Second Life Oculus Rift experience

Reddit can be an intimidating place, especially if you love Second Life and dare to get involved in discussions about games, Virtual Reality and the Oculus Rift.
Because, let’s face it, Second Life is generally not very appreciated.

So when I found a story on the Oculus Rift Reddit page about someone’s experience in Second Life with the Rift, I was a little worried.

But Reddit user digi1ife wrote a wonderful, honest, critical yet enthusiastic and positive story.

I think he managed very well to explain the excitement of being “inside” Second Life and to share this with other, mostly non-SL users.
A good positive story about Second Life always makes a bigger impact when it comes from a skeptical user in stead of a hardcore fan.

With his permission I share his story here.

But I suggest you also visit the original page HERE so you can read the comments.

And do me a favour, vote up his original post.

My experience in Second Life with the Rift, by digi1ife 

A friend talked me into installing Second Life and trying it with the Rift viewer. Let me tell you. It still has all the same issues as SL. The thing is when seen from inside of the RIFT, your mind starts to explode at the scale and even tho crappy and unfinished things are there. It really does feel like you are in the huge world with so much potential. It’s crappiness actually looks amazing when it’s life size. Some how seeing it from inside the Rift changes your perception. It goes from being a crappy looking location. To some cool eclectic fantasy world. To be honest the experience may have been one of the best RIFT experiences I have had. Minus all technical wonkiness of it being tacked on Rift support (this was almost a year ago).

My friend invited me and another friend to her house she built in SL, Which was super cool being able to actually be inside of this house she built / Decorated. (hard to explain but really cool, We all had Rifts on) The coolest thing was she spawned a Life size car out of no where and me and my friend were able to get in said car and drive it down the road. He was the driver and I was the passenger. ( we left her standing on the side of the road ) It was like BOOM OMG i’m in a car with a friend who live states away. Driving down the road in a city we both never been to. When my friend looked at me I could see his avatar head look at me and vice versa. It was a CRAZY Awesome feeling.

We started to drive off and I looked back out of the back window at my other friend standing on the side walk. ( it was only a 2 seater) I shouted out this is NUTS! I turned and started looking out the passenger window as my friend who was driving started talking to me. (we had mics) He took his eyes off the road because he was so mind blown as well. We drove right off a cliff. I start to reach for the Door handle only to remember i’m in VR with no Hand / arm control. Pure fear seeing the ocean come into view out of the front windshield as we free fall to our would be deaths. I look over at him as we splashdown in the water. Car instantly starts sinking. I felt an uncontrollable urge to hold my breath. Then we teleported out back to safety.

Hands down one the best interactions I have had in VR! This being said it was all in crappy Second life. (I don’t mean to be rude saying that, it’s just too complicated of an interface and graphically dated) With the Rift it was worth it!! It told me what the future of VR is going to be like and I can’t freaking wait. It was the wildest thing ever. I mean COME ON! me and a friend were in the same car, in a world driving around talking to eachother. Then he drives us off a cliff on accident. All the while feeling like you are really sitting next to someone in a life size car. This was seriously Science fiction a year ago! For crying out loud I was inside of Second life. (as far as my brain was concerned)

I’m not saying you should go try the Rift in SL. The set up was a pain. The controls took 3rd part apps ( xpadder ) just to get the xbox controler working with it. We got it working well enough to be playable that way. I know SL made an official view and reworked a small area just for VR. But I have not tried that version. This was about a year ago that we did this. What i’m trying to say is you guys are gonna Fraking love this stuff when it’s made for VR. Be it SL, Hi Fidelity, Facebook World or Metaverse. It’s almost hard to believe it’s happening. Rant over.

 

What should SL2 be called?

It is way to early for Linden Lab to announce or even start thinking about what SL2, the ‘sequel’ to Second Life shall be called.

Its name will be very important, the name of Second Life has been cause for the funniest and most original commenters of all time to say hysterical things like ‘I don’t need a Second Life, because I have a real life’ or ‘People in Second Life don’t have a first life’.
Quite witty, I’m sure you’ll agree.
And even though I generally say something like ‘One life may be enough for you, I want more’, the name still did not give our world a very exciting and flash reputation.

Full version.

Anyway, what should we call this new virtual online world?
Finding the right name that makes people curious, tells the real world that this will be the most interesting and cutting edge virtual online world since the dawn if mankind and is not just a place full of weirdos who only care about shopping and hanky panky, will be very important.

Or should they just call it Third Life?

Or Jo’s private little universe?

Or Pixelworld?

Or ‘That is another fine Mesh you got us into world’?

Let me know what you think it should be called!

Remember, Lindens read this blog so who knows, we may give them the right idea.

