Tuesday Zander Greene and I interviewed Ebbe Altberg as part of the ‘Meet the Lindens’ at Second Life’s 13th birthday celebrations.
It was an interesting chat, if I do say so myself, and many things were discussed.
Of course Sansar came up and one issue caused some confusion afterwards, especially by those who weren’t even there during the interview.
Some people were worried that they were going to have to use their RL identity to take part in Sansar and without checking if this was true, by for instance asking those who were present or who asked the questions, this story was spread.
Luckily, some people who were there and who paid attention wrote down in detail what was being said and there is now also a video.
So now you can make up your own mind.
I am far too lazy to write a transcript or detailed report of what was said so we’re all very lucky that the brilliant Inara Pey did this for us.
Please check out her blog post on the interview by following this link;
The Guardian newspaper published a podcast about the 2015 Web Summit under the title; ‘Is Virtual empathy the ghost in the machine for AI?’.
The subject is quite interesting, presenter Nathalie Nahai and her guests Oren Frank from Talkspace; Rana el Kaliouby from Affectiva and Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab, talk about;
Could machines ever understand us emotionally? How much is technology already affecting our cognitive abilities, mental wellbeing and emotional lives? And as our personal and emotional experiences migrate to alternate platforms, VR, mobile, and others, will empathy be lost in an AI world?
Today an interview with Ebbe Altberg (aka Ebbe Linden, CEO of Linden Lab) was published on ‘The Next Web‘ website.
It has over 600.000 ‘likes’ on Facebook and over 1.6 million followers on twitter.
So no small fry.
It has a very catchy title, or as those pesky young kids call it; “Click Bait” worthy;
Think Second Life died?
It has a higher GDP than some countries
The audio was recorded at the Web Summit in Dublin and lasts about 10 minutes.
You can hear all of it by clicking here.
There isn’t much said we didn’t already know and no new exciting facts about Project Sansar were leaked, but it is a nice interview and once more Ebbe shows that he is pretty good at making people realise that Second Life is still doing well and has provided the people at Linden Lab with a lots of experience on running a virtual world, one that gives them now, on the eve of the Virtual Reality Renaissance, a very interesting position.
Ok, I know, I’m shallow, I care about the visual aspect of interviews, not just what is being said.
So when I saw this interview, I immediately liked it.
The interview was made for a website called Upload VR and takes place in front of a lovely old fashioned fireplace, both gentlemen are having an alcoholic (?) drink, there are books on shelves and dogs walking around.
Wonderful!
Before you get too excited, no this is not Ebbe’s home or a corner at Linden Lab.
Image copyright; Upload VR and youtube
Of course it could be better.
Both gentlemen should be wearing 3 piece suits, smoking a pipe and of course refrain from wearing a hat indoors!
Anyway, so far the super-visual part of this blog.
What is being said?
Not much exciting news that we didn’t know yet, but interesting nevertheless;
Sansar is still a few weeks away from letting testers in.
First half of next year more people will be allowed in and maybe by the end of 2016 a public version may be released.
Ebbe mentions something very important; that if you want to create an interactive VR experience today you have to be an engineer, it is very complicated to do but not so in SL.
We all know that of course, but I think you can’t repeat this enough.
The alpha testers for Maya will download Sansar and it will have an add-on for Maya, the software SL is using to build it.
This explains why LL is looking for Maya users to start testing Sansar, you may not even be able to get into Sansar without it, for now.
However, once you “publish” your Sansar VR experience, you can share a link to it with your friends and everyone can come and explore it.
The idea being, I think, that Sansar will be extremely easy to use and share.
I hope to one day be able to share a link to 1920s Berlin with RL friends and have them explore the sim in minutes with no or almost no installing of viewers and no or almost no instructions.
I think Ebbe is right in promoting SL/Sansar as a place where we can all experience and create VR without the skills needed to do this in any other way.
Ebbe says that SL has experienced a slow and steady decline, from just above 1 million monthly users at its peak, it is now just below.
But SL is still very strong and people cashed out 60 million dollars last year alone.
Ebbe describes Sansar as a “parallel universe” to Second Life.
I wonder if perhaps there is a good name for this world in there somewhere.
It is going to be less world focused, it will be more like several platforms.
This has been touched upon before and I think people will be sad to see the idea of living in a virtual world together change so drastically.
Some of us enjoy just exploring, running around, flying from one sim to another not knowing what they’ll bump into.
