Gizmodo Reporter Experiences A Less Than Immersive Experience Of Second Life With The Oculus Rift

Jordan Kushins of Gizmodo has a refreshingly honest report on using Second Life with an Oculus Rift : I Explored Second Life’s Forgotten Worlds With An Oculus Rift. The report has a realistic review of life with the Rift, demonstrating that work needs to be done to incorporate the technology not just into Second Life, but into pretty much any experience.

The report also has some excellent pictures of Second Life, but Jordan confesses these were provided afterwards by Peter Gray and looked a lot spiffier than the scenes he witnessed live. This isn’t a trick, Second Life is extremely capable of displaying some excellent graphical representations of the virtual world, but you need a damn good graphics card to pull it off.

The report starts with some positive commentary on Second Life :

You’d think Second Life is a ghost town by now. And yet! One million people still actively inhabit the digital universe, a number that’s stayed impressively consistent since its early heyday. Over the past decade, those loyal early adopters have created over a petabyte of user-generated content in the form of—well, anything and everything you could possibly dream up: replicas of real-life locations where it’s possible to fly, triple-X adult zones where it’s possible to get filthy, and detailed scenes inhabited by avatars who may or may not resemble their flesh-and-blood counterparts.

Personally I was quite enamoured by this opening, there is still plenty going on in Second Life and there is content of an extremely wide range. Obviously Peter Gray didn’t take the reporter on a grand tour of Zindra. However Peter Gray did allow Jordan Kushins to take control of his avatar to experience Second Life via an Oculus Rift. However there is evidence Linden Lab missed a trick here, because Jordan wanted to create his own avatar to enter the world. However he was happy enough to explore as Peter.

Now at this point I should point out that Jordan’s experience of Second Life via the Oculus Rift wasn’t smooth, but that’s fine because it’s early days for the Oculus Rift and early days for Second Life via the Oculus Rift. The issues absolutely do need to be pointed out.

Jordan donned the Oculus Rift and then found himself stuck in the corner of a mansion, with a plant between him and the wall. Jordan tried turning around but ultimately needed to take off the headset to get a better view of his surroundings to work out why he was stuck.

Jordan explains how he had difficulty with viewing the world whilst wearing the Rift, looking inside his body, instead of outside at the world and then he talks of an issue that I’ve seen repeatedly made regarding Oculus Rift usage :

Also: When you’re wearing something over your eyes that completely obscures your vision, you can’t see the keyboard. When you can’t see the keyboard, you have to be a super solid touch-typist to manipulate your avatar, which requires tapping the arrows and spelling out sentences to chat (if you’re not using vocal commands). It’s obviously not impossible, but there is a fundamental disconnect that seems important to address with a work-around.

This is going to be a challenging issue for any virtual world going forward. Keyboard communications are extremely important and many people aren’t ready to switch to voice or voice to text solutions yet, many will never want to switch to such solutions.

Jordan also compares using Second Life when it is projected on a screen as opposed to being attached to his face :

I was more comfortable navigating Second Life when it was projected on the screen versus attached to my face; in these early stages of integration the “realness” of the fully immersive experience didn’t feel… well, real.

This may all sound a little negative but it’s really not, it’s extremely constructive feedback because what we see here is someone who is not familiar with Second Life and not that familiar with using the Oculus Rift highlighting the sort of issues that people new to this setup are likely to experience. This is good feedback not just for Second Life, but also for Linden Lab’s new virtual world too because one of the crucial factors for any venture, hardware or software, is going to be ease of use.

The article states that Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg feels that most of Second Life will translate to the Rift, although there may some changes to the details during the transition. However I’ve seen debate about this already with some people feeling that you really need to build an Oculus Rift experience with Oculus Rift in mind I share Jordan’s belief that people may need to renovate their land to be Oculus Rift ready. Second Life is a dynamic platform so this is feasible, but it’s going to be difficult for people to build Oculus Rift experiences without having an Oculus Rift themselves. Hopefully Linden Lab will be prepared to shares tips and tricks on how to make places more Oculus Rift friendly in the future.

Ultimately Jordan feels that Linden Lab’s new virtual world may be better suited to the Rift and again we’re back to the idea that it’s easier to build an experience with the Rift in mind, which is something Linden Lab will be able to do with their new virtual world, but even then it will be beneficial if they can provide builders with guidance on scale, spatial awareness etc.

As I said these are early days for both the Oculus Rift and Second Life via the Oculus rift. The Second Life Oculus Rift viewer is in early development. Jordan may not have been glowing in his feedback but his feedback is exactly the sort that will help Linden Lab develop a more comfortable Oculus Rift experience for both Second Life and their new world.

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