Originally published on my Patreon
Since last week's interviews with Linden Lab head Bradford Oberwager and newly-appointed CTO Philip Rosedale were so voluminous -- between them both, the raw chat transcript was easily over 10,000 words! -- here's the core revelations boiled down to ten key takeaways:
Philip is not aiming to create a Second Life with an extremely mass market of users:
Philip Rosedale: I'm perfectly happy making it a really positive experience for a much smaller number of people. Like, that's totally fine… I'm struck by the opportunity. If we're a happy place for people like moms and vets, are there really only as many of those worldwide as we have using Second Life today? I'll leave it to you to do the same math as I have.”
Over the years, roughly 50 to 60 million people have tried to install Second Life, but gave up for various reasons, usually due to addressable technical or design hurdles. A virtual world with 50 million monthly active users would be on par with the population of South Korea.
Likely applications of AI in Second Life are a “matchmaker” to SL people and content, and an avatar appearance assistant:
PR: So when you think about AI and Second Life, I want that AI to be a matchmaker between real people. One of the fantasies I’ve had is, imagine you have an AI that’s like a bot that says, “Come with me, James, and then it takes you, and it introduces you to somebody you might like. “I’m going to take you to this island where this guy built a lot of stuff I want to show you.”
That feels to me like a good use of AI. Having the AI be a sex bot, but you fall in love with it forever, does not feel like a good idea to me.
[An] AI might be able, for example, to help you put clothes on or change your clothes. Imagine the AI getting a permission and saying, “Hey, Hamlet can you click on this dialog box?”, and then, “I'm going to put another shirt on you.”
Improved Spatial Audio and Speech-to-Text is coming to SL:
PR: [I]imagine Second Life, imagine text and audio, everything is converted to the other. So if you type text, it says Audio [as a UI option]. If you want to hear it, you just hear it. If you say something, it captions it and puts it into text. And so imagine Second Life being so accessible, because you can just use text or voice, you can turn the audio off, you can see the captions, we can start translating stuff to people in different languages. There's all these opportunities that I think are examples of how that's a really nice thing.
WJA: [S]peaking of spatial audio, do you think we'd be able to improve live music with that? Like you can have more people?
PR: Yep, stereo transmission, more people, lower latency. So yeah, yell at the band, they can yell right back at you. Well, if you remember High Fidelity, the same architecture we're building here will allow stereo streams and the whole thing. So you can do spatial and then if somebody wants to broadcast stereo, you can kind of set up the speakers, or whatever you want to do. So we'll have all those same capabilities built into Second Life as we modernize that system.
Seven more beyond the break!
The Pros & Cons of Telehubs & Taxing Point-to-Point Teleportation in Second Life (Comment of the Week #2)
Telehub image by Ciaran Laval
How do you make Second Life feel more like a serendipitous social space? Expanding off some good points raised by EmptyEyes, I suggested this:
Add a small L$ charge to teleporting, and bring back free-to-use telehubs that are available across the mainland, and an option for sim owners. That would subtly encourage players to walk/fly/ride in vehicles and socialize more.
Lots of interesting reader comments (and guffaws) around my idea, especially this from Sue R.:
If Linden Lab had created towns, each with a community center or square, instead of an amorphous, giant expanse of Linden houses... maybe. Telehubs were an interesting compromise, but they had their cons too.
Charging for teleports isn't entirely absurd, there are MMORPGs that do something like that. In Ragnarok Online you had (still have?) to spend a gem to open a warp portal.
However:
- SL was still very social after teleports were introduced. [In the mid 2000s - WJA]. So I don't think teleport affected socialization so much.
- Other virtual words, like VRChat and Roblox, are basically a portal to different words/experiences/rooms and are more social than SL.
- Since the SL viewer mimics a web browser, teleporting is like changing web page. Can you imagine paying to change/open a webpage?
- If traveling around is so important, then I'd rather improve and encourage that and vehicle driving/piloting, which is rather poor in SL - and despite that, the Drivers of SL [group] is fun, isn't it? Imagine if SL worked better and there were better travel games/experiences - instead of discouraging and nerfing a very common, well-established and useful functionality.
- Without teleport, I doubt people would go to a nearby community anyway: most people don't wander, barely look around without any incentive to do so.
All very valid points! To discus them one by one:
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Posted on Thursday, November 07, 2024 at 04:58 PM in Comment of the Week | Permalink | Comments (3)
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