Using virtual reality to rebuild the past, reconstructing the Zum Nussbaum restaurant.

Tags

"1920s berlin project", "second life", "Zum Nußbaum", "zum nussbaum", architecture, building, history, reconstruction, restaurant, The 1920s Berlin Project, virtual reality

—The Zum Nussbaum in 1903.

According to the media, I should be using Second Life for all sorts of wacky kinky pervy stuff, but I’ve found something a lot more exciting… time travel!

For the last 6 years I’ve been recreating a 1920s Berlin neighbourhood, in the progress gathering a wonderful community of people from all over the world who bring life into the narrow streets and small dark courtyards.

We’ll be celebrating the 6th anniversary of our sim at the end of this month and for almost all its existence we’ve managed the pay the tier, so I guess I’m not the only one who thinks Second Life has a little more to offer than what it’s reputation seems to suggest.

When I first started The 1920s Berlin Project, I realised the sim, just a tiny skybox back then, needed a hotel, a place to stay at.
I wasn’t sure anyone would want to actually rent a home and live there permanently (Oh how wrong I was), and a nice hotel where you can rent a little room to live for a few days would be more interesting.

The Zum Nussbaum building as it looked in 2010

After some research I found a nice looking building that wasn’t too big and an actual building in Berlin, with my very basic knowledge of how to build, basically walls with pictures and alpha texture windows, I recreated the first building for the sim that was based on a RL location.

Because of its age, the Zum Nussbaum has become a much loved little corner of our neighbourhood, people enjoy sitting there and chatting, having a meal and for many its tiny, dark, damp rooms were the first place they could call their own.

And although I rebuild it once or twice, it clearly was an older building.
As part of my massive “mesh Berlin campaign”, I’ve been meshing, and in many cases improving and rebuilding all the Berlin buildings from scratch.

Drawing by Heinrich Zille, 1922.

Most of the time meshing a building means that its land impact goes down but it actually looks better.
But sometimes I don’t care about the land impact and just want it to look great, even if that means the land impact goes up.
I especially feel that way when I am building something that is an actual RL building or that I just really really like.

The Zum Nussbaum (Or Zum Nußbaum) restaurant is one of those buildings.
Originally build in the 16th century, it was destroyed by bombs in 1943 and rebuild in the 1980s.
But that didn’t keep it from becoming one of Berlin’s few typical old fashioned bars.
Unfortunately for me that meant that most modern day photos of the building were pretty useless for reconstruction purpose as the modern rebuild version doesn’t look much like it looked in the 1920s.

So all I had to work on were old photos, pictures and paintings.
Together with the building next to it, I think I succeeded pretty well in making the building looked like the way it did before the bombs fell.
Someone alive back then would at leas  at least recognise it.

So, after 72 years people can once more head over to the Zum Nußbaum restaurant for a good cheap meal.

First look at Project Sansar, the next virtual world Linden Lab is working on

Tags

"second life", ebbe altberg, sansar

During his speech at the SVVR (Silicon Valley Virtual Reality) Conference & Expo Ebbe talked a bit about Second Life, mentioning again some interesting (but not new to most of us) facts and figures, spoke of how The 1920s Berlin project was one of his favourite sims (hurrah!) and again had to tell everyone there that I am such a cry baby.

I never cry but when I explored my sim with the Oculus Rift for the first time and saw the Zeppelin fly over, something I’ve been dreaming about ever since I was a little girl, I did shed a little tear 😉

Most interesting to us was of course his talk of Project Sansar (working title), the next virtual world Linden lab is working on.
And Ebbe showed the first image related to Sansar.
Even though this was just a picture, not a screenshot or anything, it is still the first image we’ve seen, as far as I know.

I know Sansar is already running on some Lab’s screens but they haven’t shown us that yet.

So here it is, the first Sansar publicity picture;

The positive SL article, Wagner Au’s story, the public response and the finale on The Drax Files Radio Hour

Tags

"second life", atlas obscura, decency, drax files radio, eric grundhauser, media, morals, new world notes, values, virtual reality, Wagner James Au

How is that title for click bait?

Recently a journalist who wanted to write about Second Life did the right thing, he asked for help.