With Sansar, it seems, you’ll have to actively choose your destination before you can go there.
That is why LL prefers to compare Sansar to a virtual version of WordPress, and not a world.
Tier is also brought up, land is very expensive in Second Life but this will change in Sansar.
Land in Sansar will be much bigger, much cheaper and, Ebbe said with a smile, much more beautiful.
To be able to afford this there will be a sales tax on the Gross Domestic Product.
In short, property taxes go down, sales taxes go up.
Right now in world transactions are tax free (which I sure hope they will stay!) and marketplace taxes are 5% which is very low, 30% is the norm.
By doing this LL hopes that Sansar becomes appealing to many more users to start creating content, to build things and experiences.
Ebbe also shares a few examples of how SL is used, the musician who can afford to have his RL record published because of SL concerts, the fashion designer who made over a million bucks selling SL clothes, the man who make an income selling jeans, etc.
These kinds of stories appeal to people, it may be a bit daft, but fact is that when people hear that you make virtual goods for some virtual world they may think it is a bit silly but when they hear you can make a living out of it they are often suddenly very interested.
But also the many other wonderful things people do in SL get mentioned, lots of different ‘use cases’ that I think will give outsiders a real good idea of what SL is all about.
And even that crazy woman from Holland who build 1929s Berlin gets mentioned again.
Together well known VR Tv personality Saffia Widdershins and I got to interview Ebbe Altberg, aka Ebbe Linden, CEO of Linden Lab and thus, boss of our virtual world.
After a rocky start (something always goes wrong when audio and video are involved in SL) we got started.
It was interesting to note that Ebbe had returned to using his original avatar and was no longer wearing a mesh body.
Thus allowing his face to actually move as he spoke.
He said that he had only worn the mesh body as part of a presentation but I wish I’d asked a little further, because I can’t help wondering if perhaps he didn’t like the mesh avatar very much, especially the fact that you can’t really open your mouth with those avatars.
A rather bad side to the ‘new’ mesh avatars Linden Lab announced a while ago.
Nothing much new was announced or revealed during the interview, if you’ve been keeping up with the news and especially if you watched the earlier Linden interviews, you’d known most of what was being said already, although here and there extra information was being added but generally Sansar is just in too early a phase to get into real detail.
I was too busy to make notes, so I hope I remembered (and read from others) the below correctly;
In SL there will be more options to buy and own more kinds of land, I suggested something like this in my blog in this post (click to read).
Land in Sansar will be cheaper, even free for new users.
In Sansar LL plans to make money by putting a tax on sales and transactions in stead of land.
If you can run SL on your computer today you should be able to run Sansar on it as well although this could still change and Ebbe isn’t promising that you won’t need a new computer anyway. Then again, in VR everyone always needs a new computer.
Ebbe is proud of improving communication between Lindens and the SL residents.
Ebbe was also proud of several improvements that were implemented since he became CEO.
Ebbe repeated that he plans to make cashing out Linden dollars faster, right now it can take several days, the plan is to make it happen within 24 hours.
Ebbe said he walked around SL12B and enjoyed some Techno music, which I find a horrific announcement that shocked me to my core, I didn’t think that was even possible 😉
Ebbe almost always goes around Second Life as himself, not using an alt.
He does not mind mingling and said that quite often people don’t even realise he is the CEO.
Which I find odd but I guess not everyone follows the SL news and maybe not everyone gets excited when they meet a Linden, any Linden.
LL will also continue making SL run better and media on a prim will also be improved.
Second names will very likely not return to SL, but what names will actually look like in Sansar is not quite clear.
As Danger Linden already said, there will be one main account and several co-accounts per user, allowing you to have alts but still share the same inventory and linden dollar balance.
In Sansar, you will probably be paying for how much your sim demands from the LL servers, for instance if you don’t mind our sim being offline when you’re not there (for instance when you run a club thats only open in the weekends) or when you don’t mind visitors having to wait a little while your sim loads, it can be offline when nobody is there, bringing your costs down.
If you want your sim to be online all the time, you maybe have to pay a little more.
Which makes sense to me.
There won’t be an Linden Lab run version of SL Go yet, no Linden Lab Streaming service, which is a huge shame.
Ebbe explained that although they looked at it, but felt it would just be too expensive to run. I disagree, one of the SL Go people told me that although Onlive failed, SL Go on its own was very close to making a profit and that if they had realised from the start that their main target audience was the kind of SL user with an old computer and not the mobile user, they would have done better sooner.
