Firestorm Second Life Viewer Now Available for iOS and Android... Is Great News Were It True (And It Should Be)

A full-featured version of the Firestorm Second Life viewer is now available for all major mobile platforms including iOS and Android, except this actually isn't true, but you should watch the announcement anyway:

Kudos to Firestorm lead Jessica Lyon and team for pulling off such an epic Fool. And credit Gwynneth Sinclair for fooling me last night, because I was seriously suckered when she posted the link on my Facebook feed last night. I'm not the only one:

The video has already been seen over three thousand times, and the responses are telling: "Oh, awesome!" gushes Liona Clio, "I have so been waiting for this type of...looks at release date ... Oh, wait." So this is an April Fool's with a very real takeaway: Demand for Second Life on mobile is huge. The Lumiya viewer for Android (which you can get here) is extremely popular as is Pocket Metaverse for iOS, even though those are both viewers with very limited features. Imagine how popular a mobile version of Second Life with 3D graphics powered by Unity would really be. In fact, let me explain how it would best work:

Create a version of Second Life for mobile that enables users to import their avatar shape from the PC version, along with any mesh items they've purchased through the Marketplace, and connect them to a limited 3D chatroom experience (detached from the grid) which allows several avatars to be in the same space at the same time. I can guarantee that would be huge, and even create a new user base of mobile SLers. And that's no fooling.

Please share this post with people you like:

Tweet

Comments

[Ilsa Hesse]

is Omlette a cousin of yours?

[Graham Mills]

:-)

The announcement at GDC13 of free Havok libraries for indie Android devs could be handy too.

Incidentally, Hamlet, Lumiya already does all that and more, hence its popularity.

[Steven King]

It is definitely possible if it is done ala the OnLive gaming platform. An iPad or Android tablet is not powerful enough to do all the rendering locally.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Several of the April Fools pranks I saw this year were of the "oh, that's cool! PSYCH!" variety.

They don't really hit their hilarious stride until a rival company sees it, strokes their chins, and a year or two later releases the product that the original company thought was so ludicrously impractical that they made a joke of it.

[Dizzy Banjo]

lulz
ha "more free" .. "free-er" would be good too :)

A very lightweight avatar environment could be interesting on a tablet or phone - but I personally think it will be a FAR more interesting proposal on something like Google Glass.. I want to walk down the street and see people's avatars overlaid over their physical bodies. I want this now. :)

As for mobile clients, I actually quite like extremely lightweight clients like Pocket Metaverse and on the desktop SLiteChat. I use them a lot of brainstorm ideas with fellow SL creatives when I actually specifically do not want the performance hit of a full graphics capable viewer.

[Archangel Mortenwold]

Firstorm would NOT be my pick to go mobile. Phoenix or Singularity, or Cool VL Viewer, yeah, but not Firestorm or any other viewer that uses the V2-V3 user interface. My SL girlfriend uses Lumiya from her pad but it crashes every few minutes, often times every few seconds. Second Life was just not designed with mobile apps in mind.

[Remington Aries]

People should realise that the pads get updated each year, my iPad 4 runs real racing 3, a fully immersive racing simulator at a definition so high you cannot see any pixels. The frame rate is incredibly high too. Bottom line, that pad has considerably more 3D rendering power than the computers hooked up to SL in 2005.

[Johnny]

Blue Mars already does the mobile avatar-based 3D chat room thing, and it is almost unbelievably dull.

[Jeff Dearman]

Why the hell wont Firestorm make a app for android phones, ipad, iphone?

WAKE THE HECK UP I'd pay $3.99 for it...please make this! app!!!! thanks

[Jeff Dearman]

And why cant singularity or the others make apps too???