As soon as reporter Eric Grundhauser realised how massive our virtual world was and how impossible it would be to write a proper article about it without exploring it for many days, he reached out to Linden Lab and asked for a guide.
Linden Lab pointed him in the direction of one of the best guides  imaginable, Ziki Questi.

She showed him some of SL’s most impressive sims (but forgetting the best one, mine ;)) and the result is a rather nice, positive article about Second Life.
One to counter all those negative stories with.
But he didn’t forget to mention the more adult side, luckily, unlike with most media, it was not the main focus of his story.

The story was published on a website called ‘Atlas Obscura‘, “the definitive guide to the world’s wondrous and curious places.”, as they describe themselves.
So not a tech website, not a blog about games or virtual reality, but more like a travel guide for those interested in the unusual.
It is very interesting that they choose to publish a story about a virtual destination, I like that a lot.

Make sure you read it, you can find it by clicking here.

But a few days later Wagner James Au on his website ‘New World Notes’, wrote an article about the Atlas Obscura article that was rather surprising to many.
He felt that the adult side of Second Life, ugly outdated sims and things such as lag, old graphics, etc. did not get enough attention and that the article thus “presents a distorted picture of Second Life that ultimately does a disservice to SL and its best creators, while doing nothing to help grow its userbase.”

You can read his entire article by clicking here, make sure you also read the comments below it.

Unsurprisingly many Second Life users were confused, annoyed and angry about his story.
Finally the media writes something positive about our virtual world and now this.

Honour McMillan wrote an interesting reply to Wagner’s story here on her blog and of course there was lots of talking about the subject on Twitter and plurk.

So Drax and I decided to invite Hamlet to our little attic studio in Berlin (AKA Skype) and interviewed him.
I think the result is rather interesting, an edited (for time) version will be part of the Drax Files Radio Hour to go online this Friday and we will also put the complete unedited interview online.

I personally think that just because sims are catagorised as adult, they don’t necessarily are ‘rated Adult for extreme sexual and violent content’.
Interestingly enough yesterday Linden Lab organised a ‘Inworld Linden meet up’ in the adult themed (stunningly wonderful) sim Basilique Town… where public nudity or even (wearing or walking around in?) underwear is not allowed!
And although the place has a few corners here and there where the rules are more relaxed and hanky panky probably goes on somewhere, these areas are for members only.
So their rating as adult may be legitimate, I definitely wouldn’t call it a sex sim, if it was, I wouldn’t even dare visit it, Lindens or no Lindens.

Then again, my rating system would be even worse, I’m such an old fashioned prude, I’d probably rate 99% of SL as perverted.
I mean some women walk around with skirts that don’t cover their knees!

I also think that a lot has to do with the words you use.
For instance Hamlet says Second Life is dying, I’d prefer to say it is declining or even better; evolving into the Next Generation virtual world that Linden Lab is working on now.

Anyway, I’ll leave the rest of my opinions to the interview we did with Wagner, a link to our podcast will be shared here on this blog, and on of course on the Draxfiles website as soon as the show is online.

The SL Go interview; past, present and future of cloud streaming Second Life

Tags

"second life", cloud, sl go, SLGo, streaming

In todays ‘Drax Files Radio Hour’ we air an interview with Dennis Harper, Sr. Product Manager of SL Go.  The SL streaming service that recently announced it would not continue after Sony bought important patents from OnLive, making it impossible to continue the service.

In the interview Dennis talks about how SL Go came to be, the future he imagined for it a, how the SL Go community grew and how SL Go got a huge boost at the very last moment thanks to the inworld paying option.
I’d love to see Linden Lab put that in Second Life, allowing us to pay our tier and premium fee inworld!

About the sale Dennis says that Sony never intended to own or run the service, they were only interested in the intellectual property and patterns. Buying these meant Onlive simply had to stop in their tracks.

Onlive was put on the market because it was not profitable, but they were getting close to turning this around. Cloud steaming itself is a very good business but it just took a lot of investment, time and effort to get the customers they needed.
The long time yield over a customer was just not enough and as Dennis describes it; Onlive just ran out of runway and money.

