iPad Will Give Us a Second Life We Can Hold in Our Hands

What does the just announced iPad mean for Second Life? Quite a lot, actually. There's already two iPhone apps for accessing and interacting in Second Life:

• Sparkle by Genkii
• Touch Life by Pocket Metaverse

Based on what Steve Job says in his announcement, both will be compatible with iPad. What's more, it's now feasible to incorporate the 3D graphics elements of Second Life into those apps and others sure to come.

But that's only the beginning. Because at least two companies (that I'm aware of) have already developed touch screen user interfaces for Second Life. Here's one:

Read more about it here. Then imagine a similar display running Second Life on the iPad. The near future of the metaverse may not be in desktops or laptops or game consoles (not portable enough) or mobile phones (too portable). For today at least, it seems like the metaverse is moving toward a time when we hold it in both hands.

Jobs photo credit: Ryan Anson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Comments

[Leondra]

I have tried moving around SL with my Wacom pad. It's just not easy or accurate. There's so much one needs a keyboard to do. It's not unlike using a Smartboard for SL. You would still be pulling up tools like a keyboard.

...and BTW, these guys need to drop the noob avas if they want to impress anyone with their SL skills.

[Csteph Submariner]

The AV in the demo video didn't seem to be moving around very easily either.

I think this would totally rock for some applications (building!), but they shouldn't avoid chucking everything through multi-touch

[Csteph Submariner]

The AV in the demo video didn't seem to be moving around very easily either.

I think this would totally rock for some applications (building!), but they shouldn't avoid chucking everything through multi-touch

[Hiro Pendragon]

I program with the iPhone SDK that iPad runs on.

The iPhone has 3-D capabilities, so the iPad doesn't offer anything new in that respect.

Bottom line - no graphics card, no full SL. At least LL comes out with a simpler viewer.

(Recommendation: before making technical claims, speak to someone with a technical background. Sorry if this makes me sound like a jerk, but my tolerance for blogging-without-research has been dried up. )

[Nine Warrhol]

Its a giant iphone. lol. Really funny because people will fall over themselves to get it. I will have to pass. :P

[Anna]

Wow, that looks really laborious to move around with a touch screen. Worse than my already bad laptop touch pad. I'd much rather see technology advance along the lines of glove input and graphics processing speed than some novelty piece of overgrown cell-phone technology from Sunnyvale's pied piper.

[Crap Mariner]

I'll wait until I actually see it before I believe it.

-ls/cm

[Hamlet Au]

Hiro, I said "3D graphics elements of Second Life" precisely because I'm not claiming a full viewer can be ported to the iPad. (Yet.)

[radar]

"...and BTW, these guys need to drop the noob avas if they want to impress anyone with their SL skills."

Any idiot can sign up for SL and make a decent avatar. How many people can program a new user input technology for it?

I'm PRETTY sure they aren't as focused on what their avatar looks like (like apparently some superficial, non-technical people roaming SL are) as they are on the technical aspect of what they are creating.

[Sidney Smalls]

Yeah, but I have no idea what "3D graphics elements of Second Life" is supposed to mean. I can't really think of anything between running an SL client (which will take much more powerful hardware) and...well...not.

[Sidney Smalls]

**** Any idiot can...make a decent avatar. ****

Actually I find that not to be true in a surprisingly large number of cases.

[Hamlet Au]

Sidney, Hiro: A couple years ago, using streaming and cloud technology, a small start-up called Vollee created a Second Life viewer where you could walk/fly and communicate in-world with full 3D graphics on your mobile phone:

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2008/09/hands-on-vollee.html

Like I said, "3D graphics elements of Second Life". Maybe not dynamic content creation and the full megillah, but yeah, some kind of version is definitely feasible.

[Pavig Lok]

I would be surprised if you couldn't compile SL for this thing (though there would be a lot of work in it. The iPhone already has openGL graphics acceleration (new models with shader support). This pad is clearly quite a bit more powerful than the iPhone given even the UI is in 3d and it has a lot more pixels to push around.

The other reason I believe SL could run on this thing is that it will be a stable known platform. It's a lot easier to develop fast, tight optimized code for one piece of hardware - doing it (as they do for SL) where you code for the worst case scenario on all fronts is significantly harder. I'd expect optimized SL to run on this a lot better than "a netbook", because compiled specifically for the hardware it should be better tuned.

[Leondra]

Avatar as literacy... research it.

[Jane2]

Name one thing that suggests this iPad (and I won't even make the juvenile jokes that circulated in my office) can do what the iPhone or iTouch cannot. Like a previous commenter said, no grpahics card, no SL. So if you want to spend 800 bucks for something that "might" show graphics, why not go the extra 400 and get a darned Mac?

[Ann Otoole]

Give it time. The right client UI for SL compatible 3D Virtual World Simulators on ipad will get built by someone.

The fact someone had the balls to recognize those tiny phone screens were a poor idea is a sign of serious progress. Next we need to move into wearable flexible computers that use a ocular HUD projection and eye position tracker for true augmented reality. This too will happen.