SL Go also showed us that people were willing to pay 10$ a week for streaming SL.
And I also think that even in SL Streaming does not make any profit, or not much, it would be an important service that is good for SL, as it would allow people to see SL the way it should be seen and thus send out more high quality screenshots and videos into the world, giving SL priceless advertising.
So I hope that perhaps someone at SL invites some of the ex-SLGo staff to have another chat anyway.
Nevertheless, LL is looking into streaming Sansar, although again, this is something that isn’t happening any time soon.
As Sansar won’t be open source (at least not for a while), there is no room yet for third party viewers, such as Firestorm.
Which would be upsetting unless LL is implementing a lot of that what makes Firestorm the better viewer.
But there will be room for add-ons, so I assume people will be able to create certain tools you can add to your viewer to give them more features.
If this works, it would be really cool.
Especially if people can create all sorts of applications for the official viewer that they can then sell on the Sansar marketplace!
It could start a whole new industry.
Near the very end of the interview Ebbe said that he really enjoyed the chat and that we should figure out a way to do something like this again.
This made me think back to an idea I had a few days ago and posted about here on my blog;
I had discussed this with Saffia Widdershins before the interview and in a spur of the moment sort of thing, we decided to take Ebbe up on his offer and told him that we should have some sort of Question Time, but with Lindens.
Jokingly I suggested we could do one every week, but Ebbe thought that once a month would probably be better.
I replied that it was a deal, a verbal agreement and Ebbe agreed.
Afterwards, off the air, we briefly talked about this idea a little longer and it seems there really will be a Question Time show coming to Second Life.
So in a way, we had a little scoop after all.
I’m very excited about this because I feel it will make communication between us and the Lindens even better and there seem to be so many people with questions.
The idea will be simple; we invite Lindens (and perhaps one or two guests as part of a current SL related news story) and let the audience ask the questions.
Don’t start sending in questions just yet, we need to build a stage, find some space, set a date, etc.
But we will of course let everyone know when it is going to happen.
As part of Second Life’s 12th birthday (aka SL12B) I’ve been enjoying a series of interviews with Lindens.
I sneak into the audience and sometimes even get a chance to force my own opinions and questions to the front in a subtle and ladylike manner… ish… sort of… shouting is involved…
You may have read my near- hysterical post yesterday about when Oz Linden announced 24 hour days are coming, partially as a result of my nagging 😉
Since Linden Lab opened their doors and luredkickedpushedenticedset free allowed the Lindens to go out into the wide open world again we’ve been seeing a lot more of them and generally people really like seeing, hearing and meeting them in the wild.
And you can see that in these SL12B interviews as well, when Lindens get on stage, regions fill up.
The interviews are very good, veteran interviewer Saffia Widdershins does her job rather well together with Elrik Merlin, Draxter Despres and others.
Yes, they’ll even let me on the stage to talk to Ebbe.
If you’ve got any questions for him, leave them in the comments section, I may be able to squeeze them in.
If not, make sure you’re in the audience and ask them yourself!
But no matter how much the Lindens talk, you always think of something to ask that doesn’t come up or that you only think about after the interview is over.
And it made me wonder if perhaps it would be interesting to have more chat shows like these.
And no matter how interesting the interview is, the interaction with the audience is often even more exciting.
In the UK there is a tv show called ‘Question Time’, a hand full of politicians sit on a stage while the audience asks them questions.
They can ask (almost) anything they want, several questions are handed in before the show starts but people can also put their hands in the air and ask something else.
You can imagine that these shows are very entertaining.
And of course the questions can get quite difficult sometimes.
As far as I am concerned every country needs a show like this, a place where the politicians directly have to respond to the questions of their employers; the people.
Picture; BBC
I started wondering if perhaps this would be something great to have here in Second Life.
Imagine, once a month (or more often?) 3 or 4 Lindens and 1 or 2 guests who for one reason or another have something to do with whatever story is in the news at that time, are invited to Second Life Question Time.
The public gets to send in their questions in advance, there is a host, someone like Saffia, Merlin, Drax etc. and together with the public, for one hour, there is a debate.
The news of the moment is discussed, the questions that were send in are asked and members of the audience with lovely ‘hand the air’ gestures can get to ask questions as well.
This is something I’d watch and I bet so would many others.
