Virtual Reality Investment News Continues To Cement Second Life’s Place In Virtual Reality History

The current hype wave regarding virtual reality is now moving on to more and more news about the investment stage of the process. What I find interesting about many of these articles is that many of them refer to Second Life and Linden Lab as points of reference. I’ve talked about this before but the more of these articles appear, the more Second Life’s place in VR history gets cemented.

This is exemplified well in two recent articles. The Irish Independent talk to one time Linden Lab employee and now venture capitalist, Ethan Kurzweil. Ethan is the son of Ray Kurzweil. Ethan worked on new customer acquisition and user retention at Linden Lab over nine years ago and talks to Adrian Weckler in an article entitled “The billion-dollar investor’s guide to getting startup cash in Ireland“.

The second article is by Chris Owen at The Huffington Post and is entitled “Virtual Reality Industry Rapidly Gaining Investment – and Momentum“. Whereas both of these articles talk about where they think Second Life went wrong, the fact that they are still today talking about Second Life also points out that Second Life went right in a lot of areas.

The Irish Independent article is about more than virtual reality, it’s more about investment and in particular why investment in Dublin may be a good choice rather than San Francisco, but Second Life does get discussed. Ethan Kurzweil points out that a lot of things that happened outside of Second Life, such as Skype, Whatsapp, Telepresence etc. were the sort of ideas that people thought could all be embraced by a platform such as Second Life.

However Ethan also points out one of the reasons for Second Life’s longevity, the sticky factor. People stay in Second Life. The comment comes in response to a question about the Second Life economy, or more to the point, the fact that Second Life had an economy. Ethan points out that there’s still an economy in Second Life :

There still is. It’s still a profitable company based on the Second Life product. The one thing that probably everyone underestimated is just how sticky it is. I haven’t worked there in nine years. But there are probably users who are just as sticky, just as loyal and just as highly monetisable as they were back then.

However Ethan also points out some of the flaws with Second Life. I know many Second Life users don’t agree with these sort of sentiments but I see them repeated far too often to dismiss them :

Yeah, not the way that they implemented it, because it’s too hard, too nichey and too geeky. But I do think there’ll be a way to engage in a virtual way that is more immersive than what we have now. And maybe it’s a VR thing and not a flat world like Second Life had.

The flat virtual world society are at this point shouting “We told you so!”

In The Huffington Post article Chris Owen poses :

So the VR world is upon us. But haven’t we been here before – wasn’t Second Life supposed to be the harbinger of untold wealth for retailers, with consumers happily jumping online and trying on the latest trends, products and fashions before parting with their hard-earned cash?

I’ve said this before but I still think that one of the big ways that retailers failed in Second Life was because they did not engage with the local community. They wanted their own island, away from the mobs and away from the community. I still think they would have been better served by embracing said community, renting space to others or renting space in another user’s sim. They could have even sponsored regions. Too many decided to stand alone and ended up all alone.

Chris points out some of the problems Second Life faced, such as 2003 bandwidth levels and how performance was really dependent upon having a desktop PC, with the future looking more and more mobile, this sounds like an old fashioned to some. I agree to a degree but I still think the future will involve virtual desktops and people will still want to engage with virtual reality and virtual worlds via a large screen.

Chris also includes an interesting quote from Raphael Seghier, co-founder of Homido, a company which produces VR headsets :

Once VR has become mainstream, it may allow Second Life to become more popular, as it will deliver what Second Life was lacking, namely being a truly immersive experience that feels real.

I don’t think Raphael is talking about Second Life in its current guise there, I think he’s talking about future platforms that are Second Life-esque. There’s a lot more in both articles, optimism, caution.

There’s also talk of flying phalluses in Second Life. This is an old story, but it keeps getting brought up time and time again. I mean, this was one incident.

However as Ethan Kurzweil points out, there’s a lot of power in the image of the flying phallus :

those flying phalluses made it much more like a game than a real tool that was going to help us live our lives. Most people didn’t want to live their lives being hit in the head with a flying phallus. Like, try that in a business meeting. People would be giving press conferences and things would fly all around them.

One small blessing of course is that the media remember flying phalluses but they don’t know about the real dark side of Second Life. The side that would make these investors pause for thought. I’m talking about the welcome area of Ahern! Whatever you do, don’t let people know about Ahern, all bets will be off, headsets will be packed up, people will flee in horror. Ahern, a place where virtual reality could well and truly die!

That aside, Second Life keeps getting mentioned because although it’s far from perfect, it achieved the goal of not only getting people to embrace a virtual world, Second Life also got people to stay, create businesses, make profits, hold discussions and much more. Once you scratch below the flying phallus, there’s a lot in Second Life that investors like, only this time they want to make it bigger, better but probably not uncut.