delights Info" and inside it for the NPIRL Garden Tour HUD. "Wear" it. It will look like this but only fill a tiny spot on the lower left-hand corner of your screen.



"Touch" it with your mouse, and it will pull up a Second Life® teleport map. Choose "teleport," and you will find yourself at one of the installations at the Garden. And get this... the HUD will remember where you have been and take you to new places each time. Once you are wearing the HUD, you will be able to teleport to all these places directly from any spot on the grid, too.



4) Nifty Landmark-Ready Notecards
Loved the work of a particular artist and want to go back? Easy! Thanks to my SL brother, Corporate Jay, and in the same folder where you Garden HUD resides, you have four notecards, one for each sim. Open them... and voila!


Click to see large

Obviously, the notecards don't have to be stretched so large on your screen, but thought you might like to see their content.

5) Walk down the green glowy paths
That King of Glow, Spiral Walcher, spent many hours arranging his official Garden path throughout the four sims to ensure that you had ready access to every single installation on the ground.


Here we are, in the wee hours of the morning, welcoming our first guests to the Garden. That green glowy path will lead you to many adventures and surprises.

Along the paths, you will find local teleporters to the sky builds, too.

As you can see, many people contributed countless hours of their time, and industrial quantities of their knowledge and good ideas to make your visit to the Garden a happy one. I can't even begin to thank each one of them enough.

Gary Hazlitt's latest Machinima/music vid: "Hide and Seek"

I spoke briefly yesterday with that Sydney-based Brit and marketing wiz, musician, composer and rich content creator in virtual worlds Gary Hazlitt (aka Gary Hayes), when he happened to mention - among other things - that he had a few days off and that he "might make a little Machinima."

Gary, who studied physics - I border on worshipfulness when it comes to physicists - is the director of the Australian Laboratory for Advanced Media Production (LAMP), and also heads up Virtual Worlds for the UK-based The Project Factory, for which he produced the highly successful and eminently revistable (as the traffic numbers indicate) Australian Telstra and ABC Second Life presences.

I've just now learned that Gary had a productive Easter weekend Saturday and paid this NPIRL compliment to three of our fave builds in the metaverse, from start to finish, including the avitanimation and editing, in just five hours:



Credits:

This JustVirtual production features the song "Hide and Seek" by Imogen Heap from the album Speak for Yourself.

Gary shot the video at Lumiere Noir's fantastic tribute to Flash Gordon: Planet Mongo, at our beloved Svarga by Svarog Laukosargas, as well as a new sim that Gary has just finished creating but is still not open to the public: Deakin.

Lip sync animation created using Crazy Talk 5, green screened in Final Cut. The spaceship shots were filmed live in Second Life.

Greetings from Planet Mongo! - Sneak peek at Lumiere Noir's new sim

"Howdy, howdy!" That's the signature 'hello' you can expect to hear from Lumiere Noir, creator of the Ivory Tower Library of Primitives (teleport directly from here), and the man most responsible for enabling all of you Second Life peeps to learn how to build. The set of choppers standing on the stairs there is me, and I'm just being a show-off, 'cause not only did he give me this snappy avatar - which he made some time ago and calls a "very old thing" - but last week he also invited NPIRLers to a super special 24-hour preview of his new island... Planet Mongo!

I realize my avatar is out of place on this Flash-Gordon inspired sim, but I somehow doubt Alex Raymond (he created the FG character for the original comic strip) would have minded. Like Lumiere, Mr. Raymond loved fast vehicles and drove around in this little Bandini sports number and like Lumiere, he was also known for pioneering a technique, manifested in his soft feathering pen style to produce one of the campiest, glitziest sci-fi stories ever. There've been about a bazillion versions of Flash Gordon since those depression-era days, and now we have the newest... conceived and hand-built by one of the most venerated creators on the grid.

His strength is a legend, his skill conquers all. On with his power we never will fall. Lothar. Defenders of the Earth!

As some of you know, I don't build - I just look at builds - and one of the first things I do when I rez at a new construction is look up. At the ceilings. A truly great builder generally can't resist making a detailed ceiling - prim count be damned. And nowhere else on the grid have I seen finer ceilings than at Planet Mongo. Just look at this chandelier!



The shimmering layers rotate, producing an elegant, mesmerizing effect. It turns out that Lumiere loves making ceilings, but "a lot of the time people never look, though," he said. Still, it's evident that building is a creative outlet for him, and he does it for himself, as well as taking pleasure in sharing it with others. "Paolo Portoghesi is my biggest hero. He brings the organic into modern architecture, and uses so many beautiful geometrical forms. He really reaches back into antiquity... the Roman and Greek forms, and makes them modern. When I saw this I freaked. This is the kind of building I'm doing now."



Decorative mouldings and architectural ornamentation abound here, as can be seen in yet another ceiling.



Like me, Lumiere is rapt about glow rendering, now possible because it has been added to the Second Life client viewer. He's used it to great effect throughout. "I've been drinking a lot of art deco," he said. The architecture and style of the 30's is a fave period for him... which also happens to be when Alexander Raymond introduced Flash Gordon.



