In a very interesting interview with www.allthingsd.com Rod Humble talks about the Oculus Rift.
He says amongst other things;
I’m traditionally very skeptical of peripherals or hardware, but we’re integrating Oculus Rift support, which turned out to be really cool. Surprisingly cool.
It is great to hear that Rod is very excited about the Oculus, because I am too and I truly believe that it will not only change gaming and interaction with computers for ever and for more people then just gamers, I also think it can be a ‘game changer’ for Second Life.
We already know Linden Lab has the Oculus Rift up and running and is working on its usability, thanks to the interview with Draxtor Despres a few weeks ago.
But that Rod himself is also keeping an eye on it and doing some of the ‘testing’, is fun to read, he says;
I’ve ridden on a train within Second Life with the Oculus Rift on, and it’s very cool.
But most interesting is what he says on how far Linden Lab is with working on it;
We have it up and running, and right now we’re working on usability. You need to integrate it with the Rift so you can look around and touch things. I think it’s late summer when it’ll be public.
The official commercial Oculus Rift model is not out yet of course, so only people with a developer’s kit will be able to use it but nevertheless it is very exciting that, if all goes well, people will probably be able to start using their Rifts in Second Life within a few months!
There are a few more interesting things Rod says in this interview;
It’s coming in and out. When I arrived (in 2010, coming from EA), I thought it would be a core group. But well over half of our user base has been here 18 months or less, with about 400,000 new registrations a month. With the world I’m used to, video and computer games, usually you get a core and it’s the new users who stop coming. And we’ve maintained this incredibly healthy user acquisition. It may be that we don’t have a large competitor that’s well funded. If you want a user-made virtual world, we’re kind of it.
He also mentions one of SL’s biggest problems, the fact that so few people stick around, this is something I will write about (again) in my next blog.
It’s usually about 20 percent are going to be around a month afterward. That’s a massive drop-off, but it’s still not too bad compared to other services.
You can read the full interview by clicking here.
Only negative thing I can say about this interview is that once more… they used a picture from 2007!
I wrote about that typical problem we have with the media in a blog you can read about by clicking here.
That is sloppy journalism (let’s use google images to find a copyright free picture of Second Life and use the first one we find) and I think Linden Lab should make sure that every time they get a request for an interview or some background info, that the journalists use the pictures Linden Lab provides.
One of the things people complain about is the level of graphics in Second Life, by showing them six year old screenshots, it will be hard to convince people things look a lot better these days…
Oh, one final thing, Rod needs a haircut.
But I say that about all men 😉
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Sparkaphat Doobie said:
I’m glad to see LL recognizing this for what it is, a game changer. This will be the coolest thing in the metaverse since the metaverse itself! Detailed content to follow! 🙂
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Indigo Mertel said:
I agree about the pictures and what people think of the rendering engine. A couple of months ago I was following a thread on Reddit about Oculus Rift and the general complaint was how bad the SL engine is. After I sent a post with links to some nice pictures of SL to one of complaining guys and former SL user he was like “wow, I had no idea the engine improved so much”.
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Jo Yardley said:
Exactly, just simple screenshots can make such a difference in the reputation of SL!
Can you share a link to that reddit discussion?
I’m not very good with reddit.
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Indigo Mertel said:
Sure. Here’s a link to the post I made where I invite to take a look at some recent pictures: http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/1d0lws/oculus_rift_integration_coming_to_second_life/c9qhzf3
From that post you can read the full thread.
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