Philip Rosedale's New Vision for Next Gen Metaverse Content Creation Includes Live, In-World, Multi-User Collaboration -- But Can We Bring It Back?

Philip Rosedale has a pretty fascinating new Medium post based on a presentation he recently made at an unnamed Metaverse work group, laying out a vision for value creation in next gen platforms, primarily based on what worked well (more or less) in Second Life -- Clear Property Rights, Collective Ownership and Participation, a Stable Currency Price, and so on. It includes a call for a feature that was clearly unique and great about 3D content creation in Second Life -- but I'm not entirely sure is feasible, beyond SL and Minecraft:

Support Live Collaboration rather than Offline Editing

Having someone stop by and compliment your work-in-progress is a powerful amplifier for participation, as is the ability to recruit passersby to help with a project. Reducing the time delay between content creation and publishing is effective in both virtual worlds and programming languages (compiled versus interpreted). A great temptation in virtual worlds is to take advantage of powerful offline editors (Unity, Blender, etc) and standardized file formats by creating an edit/publish sequence. Roblox, VRChat, and Sansar are examples of worlds taking this approach. But the problem is both that the creator cannot enjoy social interaction while working, and also that multiple creators cannot then work together on one place or project.

Something magical was surely lost when our focus moved away from live, immersive social creation, and we seemed to resign ourselves to offline editing as the inevitable default.

But is it really possible to build an in-world collaborative creation system, where the content is also mesh and optimized?

Philip believes so, when I ask him, pointing to Sony Dreams as an example:

"That could all be done live together," he argues. I agree that Dreams is an impressive model, though last I checked, its userbase is frustratingly small.

Rec Room by contrast, is quite large, and it does support multi-user creation. As a Rec Room creator recently told me:

In Rec Room, you're doing it with up to 40 people across almost any platform, voice chatting and co-building and hanging out the entire time. You don't have the friction of needing to go download Unity or ROBLOX Studio and learn all of this dev tool stuff on your own. Plus other Rec Room users will teach you how to build in real time.

Then again, Rec Room graphics are by design cartoonish and blocky, which can limit its appeal as a metaverse platform for broad demographics. (Rec Room's user base is overwhelmingly kids.)

Somewhat ironically, Second Life, which enabled mesh file support in 2010-ish, might still be the industry leader in live multi-user creation with content that's also high quality mesh:

"[E]ven with mesh live collaboration is tons better in SL because multiple people can still rez and script, arrange, edit meta-data, etc.," as Philip puts it to me.

That's also true, though in recent years, it definitely seems to be an under-appreciated feature of Second Life. I rarely see announced events of YouTube videos of live building in an SL sandbox, beyond one put out by Linden Lab itself. (Above.)

So to me it remains an open question: Can we bring excitement around shared, immersive creation, and scale it up to as many metaverse users as possible?

... you know, like this, but much more visually dazzling?

Comments

[Martin K.]

> Plus other Rec Room users will teach you how to build in real time.

For people who are not familiar with Rec Room or Horizon Worlds, the importance of this point might not be clear. Have a look at this page: https://recroom.com/class , it links to discord servers of dozens of classes that are taught live in VR. (Discord is typically used for scheduling classes and other asynchronous communication.) These are not videos but live classes in VR. How many such live classes about creating worlds are there in VRChat? In SecondLife? Supporting a culture of live teaching is probably reason enough to support live collaboration.

> Then again, Rec Room graphics are by design cartoonish and blocky, which can limit its appeal as a metaverse platform for broad demographics.

While that sentiment is not wrong, it can be said about any artistic style - including the best "realistic" graphics of SecondLife and VRChat. In fact, it is especially true for the best "realistic" graphics of SecondLife and VRChat because avatars in that style are deep inside the uncanny valley. That might not be obvious in still shots, but it's painfully obvious when you compare the pre-canned movements of avatars controlled by keyboard and mouse against motion-tracked avatars. Ask any VR player in Rec Room what they don't like about screen-mode/mobile players and you are likely to hear a rant about their robot-like appearance.

The sentiment that computer graphics should be ever more "realistic" to become more immersive has been called "the immersive fallacy" in the classic book "Rules of Play" by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. It is simply not true that more "realistic" graphics are automatically more immersive. One reason more "realistic" graphics might be less immersive is the uncanny valley effect. Another reason is the development costs for more "realistic" graphics that leads to budget cuts in other areas and apparently resulted in less deep gameplay. Raph Koster argued that online virtual worlds reached their "peak complexity" in 1992-2003 (here: https://youtu.be/mKB09_XEr2g?t=26922 ).

And even the players who are attracted by more "realistic" graphics soon find out that they need a powerful PC to be able to enjoy those graphics - but only with other players who have access to powerful PCs, while players on low-end and mobile devices enjoy virtual worlds with less demanding graphics but populated by larger communities.

In any case, the commercial success and broad appeal of Nintendo Wii, Minecraft, and countless mobile games speaks for itself.

[Iggy 1.0]

Collaborative in-world creation was SL's special magic: consider Burning Life.

So yes, bring it back in a world optimized for creativity rather than photo-realism (and ever-greater GPU needs).

Seems to have worked for Minecraft. Bring on the Blockheads!

[seph]

Why is it offline tools vs. in-world collaborative tools? Why can't it be both?

In Second Life we're able to preview textures before uploading them with local files; why not have some server-wide temporary cache where everyone can see our texturing progress everytime we hit Save in Photoshop?

Why not the exact same for mesh; the viewer sync'd for all as we save?

Sound and every other asset type?

Collaboration and real-time are largely contingent on how quick the feedback loop is. Linden Lab is the one that put upload fees and a global asset server inbetween a few people that just want to see what each other are doing.

It's a good thing that there's are huge open source projects like Blender, billion dollar companies like Adobe/Substance and etc. to give us quality tools that're always improving. That's more than Linden Lab or any single company can ever replicate. Support those, but better.

And don't forget that no matter what times have changed. A lot of socializing and collaboration for Second Life happens on a Discord server in voice chat with screenshare. This isn't a bad thing, and it might be ok that a virtual world isn't also where we choose to voice and see what each other are doing.

[YadNi Monde]

I do remember when it all started with a Cube, those days are long gone, but it was a lot of fun to work with Prims, with Friends around.
Sweet Memory: Teaming up with Lumiere Noir at a Co Op Building contest and winning a trophy with Him !!!

[Cathartes Aura]

A Virtual World with In-World Creation Tools using the latest 3D Objects. Residents working together. Creating together. Both In-World and Out-World.
Sounds like an awesome place. Where do I sign up? Smiles...

Reminds me of SL back in the fall of 2006 when I joined. A beautiful place with beautiful people creating some amazing things In-World. It was fu$king fun... Almost anyone could create very cool objects with just a little training.

And that's what is missing from this Barbie and Ken Dress-Up World that SL has devolved into.

Cheers to whoever can recreate the magic that existed in those early days of SL. And if they are successful. SL is road-kill. Stinky and slowly decomposing Road Kill. And that's beak licking goodness for this carrion eater... ;)