Second Life of Second Life Now Seems Driven by Facebook

Here's an excellent CNN article by Erin Griffith on the inside story of how the Oculus Rift/Facebook deal came together (very quickly). Most interesting for New World Notes readers is the dinner where the deal was finally closed:

The two teams reached an agreement, and that Wednesday the four Oculus founders had dinner at Zuckerberg's house, along with [Facebook's VP of product Chris], Cox, Amin Zoufonoun, head of corporate development, and Cory Ondrejka, a Facebook VP of engineering who was also a co-founder of the virtual world Second Life. At the end of the dinner Zuckerberg said, "We should do this."

I haven't asked Cory about this (and I doubt he'll give me the story any time soon), but this makes it even more likely he was one of the leading drivers of the Oculus Rift acquisition by Facebook. Here's Cory Tweeting soon after the deal was announced:

Most excited I've been about games/VR since building core #secondlife team in 2001. — traveling to San Jose,... http://t.co/tlMp9Mw3wV

— Cory Ondrejka (@CoryOndrejka) March 28, 2014

And as I noted, Cory has already brought many former Linden Lab engineers to join him at Facebook. And as I noted, the other Second Life co-founder, Philip Rosedale, is building a new virtual world compatible with Oculus Rift right out of the box. So from separate directions, the original vision for Second Life conceived nearly 15 years ago is now coming together at the Internet's largest company. Or like I put it at the outset of this post: The second life of Second Life now seems to be driven by Facebook

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[Pussycat Catnap]

Well that affects Facespam. But not SL. Not unless Facespam buys SL and forces us all to log in with our real names or something... Until then...

People move jobs, and often try to bring their friends with them.

[Ezra]

I wonder what Cory can and will do to ensure a Second Life-like virtual world with Oculus Rift support? Too bad the Cloud Party investment didn't work out for him, but I hope he invests again in something similar, without the mistakes.

High Fidelity I'm not sure about yet. It barely sounds like anything close to Second Life, or anything that'll be realized any year soon.

[MetacamOh]

Pretty excited about it. Was listening to Metareality Podcast and Qarl was saying Cory was the guy trying to get SL to open source the sims before he was canned. Cory has the vision to make it happen. Should be interesting to see now it seems we may be gearing up for a Rosedale vs Ondrejka Virtual World battle.

[technocat]

Regarding Philip and HF. SL, et al...

Doesn't that story arc - ​​Philip leaving SL and now working on HF - look a bit like it could follow the one of Steve Jobs leaving Apple and working on his NeXT computer....which he then used as the basis for upgrading Apple products?

[the similarity is that a leader/designer of a technology company leaves the first main company he founded to then establish a second company the is duplicating the first only in a more 'technically pure and leading edge' than the first, then that second company being absorbed into the first, with the leader/designer then back in charge of the first....]

The story arcs look pretty similar... well yes, of course Philip is STILL working on HF, but I think the low lag approach looks like something SL could fold into bringing in new technology ​...​

[Ezra]

What I can't believe is people are actually buying the idea that anything developed for HF will make it into SL. The whole issue with SL is that its racked up too much technical debt to be improved very much.

Recall how torturous the process was to get normal and specular maps in; very old graphics concepts. Much appreciation to the open source contributors and receptive Lindens that made it happen, but even the material feature is mostly useless due to ALM not being on for most, and lighting in SL being pretty terrible anyway.

The improvements Second Life needs are much more minor than needing to invest millions in another company to squeeze out some innovations. Another example is Fitted Mesh; if Linden Lab couldn't find resources to get Qarl's (superior) solution to work, why on earth believe Linden Lab is waiting for any kind of real solutions to trickle in from HF?

Philip and Ebbe should've never pitched that crap recently.