Onlive was ahead of its time, like Second Life once was.
Dennis feels that they could have made it an incredibly viable business if they had had another year or two. Cloud gaming is the future. Onlive had been looking for a buyer for some time, several parties were interested and some of them did want to take over and run the service, but in the end they decided to sell to Sony.

Linden Lab did show some interest in SL Go and did come to discuss the service, but I personally don’t think they actually made an offer.
Dennis said that Linden Lab and OnLive had some discussions on closer business partnerships, but nothing solid ever came from it.  Ultimately, OnLive might not have been the best solution for Linden Lab, as Second Life represents hundreds of thousands of potential users.  OnLive has a great service, but that number of users may have swamped them.  However, OnLive was actively working on new technology that would allow for this volume of users.  If given time, he is confident that OnLive would have solved that problem.

But the end of SL Go does not have to mean the end of streaming Second Life.
I’ve written before about how I felt LL should offer SL Go as a free or cheap service for premium members and it seems they actually did look into this.

One option could be the service Amazon hosts called ‘Amazon Appstream’, something I never heard of before till I read about it on Inara Pey’s blog.
Amazon has lots and lots of servers all over the world that are far from being really pushed to their limit. Most of the time they even stand idle. Linden Lab could perhaps rent those servers. It is at least something Linden Lab should look at and perhaps experiment with.

Dennis thinks that Linden Lab has now realised the possibilities of streaming SL and what it means to many users and potentially many more people who use their virtual world. Thanks to SL Go, SL finally worked on mobile devices and finally looked good.

Dennis also mentions that now that SL will soon no longer be supported for people using  XP or Vista OS on their computer.
These users, according to a reputable source at least 40-50.000 people, will soon be stuck on older viewers, unable to update to any new feature SL introduces and eventually making it impossible for them to use it.To them SL Go was a (second) life safer.

They will be left in the cold and so will those of us who can’t afford the big computers you need to run SL the way it should be running; with awesome graphics and no lag.

Forget about Sony. If you want to enjoy SL the way you did with SL Go you need to ask Linden Lab, they are the only ones who could get this done.

Personally I think that SL Go has proven that streaming Second Life works, that there is a market for it, that it means a lot to many SL users and that it could have a drastic effect on the reputation of our virtual world by flooding the internet with amazing high quality graphics and eventually perhaps even machinima.
Linden Lab is going to look running the Next Generation Second Life on mobile devices anyway, so it would be a good idea for them to start experimenting with streaming Second Life now and use that experience to make NGSL even better.

So the ball is in Linden Lab’s corner. They are the ones that could bring back SL streaming and I think they should. Linden Lab has the talent and the technology and the former SL Go staff have the know-how and experience. I also think that if they work together on building something from scratch that will just concentrate on streaming SL, there would be no issues regarding the patents Onlive sold to Sony.

SL Stream will improve SL for a lot of users and may even find a way to get more of them to sign up as premium members or even “Plus Premium” members who’ll pay a little more for the streaming service.

So forget about Sony and politely, patiently and friendly tell Linden Lab why you think streaming SL is a good idea.

Make sure you catch the interview in todays Drax Files broadcast, you can listen to it by clicking here.

To end this article, I’m sharing a few quotes, stories and opinions from SL Go users about what the loss of this service means to them and why it is important to try and find or create an alternative.

Melissa Ussy
OMG i had no idea water was SUPPOSED TO look that way!!!!

Adrian Mondrian
“I’d been hoping to get my mom into Second Life soon. She’s coming to visit me next month, and a tablet would have been a much more feasible purchase right now than a high-end laptop, for both financial as well as technical reasons. With SL Go gone, our options are more limited. I still want to introduce her to the world somehow — I actually think she’d love SL once she got used to it, especially since she feels quite isolated where she’s currently living — but it becomes a more complicated undertaking and not nearly as “accessible” an experience for her as it could otherwise have been.”

Elrik Merlin
I think the loss of this service is a great shame. Although I don’t know how popular the service was, I am sure there are quite a few users who will now no longer be able to access SL, and a great potential for expanding the reach of virtual worlds to people with almost any kind of end-user device, is being lost – at a time when the whole business of virtual reality is getting additional attention and environments like SL are being shown to be a decade ahead of the curve, and when increasingly tablets and mobile devices are increasingly the internet access equipment of choice.

