Second Life’s Shadow Gives Linden Lab An Edge In Virtual Reality Future

For a virtual world that many people comment with surprise about it still being around, Second Life seems to still cast a mighty shadow over the virtual world scene. Over at Re/code, Eric Johnson has published an excellent article about how the land lies : Welcome To The Metaverse. I heartily recommend that people read this article in full.

The article opens with commentary from Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg regarding humans creating spaces :

Some spaces are mobile, like a bus. San Francisco is a space that was created by its users. Whether you go into a pub, a bar, a classroom, a bowling alley, an office, a library … We create spaces and we have people come together in those spaces, and then we communicate and socialize within those spaces.

These spaces are of course what people have been creating in Second Life too, in many and varied forms and guises.

Early on in the article Eric seems to be talking of Second Life in the past tense. This needs to be taken in context, Eric is really talking about how Second Life did not become the 3D internet that some hoped it would and how in the future, VR ventures will be hoping to go mainstream, become the next big thing and really get embraced by society :

A perfect metaverse, then, is more than just a video game or an application. Like a Web browser, or an operating system, it would offer users a means to do many things, and likely pay for them in many ways. That’s the Big Idea — that VR would be as transformative to the Internet as the World Wide Web — and it’s why so many companies are testing the waters. If one or more of them can crack it, they would unlock a great deal of virtual reality’s long-term potential.

Those of us who have already embraced virtual worlds know that the potential is there, but we also know that a large number of hurdles exist too.

This time, the excited ones predict, they will get it right. We’ve heard this before of course, in the last round of VR hype and the one before that, but this time it feels different. Facebook haven’t plunged $2 billion in to Oculus VR for the fun of it. That’s a big investment, even for a company the size of Facebook and with that sort of investment comes excitement, talk, interviews and hype.

The proof of course will be in the pudding but there are many ventures competing for this potentially massive VR market. High Fidelity, whom are of course under the watchful eye of the godfather of virtual worlds, Philip Rosedale, also get mentioned in the article. An issue that Philip Rosedale mentions is contact, although not real physical contact, but the way we interact with each other may very well change :

“How do we do things like shaking hands?” Rosedale asked. “As designers, we’ve never had to deal with an environment where the motion of your avatar was both under your control and potentially under somebody else’s control, because, for example, they grabbed you.”

This sounds like something that should be straight forward, but it’s really not, we haven’t really done this before. Yes there have been animations that allow people to shake hands, but we haven’t really felt like we’re shaking hands.

High Fidelity of course is going down a different route to Linden Lab with Project Sansar. High Fidelity will be Open Source and there are many good reasons as to why this may be a very wise choice. Open Source allows the software to be developed and deployed by vast numbers of people at low cost, that can in turn lead to widespread adoption. There are of course challenges with trust and development not being consistent in the Open Source space.

There are potentially many use cases for VR, education, entertainment, social interactions and in more immersive environments there’s hope that people will engage in a more civil fashion with each other than they currently do with remote communications. Palmer Luckey of Oculus VR and Philip Rosedale both chime in on this issue in the article :

“Virtual reality will make it a lot harder to be a total dick to somebody [online],” Luckey said. “When was the last time you saw a hundred people show up together and yell at somebody in real life? It would be a lot more uncomfortable to have people shouting at you in real life than on a message board, but you don’t see that happen.”

“The more synchronous, the more real-time you force the interaction to be, the better everyone behaves,” Rosedale said. “In VR, it’s much harder to be a bully or be abusive if you’re doing it face to face. Harder — not impossible — but it’s harder.”

Some would argue that this is wishful thinking and that people will be dicks whenever they get the opportunity. However personally I feel that in a more immersive environment people may very well display more empathy when it comes to conversations getting heated. I feel this way because visual clues of sight and sound will be present and whereas I don’t see it eliminating trolling, abuse and pile ons, I do think it will be reduced.

People need to stop and think about the fact that humans have been horrid to each other ever since humans evolved. To say that this is a flawed human trait would be an understatement. However these days more people have more ways to be more horrid to each other via the spoken and written word and we see that in far too many interactions.

The future of VR will however require people to look to the past and when it comes to virtual worlds, Second Life remains the Daddy in that regard. Eric takes a closer look at the Second Life model in his article :

Second Life’s profitable business is a common reference point for all the players in this space. So, it’s worth taking a closer look at that model.

Second Life is free to start, but it costs money to really enjoy it. Its users have avatars, virtual characters that represent themselves. They can buy (with real money) virtual currency called Linden Dollars, and spend those Linden Dollars on things for their avatars, like clothes, accessories and property.

Many people express surprise that this model works, and yet there is proof that it does. I’ve seen people being shocked about how much a full region in Second Life costs per month and yet thousands of them exist. I don’t think anyone really expects such a model to work again  as it currently stands, but the basis of a virtual world in the early stages is likely to follow many of the themes that work in Second Life.

We are likely to see education, entertainment, live music performances, art displays and a thriving market for virtual goods and items for people to enjoy those activities. The hope for many is that the future of VR will build on what Second Life has achieved and make it cost effective for more people to embrace the experience. This is certainly what Linden Lab are hoping for with Project Sansar.

I believe the market is there for VR to go mainstream, but I’m not at this moment in time convinced that the hardware is right. I’ve mentioned this before but I simply cannot envisage people wanting to wear headsets for hours on end. I can’t see people wanting to use a vast array of peripherals to move and control their avatars, but I do think people will to some degree want to be immersed. The use cases and how they deliver the experience will be the key.

The future of VR at the moment looks exciting. The truth is that nobody really knows where this stage is going to lead us, but if this stage does prove to be another false dawn, then there will be another stage further down the line. This isn’t going to go away.

Second Life’s shadow is a blessing for Linden Lab, it means that people will pay attention to Project Sansar in the media because Linden Lab have already been there and done that. Even people who dismiss Second Life will pay attention to Linden Lab’s next venture and that puts them in a great position.

Other ventures will arrive and of course some of them are very much in progress. However when they are looking for inspiration, potential use cases, whether people will really want to engage, Second Life is still there, as a live demo of some of the potential directions VR can take, for Linden Lab, this is a good place to be.