It would be the cherry on top of the whole new openness that has changed how LL interacts with the people of Second Life.
What do you think?
Do you like the idea, is it something you’d watch, do you already have questions popping up in your head?
Here is a video showing the UK Question time, not very exciting, but it shows you the general idea of what it is;
And to make up for that video, here is one mocking Question Time;
Today Ebbe Altberg (AKA Ebbe Linden, CEO of Linden Lab) took part in a chat at the Engadget Expand 2014 event in New York.
It was a short interview, but interesting to see.
Ebbe did a good job of representing Second Life, within moments of being allowed to speak he managed to make sure that the public was brought up to date and possibly had some of their preconceptions challenged.
He mentioned that Second Life has been around for 11 years, is still going strong, is the biggest most successful virtual world ever created and that it is being used for education, entertainment, art, and more.
Universities use it, everything you see has been created by regular users, etc.
This is of course all obvious to us regular users but I think that it is always good to tell people these things, especially people who have not tried Second Life or have not heard anything about it since some dodgy stories with bad screenshots in 2007.
He also mentioned that they are working on a ‘Next generation Virtual world’ that will take off ‘way beyond’ what Second Life can do today when it comes to avatar, communication, graphics and physics capabilities.
He says that all this will take quite a while but “High end users” will be invited to come try testing it in the middle of next year.
Ebbe also talked about the massive economy of Second Life, that a million dollars a week is being cashed out and that a lot of people make a living out of what they do in Second Life.
Again, not news to us, but these are all things that make people pay attention and realise that Second Life is not just still around but actually a pretty interesting party in the VR business at the moment.
In short I think Ebbe did a pretty good job of representing Second Life at this opportunity.
The excellent Second Life show ‘Designing Worlds‘ celebrated its 250th (!) episode with an exclusive interview with Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab.
It is a very interesting and exciting talk, I won’t write too much about it because others have already done so and you should of course just watch it.
I could not resist picking the currants out of the porridge (yes, that is a Dutch saying), and sharing some of the extra interesting bits;
In short; mesh avatars will be improved, starter experience will be changed, 1920s Berlin is amazing, Ebbe’s son Aleks helps Linden Lab with inworld research, Second Life isn’t coming to an end, groups and group chat are being worked on, bringing back last names is high on the list, SL2 Alpha release planned for middle of next year and it already looks better than SL1.
Ebbe;
The team is working on making improvements to the avatars, from little things that we might see as bugs, and also trying to solve the “dead face” , get some eyes and mouths start moving.
For the future, we’re thinking really hard about how the on-boarding to the next generation platform will not necessarily be to have you go through this one place because we want to make it easy for the creators of experiences to bring-in an audience directly into their experience.
It’s one of those things that’s near the top of priorities for Second Life to bring back the idea of the community portals or something like that, where it’s easy for experience creators to attract users directly into their experience from the outside world.
(1920s) Berlin is amazing to me. It’s funny. My son actually did a little bit of contracting here, helping the product team with some in-world research. He spent some time in Berlin and interviewed Jo Yardley, and just listening to him talk to me when we were driving down to LA together the other day just you know, how it’s grown over the years and the incredible community engagement around that experience and how they’re sticking to a very specific design and community philosophy, and it’s working and the residents in that community love being there.
Second Life will be around for a long, long, long time for people to continue to enjoy what it is.
We don’t have any plans right now to do anything that would be destructive to what you can do in Second Life today. So it’s mostly just improvements we’re talking about, not extreme changes to anything that would jeopardise the content or the creations or people’s livelihood.
On group chat ; We spoke to Jo (me! 😉 ) and many others, once you get into many groups and you’re trying to manage communities, there’s plenty of functionality we could add to make that easier.
But the performance issues of the lag in chat is something that a group of people here worked on for quite a while. It’s only of those Second Life old technology things where you just start pulling at a bit of string and it keeps going and going. So I don’t know when we can say definitively that we’ve solved it and you’re no longer going to see chat lag, but I already know we’re better today than we were a few months ago, but I’m not sure how close we are to being able to say, it’s solved now, there are no more problems.
(Bringing back last names) is on the list of Second Life things that I know both Oz and Danger would like to tackle.
I don’t know what exactly or when exactly. I just know it’s high up on the list… …But it’s clearly something that the team would like to solve. I just don’t have any more information than that right now, because everything that is below the thing that we’re actively working on right now, gets a little fuzzy until it actually becomes an active project where people are actually working on the designs and the specifications and the code.