Selena
I am an estate owner and pay the premium membership. Normally I use my own computer to run SL but recently my mother had a life altering surgery that has required me to move in with her and use her new but not meant for graphics computer. SL GO has allowed me to continue to service my estate and keep in touch with my residents. The closing down of SL GO will be a hard blow indeed.

Aelggyva Fenwitch (Effy)
Once i saw what Second life and its many artists and creators meant me to see in previously unattainable graphic settings my virtual life underwent a major change . I was able to visit some astounding visual creations and interact with other visitors in a much more rewarding way.
I am really not looking forward to returning to my virtual life which consists of walking through treacle surrounded by grey blocks.

DevinVaughn
With SL Go, I could be film maker. The frame rates were smooth while normally my computer skips. …And I could do it with advanced lighting too. I could also do amazing things like waltz into the super busy The Arcade sim, and yard sale hunt at Epic without choking on all those avatars, textures, and meshes densely populating a small area. … I even figured out how to use SL Go for my blog photos. SL Go photography saved the day but when I would otherwise crash trying to get the shot. (Yes, I was brutal with SL Go photography, pushing it past it’s limits with ultra advanced lighting, 16x anti aliasing, and trying to do a larger image size than double my screen resolution and it would crash on me of course. lol) But when I needed fast and reliable, SL Go photography was there for me. … I had big plans to use SL Go for my coverage of Fantasy Faire. I was planning to make movies while the sims were crawling with people, filming them all in thier wonderful and wacky outfits, and I would do all it on Ultra settings too. …. It sent me reeling that something so useful, SL Go, was taken away suddenly without warning and no way to fill void left behind. …. SL Go was a great tool and I enjoyed having it. I hope in the future there will be new ways to solve the problems of making VR faster, stable, able to handle busy sims, be beautifully lit, and of course, do it while waiting in line at doctor office or sitting on the beach.

A.
I used singularity – graphics setting as low as they’d go, a draw of 32 – max avis 3 at the most – often 2, so i could see my partner and i dance.
In crowded places, i looked like a whirling dervish – i couldn’t control my movement and anyone moving in front of me took my fps from 7 – SEVEN mind you, at the best – to 2 and i’d crash. You can’t run a venue like that.
Then sl go and FS – and i became so dependent SO very quickly.
I’m so crushed – and i know from using it again now, that singularity is if possible going to continue to be worse.
I’m looking at closing both venues, and leaving second life – i can’t afford a new box.
Maybe going to InWorldz to see if it’s better there, that’s what losing sl go means to me. The fact that i’ve never seen a framerate over 10 in my three years in sl says it all, i think.

Ali V
It means i have to buy or build a new computer in order to continue being on sl.
LL is out “tech’ing” themselves from mainstream people.

Sarah Snow
It means the end of SL as it should be experienced.  for me at least

Jaska BloodMoon
It means my fiancée will be unable to join me in SL until sometime down the road when I’m capable of breaking free from the chains instilled by bills and bloated prices, and finally buy a better laptop that she can use.

Ed Merryman
well it does mean that I won’t be able to use my xp pc for sl much longer,, but LL won’t be worried about that 😛

Jaska BloodMoon
It’s bad enough that I have more money going out to bills than I have coming in right now, paying a bloated price just to stream a viewer so that my laptop can run it just isn’t in the cards for me, at least not at the moment. That’s why I liked OnLive as an option, paying by Linden took quite a bit of weight off my shoulders.
The hardest thing for people right now is that Second Life is changing and becoming more and more demanding of computers. A low to mid-range computer that used to be able to run SL is now barely able to function properly, and these low to mid-range computers are “new” computers that are literally obsolete right out of the box. Most people can’t afford to pay a one lump sum for a high-end rig, especially when the rigs that are capable of running SL the way it’s meant to be run is well over 1 to 2,000 USD. x.x Some folks could probably afford that and save up for it rather quickly, but with so many places price gouging on their Internet services or electric, or what have you, bills just aren’t permitting for some folks. Some of SLs residents draw a monthly disability in RL, and SL is pretty much their reality, and it’s a reality that they can’t truly enjoy.  -shrug- Just my thoughts.

