Tis the season to be a speaker it seems. Last weekend’s events aren’t the end of the event season by any stretch of the imagination and Gigaom are talking up their Gigaom Roadmap 2014 event, scheduled for November 17th – November 19th. There are a couple of posts about this event and I’ll highlight this one first : At Roadmap, Delve Into Virtual World Design With Philip Rosedale.
The article doesn’t give too much away about what Philip may say, which is fair enough, otherwise why would people go and listen to Philip speak? However the article does start off on a controversial footing for those who are still very much engaged in Second Life :
When Second Life launched in 2003, it was the future. Now it is the past, with its once-hyped virtual storefronts and social centers empty (or nearly empty, as 1 million people still log on each month).
It’s possible that it came 10 years too early.
I’ve blogged recently about how some designers are finding those once-hyed virtual storefronts getting a new lease of life due to the number of virtual events. There’s something uncanny about that as I’m blogging here about the number of events outside the virtual world, although many of them are designed to talk about virtual worlds and peripherals. Hmm, this could get quite circular! Anyway, I don’t agree with Signe Brewster’s premise regarding where Second Life is today. Second Life is in a much stronger position than outsiders realise, although it’s certainly not at the peak of its popularity.
Philip Rosedale of course has moved on from Second Life and will be talking about his new venture, High Fidelity. I would imagine he may well cover some of the ground he discussed at the OpenSim Community Conference. Philip spoke well on a number of High Fidelity, OpenSim and Second Life related issues as a keynote speaker at the OpenSim Community Conference and hopefully an official video of that speech will be released soon. There were some technical difficulties with sound, but it’s a speech well worth listening to and involved a very interesting Q&A session too.
There’s another article on Gigaom about this event too : 10 Things I Can’t Wait To See At Roadmap 2014. This is a good article because it gives you more of an idea of who else will be speaking at Gigaom Roadmap 2014. Now the author of that article, Katie Fehrenbacher, is very much looking forward to hearing Philip Rosedale speak, she even dubs Philip, “The godfather of virtual reality“. I’m not sure how Mr Rosedale will feel about that.
Next-gen UIs: One of the big themes of Roadmap this year is the future of the computing interface, whether that’s with audio, virtual reality, touch, wearables, or robotics. We’ll have the godfather of virtual reality, Philip Rosedale, discuss designing virtual worlds with Gigaom reporter Signe Brewster; we’ll have an interaction designer who worked on Google Glass, Hayes Raffle, talk about the next-gen wearable interface; we’ll have sound designer Brant Ward inform us on designing the future of the audio interface, and we’ll have the production designer for the movie Her, KK Barrett, show us how he created the futuristic look and feel of the movie where an OS and a human fell in love.
Another interesting area of discussion for me at Gigaom Roadmap 2014 is to do with something I’m very much a fan of, storytelling :
Designing storytelling: Media, content creation and the ways that digital stories are being told are evolving, and new visual, audio, and interactive mediums are driving that change. Evan Willams, the co-founder of Medium and Twitter, will discuss why design is so important for storytelling and narrative, and designer and writer Craig Mod will show us how storytelling is evolving and using design to delight.
This again looks like another interesting event, although again it needs to be pointed out that unlike the OpenSim Communnity Conference, there will be no virtual world streaming of this event. Maybe in a few years time.
One of the major challenges with all these events is keeping up with what’s being discussed, there’s a lot of discussion going on, the real question of course is whether the potential will be realised. That’s something that won’t be answered for many a year yet.
I’m getting real tired of the Tech industry in general trying to downplay or turn SL obsolete. It’s a pure lie. What kind of world states that a niche product (all VR ever will be) attracting a steady state of 1 million plus a few thousand more is a failure or failing? It keeps the lights on in Linden Lab AND allows them to build a new VR platform.
The meme has got a bit silly now. They all retreat when challenged about it, but why they keep repeating the myth is beyond me.
When Rosedale would not have scammed the users of Second Life with their Homestead islands like he did Second Life would be much larger and would have much more land compared to now as well. Rosedale is a serious reason why Second Life did decline. Pulling the educator tier reduction was also his decision. There is a reason why Kapor and company made him step down as a CEO and gave him a technical job instead.
Maybe it is possible Rosedale treated people in a nasty manner and made them leave in droves. After what Linden Lab pulled in the previous decade it is a miracle people still log in. No other company with competition should have tried to do what Linden Lab did, none of them would still be in business today.
This here could be a sim in Second Life today but the company did not use Linden Lab their product because maybe they did not agree Linden Lab would claim ownership of it or go as far as claiming ownership of their music.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/10/7188649/the-who-release-ios-and-android-apps-and-are-heading-to-oculus-rift
All the storefronts came to Second Life and did establish their stores and sims but failed in their marketing efforts. This combined with the horrible behaviour of Linden Lab who made the choice to treat customers like filth and were thinking they were “special” caused the decline.
Second Life did happen by accident, it is Rosedale his hardware testing sandbox do not forget that. Rosedale and his fellow staff found it fun to goof around in the hardware testing sandbox. Then they discovered how fun it was and build upon that and forgot about the hardware product.
Thanks to Oculus VR there is an army of companies who want to get in on the VR wave now, they are putting in large budgets in anticipation that VR goggles will go mainstream. Linden Lab and Rosedale are small players now competing with Samsung, Facebook, Google and Sony to name just a few.
Linden Lab tried hard to chase people away, Second Life could still be growing because the system is a good one.