New World Notes

Second Life Website Data from SimilarWeb Shows Surprising Results - Much Younger, Male, Mobile Than Typically Assumed

Click to expand -- data courtesy SimilarWeb

We know that Second Life's active userbase has been about 500-600,000 for over 10 years, but visits to the official website SecondLife.com tell a different, more interesting story. Courtesy top web/mobile analytics company SimilarWeb, take a look at these charts. Some key takeaways:

• Visits to SecondLife.com from the United peaked in July 2016 at about 8 million/month
• Monthly US visits to SecondLife.com have been trending down since 2016, from around 6-5 million/mo since 2017 to now
• Current US unique visitors: 770,000, from 6.9 million total visits
• 1 in 3 of US visits to SecondLife.com are via mobile

First question that jumps out: Why the spike in July 2016? The only major US/SL news item I can find from the archives is an SL-based fundraiser for victims of the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orland, Florida.

Followed by: Why has Linden Lab refused to create (or just go ahead and buy) a smartphone version of Second Life when 1 in 3 of its own website visitors are on mobile?

Now let's look at Similarweb's demographic data from the USA, because that's also surprising:

Sansar Survey Shows Clear User Preference for Accessing Via PC, Not VR

How do you prefer to experience Sansar?

— Sansar (@SansarOfficial) May 30, 2018

Linden Lab just asked how people prefer to access Sansar and the survey results are clear -- a majority prefer the PC client, with VR access split evenly between Oculus and Vive. The results should not be surprising to anyone reading New World Notes, or for that matter Linden Lab, which recently shifted away from its branding as a social VR space. The somewhat surprising thing is the 50/50 preference for the leading high-end VR HMDs. If one of them was a clear winner, the Lindens could focus more resources on that one VR platform. But based on these results, maintaining Sansar as a VR space would mean putting equal resources into two sometimes incompatible systems!

Oculus Venues Partly Inspired by Suzanne Vega's Legendary 2006 Appearance in Second Life

Wired has an in-depth story on the launch of Oculus Venues, which aims to transform social VR into a mixed reality, live event experience:

But those 9,000 people [watching a RL concert in Colorado's Red Rocks] won’t be alone. They’ll be joined by others watching it live—perhaps as many as in Red Rocks itself, perhaps more. These other spectators will be watching from home in their virtual-reality headsets; courtesy of a new app called Oculus Venues, they’ll get their own panoramic three-dimensional view of the show. Vance Joy at Red Rocks isn’t the first time people have been able to watch a live event via VR. That’s been possible since 2015. And multiuser VR platforms have been able to accommodate small crowds of people for just about as long.

Quite a bit before 2015: Back in 2006, Suzanne Vega made a live appearance/performance in Second Life (watch above) to an audience of about 80* -- and that helped directly influence Oculus Venues. That's because one of Venue's lead developers is Linden Lab alum Jim "Babbage" Purbrick.

"Lessons from early music experiences like the Suzanne Vega concert and Secondfest in SL definitely fed in to Venues and made me a huge advocate for live music in VR," Jim tells me. (Second Fest was an SL-based concert featuring Pet Boys.) Second Life has never quite succeeded as a venue for huge live events, since lag starts kicking in at around 30-40 avatars. But Jim and his team have managed to increase the avatar capacity by nearly 10X:

Philip Rosedale: VR/AR Headset Adoption is About Overcoming The Diffraction Limit for The Human Eye (A Dialog)

Pic via Road to VR story on virtual desktops

"VR and AR hardware investment isn't about 3D," High Fidelity/Second Life founder Philip Rosedale recently argued, "it is the battle for the next screen. We've reached the diffraction limit for the human eye and a desktop or handheld device and now must move to HMDs." In other words, Philip is arguing that we'll adopt VR/AR headsets because graphics on our existing devices (and that includes the human eye) have reached their technical limit, and only HMDs can move us past that.

This to me is a novel argument that I hadn't quite considered before; but then again, Philip often makes those -- for example, arguing that the key to social VR adoption is extremely low latency.

So an e-mail dialog (edited for clarity) followed:

"Why do you think diffraction limit of screens will make people want to adopt HMDs?" I asked him. "If I'm reading this chart right, most consumers don't set their desktop PCs to the highest possible resolution. So why would they want even more from an HMD?" 

Here's Philip's case, with some of my (somewhat skeptical) follow-up questions:

"The 'diffraction limit' means that in a given degree (imagine a compass heading) around you, you are only able to see so many pixels - about 60.  It doesn't matter how far away from your eye those pixels are located, you can't see them any better.   In other words, if your 4K TV is far enough away from your eyes that it's pixels per degree is less than 60, you are wasting money.  See what I mean?  