Katy
for me the effect personally is negligible except when i’m away from home and have to use my laptop.  But what bothers me is the large number of people who have had their first experience of being able to see and function in SL as it is meant to be, and will no longer have that ability.

Mesh upload with “NO” limit to amount of faces coming soon

Tags

"second life", ebbe altberg, ebbe linden, improvements, mesh

It has been mentioned before that an update is coming to mesh uploading in Second Life that will allow us to go beyond the limit of 8 faces on a prim.

This is very exciting to us creators, because at the moment, when I build a building, it can only have 8 different texture faces.
So when I for instance want to make a building with several rooms, all with a different kind of wallpaper, nice plaster ceilings, wonderful 1920s façade, ceramic tiles on the roof, etc, etc… you can imagine that I’ll need more than 8 faces.

To still make the buildings I want to build, I therefor have to cut the building into several mesh parts that I then have to stick together again and link.
To make things a little easier, I usually decide to make every floor of a building separately.
And sometimes, this means your land impact goes up.

So learning that this limit was going to go up, was great news and I am an impatient kind of person.
I wanted to know what the new limit would be, so I decided to ask Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab, himself;

@1920sberlin No specific limit when it comes out in a project viewer in a month or so.

— Ebbe Altberg (@ebbealtberg) March 29, 2015

@1920sberlin No set limit but something will probably cross the line…

— Ebbe Altberg (@ebbealtberg) March 29, 2015

I’m not a very technical kind of person, most of this stuff is abracadabra to me, so maybe this is not big news to some of you, but to me it is rather exciting.
I think it will make working with mesh more fun.

I still make all my mesh inworld, I use a tool called ‘Mesh Studio’ (you can find it on marketplace) that allows me to keep making stuff with the good old prims and then turn them into mesh.
With the “no faces limit”, I hope to be able to make more stuff with less effort.

And yes, although it seems there won’t be a limit, I am sure some of Second Life’s most creative users will eventually find out how far this can be pushed.
Once that happens, the server farm at Linden Lab will probably explode, causing the rise of the machines and the apocalypse.

Till that happens, I can’t wait to create something new with this improvement.

Another step forward!

Yet another positive story about Second Life in the media

Tags

"second life", ebbe altberg, ebbe linden, media, PR, publicity

Is the media falling in love with Second Life again?

After years of terrible, silly, shallow, badly researched or simply made up articles with screenshots from 1979, recently there have been a few rather positive and well written stories in the media about Second Life.

It seems that the virtual reality renaissance, set in motion by Oculus Rift, is bringing Second Life back into the spotlight and quite rightly so.

Because no matter what you think about our 13 year old online world, it is still there, it is still doing well and unlike any other VR related thing out there, it has a huge amount of experience, an amazing track record and its own economy.

It was a matter of time before (good) journalists would realise the importance of Second Life, or at least how interesting its story is today.

A few days an online magazine called ‘Good’ had a pretty decent article about us and today ‘Business Insider Australia’ published a wonderful story with the rather good and eye catching title;
‘This company was 13 years early to virtual reality — and it’s getting ready to try again’

Love that title, because SL was early, perhaps even ahead of its time.
The story has an ok screenshot, that at least is up to day (although not very exciting).

Because the audience is people who want to read about business, they get straight to the point and in my experience, that is very good when the story is about Second Life.
Throw some facts and figures at the reader and they will be impressed and perhaps stop thinking about all the pervy stuff they read about in the other articles.

Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab is quoted in the article and as I mentioned before, Ebbe knows what to say and how to sell our virtual world to outsiders and once more he does a wonderful job of it.

The story goes into the past and future of Second Life and well, it just sounds good.

Which is why the next version of Second Life has a few clear priorities, Altberg says:

• Make it easier for people to find cool, relevant stuff.
• Make it possible for more people to attend and experience that cool stuff (Duran Duran did a free concert in Second Life once, but only 50 people could fit in the room for technical reasons).
• Make it possible for people to make money in new ways from their stuff (like letting people who run virtual classrooms rent out the technology to other universities).