"It's very minimal, but on a big scale," said Lumiere. "I like to keep it simple. Less lag and more unified." He's planning a big ballroom, which he will call UFOria.



Not surprisingly, Lumiere is an avid science fiction reader... "especially what other ages thought the future would be like. I'm a huge fan of kitsch." He reads Stanislaw Lem, who wrote Solaris, and Cordwainer Smith.

Planet Mongo - which will also serve as a retail location - is slated to officially open to the public in approximately two weeks. In the meantime, you can still enjoy the architecture and much more. Teleport directly from here.

A run in with a rocket scooter.

This is part one of a two part article based upon the creations of Lumiere Noir and his contributions to Second Life. Corporate Jay has gone undercover [shh!] to uncover Lumiere Noir's newest creations.


Ever since the dawn of the virtual world and Second Life, we have looked for methods to immerse ourselves in fantastical and creative ways. When Second Life first emerged from the dark underworld of the Internet, it was found that as the grid grew, it slowly became tougher for residents to get to the places of their choosing: the teleportation system that we have become so used to today had not yet been implemented and residents had to teleport to telehubs, and move to their respective destinations. As sometimes the destinations were a couple of sims away, vehicles were used to cover the remaining distances. At first, the few vehicles that existed were created by the Lindens. However, they soon began to be created by other, independent, users. As was expected, they quickly gained immense popularity. However, when complete teleportation was introduced, vehicles dropped in popularity as no one needed them anymore. They were seen more as recreational objects as they began to be outfitted with many features.

A few days ago, I met with Lumiere Noir, creator of the Ivory Tower. I had been told that he was making big breakthroughs in vehicles. Sure enough, he was nice enough to send me a copy of the Rocket Scooter 3000. Following a quick read of the instructions, I sat upon it to try out what would be one of the biggest thrill rides of my second life.

The scooter itself is outfitted with crazy tricks and is built for speed. With up to 7 different speed levels and just about the same in tricks and built in features, the rocket scooter is perfect for the speed enthusiast in anyone. If you've tried Abranimations' free roller skates, then you'd know the thrill of watching yourself attempt to skate on Second Life. This is comparable, except you're flying a fantastical scooter and have a need for speed.

If you've ever watched a cheesy movie about Aliens and abductions, then you'd know what most UFOs look like and move like. I watched as Lumiere rezzed one in front of us and proceeded to sit in it.

As it goes, most UFOs I've seen are freebies - badly designed freebies at that. Lumiere instructed me to sit on the UFO and he flew. This single project of his has been the longest in production and the particular version that he showed off was in beta v.99.

From what I experienced, it was the most realistic UFO to date, in both the building and the movement. Even the little details, such as the swaying and hovering motions were spot on.

Lumiere took us up into the clouds and showed off many of the little features of the UFO, including the fantastic particle effects. He then took us down, into the water and told us of his plans to include a bubbling particle effect and when it emerged, a water dripping particle effect. I urge everyone to drop their silly little freebie UFOs, and invest interest in this one, for it is perhaps one of the most interesting vehicular concepts that I have seen!

After a wild ride on the rocket scooter, in which I was shown just about all the capabilities of the scooter including a feature which drops giant bouncing balls for you to avoid (or crash into, depending on your mood), and the humdinger drive, which propelled us to insane speeds that only Ricky Bobby could dream of achieving, Lumiere set us back down on the ground.

He showed me two of his other creations, a dive ship, and a vertical take off and landing ship. The dive ship that he showed off was capable of taking us up to 4000 meters and releasing us to fall to the ground.

The other ship could take off vertically, much like those in 50's movies. Although we couldn't test this, we were able to try out the drop ship. Lumiere took off and dropped us into the ocean, whereupon he rezzed a submarine.

Not just any submarine though. It was very Pink. Lumiere told me that it was for a customer who had specifically requested a pink submarine. He got in, and I sat down on the railing as he took us both deep underneath the water.

We sailed around and he showed off some of the many features of the submarine. He took us up to the surface and shot a rocket, which was purely for aesthetics. All the “weapons” and features implemented within the submarine were based upon a 'girly' theme. Lumiere proceeded to show off many of the features of the submarine by launching a torpedo at the shore.

The torpedo exploded into a shower of kisses. He then showed off another feature of the submarine, that being crabs being launched everywhere. I found the submarine extremely enjoyable, and definitely something to look forward to within the world of recreational vehicles.

Throughout my stay at Lumiere's sim, I enjoyed all his works, especially the rocket scooter (definitely look forward to it when it comes out) and the UFO (I wish I were rich...). Lumiere Noir has certainly crafted his own little niche in the world of recreational vehicles. A niche that encompasses vehicles in their entirety to such an extent that most anyone can find enjoyment within these objects. As I write this, I have an intent to search through my inventory, pull out my little Linden go kart and play around in the racing sims.