Ask The CEO Featuring Ebbe Altberg – What We’ve Learnt So Far

Ask The CEO, featuring Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg is still in play on the official Second Life forum. However we’ve learnt a few things from the eleven pages of the thread that currently exist.

The first thing to do is to read the opening post, because that already includes a lot of answers that Ebbe gave at the SL12B meeting. That’s where you’ll find out that Linden Lab are planning to improve media on a prim in Second Life :

We are working on a significant upgrade to the media capabilities of the Viewer (watch for a Project Viewer release). The new support will be focused on supporting modern formats and HTML 5. Content creators should be preparing to convert any older proprietary media such as Flash or Quicktime to the newer formats soon. Longer sound files has not been on the list, but perhaps it should be?

With the recent problems Flash has been facing, many would say that this can’t come quickly enough! That’s also the place where you will learn a little bit about differences in the approach Linden Lab are taking with Virtual Reality Head Mounted Displays, in Second Life and Project Sansar. When it comes to Second Life :

We don’t have any specific plans at this time, but with our open source Viewer, third parties could certainly integrate new hardware and we’ll continue to experiment from time to time.

Whereas when it comes to Project Sansar :

Right now, we’re focused on making Project Sansar an ideal experience with the Rift. In the future, we’ll probably support other hardware as well, but some of the challenges we’re solving for with the Rift – latency, frame rate goals, etc. – are things we’d need to get right for any HMD, and we don’t want to diffuse our focus by integrating lots of peripherals right now, when there aren’t any consumers who even have the hardware.

This is understandable because Second Life is already here and would need a lot more work to optimise for use with VR HMD than Project Sansar, which is a work in progress at a time when these devices are coming to the market.

Moving on past the opening post, Ebbe, Pete and Danger have all provided more answers to additional questions. I’ll highlight some of the answers but not all of them. The thread is worth a read and if you read the thread, you may even have questions of your own

A very interesting question came up wondering whether Project Sansar you have instancing for terrain and inworld mesh objects, Ebbe replied :

Yes, we’re planning to support instancing of entire experiences. 

That sounds interesting, very interesting. I hope it means what I think it means!

A question came up regarding new user retention for Second Life and what do LL believe will improve that retention. Ebbe gave a very positive answer :

This is a focus area and three shorter term projects is to simplify onboarding from SLURLs, test some custom gateways operated by creators and improve tracking and instrumentation in SL so we can better understand behavior from source click through registration and then inworld as well to better understand the full path and actions users take. Until we have some of these improvements it’s hard to find clear obvious things to improve. None of the A/B tests so far has found a clear improvement overe the default we have today. 

The issue of streaming came up in different areas. One person pointed to NVIDIA Grid, which is a game streaming service, as an example of a streaming service. Ebbe replied :

Streaming (render on the server) is interesting but the issue is cost. The day will come but we’re not there yet. Between nVidia, Amazon, Microsoft etc. hopefully the competition will drive pricing down soon to make it something we can offer at a price that users are willing to pay to make it worthwhile.

The issue came up again later in the thread in relation to computer specs for Project Sansar. The person asking the question did not ask about streaming, but streaming on lower spec computers was one of the more popular use cases for SL Go. This time Danger Linden answered :

Sansar will require higher specs than SL, especially when using VR HMDs. At some point, someone’s going to create a workable streaming solution, which will allow low-end systems to run experiences like Sansar. OnLive delivered the tech, but the business didn’t work.

There’s a common theme here for those of us who have used streaming and are big fans, companies are struggling to find the right price point to offer these services to consumers the moment, but in the future that is likely to change. There are of course companies around offering such services, but in terms of widespread availability, there’s a large degree of caution.

The issue of a marketplace for Project Sansar was raised, Ebbe replied :

Sansar will have a new marketplace with new tech and user experience.

What about the Second Life marketplace? Ebbe stated :

It will be improved but we’ll have to wait on more details here.

There were quite a few questions about land, when asked if land in Project Sansar will be advanced enough for the creation of caves, Ebbe answered with a resounding yes. This is very encouraging, caves are a lot of fun, so are underground stations, secret tunnels and more.

How about the cost of land? This was an issue in terms of Project Sansar and Second Life. Ebbe answered a couple of folk on the land costs for Project Sansar issue, I’ll combine his answers here as they are related :

We’re thinking of cheaper and larger land supporting more scalable experiences. This will make it easier to create and successfully operate these types of experiences.

In general we will lower the cost of land.

That’s good for Project Sansar, but how about land costs in Second Life? Ebbe answered that question too :

We continue to look at options for SL but I can’t promise any changes there.

Danger Linden has also been dipping into the thread and he also answered some questions relating to land. In terms of land size in Project Sansar, Danger made the following point :

Since Sansar experiences don’t have to fit into a slot into a contiguous world, the experiences can be arbitrarily large in area. You’ll be limited to what you can put on/into an experience, not the area.

That having been said, there is a (large) theorectial limit to what the physics simulator wants to deal with.

This sounds a little bit like the Cloud Party model, where size wasn’t everything. In Cloud Party objects, scripts and textures all counted as resource usage. This is something I’m a fan of, you can create vast landscapes with very little on them, which won’t be using all your resources. We’ll have to wait to see exactly which model Linden Lab come up with, but this was encouraging.

A lot of Second Life residents would like Project Sansar to be similar to Second Life in it’s land mass approach, particularly when it comes to Mainland. This prompted Danger to fire a very interesting question back :

Sansar and Second Life have fundamentally different approaches to a lot of Virtual World features, so, as Pete Linden said, there’s not a direct analog to the Mainland in Sansar.

We are curious about what specifically residents like about the Mainland? Provided infrastructure? Large contiguous areas? A sense of community? Neighbors with common interests? Affordability? The catchy name?

Just what is it about Mainland that so many Second Life residents like? Personally I feel it’s something to do with shared spaces and community building, but many Second Life residents find Mainland a complete and utter turn off.

Another interesting issue came up in relation to accounts and how Second Life users might end up with a Project Sansar account. This is an important issue to keep an eye on because it has to do with claiming your own Second Life name in Project Sansar. Danger commented :

Initially, SL residents will be able to create Sansar personas (under a master account) using their Second Life user names. (There may be some esoteric restrictions on Sansar names that I don’t know about). At some point in time that offer will expire and all untaken Sansar names will be available to the general population.

Don’t worry; there will be plenty of notice.

There will be plenty of notice, but I’d advise you to keep your eye on the ball. I am very much in favour of the master account concept. This should mean you have one account to login with but you can go inworld with different avatars. Again, we’ll have to wait and see exactly what the Linden Lab model is.

Finally, for now, I’ll finish with Ebbe’s response to a questions asking him what he would cite as the number one problem that virtual worlds solve for people.

A. I believe virtual worlds and VR empower and enable people to do and be almost anything. This will completely change how we socialize, learn, teach, work and entertain ourselves. 

Good question and a good answer.

Now if you want to find out more about what’s going on and what I’ve missed out, go and read the official thread on the Second Life forum.