If the company can do that with this next version, Altberg says, then Second Life’s prosperity will continue well into the new reign of virtual reality.

And what can I say, I am easily pleased, so I was quite excited when my 1920s Berlin Project was mentioned.
My already massive ego likes being stroked but to be blunt, I do think that at least the theme of my sim is a good one to show outsiders with that Second Life is about more than shopping, chatting and hanky panky.
Although of course all those things also happen in our sim… ssshhhh don’t tell anyone.

In short, an article worth reading (and you can read it by clicking here), but also positive about our virtual world.

Let’s hope more journalists start to realise that Second Life is actually a very interesting topic, again.

Putting yourself into Second Life

Tags

"second life", avatar, SL2, slng

Many, if not most users in Second Life love to be anyone but themselves in Virtual Reality.

But some of us, including myself, would actually love to have their avatar, or at least one of their avatars, look like an exact or only slightly improved versions of their real life selves.

And if VR is going as big as some of us think it will be, we may eventually end up using our avatars for more than Second Life.
Imagine one day using your avatar (Second Life, High Fidelity or Facebook World) to go visit your family who live on the other side of the world.
I bet your aunt might not be too keen to see you appear in her virtual living room covered in scars waving a sword around and wearing a suit or armour, or see you the way you looked when you were dancing on a bar in a ‘special interest’ kind of club last night…
She’d want to see you look the way you do.
And one day when we use VR to do all sorts of things, you may even be invited for a job interview or a chat with a bank manager in VR, again a situation where you may not want to show up looking like Satan or a kitten with a hat on.
Even though nobody can say no to kittens with hats on.

Either way, I think it would be fantastic if Second Life Next Generation would have a tool that makes it al lot easier to make your avatar look like you and in a discussion on the SLUniverse forums I bumped into the two videos below that show some rather cool tech doing just that.

I think that even for people who do not want their avatar to look like them, this could be very interesting.
Because if by using a camera or even a motion sensor device such as Kinect or Leap Motion, you could create an avatar in SL, you would at least end up with a realistic proportioned avatar as a foundation.
Turning it then into a giant, elf, furry or child would be even more fun and you would always have this real grown up body to use as a template, something to compare your fantasy avatar with.
Or maybe you want to give your fantasy avatar your RL face or parts of it.

Anyway, I just think this is rather interesting and fun stuff that I’d love to use in Second Life, so enjoy;

Thank you Wolkenreiter for posting these on the SLUniverse forums.

SL Go now has its own Facebook page and group

Tags

"second life", facebook, sl go, SLGo

The SL Go team keeps up the good job of opening up lines of communication with its users.

They already have a busy inworld group and an island location you can visit but now there is also a SL Go Facebook Group and page!

Although many of us, especially those who are avatars, really dislike Facebook, but it is still one of the best and most used social media tools out there.

The Facebook page will be a great way to stay up to date with the latest news, improvements and special deals, while the Facebook group will be a place where you can share your amazing pictures, ask for help or interact with other SL Go users and the SL Go team.

You can find the Facebook page here; www.facebook.com/slgobyonlive

And the Facebook group here; www.facebook.com/groups/slgobyonlive

SL Go now offers Firestorm viewer for mobile devices

Tags

"second life", mobile, sl go, SLGo

SL Go has just announced that from now on the Firestorm viewer is available for mobile devices including Android and iOS but not the official Linden Lab viewer.

I quote from the Press release;

OnLive is thrilled to announce today that due to overwhelming demand from our community of SL Go users, we are making the Firestorm Viewer available for mobile devices including Android and iOS. Due to current technical limitations, we are only able to offer one viewer for mobile devices. Our studies have shown that the SL Go community prefers the Firestorm Viewer, and now they can enjoy the same rich experience on their mobile devices.

Of course the LL viewer still works on PC and Mac computers, but for mobile devices you now will have to use Firestorm.

For me this is not a bad thing, I ever only use Firestorm for Second Life and I don’t use any mobile devices anyway.
But for others it means they have one less choice and may even have to start getting used to the Firestorm viewer.

