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.

The CNN Money article also points out that internally Linden Lab have built some content for Project Sansar, including :

A desert scene with crazy big machinery, weird futuristic lounges and a famous landmark. They’ve even created an exact replica of a conference room in Linden Lab’s San Francisco office, down to the objects on the desk.

Alas nobody outside the NDA groups has seen anything inside Project Sansar yet.

Another article that has recently been doing the rounds is by Kevin Ohannessian over at Fast Company; How Virtual Reality Will Take Over Your Virtual Life. This article talks about other virtual world ventures, such as ConVRge, VRChat, AltspaceVR, Surreal and High Fidelity. Rather oddly in many ways, this article talks about Second Life by linking Philip Rosedale to Second Life. Philip Rosedale is of course inextricably linked to Second Life but it seems almost odd to link Philip Rosedale so closely with Second Life when he is working so hard on High Fidelity :

“The first applications of VR that are standalone games are going to be incredibly cool when we first see them. But the interconnectedness and the growth that the Internet enabled, that is what we are going to see with virtual worlds,” says Philip Rosedale, one of the founders of Linden Lab, the company that built the virtual world Second Life.

With 1 million users that in total earned $60 million last year by selling virtual goods, Second Life proved the viability of virtual worlds. Rosedale has since cofounded High Fidelity, which is working on software to make virtual worlds for virtual reality. And he isn’t the only one that is working on a future with social VR.

Philip is also extremely optimistic about the future of VR and you have to admire the man’s enthusiasm, he still believes and that’s something to be admired :

Rosedale believes the human interaction within personalized virtual worlds can be as powerful as the Internet. “It is inevitable that we will get an Internet-scale audience in a virtual environment. I’m going to be able to wander around and do business and play and see things in virtual spaces. And I would like it to happen in the same scale as the Internet. The round number would be a billion people,” says Rosedale.

All three articles are worth a read but it’s interesting that despite the criticism, despite the scorn, despite people looking down their noses at virtual worlds such as Second Life, when people look to the future of VR and virtual worlds, they go back to Linden Lab and Second Life for examples of how it can work and where one needs to tread a little more carefully.