Tech -- Culture -- Humour
Over the past eighteen months or so The Metaverse Journal has grown slowly but surely – our readership has grown every single month since our launch in late 2006. We have two intermittent contributors in addition to myself but the time’s come to expand the number of writers. Therefore, I’m extremely pleased to introduce Anastasia Vesperman (SL: Feldspar Epstein).
Anastasia is based in Melbourne and has been involved with virtual worlds for more than ten years. Her brief is wide: to bring one story weekly on anything inspiring or interesting happening in Second Life or other virtual world.
I’ll let Anastasia introduce herself further but suffice it to say I’m thrilled to have her on board. Please make her feel welcome 😉
With the upcoming five year anniversary of Second Life’s public existence, there’ll be plenty of editorialising and we’re not about to miss out. Below are the key achievements and challenges arising from Second Life’s first five years.
The achievements:
1. Changing the landscape
There’s no doubt that Second Life broke some serious new ground over the past five years. It was the first virtual world that gave residents enormous freedom and ownership over their creations. This alone makes the past five years a worthwhile exercise. Until then, there were gaming worlds and more restrictive social worlds like The Sims Online. Most importantly, it’s started to change the mindset of the broader population – virtual worlds are no longer just some freaky hobby experienced by a few.
2. Growth
In June 2003 there were 623 registered users of Second Life. Now there’s around 14 million registered users. Using the traditional method of a 10% active user base, that’s 1.4 million active users worldwide. That’s certainly growth, albeit not growth that matches gaming world success stories like World of Warcraft. Given some of the challenges listed below, this growth is arguably surprising and a testament to the user-driven community in Second Life.
3. Marketing
There’s no doubt that Linden Lab have had some real marketing successes, although the biggest story wasn’t created by them – Anshe Chung’s first miilion dollars . There was a deluge of new residents in late 2006 came and Linden Lab ensured the momentum continued well into 2007. The gambling, banking and ageplay bans weren’t perhaps handled as well, but overall Second Life is still perceived as a viable and attractive option in spite of its shortcomings.
4. Transparency
Linden Lab do try at times to maintain some transparency around their decisions and operations although I believe this has declined in some areas over the past year. They’re far from perfect in this regard but still a step ahead of a lot of tech companies.
The challenges:
1. Usability
This is by far and away the biggest issue facing Second Life, particularly if you live outside the USA. Linden Lab have actively touted 2008 as the year of improving the Second Life experience and there’s still a long way to go. It’s now well over a year since the word ‘soon’ was uttered in regard to SL servers based in Australia. Until this occurs there’s little likelihood of significant growth locally as the experience for most people is frustrating to say the least.
2. Relevance
With so many competitors on the horizon, SL will have a battle to maintain its market share, let alone increase it significantly. That said, the open source corse Linden Lab have taken ensures it remains the preeminent virtual worlds platform for now.
3. Interoperability
The works well underway in ensuring different worlds can directly interact but there’s an enormous amount of work still to be done. Projects like OpenSim are leading the way and the list of new grids continues to grow but OpenSim will continue to have an uphill battle against the large number of proprietary worlds underway.
4. Governance
I don’t envy Linden Lab at all as far as its role in deciding what’s acceptable or not. The numerous legal jurisdictions are enough to turn any risk manager’s hair white overnight. Things aren’t going to get any easier either as real world governments finally start to grasp the impact of virtual worlds in a range of areas – intellectual property, taxation, and health and welfare are the three more obvious ones. Linden Lab’s banking ban, ageplay intervention and gambling crackdown have had varying degrees of success – expect more intervention in coming months and years.
The overall report card
It’s hard to imagine that any company could pull off a faultless virtual world creation and expansion, so at the very least some credit needs to be given to Linden Lab, faults and all. The continued expansion of the organisation in a coherent way will make the difference between a relevant and ever-improving virtual world platform and a declining pioneer that lost its way.
Here’s to another five years of innovation and inspiration – and maybe even a more usable virtual worlds for those of us down here.
Over to you – what do you consider have been the highlights and lowlights of Second Life’s first five years?
Wimbledon is one of the world’s best known tennis tournaments and once again it’s going to be in Second Life on the heels of the Australian Open presence earlier this year.
Closely involved with the project is Ian Hughes, a Meteverse Evangelist with IBM. I asked him to throw some light on the goals of the Wimbledon build this year:
“Amongst other things we have about 180 people onsite working to help the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) deal with the massive event, from collecting scores and stats and moving that data around to the TV people, to ticketing and wireless networking for press. The website is somewhere we provide point by point live scoring in seconds and sometimes quicker to the world.
In 2006 I did a proof of concept privately to show that we were able to bring much of the web data into Second Life and render it in various ways allowing people to consume and enjoy the content together, also to provide the ability to get involved through being able to talk to people working the event and leave wearing free tshirts. In 2007 we made this a more public and approved build. I manned the build for 12 hours a day for 2 weeks. The centrepiece was bringing the Hawkeye ball tracking data into a prim based court, playing near-live rallies in real time.
The build on IBM 7 was deliberately small and intimate, as we have exmaples of large stadiums as was done for the Australian Open. So to compare and contrast was important. Also, this build was placed in the heart of the main IBM 12 islands, to be just part of our virtual world presence and make it easier to take people to other nearby IBM builds such as the SOA (service orientated architecture) one. In fact, you can point to them from Wimbledon and show people the neighbours.
We also found that people came to hear what IBM does for Wimbledon and so built a ‘behind the scenes’ tour. We kept it fairly low key events-wise though got lots of press and blog attention which kept me busy talking to 200 people a day. This year we are reusing much of the build, but renovating part of it. We are looking to put a few more entertaining mini games in place, remodelling the shop, providing some more takeaway products. We are not really planning on doing the ball tracking, simply because we want to focus on the web page integration in Second Life this year and we have proved the principle works.
In order to take that live representation further we would need to start to represent the the real player images, something that may get us into image rights. The new web page elements in SL mean we can provide complete score pages live and in realtime as we do to the web, but be able to see them all together as a group. The experiment is to see how that dynamic works with an event. We can place a browser on a prim surface and remove the need to remake everything (even text) in 3D. Showing how it is possible to re-use much of the web, but benefit from shared browsing and communication between avatars is a key driver. Having a live dynamic website with constantly changing information will help us evaluate the best way to approach this on other projects. In particular, the dynamic of what happens in a virtual world that is integrated with a company intranet and a company’s business, not just a place to escape to.
As I have said, this is still an experiment that we are lucky enough to be able to partake of. I know I learned a great deal in the marathon staffing of this last year. Having been free and roaming across Second Life, visiting events, running workshops, building, scripting etc it was a very different feel to be locked into one place and enthuse about it and what it represents for so much of the day. Unlike in RL where we have bursts of visitors, SL visits happen all the time. Likewise seeing the wax and wane of the green dot effect was intriguing. Also, the support from my fellow eightbars from IBM, where many of them chose to also come along and help out through the tournament. Building, hosting, just passing the time of day. All these are things that are often lost in other electronic communication.”
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