Virtual Reality – Page 15

October 5, 2015

Ebbe Altberg Talks To Geek Dad

Derrick Schneider over at Geek Dad has been talking to Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg about Project Sansar. There’s not really a lot new in this article, but every article seems to reveal a little bit of something that may have been missed or overlooked in other articles. These pieces are slowly starting to fit together.

For example Derrick posts :

What happens when your Second Life city gets too many people inside? Lag. And then you’re sort of stuck. In Sansar, says Altberg, a successful multiplayer experience can automatically spawn a new instance of itself when you hit some limit: Linden’s jobs website asks for experience with Amazon Web Services, so it’s easy to see where they’re going: Scale up behind the scenes so the creator doesn’t have to think about it.

I don’t think it’s any surprise that Project Sansar is looking at cloud based delivery, this has probably been mentioned before. I know instancing has been mentioned before and I know I’ve had someone post that instancing has been mentioned before when I’ve posted about instancing! So a lot of the information about Project Sansar is already out there, but it’s scattered.

However an interesting part of the Geek Dad article comes in terms of experiences. Linden Lab have invited people to alpha test Project Sansar and one point that has been mentioned is that Linden Lab are currently looking for people with Autodesk Maya experience. Now you may have thought this was to get 3D models inworld, but it appears there’s more to it than that :

The initial focus is letting people make experiences, and the authoring tools will reflect that need. “How many things in your home did you make,” asks Altberg. “But it still reflects your identity. We didn’t make the chairs in this room or the table,” he continues, gesturing around to encompass the reinforced brick walls, “but we are making an experience.”

There’s a lot more in the article, including talking of a Project Sansar downloadable client and talk of content ratings, with Ebbe suggesting that Linden Lab do not want to impose strict censorship, but it seems they do want content ratings to be there from the outset, which I think most people would agree is a sensible idea.

Continue reading “Ebbe Altberg Talks To Geek Dad”

October 1, 2015

Virtual Reality Investment News Continues To Cement Second Life’s Place In Virtual Reality History

The current hype wave regarding virtual reality is now moving on to more and more news about the investment stage of the process. What I find interesting about many of these articles is that many of them refer to Second Life and Linden Lab as points of reference. I’ve talked about this before but the more of these articles appear, the more Second Life’s place in VR history gets cemented.

This is exemplified well in two recent articles. The Irish Independent talk to one time Linden Lab employee and now venture capitalist, Ethan Kurzweil. Ethan is the son of Ray Kurzweil. Ethan worked on new customer acquisition and user retention at Linden Lab over nine years ago and talks to Adrian Weckler in an article entitled “The billion-dollar investor’s guide to getting startup cash in Ireland“.

The second article is by Chris Owen at The Huffington Post and is entitled “Virtual Reality Industry Rapidly Gaining Investment – and Momentum“. Whereas both of these articles talk about where they think Second Life went wrong, the fact that they are still today talking about Second Life also points out that Second Life went right in a lot of areas.

The Irish Independent article is about more than virtual reality, it’s more about investment and in particular why investment in Dublin may be a good choice rather than San Francisco, but Second Life does get discussed. Ethan Kurzweil points out that a lot of things that happened outside of Second Life, such as Skype, Whatsapp, Telepresence etc. were the sort of ideas that people thought could all be embraced by a platform such as Second Life.

However Ethan also points out one of the reasons for Second Life’s longevity, the sticky factor. People stay in Second Life. The comment comes in response to a question about the Second Life economy, or more to the point, the fact that Second Life had an economy. Ethan points out that there’s still an economy in Second Life :

There still is. It’s still a profitable company based on the Second Life product. The one thing that probably everyone underestimated is just how sticky it is. I haven’t worked there in nine years. But there are probably users who are just as sticky, just as loyal and just as highly monetisable as they were back then.

However Ethan also points out some of the flaws with Second Life. I know many Second Life users don’t agree with these sort of sentiments but I see them repeated far too often to dismiss them :

Yeah, not the way that they implemented it, because it’s too hard, too nichey and too geeky. But I do think there’ll be a way to engage in a virtual way that is more immersive than what we have now. And maybe it’s a VR thing and not a flat world like Second Life had.

The flat virtual world society are at this point shouting “We told you so!”

Continue reading “Virtual Reality Investment News Continues To Cement Second Life’s Place In Virtual Reality History”

September 30, 2015

Joyce Bettencourt Captures Fascinating Chat With John Carmack At Oculus Connect 2015

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes has blogged about mobile phone footage from Joyce Bettencourt of John Carmack talking Metaverse, Second Life, Minecraft and a hell of a lot more at Oculus Connect 2015; John Carmack: “Crass Commercialization”, Not High-Mindedness, Will Lead to the Metaverse.

John Carmack, for those who aren’t familiar with the name, was the co-founder of ID Software and lead programmer on games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake amongst others. These days he’s the chief technology officer for Oculus VR … the company behind the Oculus Rift … I hope most of you are familiar with Oculus VR! Oculus offer their staff free breakfast, lunch and dinner on their campus, so they sound like a decent company to work for although with perks like that you wonder if their staff get time to go home or out for a meal. Don’t panic, they also say they have family friendly policies.