[Hiro Pendragon]

Hamlet:

Vollee, and similar "SL on a mobile device" gimmicks that were released over the last few years amounted to nothing more than "You run Second Life on a computer and stream it via desktop-streaming-app-du-jour to your mobile phone." Which is distinctly *not* SL on a mobile device, it's VNC on a mobile device. And it's certainly not 3-D on a mobile device - it's a 2-D moving image being broadcast to a mobile device.

You can't have "using streaming and cloud technology" and "full 3-D graphics". It'd be like saying that a standard video projector runs Second Life when you plug in your laptop to it - it's not running *on* it. And it's certainly not feasible for mass use, at least not until cloud computing becomes the standard for all computing (and not just data backup, which is largely its primary use).

It defeats the purpose of mobility if it depends on a computer running somewhere else.

But considering the size and price of a new iPad, a person can go pick up a portable mini PC with a graphics card, and have Second Life running on a device just as mobile, but *for reals* on it.

[Sidney Smalls]

Compiling is not the issue. The fact is that iPhone and iPad apps live under some *extreme* limitations, for reasons of security and battery life. It will probably be another couple of generations of these things before anyone gets a full SL client running on one as anything more than a demonstration.

[Sidney Smalls]

*** It defeats the purpose of mobility if it depends on a computer running somewhere else. ***

Hardly. A lot of mobile apps depend on servers running somewhere else.

And data backup isn't the main use for cloud computing. You're pretty far behind the times technically speaking.

*** You can't have "using streaming and cloud technology" and "full 3-D graphics". ***

Sorry, but you're being extremely pedantic here. I don't doubt that such apps were gimmicks, but nobody other than geeks care where the shaders are running. If you're seeing and maneuvering in a 3D environment, that's what counts.

[Sidney Smalls]

*** And it's certainly not feasible for mass use, at least not until cloud computing becomes the standard for all computing ***

This is a particularly bizarre statement. First of all, cloud computing isn't even necessary. You'd just need a server. Second, whether or not cloud computing is "the standard for all computing" is utterly irrelevant. It just has to exist. Which it does.

[Hiro Pendragon]

"Hardly. A lot of mobile apps depend on servers running somewhere else."

Yeah, but they don't depend on an entire machine dedicated to running something. This is *not* the same as, say, a server that supports dozens of different users. This is a wholly different beast than, say, "I need a database housed somewhere that holds data that many mobile apps are accessing." This is an *entire computer* running Second Life that needs to be left on.

" First of all, cloud computing isn't even necessary. You'd just need a server."

I was responding to Hamlet's assertion in his earlier article that the Vollee utilized "cloud computing". It doesn't, but that's besides the point. Essentially, until CPU power becomes as easy to grab from any particular server, in the same way that hard drive space is, you can't effectively run a mobile Second Life *in this manner* - tying up a whole machine.

You mentioned battery life - I think you're right on listing that as a limitation. While an iPad may run normally 10 hours, something like a constant VNC connect (as Vollee likely is) likely eats that up much faster. And if Second Life actually ran on a mobile device - well, it's a memory and CPU beast of a program. Linden Lab would need to release a SL Very Lite version, else you'd have about 30 minutes of SL time.

Again, the bottom line is that it's unrealistic to expect iPad as a Second Life platform in its current state. The ball is squarely in Linden Lab's court to have a more mobile version of SL available. In last year's SLCC keynote, I believe it was Philip or Mark who mentioned a goal of having a version of Second Life that could run on a browser. Should that come, I would expect very much that Second Life might be good for an iPad. However, Hamlet's assertions are misleading and not based in knowledge of the technology. Read his last two lines again:
"The near future of the metaverse may not be in desktops or laptops or game consoles (not portable enough) or mobile phones (too portable). For today at least, it seems like the metaverse is moving toward a time when we hold it in both hands."

No.

Let alone the fact that "Metaverse" is a term that's both in question and moving. "Metaverse" doesn't mean a walled garden anymore. Metaverse indicates (as the name literally implies) an Internet with 3-D capabilities that encompasses galaxies of different applications - WWW, mobile, virtual worlds, etc. But that's a whole different discussion.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Oh, I don't know, Hiro, I'm not so pessimistic myself :) Someday someone clever enough will just add numbers and calculate how many people might download a 3D SL client for the iPad and see if it's worth the trouble creating a viewer using Unity ;)

Sure, it might not be as fully-featured as LL's series, but, if you can sell it for, say, US$9.99 and sell 100,000 copies...it might be worth the cost of development.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Mobile phones are an ideal gaming platform... for a pixie. For people with normal fingers and eyes, forget about it.

Yes, I really am that dismissive of mobile apps. They're big right now. So was the pet rock. FOTM.

Pads are a little more promising. There's at least some real estate to work with, though the inputs are primative.

But I think Ann's got the gist of it. We need to find a way to put it all on a big screen... even if the big screen exists only on your retina. Given the alarming degredation of writing skills amongst the general populace, the inputs will likely be gesture, eye tracking, and/or voice (possibly subvocals).

