I think that virtual worlds are going to play a big role in the future of Oculus and VR on the whole, but it remains to be seen how big of a part of that future Second Life will be.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\nSecond Life is of course approaching its official eleventh birthday and is therefore an older platform, it’s not young and exciting but I still believe Second Life can be a platform that takes advantage of technology such as Oculus Rift because Second Life is a very dynamic platform. Second Life is a platform whereby you can wipe the slate clean on a parcel or sim and start again, therefore I believe that people could create builds that are optimised for technology such as Oculus Rift, but being Second Life, that would also mean vast swathes of Second Life aren’t optimised for the technology and that could very well prove to be a stumbling block for widespread adoption of the technology in a virtual world such as Second Life.<\/p>\n
Oculus Rift will probably be better served by a virtual world that is created with Oculus Rift in mind from the start. Hamlet asked Palmer Luckey what Second Life most needed in order to transition to the Oculus\/VR age, and be relevant in it? Palmer replied:<\/p>\n
I don’t think anyone will know for sure until VR has more time to mature, lots of poorly understood problems right now.\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\nThis brings us back to the point I was making earlier that Oculus Rift will probably be better served by a virtual world built with Oculus Rift in mind. This is a point that I’ve seen Adeon Writer make time after time regarding existing games and virtual worlds, the advice is that trying to fit existing virtual worlds and games into the Oculus Rift umbrella is likely to be more pain than its worth.<\/p>\n
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Now this isn’t what a lot of us current virtual world enthusiasts want to hear, we want to hear that when the new frontier arrives, we’ll be able to boldly go where many avatars have gone before, but with new headgerar. This probably explains why I feel Second Life can accommodate the technology, it’s possibly more wishful thinking on my behalf, although I still believe that the dynamic nature of Second Life does make it a possibility, albeit a remote one.<\/p>\n
However current Second Life intergration hasn’t thrilled Palmer Luckey, he tells Hamlet regarding current Second Life viewers designed to run with Oculus Rift :<\/p>\n
There are some cool third party viewers, but the initial official release from Linden left a lot to be desired. I hear they just put out a new update, but I have only tried the old ones.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\nThis response puzzles me somewhat because Second Life’s Oculus Rift intergration is in very early stages, as is the Oculus technology itself. I wouldn’t expect to be bowled over by it just yet, but this again exemplifies the problems of trying to make existing virtual worlds run smoothly with the technology.<\/p>\n
Hamlet has one last revelation up his sleeve. I can recall a while back someone over on the official forums saying he’d came to Second Life to buy some Bitcoins, this puzzled me somewhat as Second Life isn’t a place to exchange Bitcoins and Linden Lab don’t accept them as payment. However it seems this stranger wasn’t the first person to come to Second Life in search of Bitcoins, Palmer Luckey himself has done the same thing and, as Hamlet notes, there’s a twist in the fact that Palmer seems to have found it odd that to meet the Bitcoin seller he had to enter a virtual world, when he himself is behind a technology that at its heart has the potential to boost virtual worlds no end.<\/p>\n
All in all it’s a brief but very interesting read from Hamlet.<\/p>\n