Ebbe interview with Engadget

A rather nice interview with Ebbe Altberg was just published on the Engadget website.

I am sorry about sharing links to articles and interviews here on my blog in stead of just articles I write myself, but I think that some of these things are rather interesting and not everyone who follows my blog also follows me on twitter and I still want to share what I find on the web.

And of course, here on my blog I can add a few comments of my own.

First thing I notice is that they used some up to date screenshots, with reporters today it is quite a miracle if they don’t use images from 2007 to illustrate Second Life…

Ebbe says a few things that stand out, I’ll quote them and a few other bits below and then leave you the link so you can read the whole article on the Engadget website.

The privately held firm wouldn’t say exactly how much that adds up to on its own ledgers, but maintains its annual revenue is in the same ballpark as the $75 million figure given to SFGate last year.

“I wouldn’t necessarily want to send an incredible mass of people to come to Second Life today,” he explains further. “Many of them would have the same opinion they had a year ago … It’s very easy for someone who would be an ideal user for our product to come in and end [up] in the wrong place and get a negative experience.”

“We’re going to spend a ton of energy in the coming years on a next-gen platform,” Altberg says. “That’s a big project that we’ve kicked off since I came on board.”

“How do people interact with the world from their phone, from their pad, from their PC and from their Oculus? All of that we’re solving from the ground up with this new code base,”

“We’re building the next-generation platform for hundreds of millions of people; not for millions of people,”

“Would you rather have a really deep and broad product that enables a ton of stuff, and it can only attract 50 million people,” he asks, “or do you want a really dumb product that can attract 800 million people? Or a billion people? You have to choose, sort of.”

“I feel like we’re in a very good place,” Altberg says. “We are the most experienced when it comes to this stuff. We’re bullish; we’re investing; and all the things that are happening around us with Oculus and the market getting excited about these things again [are] great for us. It’ll make it easier for us to attract talent.”

You can read the interview here:
http://www.engadget.com/2014/06/27/second-life-social-network-for-virtual-reality/

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Ebbe interview on Re/code website

Re/code has just published a nice but short interview with Ebbe Altberg.

I’m not going to pick it apart because there isn’t enough there, but I thought I’d just share the link.

One bit I do want to share is;

“One creator went into her virtual world in Oculus for first time and was crying,” Altberg said. “It’s very powerful stuff.”

Jeez.
I wonder who this crybaby is, silly woman! 😉

Ebbe also mentioned that he has talked about incorporate facial tracking for Second Life, I hope they do.

You can read the full article by clicking HERE.

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Ebbe talks a little more on the forums

Ebbe Altberg sure doesn’t shy away from the Second Life forums and I thought it might be interesting for you to read his comments without having to read the entire discussion.

Thank you Carl Metropolitan for telling me about these posts and lining them up in your blog.

In this thread Ebbe said the following things;

I pretty much only said these things:
We are embarking on a huge project to build a better virtual world from the ground up.
We are not going to constrain how good it can be by forcing some levels of backwards compatability (Sine then I’ve added some detail that identity and social connections and Lindens$ will come across and quite a bit of content as well, but with content we need more time to figure out exactly what will be backwards compatible, people will have plenty of time to see how this plays out and get a chance to try the new while still also hanging out in SL)
We will continue to invest in SL and keep improving and have no plans for any shutdown.
The rest is all speculation that has since then popped up.

You asked:
1 – What type of assets are more likelly to be transferable to SL2 and what probably not? (meshes, animations, sculpts, scripts, textures, builds made of normal prims, system clothing ?)
We don’t have all the answers to this one yet, but several areas will have radical improvements and thus not possible to be fully backwards compatible.
Mesh is ok (but with better lighting and other tech you may want to make tweaks)
Animations will change (major mprovements as we don’t currently do it the way it should be done)
Sculpts (TBD, but not as is, but maybe converted to Mesh?)
Scripts (major improvement, so will change)
Textures ok
Prims (TBD, but probably not as is)
Avatars will be radically improved as well so a lot TBD
Again, we will have years to sort this all out together…
2 – Is SL2 to be considerd “another grid” in which case the TOS of most full permission creators would prohibit the transfer to that grid? If that is the case, could LL speak a word of power and decide that for full permission items that CAN be transfered, the new SL should be considered as the “same grid” ?
ToS will not be an issue.
3 – Will at least the L$ currency remain the same and will available balances be usable in both worlds?
Yes
4 – Will the 2 worlds be connected in any way and will an avatar be able to move from one to another with the same name and profile and groups and friends? And .. some of its inventory..
Identity and friends will be preserved. Inventory depends on above decisions under #1 but we clearly want as much of existing work to be possible to leverage as long as it will not impact how good the new platform can be.