Anyway, back to the footage. This comes in at just over fifteen minutes long and would probably have been longer if it hadn’t been for the fact that Joyce’s battery on her phone died whilst filming. Modern technology hey. I hope this is legally obtained footage, I trust Joyce so we’ll dive right in and I’ll embed the video at the end of this post.

John Carmack talks about virtual reality, head tracking devices, how the technology is still evolving and you get an insight into just how technically challenging getting a compelling VR experience to work is. He also talks about virtual worlds and the metaverse and I guess that’s what most people who read this blog will be interested in.

He starts talking about virtual worlds around the two minute mark and then gets deeper into the concept of a metaverse around the four minute mark where he states that he fought against Oculus building a metaverse team because they don’t really know what they are doing well enough yet, he adds that they didn’t want to build a Second Life but better in some way. John also raises the point that what the metaverse is still a question that hasn’t really been answered.

Continue reading “Joyce Bettencourt Captures Fascinating Chat With John Carmack At Oculus Connect 2015”

September 29, 2015

Philip Rosedale Talks To Nautilus About Earth-Sized Virtual World And More

Dr. Kiki Sandofrd has posted a very interesting interview with High Fidelity CEO Philip Rosedale; The Man Who Created Second Life Thinks We Can Make an Earth-Sized Virtual World.

I found this a fascinating read and it exemplifies so very well how Philip has not lost his enthusiasm for virtual worlds, indeed he sounds more excited than ever about the concept. We’ll forgive Kiki for calling a company Linden Labs, this is such a common mistake that the URL Lindenlabs.com resolves to the correct website. The articles talks about how Second Life was once bigger than it is now and yet, as I’ve mentioned before, when people look to the future of virtual worlds, they can’t help but look back at Second Life and even grudgingly seem to admit, it’s not the giant flop that some paint it as.

When asked how virtual reality will change society, Philip answers :

If you look at Second Life today, as a sort of a terrarium for looking at that question, it already has. It demonstrates that we go after and exploit and enjoy the benefits of any increase in tools that enable our creativity and our commerce—and that our willingness to engage in business and in transactions with each other seems to be virtually boundless.

He says a lot more, he talks about how virtual worlds can cross boundaries and get people to talk with each other when those people would otherwise be enemies. I haven’t seen enough studies on this to have a firm opinion on it to be honest, but there is the common denominator factor. The issue is surely going to be that if virtual worlds grow as some predict, some of those common denominators will be removed.

However what’s this business about earth-sized virtual worlds, well Philip gets to that in the interview :

In a recent analysis that I did in thinking about this, I figured out that if we used all our computers—connected via broadband to the Internet—to make a virtual world, it would be as big as the landmass of Earth. You and I could go fly around in it, wander into some cave in Siberia that no one had ever been probably, write our names on the wall in there, and come back ten years later and the names would still be there.

Obviously, as soon as someone says something like that, the next question is likely to be whether virtual worlds could ever be the size of a galaxy. Indeed, that is pretty much the next question in the interview, but you will have to read the article on Nautilus to find out more.

Continue reading “Philip Rosedale Talks To Nautilus About Earth-Sized Virtual World And More”

September 21, 2015

Linden Lab Continue To Generate Publicity As VR Hype Cycle Gathers Pace

Whilst reading Nalates Urriah’s blog last week I noticed an article related to Second Life In The News. Inside Nalates’ post was a link to an article on the Financial Times, which at the time I couldn’t read because the FT have this paywall thing going on. However today I discovered that I could read the FT article as long as I answered a one question anonymous survey.

The FT Article is by Tim Bradshaw and Emma Jacobs and is entitled “Second Life eyes second act as virtual reality matures.” Whereas the article does look to the future, it also looks to the past and this is where Linden Lab and Second Life, benefit from the current hype. The article starts off by talking about how magazine covers from over ten years ago that praise Second Life still adorn the walls of Linden Lab’s HQ.

The article doesn’t really reveal anything new, although there is an interesting aspect regarding adult content within the article, with quotes from Ebbe Altberg, Linden Lab CEO and Hamlet Au of New World Notes. Ebbe mentions that metadata will be used from start with Project Sansar to filter and sort certain types of content whereas Hamlet points out that adult content is a popular area in Second Life and therefore a source of revenue. Hamlet also talks about companies making the same mistakes in the future of VR as they have done in the past.

Another article on a similar theme by Heather Kelly was published on CNN Money; Company behind Second Life building virtual reality universe. This article also looks back on Second Life, but ultimately points out that Second Life isn’t the future, but this article also makes an odd claim that I haven’t seen anywhere else :

Creating worlds will be more difficult in Project Sansar than Second Life, but Altberg said they’ve made a tool non-engineers can use.

“It’s still extremely difficult to create content for virtual reality. Pretty much anything you want to create, you have to have a sophisticated engineering organization in place,” said Altberg. “We’re trying to solve those problems.”

Most of the quotes I’ve seen about Project Sansar have been about making it easier for people to create worlds, so I’m not sure whether the author has got the wrong end of the stick or LL are admitting that building with third party 3D tools isn’t as easy as building with prims in Second Life. Time will tell on this one, I have seen quotes suggesting that there will be inworld building tools in Project Sansar.

Continue reading “Linden Lab Continue To Generate Publicity As VR Hype Cycle Gathers Pace”