"So, once you have the number of pixels you have on an iPhone (actually anything newer than an iPhone 4), the only thing you can do is make the iPhone bigger (like that ridiculous iPhone6S+).  But of course you can't make these things bigger - like a newspaper or something because they would get too heavy and bulky (except that cool-as-shit foldable screen in Westworld but that's sci-fi).  The way that we have to go next is somehow make it so that wherever you look you see a mega-screen:

WATCH: Someone on YouTube is Making Many Machinima Music Videos Featuring Classic Pop Hits & Beautiful Second Life Locations

Tiara Ashley is a dedicated SL YouTuber who only has 51 subscribers at the moment but deserves many more. She created that impressive machinima music video of "Lucy in the Sky of Diamonds" I blogged last week, but there is so much more where that came from - by my count she's been making several every week for the last few months, most featuring gorgeous SL sims. For example (above), Depeche Mode's "The Things You Said" shot in the dark and moody Camaro sim (direct teleport here).

Also like this Smiths track shot in Strawberry Lake.

Some more recent classics too, like this Daft Punk track:

Most VR Owners Want Casual Fun, Not Immersive Worlds: Beat Saber Far Outsells, Out-Engages Skyrim & Fallout for VR

Wow! Beat Saber sold 100,000 copies in less than a month! We're so excited to watch our community grow this much. Thank you for your support!

💥 Next steps: finish our Level Editor & bring you fresh new music content! pic.twitter.com/IwIDMFNC3W

— Beat Saber (@BeatSaber) May 28, 2018

With 100,000 copies of Beat Saber sold in under one month on the market, we're getting to the point where nearly 1 in 10 of all owners of Vive, Oculus, or Windows Mixed Reality have a copy of the game. To put that 100,000 in even better perspective, that's more than Skyrim VR sold all last year (37,000), and surpassing all Fallout 4 VR sales in the same time frame (78,500).

And the thing is, owners of those immersive world games are not playing them anywhere near as much as Beat Saber -- here's the latest stats from VRLFG:

This undermines the idea that Beat Saber is merely selling better just because it's much cheaper than Skyrim and Fallout 4 VR. That's somewhat true, but also true (and more important) is even the people who did buy Skyrim and Fallout 4 VR are playing it a lot less than Beat Saber.

Which brings us back, once again, to Drake:

Second Life Land Developers Have (Mostly) Left, Hobbyists (Mostly) Remain -- Comment of the Week

Good point from "irihapeti", analyzing the news that the loss of private Second Life sims is (finally) slowing:

Most of the sim/parcel ownership downturn I think is that historically a significant number of people obtained land and built on it a space for others. When the others didn't/don't come then the land is abandoned.

Building spaces for others often comes with an owner hope/expectation (stated or unstated) that the others will contribute to the tiers in some way. Item purchases, parcel rentals, donations, tips, group fees, tier contributions, etc. When the hope/expectation is not met then abandon.

Linden Lab has never released any data on the status of the others but I am pretty sure that land occupants today are more proportionately residentials/hobbyists now than in any previous year. Residential and hobbyist occupants who have no expectation that others will contribute to the occupants' tiers/costs.

In other words, we're at the point where SL sims are either owned by "land barons" who have a stable income source -- or folks can afford to pay hundreds of dollars a month without depending on monetizing visitors:

Top 6 New World Notes Posts from Last Week: Interview With VR Pioneer in VR as VR Sales Stay Slow, Much More

• Watch: VR Pioneer Jaron Lanier Discusses The Past & Future Of VR As A Virtual Octopus In Sinespace
• Sansar Sees Little User Growth Despite Partnership With Top Twitch Streamer - Daily Usage Still Below 50
• Cajsa's Choices: Seven Stylish Second Life Male Fashion Photographers
• WATCH: Facebook's Jim Purbrick Demonstrates Tech For Deploying Multiuser VR Experiences For The Web
• Sansar Beset By "Constantly Shifting Priorities" Asserts Ex-Linden Staffer
• Oculus Go Sells Only ~ 100-200K Units In First Month On Market

Watch: VR Pioneer Jaron Lanier Discusses the Past & Future of VR as a Virtual Octopus in Sinespace

Advance video to 43:30 minutes in, when the interview starts after some inevitable technical sputtering.

Thanks to Jaron for a fascinating hour in Sinespace, and for everyone who attended! Above is the rough video livestream -- a polished version of highlights is coming soon. 

Watch: SL Machinima Makes Most Literal Music Video for "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" Ever Made Possible

From Tiara Ashley comes this fun and visually impressive SL machinima music video to The Beatles' hallucinogenic classic "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" (as covered by Elton John). I've seen other music videos which attempt to capture the headtrip lyrics of "Lucy" with abstract or evocative imagery, but because Tiara shot it Second Life, she was able to be incredibly literal with nearly every other line.

So, say, when you hear about being on a boat on the river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies, those skies are literally marmalade,  or about rocking horse people eating marshmallow pies -- you see actual rocking horse people. And yes, for newspaper taxies which appear by the shore...