There is so much wrong here, speculation, suggesting things I said that I never said, or somehow suggesting that I, or the great people here are responsible for what happened five or ten years ago….but here we go, I’ll respond to some of this stuff, but I’ll skip all the stuff about problems in the past…that was the past…and by the way, all that “crazy” stuff has given us the best virtual world there has even been and still is. So somehow people here managed to do something right over the years…
Then you say:
Now, How could SL 1.0 be future-proofed?
Get the Lindens back inworld – I remember the Linden Village area, inworld meetings, Lindens just hanging around just talking to passers by.  I haven’t seen a Linden since M was CEO and their inworld presence got cut back.  It was reassuring to have staff inworld…proof they used the product they created.
Ebbe says: I removed the restriction that was in place for Lindens to be inworld. I’m not going to force people in there, but nothing is stopping them now. I go in as much as I can to hang out and chat with people.
Ditch the TPV’s – Figure out the best features of the various TPV’s and implement them in YOUR client and OPTIMIZE, OPTIMIZE, OPTIMIZE.  There is no reason residents shound need a TPV to get MORE features, higher FPS AND less crashes than the official client.   Third party software should not hold back releases so they can implement features.   If you really feel you need TPV’s, release new code even if it breaks their browsers and let them catch up.  I use firestorm, but losing it would be a small price to pay for faster releases (not that we have to worry about that, SL1.0 being in maintenance mode and all).
Ebbe says: I don’t think doing that would be a meaningful difference in the success of SL.
Incremental Graphics and Infrastructure Upgrades – To use MMO’s for an example as they are the closest thing to SL, you could redo the graphics and optimize to fix the dated looks..  You could optimize the back end for current standards on a regular basis.   Instead you decided to build a product to compete with your flagship product.   This did NOT fill me with any degree of confidence or any great desire to remain a premium or use the Lindex.
Ebbe says: We have. SL is a lot better today than it was a couple of years ago. But there is a limit to how much better we can make it…and how much effort it takes to move forward incrementally.
If you did all the above, ESPECIALLY the Incremental upgrade of graphics and infrastructure, with gradual depreciation of things that just cannot be carried forward, I see no need for a 2.0 SL.   We could get there by evolution rather than revolution.
Ebbe says: That is your opinion. But I know that the more distant future will have to go way beyond what incrementally can be done to SL. And it’s either us or someone else…
> We are going to do our best to make it  smooth, but if we have to make a crappy product with crazy complexity and poor user experience to preserve some very specific content compatability we don’t want to cause those problems.
Make it smooth, I really doubt you can, based on past rollouts of new features.   If you need to depreciate various pieces of older content, do it and explain why.   Don’t depreciate the entire world, which is what you are doing.   Rewrite what you have to current standards.    I’d rather lose a fraction of my inventory rather than 9+ years of collecting, outfits, and memories…and possibly my AV name.
Ebbe says: Again, your speculating a lot. You won’t lose your name. A lot of content will work fine. Some won’t. And that would be true regardless if we improved SL incrementally or started from scratch to get modern tech and capabiliteis done right.
> A lot of what you have will be possible to move across and more specifics will come through over time.
You should not have announced this until you have specifics.    First it was no compatibility, maybe, now its a lot of compatibility.   Make up your minds.     It appears you announced early, shooting for some kind of PR boost, but all the vagueness and ‘we can’t answer that now’ has just destabilized things for many.
Ebbe says: I never said “no compatability”. Where did you get that from? I said that we will not sacrifice how good a next generation virtual world can be due to backwards compatability (something you say is ok to do).
Quite frankly, and this is strictly me speaking for me, I will be staying with SL 1.0 until you pull the plug, then I will find another home that does not involve giving money to LL.  I have NO desire to have to rebuild my VR life and possessions in a ‘like SL, only better’ SL 2.0, not with LL’s track record.”
Ebbe says: Let’s see what you think when you see it. And sticking
with SL is fine, it will be around for a very long time ;P

You will be able to use your L$ in both SL and the next platform as you wish.
And SL will be around for a very long time.

You will certainly be able keep your identity, social network and L$ and you can hop back and forth and decide for yourself where it makes sense to spend your time and energy.

Again, I have not said there’s any end coming. We have made no plans for any SL shutdown. None.
We are simply working to make an even better product from the ground up. You will have plenty of time to evaluate it and decide.
Your identity and L$ will be the same for both so it will be easy to hop back and forth.

We have no plans to disallow anything that’s going on in SL and is legal. We’re proud of the freedom we offer.

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Ebbe Altberg talks to Voices of VR

‘Voices of VR‘ has published an interview with Ebbe Altberg recorded at The Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference last month.

Too early to discuss Second Life 2.

You can listen to the interview by clicking HERE.

