Ciaran Laval

December 4, 2015December 4, 2015

Exclusive – There Is No Secret Second Life Bloggers Club

Picture the scene, Daniel Voyager, Draxtor Despres, Inara Pey, Loki Eliot, Jo Yardley, Nalates Uriah, Canary Beck, Strawberry Singh, Hamlet Au and myself are all in a darkened room somewhere in Second Life, quite possibly Linden World, which is a top secret bunker. A door opens, the creak echoes in the room and we hear footsteps. Fire lights the room, a wooden torch held up to reveal that Gray of the Lab from San Francisco (AKA Pete Linden, AKA Peter Gray), Ebbe Altberg and Xiola Linden have entered the room.

They look at us, suspiciously, there’s a hush and then we are all asked to swear an oath of secrecy before being handed a dossier entitled “Top Secret”. This dossier contains secret plans from the evil empire with regards to taking over the virtual world under the banner of “Project ~~Sanasr~~ Sansar”. *See comments for explanation of the strike through.

“At least one of you will betray us .. three times to be precise,” Xiola Linden tells us.

“Three of you may betray us once each”, ponders Gray of the Lab from San Francisco.

“All of you belong to us,” cackles Ebbe Altberg and with that they leave the room. The bloggers stand there, cold and in silence.

I look at the dossier in front of me, this is gold. I’ll have countless blogs on this subject. At that point, Strawberry Singh elbows me in the ribs and glares at me “You swore an oath!”

So I’m here to tell you that I can’t tell you about the top secret dossier. What I can exclusively tell you is that Secret Second Life Bloggers Club doesn’t exist. The last person you would entrust with secret plans for virtual world domination is a blogger, seriously.

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December 2, 2015

Project Sansar Won’t Eat Second Life

Fancy a bite,
My appetite,
Yum yum gee it’s fun,
Banging on a different drum,

There seems to be a concern in some quarters that Linden Lab’s Project Sansar is poised to eat Linden Lab’s Second Life. I’m not quite sure where this concern stems from and that’s before we mention that Linden Lab have another product; Blocksworld, which people don’t pay much attention to in terms of eating too much of the Linden Lab pie.

Yes, Project Sansar is the project that Linden Lab have most employees working on, yes it’s new and shiny, yes it will tie in better with HMD’s than Second Life does. None of this means that Second Life will be swallowed by the Project Sansar shark. A lot of the current concern seems to stem from the recent Lab Chat and a question from long time Second Life resident and all round good guy, Qie Niangao :

Assuming Sansar makes it into a revenue-generating beta, how will the Lab organization be structured to keep SL and Sansar from sabotaging each other’s success?

This has been a problem for the Lab, historically, most disastrously with the competition between Marketplace and the Land product, but this could be worse: the Sansar team has a natural incentive to cannibalize the Second Life business — but if that’s premature, LL could be left with no profit from either product. How will you prevent this?

(Yes, eventually Sansar’s market should be so large that the current Second Life business doesn’t even register as a blip on the adoption curve. But initially, Sansar Marketing will be tempted to feed off SL, potentially leaving neither platform viable).

Good question, which deserves a good answer and it pretty much got one from Ebbe Altberg, Linden Lab CEO :

Well, I’m not sure why we would try to sabotage ourselves in the first place. But they are two very separate teams, from product and design and engineering are two completely separate teams … at some point they meet-up in the organisation higher up, but they are working very independently today.

And there’s some pieces the two products will share. Clearly we don’t want to have to replicate the whole virtual economy pieces, and all the compliance work that goes with that, so that is something we try to make sure we only do once; and that will be a service both Sansar and Second Life will leverage. but other than that, the teams are free to work completely independently on what they think is best for them and their users every day.

However the answer went further, it went into the cannibalisation issue and that’s where things get a bit messy in the minds of some.

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December 1, 2015

Linden Lab TOS Change Addresses Harassment Of Linden Lab Employees

Linden Lab today launched a new terms of service, which has been updated in three areas :

Remove outdated references to Desura and Authorised Resellers.
Explicitly address our intolerance of harassment of Linden Lab employees.
Clarify the arbitration provision in accordance with applicable law.

Some of these changes reflect the fact that terms of service changes can be a slow process. Desura went long ago, as did authorised resellers. The arbitration issue, I have absolutely no idea what that’s about, although I’m sure others will highlight those changes. The harassment of Linden Lab employees change is something that can be easily found in section 6.1 :

(iv) Post, display, or transmit Content (including any communication(s) with employees of Linden Lab) that is harmful, threatening or harassing, defamatory, libelous, false, inaccurate, misleading, or invades another person’s privacy.

The important point to note here is the any communication(s) part. That is going to cover, well, any communications. That means outside of Second Life, on Twitter, Facebook, email etc. Now I’m not sure what has happened to force Linden Lab to make this change, as I would have thought that this section would cover Linden Lab employees without explicitly stating that it does. The general points about not posting, displaying, transmitting said content would in theory cover it. However Linden Lab feel the need to explicitly address their intolerance of harassment of Linden Lab employees, so this will give it more teeth I guess.

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November 25, 2015

Fantasy Creators Yuletide Showcase Now Open

I’m having a few technical difficulties this week, which means I’m not able to get inworld as much as I’d like and seek out truth and justice! However, that doesn’t mean I can’t keep track of some things that are going and one thing that has caught my eye is The Fantasy Creators Yuletide Showcase. The event, which opened on November 21st and runs until January 9th, features 20 of Second Life’s fantasy creators, in a snowy setting complete with decorations, lights and more.

The event also features live music and then there’s a Yuletide Hunt.

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November 20, 2015

The Reality Of Virtual World Shopping Is The Second Life Marketplace

Diana Budds has published an article over at Fastco Design; The Future Of Shopping Is . . . Second Life On Acid? The article features the work of British designer and filmmaker Allison Crank, who is based in Eindhoven, which is in The Netherlands, not Britain!

The basis of the article is that e-commerce is trumping the mall and therefore, the social experience of the physical mall is being lost. Allison Crank suggests that one way of bringing back the social side of the mall is to introduce virtual reality.

Allison’s concept is the basis of her thesis from June 2015; The Reality Theatre: Shopping In The Ludic Century and in the FastCo Design article we get to hear more of the concept:

Crank calls it “a new third place for the public to meet, perform, indulge, and play in immersive environments.” I call it Second Life on acid. The designer envisions her concept working with augmented reality devices like Microsoft’s Hololens or Magic Leap to superimpose this virtual world over our own. For example, if someone were commuting, he or she could strap on an augmented reality headset and participate in the Reality Theater.

The major problem I have with Allison’s idea is that we’ve seen malls in Second Life, lots and lots of malls. We’ve seen malls with impossible physics, we can teleport in Second Life. However, malls in Second Life have been undone not by a future more immersive product, but by the ease of point and click shopping that the Second Life Marketplace offers. This isn’t unique to Second Life by the way, I’ve seen people in OpenSim asking for web based marketplaces, indeed Kitely has a web based marketplace.

People love the ease of shopping that web based marketplaces provide. This isn’t to say that Allison’s idea is dead in the water, far from it, but it is a warning to people who think virtual reality shopping is going to be a popular tool of choice compared to a web based shopping experience.

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