But it is not surprising, although worrying for Linden Lab (or should be) that the majority of viewers prefer the Firestorm viewer.

The SL go team also said that they hope to “bring this same choice to mobile devices soon, but still have some technical hurdles to overcome.”.

Interested in trying SL Go?

Sign up on the SL Go website here or visit the SL Go island inworld to pay for the account in L$, no name, paypal or credit card required.

What if SL Go was a gift for Second Life premium members?

Tags

"second life", premium, sl go, SLGo

It may be obvious that I rather like SL Go.

As I’ve written, it allows me to enjoy Second Life the way it should be enjoyed in all its visual glory and even on my 6 year old MacBook.
Not to mention that it revitalized my love for virtual photography.

But it costs money, of course it does, there is no escaping that, but well, money is money and as a Dutch person, spending even a cent breaks my heart.
Yes we cloggies are cheap penny pinchers.

Something else that costs money and that doesn’t make me very happy is my Second Life premium account.
I have one, I think because I once needed one to buy land, but it has never been very rewarding.
Now and then I get a gift which, if it isn’t 1920s themed (and it never is) is of no use to me, I get a Linden home, which I’ve never even visited and that most people don’t seem to be very keen on, etc, etc.
I’m sure some people are very happy with it, but it doesn’t do much for me.
The only things I like(d) about the premium account is the live chat support (until they decided to drastically cut the opening hours) and getting some land, even though I of course no longer needed that once I got my own region.

Premium account costs about $9.95, you get a dollar in Lindens back each month, so its roughly $8.70 a month.
SL Go costs $9.95 a month.

And I know it is probably a bit of a silly idea, some wild plan, but I’ve been wondering about combining SL Go with the SL premium account.

Hear me out.

What if… the SL Go team and Linden Lab had a long chat and made a nice deal;
Every one in SL with a premium account gets SL Go for free, or with a huge discount.

I think it would make getting a premium account a lot more interesting for a lot of SL users and although it is not a huge source of income for LL, it is a regular and steady monthly income.
Of course it would also cost money, but I reckon SL Go might be willing to give LL a discount, after all they would be very happy with such a huge amount of new users.
I reckon that some SL Go users might also get interested in other Onlive services and thus create a new source of revenue.

Now I am the first to admit that I have no idea about the business side of how SL Go works or what the premium accounts actually mean to LL, so none of this may make any sense.
The money and business people at Linden Lab have to look at this and see if there is something here or if crazy Dutch woman is dreaming again.

But at this moment, Linden Lab has to host several regions full of houses for premium account holders, houses most of us are not that excited about.
This costs LL money or at least some recourses.
Not to mention the ‘Exclusive Experience’ they build and host for premium users, the gifts and activities.
Premium accounts cost LL some money.
By replacing all these extra’s with one actual useful gift of free SL Go, I think most premium account holders would not only be very happy but it would become very interesting to other SL users to actually get a premium account.

And if I am totally wrong about this, there is one other option that would work for both Sl Go and Linden Lab; The SL Premium Plus account.
In stead of paying $9.95 a month, you pay $15,- and for this you get SL Go on top of your premium account.
So nothing really changes with the premium account, but for 5 bucks extra you get SL go on top of it.
SL Premium Go!
SL Go Pro!

Again, this is just a crazy idea, I have no idea about all the facts and figures, the economical and financial parts of this idea and what kind of deal would make this beneficial for both SL Go AND Linden lab… and us users!

I just think that it would be an interesting idea to see if we can somehow combine these two things.
Making both the SL premium accounts more attractive and allowing more people to enjoy Second Life the way it should be enjoyed, with full ultra graphics, on mobile devices and with next to no lag.
This in the end will also help Linden Lab with improving Second Life’s reputation because us SL Go users are uploading a lot of really amazing screenshots… and who knows, in the future we may even be able to use SL Go to upload video or perhaps even stream it.
Can you imagine the impression all those videos made in SL with ultra graphic settings and almost no lag will make?
I can…

So what do you think?
Crazy and silly idea or is there something interesting here?
Perhaps you have a better idea?
Let us know, share your suggestions in the comments section below!