Some highlights;

• LL is going to enable users to use Second Life on a great amount of different devices.
• SL reached its PR peak in 2006-2008, it was probably overhyped and not possible to deliver on the promise of VR at that point but today we’re hoping for further acceleration.
• This is a good time and place for us to be in this business.
• Ebbe spend quite a bit in SL and has a lot of fun with his Ebbe avatar or his alt.
• Ebbe is all for openness and is not trying to create a walled garden, not trying to trap people’s content. Everything they create belongs to the user and if they want to take it out and then import that somewhere else that is perfectly fine.
• We have a lot to do before we can become truly mass market and we still have a lot of problems to solve and one can spend too much time trying to get compatibility amongst lots of different things (virtual worlds) that don’t work as opposed to each of us just trying to make it work.
  Once we can get it to work then it becomes more interesting to talk about making things more compatible or make it easier to move in-between, but that is a premature since there are not that many of us today.
• Inworld SL GDP is hundreds of millions of dollars, all user created stuff.
  To run an economy of that scale and keep it stable takes quite bit of effort.
• A lot of people make a living from Second Life.
• Stable economy is very important part of virtual world and we’re very proud of that.
• LL is in the fortunate seat of being one of the leaders but it is way way early but everything is starting to come together and it is going to come to a point to do almost everything anytime.

Ebbe talks to SL users about SL2

We’ve gotten used to the new LL CEO actually being able and willing to communicate with us.

And this time it is not just a few inner circle people who get responses to their messages, Ebbe has done something very very scary… he has jumped into the SL forums, both the SLUniverse (as reported here) and the official SL forum.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it is a good thing and I feel LL CEO’s should always be communicating a lot with the SL users, or at least get an employee to do that.
But as someone who’s been active on these forums, I know that it can be quite an unsettling experience.

I’m sharing a few interesting things he’s said in public recently about SL2 on these forums, twitter, etc.

If you can’t read the text, click the image.

This seems to suggest Ebbe wants us to be able to export our SL identities to SL2

Ebbe explains why he ‘leaked’ the news in the way he did.

 

Ebbe explains one of the motivations behind starting SL2 now; competition

Ebbe explaining that we will not have to leave everything behind.

Ebbe mentioning the VR Facebook is building.

We will be able to take our identity with us.

“A lot of what you have will be possible to move across”

You can read the full thread by clicking here.

Second Life 2 scheduled for 2016 launch

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SL2

In an interview with ‘The Next Web‘ Ebbe Altberg (CEO of Linden Lab) says that a beta of ‘Second Life 2’ (no official new name yet) is expected to be launched in 2015 while the final version should be ready in 2016.

To achieve this Linden Lab is hiring 40-50 new people.

Ebbe feels that with the current state of technology, market interested and available hardware and software available, this is the time to try something big.

Second Life 2 should offer the users more and better tools for creators, games, designs, good, and of course all the things SL has now will be part of the new world.

Linden Lab hopes that the users who tried SL in the past and have not stayed, to return and try it again.

It is time for the SL community to grow, time for SL to go mainstream.

You can read the complete interview here.

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SLGo’s SL birthday promotion

The folks at SLGo are offering the people of SL a special promotion as part of Second Life’s 11th birthday celebrations!

This special promotional code will give you 75% off the first month of your SL Go subscription.
Combine that with the 7-Day free trial and they will get 5 weeks of SL Go for only $2.50!

This is of course extra interesting for those of us with old computers who would love to go explore SL11B without the lag such massive events are notorious for.
And not just without lag but also with ultra graphics!

Click the picture below or go to this page.

To claim the discount use the promotion code when signing up.
For US residents the code is SL11US and for UK residents the code is SL11UK.
This discount is also valid for people living outside the UK and US, jus pay with dollars or pounds.

The codes are only valid between June 22 and 29, 2014.

Oh and they’re actively fixing the ‘fitted mesh’ issue now!
Hopefully we should see a fix very soon.

Click to sign up for the promotion

1920s Berlin at SL11B

The 1920s Berlin Project

Like the previous years The 1920s Berlin Project will have its own place at Second Life’s 11th anniversary celebrations, aka SL11B.

The theme of SL’s 11th birthday party is “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”.
A look at the future!

In our exhibit we do that in two ways.

First of all we’re looking forwards to the future of Virtual Reality and Second Life.
The 1920s Berlin project was build to a realistic scale, we took a prim, noticed its measurements of 50x50x50 centimeters and used that as our foundation to build with.
That means that our buildings are generally smaller than in many other places in Second Life but also that the perspective and scale is always based on reality.
This way you can get a real idea of what things looked like in reality, for instance we have a Zeppelin that is 244 meters…

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