Babbage Breaks News: Ex-Linden Lab Engineer Now Working on Oculus Avatars & Rooms!

In case you missed it during the controversy over Palmer Luckey's suspicious absence, here's highlights from last week's Oculus Connect 3 conference -- watch especially starting around 2:50:

... because as it happens, one of the lead developers of Oculus Avatars and Rooms was once a lead developer of Second Life: Jim "Babbage Linden" Purbrick, who left Linden on a longboard in 2010. It's amusing when younger VR enthusiasts inform me that Second Life is "not really VR", when so many developers of Second Life are behind the scenes shaping the current generation of the platform: 

Jim announcing the news on Facebook last week

Not only are ex-Lindens like Jim still working on leading VR projects, but the Facebook acquisition of Oculus which pretty much got the new VR wave going in the first place was shepherded by Second Life co-founder Cory Ondrejka.

To be sure, this also means Oculus Rooms is going to face the same challenge that Second Life faced (and still faces): After the novelty of hanging out in a 3D chatroom with friends wanes, how many people really want to keep trying to connect through such resource-heavy, attention-consuming means? At least this time, developers aren't just spending millions on solving that problem, but billions. 

Jim during his last Linden Lab days in San Francisco

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Comments

[JohnC]

I am continually surprised at my instinctive negative reaction to these new breed of VR sales videos.
I have always considered myself to be a full on advocate of Virtual worlds. Even to the extent of imagining one day the opportunity to disappear completely into one, or to build such places for others.
But this whole new trip seems to sickeningly commercial, like being force fed by a bunch of over excited billionaires, who are determined to do whatever it takes to make money back on their investments, while telling us all the time that they are only doing it out of the goodness of their hearts for our benefit. Their creepy method is to act as if the revolution has already happened, attempting to make, especially the younger generation, feel as if they are already late to the party and they need to catch up fast. It has such a negative effect on me to know that it has all turned for now into just a huge money pit, where the wealthy hope to feed upon the stupidity of the easily led. If HR Giger were still alive he would have already spotted the similarity of the new VR headsets to his face huger aliens. The similarity is striking, the only difference is that the tube that usually goes down the throat is now diverted to the victims wallet sucking it dry while the victim is lost in childish wonder. There must be a child in the crowd somewhere who can see that the king is naked.

[sirhc deSantis]

If you think the work Giger did for Alien is apt then you have a whole meat/machine world to erm explore :)

I believe the term is NSFW

http://tinyurl.com/jykz2vx

[JohnC]

It is difficult to find futuristic art or media of any kind that is not influenced by either Giger or Scotts interpretation of PKD Blade Runner. I knew of Giger when computers were glorified calculators.