I Have Explored Second Life Through The Oculus Rift...

Here's my instant take:

Thanks to Jacki Morie of All These Worlds for the Sunday tour; I'll be sharing my thoughts here on NWN later this week. Having now tried Oculus Rift with Second Life, I remain convinced it's a crucial part of SL's future (if it's going to have a future), but at the same time, I'm also now convinced of this:

It's going to take a lot of work from both Linden Lab and SL developers to make Oculus/SL integration anywhere close to being ready for prime time. But if neither party is prepared to make that deep commitment, it won't happen in any scalable way, any time soon. But then, it hasto happen soon, or it can't happen at all.

Anyway, much more on all that in the next few days.

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Comments

[Ciaran Laval]

From what I've read, scale is going to play a big part in this and scale is a tad off, to say the least, in Second Life.

I'm sure LL could put together some demo areas exemplifying good design practices for such intergration though but Second Life will have to remain a user defined world to thrive and that's going to be a stumbling block.

[Adeon Writer]

Be sure to note how obvious SL's problems with scale were in VR, I have zero doubt it it was painfully obvious.

[Bill Freese/Friis]

I love this image. I may make a poster for my office.

[2014]

I'm convinced you have a monetary stake in Oculus! Do you not realize that the other 99.9% of users that don't follow the one or two gamer sites that are pimping OR, have never heard of it?

I get super bored when I do one of my many DJ gigs in SL, so I'll toss random IMs to people at the events. I'll throw out questions like "do you know what materials are?" "Have you ever heard of Oculus Rift" "Do you know what pathfinding does in SL". To date...not a single yes to any of the questions except about materials, because she had bought shoes in the past that had "materials" on the folder. She didn't know what the "materials" did, just remembered seeing it.

[Bill Freese/Friis]

Scale is not the only problem, but I am not worried. I have been using still dual images for years to look into SL. My own building skills improved when I could see in 3D what I had done. Live 3D feedback will be even better. When people build in 3D, they will build for 3D.

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

When he says "scalable" he's not referring to the scale of buildings to avatars and one's field of view.

[Ciaran Laval]

@CronoCloud the scale of buildings to avatars is one of the issues I've seen mentioned by those who have used Oculus Rift.

[Adeon Writer]

Chrono: when I said scale I am indeed referring to object size. :)

[Adeon Writer]

Materials has been implemented correctly. If you aren't a creator you have no need to know what they are, anymore than you need to know about new script functions or server rollouts: they just make new stuff look nicer.

[Orca Flotta]

I guess in a VW where 90% of the residents logging in on 300$ craptops, with minimal graphics and not much clue about anything other than humping poseballs, an outlandish thing like the Oculus Rift is like pearls for swine.

And even we better prepared users on more powerful machines aren't necessarily keen on putting a stupid thing lke the rift on our noggins. To much hassle, too much effort, too geeky.

[Bill Freese/Friis]

Right. Wouldn't want to get geeky while sitting in front of our computers interacting with a virtual world. ;-)