So it’s sort-of in that next set of things that we would like to tackle, I just don’t know how many other things could get in the way.
On SL2;
We are also looking out to what will the first, at least a little bit public, release, an alpha release which might be invite-only for certain use cases, when can that take place. And we’re trying to aim for somewhere middle of next year.
…I’ve already seen this little test world that we have, and I look at that little test world, and I go you know what? I haven’t seen something in Second Life that looks that nice. So even though it’s this early, you can already start to see that we have some advantages already this early on.
We’ve said that mesh is something that is very likely to be importable (in SL2), we’re working on that already. so people working in mesh should be able to leverage their assets to a large degree in the future.
This place (SL) is great, stay here for a long, long time. We don’t even think about how to transition people in some specific time frame. If three years from now, this is still a better place for people than the new place (SL2), then so be it.
We’re trying to make it clear to people that the content is yours, and we just need to have sufficient protections to protect ourselves. But again, it’s obviously not in our interest to make a mess for content creators by ourselves stepping in and starting to be part of the problem, rather than the solution with regards to IP protection.
On ending, congratulations to Saffia Widdershins and Elrik Merlin on reaching this very impressive milestone.
Thank you very much Inara Pey on providing the excellent transcript and writing about it on your blog.
And well done Herr Altberg on another excellent interview.
One of the big games websites Gamasutra interviewed Rod Humble about Linden Lab buying Desura, some sort of digital distribution website.
And this time the website used a SL picture that is only 3 years old… I think that especially when Rod Humble does an interview, LL should flood those people with some up to date screenshots they could use.
“Hey, you want to interview me, sure, but please use up to date pictures when talking about SL, like these….”
I’ll admit that I am not that interested in this story (yet) but I do know that this is very big news and probably a good move.
Well done Linden Lab.
But, more interesting to me, Rod also mentioned Second Life.
Now, this of course is old news, but it is nice that this website feels that perhaps the media treatment of SL the last couple of years has been a bit unfair.
The reason we don’t retain [more] people is, very simply, if they don’t find something that fits with their vision, they’re gone,” says Humble. “[For years] there was a belief that it would be big companies coming in and setting up shops, and in fact what happened was this user-generated economy of millions of people coming in and making small things. That’s a pattern that you’ve seen throughout many industries, the games business being one of them.
Rod Humble shows that he has pinpointed the reason why new people don’t stay in SL; they don’t find what they are looking for.
I also think this is one of the major problems SL has, new users need to be at least helped finding a sim they will enjoy and like, a theme they find interesting.
Once that happens, the rest will follow and they will want to figure out how it all works and accept the steep learning curve.
In facilitating that, Linden has rolled out (and continues to roll out) some pretty significant overhauls to Second Life, including to the servers. “As I’m sure you’ve heard from a lot of MMO developers, the one thing you never want to do is go in and try to refactor the server code. It’s just a nightmare. Well, we did that,” Humble chuckles anxiously. “We thought it was going to take us a year and it took us 18 months… [But] I think a lot of people will be seeing performance improvements now.”
I find this interesting as well, they planned such a massive overhaul that they assumed it would take them 1.5 years, that is impressive.
And yes, I’ve experienced some improvements already but am still waiting for the server side texture thingy to come to 1920s Berlin.
Either way, in my experience SL has changed a lot for the better in the last year.
The journalist writes;
Propping up the company’s mainstay is of chief import, obviously, and certainly a developer couldn’t be blamed for sticking to just that. The fact that Linden is instead capitalizing on Second Life‘s cashflow to expand into what could turn it into a solid rival for Valve’s Steam service is unique, risky, and potentially something to watch out for.
That is a good way of putting it, personally though I am not very interested in the LL cashflow but I guess that eventually, what is good for LL is good for SL.
I just hope that if it all goes wrong, SL does not suffer.
“We’re always on the look-out for key partners to further our strategy,” Humble says candidly. “We’re a very profitable company, we’re cash-rich, and if we can find potential partners, we will. That said, the strategy going forward is quite clear: to take all of our creative platforms, make them more and more open, and hopefully allow people to share and, if they want, sell their creations.”
Good, keep reminding the press how well LL is doing, that should keep them interested or make them interested again, after all, 10 years of pretty much running just one game and still making enough money to put bread on the table is a good story.
Jo Yardley's Second Life 