New World Notes

Palmer Luckey Cautions Virtual Reality Enthusiasts Against Expecting Fast Mass Growth - “GoPro Took 5 Years & 2 Models Before They Sold Over 1 Million”

Weeks before the commercial release of the Oculus Rift, Palmer Luckey is sounding some cautious notes, as in this interview with Gamasutra, saying, "Don't believe the most optimistic things the analysts say. Especially when those analysts don't actually know anything about VR." This might surprise some VR enthusiasts, but it's actually consistent with what Palmer was telling me last year, when I started interviewing him for my recent Wired article:

“It’s extremely unlikely it’s going to come anywhere close to modern game consoles,” he told me last Summer, when I asked him if he thought VR's growth would track that of next gen consoles like the PS4 or Xbox 360. Both are platforms put out from longtime companies, he pointed out, launching with lots of game IP -- neither of which is true just yet with the leading VR platforms. “[In the] early days, very unlikely [VR] will sell anywhere near the 360." (The Xbox 360 is approaching around 100 million units sold after being on the market for about five years.)

Back in 2014, analyst firm KZero predicted there would be 83M VR headset owners by 2018, a number I also brought up with Luckey -- but he wasn't even willing to go that high:

"No official forecast, but I will say 80 million is not going to happen” in that time frame, he told me. Interestingly, he contrasted VR with non-game electronics products that we consider mass market now, noting how long they actually took to gain a large install base:

SL Flickr: Wonder Woman Wednesday

Just in time for Batman vs. Superman (which also features Wonder Woman), here's the virtual version of the latter face-punching the former, because why not? Click to embiggenat the skies and the punch.

Image by and from the Flickr of Noddington Schmoo (yes, really), who has much more excellent highjinx there. Also, this moving virtual tribute to the late great David Bowie and Alan Rickman.

Survey: Who Wants to Try Out Project Sansar This Year?

Now that we know a fair amount more about Project Sansar, Linden Lab's VR-compatible follow-up to Second Life, here's a new survey of consumer interest. Read these notes from the last public discussion on the platform by Linden CEO Ebbe Altberg, and register your opinion!

Even Most Core Gamers Don't Seem Very Interested in VR

Hardcore gamers will be virtual reality's first main market -- that's an underlying assumption shared by just about everyone in the VR industry. (Which would explain the countless VR talks and VR demos happening right now at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.) They take it as a given that the tens of millions (mostly young men) who spend a lot of money to play next gen console games and games on Steam will eagerly spend their money on Oculus Rift and HTC-Vive (from Valve).

One small problem: I can't find much evidence that most hardcore gamers are actually interested in buying either one of them. Or to put it another way, I see worrying signs that there's much less enthusiasm than generally assumed. To take a couple points:

Reddit is absolutely the number one online destination for gamers, so it's no surprise that the /Gaming subreddit has nearly 10 million subscribers. What is surprising is how small the /oculus subreddit is by contrast: less than 70,000 total. (Further surprise: /Vive has far less: about 18,000.) This strikes me as a strong indication that VR's top product doesn't have a huge base of supporters among gamers -- more like a niche of a niche.

Don't believe me? Oculus Rift started taking pre-orders in January, so let's look how it did in Google Trends versus a recent top game:

GTA V Called, Brattilicious, They Want Their Anarchy Back

No this isn't from a Grand Theft Auto V mod, though I bet fans wish it was -- this is Second Life, shot in an urban roleplay sim as a fashion photography backdrop. (All the credits here.)

Upload VR Excited About "Matrix-Style Apocalypse" Tech

Wachowski siblings: Let's create a visually powerful metaphor which expresses how our hyper-consumerist/reductionist mass media culture blinds us to the reality of our oppression.

VR geeks: LET'S TOTALLY BUILD THAT COOL THING.

