Here's the results of last week's survey of Second Life users regarding High Fidelity, the new virtual world from Second Life/Linden Lab founder Philip Rosedale. A majority (54%) believe it will attract less than 10,000 users, which isn't surprising, given that it's very focused on working with Oculus and Vive VR rigs, which have a very small install base. What's much more surprising is this: A majority of 55% surveyed are just not interested in joining. This is a mirror opposite reaction of our survey about Linden Lab's Sansar, in which 55% of SLers surveyed are interested in joining.
To judge by reader comments, much of the disinterest in High Fidelity is the time and cost required to set up a VR rig. "I plan on visiting," as Raven Walls put it, "but I won't spend the $$$ to buy VR equipment to use on a daily basis. I will stay in Second Life." That's understandable to a certain extent, but doesn't come close to explaining the reaction:
Building stuff in #VR, no hardhat required! pic.twitter.com/1sre3Y10BT
— High Fidelity (@highfidelityinc) October 27, 2016
After all, Sansar is also very VR-focused, and Linden Lab has done little to promote its use with mobile devices or PCs. (Both worlds are billed as cross-platform.) Linden Lab has made no promises of being able to convert Second Life content to Sansar. And while both enable user-generated content, from what we know, most Sansar content is going to be created offline, while High Fidelity, like Second Life before it, enables and encourages dynamic 3D content creation. (As above.)
Finally -- and this is no slam on Linden Lab or its current CEO, Ebbe Altberg -- development of Sansar is being led by a team with little or no experience with Second Life, let alone any other virtual world/MMO. Contrast that with a virtual world that's the brainchild of the same guy who founded both Second Life and Linden Lab -- someone who's been working on trying to realize this dream nearly 20 years -- and I have to be stunned.
With roughly 100 people responding, a difference of 10% is not really statistically sagnificant. 45% and 55% or 55% and 45%, you cannot really make so far reaching conclusions on that result. If anything, it shows that the interest in both platforms is roughly the same.
Posted by: Estelle.Pienaar | Tuesday, January 24, 2017 at 05:32 PM
I don't see either platform trying real hard to appeal to SL residents. Hi Fidelity seems to embrace "dorky" and Sansar comes off as "lifeless". I can't say that I have my finger on the pulse of what SL residents want, but if I were trying to appeal to SL customers I'd focus a lot of attention on versatile, detailed avatars.
Posted by: Clara Seller | Tuesday, January 24, 2017 at 06:14 PM
Inworld dynamic creation eh..well probably a little out dated being last september but still. Prim to blender eh :) (nice nod to ser Yadni though)
https://forums.highfidelity.com/t/a-guide-to-building-in-high-fidelity-for-second-life-users/11454
Posted by: sirhc deSantis | Tuesday, January 24, 2017 at 06:26 PM
As a rift user, I think if high fidelity had support for GearVR we might be seeing some more people in world right now, but I understand Philip's decision. I think they are hoping that the install base for higher end VR increases by the time they are out of beta. I'm kinda skeptical, but am glad to be in the metaverse finally.
Posted by: pemdasi | Wednesday, January 25, 2017 at 07:16 AM
STOP THE MADNESS!!!! OK not really but wanted to point out High Fidelity is an open source platform that is designed for others to take the software and run with it!.. create your own creative spaces and universes with your own rules and your own servers.
Sansar is a turnkey walled garden with linden lab professionally managing the servers,software and background services centered around the concept of experiences and a market economy .
I have started to cancel all my accounts in SL the magic for me is gone.. never will I invest my time and effort as a creator into another platform were I am strangled to death by someone else's terms of services.
Posted by: Comment | Wednesday, January 25, 2017 at 07:03 PM
I don't think that a sample of 106 people is really representative, either.
Maybe you could have asked an open-ended 'why' question (i.e. why would you join any of those platforms, or none at all). I can see both the appeal of an open-source, open-ended platform, as well as one that is a closed garden ran by a company which has been doing exactly that for 14 years; and I can also see the appeal for high-end gamers with their homes furnished with all sort of VR gear, versus the social user who, at best, has a high-end laptop to log in. Both platforms will appeal to each kind of user in very different ways.
Personally I think that both platforms will find their niche markets (around the 10-100K users), and there will be a lot of experimenting by the academic community on High Fidelity (because it's free and open-source), but Second Life will still remain a 'first choice' for the casual, social users. That's why I still think that Linden Lab, at some point, will have no choice but to 'force' people to switch over to Sansar — maybe starting to find clever ways to port content, especially meshed content (which ought to actually be easier to move over) — merely from a business perspective: it might simply be too costly to keep two separate teams on two platforms at the same time, and enhancing SL will become harder and harder every day. They have been saying 'no' for quite a while now, but... for how long will they be able to keep that promise?
Posted by: Gwyneth Llewelyn | Thursday, January 26, 2017 at 01:07 AM
@ Gwyneth Llewelyn
Trump 2020!
Posted by: JohnC | Thursday, January 26, 2017 at 12:11 PM
Read the new mail from Rosedale? Oh my...
'Recently, we determined that a High Fidelity staff email account was compromised. Based on an audit of our logs, it appears that the account was accessed by an unauthorized user in late December and again in early January.
I’m contacting you today because this compromise may have exposed your email address and High Fidelity account username.
Your password was not decodable from this information, and no payment or credit card information or history was accessed.
We internally use a 3rd party analytics package. The compromised email account had access to this tool. The tool integrates with a copy of a database to allow us to track total hours of use, crash rates, and so on for users that opt to share that information. Due to an oversight, the copy of the data that we use for analytics also included these emails and High Fidelity account names. We were able to confirm that the compromised account was able to access this user information through the analytics package.
This information also included salted and hashed passwords. Salting and hashing creates an unreadable string based on your password. Salted and hashed passwords cannot be used to access your High Fidelity account, and we have had no reports of High Fidelity accounts being accessed without authorization.
However, it is the case that we have failed to hold in trust personal information you gave us when you signed up for High Fidelity. I want to personally apologize for this failure.
In terms of what happens next:
We are currently reviewing the security of all of our systems and adding additional security such as two-factor authentication to all our internal email accounts.
As a precautionary measure, you might consider reviewing your email activity and particularly any emails you have received from High Fidelity. Please notify us if you see anything suspicious.
We very much hope you will continue using High Fidelity. However, if you wish to have your account deleted, please email [email protected] using the email address registered to the High Fidelity account you wish to delete to initiate this process.
Please feel free to contact us at [email protected] with other questions about this matter.
Looking forward, this is an opportunity to touch on how important we think identity and the security of your identity will be in virtual worlds. In our alpha and beta stages we have taken the approach of storing user information in a traditional database. But, as this breach demonstrates, this is not a perfect solution, no matter how carefully designed and managed. It is our belief that as High Fidelity becomes widely used as a platform, we must design and implement identity systems which are decentralized, under the control of you (not us), and ideally impossible to breach through any single point of attack.
'
Classic :)
Posted by: sirhc deSantis | Thursday, January 26, 2017 at 02:16 PM