Apple will no doubt be there... after someone smarter and more innovative does the bleeding edge work.

[Hiro Pendragon]

Okay, here's a step in the right direction. Adobe's blog indicates that Flash support is being developed for iPad.

http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2010/01/building_ipad_apps.html

[Peter Stindberg]

The future will definitely leightweight devices. Which shows again why the Blue Mars approach (complete sims downloaded to your machine) is an evolutionary dead end.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Flash for the iPad? Woot! :) Now we just need Flash for SL too... hehe

[Ciaran Laval]

"Name one thing that suggests this iPad (and I won't even make the juvenile jokes that circulated in my office) can do what the iPhone or iTouch cannot. "

Ah it wasn't just my office that was making the juvenile jokes then, I was not expecting that.....but really I shouldn't be surprised.

As for what it can do that the iPhone and iTouch can't, I think we'll see that in the coming months, it looks like a big iPhone mixed with a kindle to me and if Apple weren't making this I don't think it would go very far, it looks cumbersome and I expect many to be dropped, literally.

[Rich]

And we have been doing this for years via Edusim -> http://edusim3d.com

[JeanRicard Broek]

Now certainly Google Warehouse is not SL but........

From: http://worldcadaccess.typepad.com/blog/ First screen shot: NaviCAD simulated on the iPad

quote:
1. Apple third-party developers don't have iPads yet, but they can run their software on the software iPad simulator.

2. NaviCAD displays 3D models from the Google 3D Warehouse on the iPhone right now.

Take a look:
http://worldcadaccess.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c19df53ef0120a8242c57970b-pi

I believe Linden Lab will miss a "window of opportunity" if they do not have some version of SL 2.0 working on the iPad soon.

http://jeanricardbroek-architect.blogspot.com/2010/01/inside-ipad-apple-a4-tft-lcd.html

[Acai Optimum]

Why does everybody call the new Apple iPad a "tablet" when it is not possible to write on it?
If the iPad is a tablet, how can it be an alternative to the many models of TabletPC that have been on the market since at least 2002? I have used a Tablet PC since early 2003 and I have always thought that the only essential difference between a regular laptop and a TabletPC is the fact that I can write on the TabletPC, using the Windows Journal software.

[Clean Whites]

How does the new apple ipad tablet benefit the economy and businesses?
Im doing a essay and i need help determining how the apple ipad tablet helps economy and businesses and people?

[dentasmile md]

Well let me answer that for you. Im going to list reasons why people want to get any apple product.
Because it looks shiny.
It looks hi tech
it looks brilliant
no need to update

Folks, those are reasons ive heard so far. Well, if you want to see a list in why you should never get an apple product, that will take longer than Apple's existence.

For the iPad:
runs a phone os- you know, one will think that any tablet would run a computer's operating system. But the best that apple can give to its fans is a PHONE's os. Good job apple.
no multitasking- a psp can multitask but not a tablet. Well, its running on an iphones os, so no durhh. Normally a tablet can at the very least open a media player while maybe browsing the web. How can u when u are on an overstretched ipod?
an iverpriced ipod- its overpriced as with all apple products. And for repairs? Oh, well you can get repairs, but that will cost you another limb.
no camera- no camera. Need i say more? Even an iphone uas one.
useless apps- the apps are simply pointless. Some apps are a fake too. You cant get a refund either, as Apple smirks qt you knowing you csnt get ur .99-50.00 dollars back.
worst battery life ever- although Jobs boasts ten hours. Browing the internet makes it two hours or more. An ipod is more.
its an apple product
keyboard on screen- it is hard to use as many have said
at least, you can finally customize your background without uaving to hack it.
Has no usb ports- wow
way overpriced
no flash.- no flash. Can't watch google videos or anything other than youtube.

for the ipod:
a dollar a song is just too much. Imagine how scary it is to put 100 songs on your ipod
20 dollars a movie: the dam ipod doesnt even do hd.
Freezes- its bad enough you cant run more than an app at a time. Now it freezes while running one.
Breaks too easliy
worst battery life
terribe ui.
Low memory

thats why you shouldnt get any apple products. Im 12 and ive own these things. I cant even imagine what will happen if i get a macbook.

You can get a 500gigabyte archos for 430 dollars. A 64 gig ipod for 400. Seee what i mean.
Post what you think of this

[Automated Forex Trading]

In the battle for the computer user, Apple seems to be catapulting over Microsoft by changing the game, Instead of of the macintosh system against the Windows system, It has changed lanes with the iPhone multitouch system. After selling over 50 millions units, it will unveil the 4th version next month. That system has more apps than Windows, it will power the iPad and will help Apple surpass Microsoft in value (Right now Apple is only $40 billion in capitalization behind MS). In my opinion, it will pass MS capitalization this year 2010. "We are better than you" Steve tells Bill, to which Gates replied "It does not matter". 25 years later, history proved that "It does matter". "The past is not dead, it's not even past" if you are new to computers, (less than 20 years), don't bother with this question.