Yes, seriously:

Two researchers in Estonia are figuring out ways to trick your brain that are effective enough to elicit physical responses, and push the sensations of virtual reality immersion way beyond anything that’s been experienced so far... “We all know what optical illusions are and we also know what nervous system allusions. We all have felt stepping on a stand still escalator. That little millisecond swoop in your stomach that tells you something isn’t right,” said Nieler. “There must be a way to convince the brain we are actually physically feeling something. That’s what we’re trying to crack.”

Like every technology with the potential for horrible repercussions (drones, atomic bombs, etc.) there is an admitted cool factor to this, but what's fascinating is how Upload VR -- the media outlet Robert Scoble is now working for as a VR evangelist -- eagerly embraces the dystopia. As Upload VR's Joe Durbin puts it in his final sentence:

Send Your Active SL YouTube Channels to Strawberry

Social media doyenne Strawberry Singh is collecting active SL-related YouTube channels on her Facebook page so she can feature them on her own YouTube channel, and if you know of any good ones, I seriously think you should send them. For one thing, I'd like to blog more more often. Like this mesmerizing, Spanish-language Photoshop tutorial from Tentacion von Jayko I found on Berry's thread:

Top Three New World Notes Posts from Last Week

• Project Sansar Updates: Beta Expanding in June, Public Release in 2016, Vive & Steam VR Support Coming Soon, Linden Dollar Transfers Accepted
• Robert Scoble Tells Me Why Virtual Reality Will Succeed Where Second Life Failed
• 71% of Virtual Reality & Virtual World Fans Agree With John Carmack That Virtually Happy is Actually Happy

Project Sansar Updates: Beta Expanding in June, Public Release in 2016, Vive & Steam VR Support Coming Soon, Linden Dollar Transfers Accepted

Surprisingly buff Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg recently appeared as an avatar in Second Life to share some details about Second Life 2, i.e. the VR-enabled Project Sansar -- several revelations likely to be bombshells to many:

• Today you need Maya to work in Sansar, this will change in June, when they open up Beta access to a broader set of creators.
• Sansar will be opened to the public at the end of the year.
• LL is now working on integrating the HTV Vive VR headset with Sansar, the headset also used for Steam VR and Ebbe expects it to work next week.
• Sansar is aiming for an age range of 13+ but there will be content ratings.
• Right now Sansar is being build for PC, Windows specifically, Oculus and Vive HMD. They are preparing for Android and iOS... There is a streaming solution for Sansar like we’ve seen in the past being offered by third parties... A Mac viewer is described as going to be looked at somewhere further along the line.
• There will be an exchange system that allows you to transfer Linden Dollars to whatever the Sansar currency will be.
• There will be lots of different building tools in Sansar but LL will strongly support 3rd party tools and thus a common file format... But there will also be tools inside Sansar such as terrain and layout tools, but also basic object manipulation tools so you can take assets and arrange a scene.
• Sansar uses a sort of ‘baking’ progress, so in stead of building something ‘live’ and seeing it work right away, like we do in SL, you have to ‘publish’ what you’ve build.

Much more from Jo Yardley here, view machinima video of his SL talk courtesy Mal Burns below. Reading between the lines, the likeliest points of controversy and interest are these:

Robert Scoble Tells Me Why Virtual Reality Will Succeed Where Second Life Failed

Robert Scoble's entrance into full-time virtual reality evangelism so eerily reminded me of his evangelism over Second Life a decade ago, I asked Robert himself if he saw a difference:

"You were a big supporter of virtual reality worlds like Second Life 10 years ago," I pointed out to him, "but they didn't pan out. Why do you think VR will succeed now where SL failed?"

"New technology makes it far more scalable," Scoble told me. "SL failed 'cause companies could only get 100 people onto an island. That limitation will no longer be true." (He's talking about private Second Life sims which companies like NBC once owned, but due to SL's server architecture, could support very few simultaneous users. And yes, Second Life is still profitable, but it's fair to say it failed to go mass market as once expected back then.)

"How about lack of consumer interest in virtual reality?" I asked him, referring to this recent report. "When we were talking about SL in 2006, it got tons of media coverage like VR is now, but the consumers never showed up, or tried it once and left."

Scoble's reply: