Official Second Life App Optimized for Vision Pro? Here Are Some Pros and Cons (Comment of the Week)

Brian Aviator exploring Second Life in his Vision Pro while also reading New World Notes on the web

While it's possible to run the iOS version of Second Life on Apple's Vision Pro, what would an optimized Vision Pro version of Second Life be like? In Comments, longtime virtual worlds developer/theorist/educator Gwyneth Llewelyn considers the possibilities:

Granted, one cannot expect the same level of quality as a specially-developed VR environment for the Apple Vision Pro. SL, after all, lags — and that will be very confusing, or probably even worse than that: inducing motion sickness, for instance. SL doesn't behave like the real world when you abruptly turn your head; all those textures coming in sight will need to be downloaded first. This is not going to change.

Also, there is a question of resolution: will the CPUs of the Vision Pro be able to render a full 360º environment at an acceptable FPS to be 'usable'? I have certainly seen videos of people (some of them my students, streaming live) who had at least 4K screens, rendering SL at sub-Ultra quality at 45 FPS.

Will that be enough? Will the Apple Vision Pro manage that as well as a top-of-the-line beefed-up PC, carefully built from scratch by a professional eSports athlete? (BTW, that's what my students were.) Maybe. The whole point is that it's not that far-fetched as it seems.

Gwyn goes on to make the case that Second Life would have an advantage on Vision Pro that other metaverse platforms would not:

And think about puppetry. No need to deal with the whole complexity of the LEAP feature built-in the SL desktop viewer, requiring building an external plugin which connects to a webcam and tries to recognise your arm motions and facial expressions, and impress them on your avatar. Apple has done all of that for the Vision Pro, and offer it as part of their SDK. And Linden Laab has done the necessary hooks. They just need to connect the two bits.

It's easier said than done, of course, but I'd venture a guess that SL will not be far behind all others — with possibly a difference: it's hardly a surprise that the Big Players are boycotting Apple's Vision Pro. I can imagine Epic saying "no" to Fortnite as a VR game inside the Vision Pro (because they also have their own hardware to sell), and possibly Roblox will do the same, as will Microsoft's Minecraft.

Meta/Facebook, obviously, will steer clear of the combination of Apple Vision Pro + Second Life, since that's precisely what they wish to sell and have been intensely developing for almost a decade now, with little to show (except, well, heavily post-processed video for their ads...)

Linden Lab with SL-on-Vision-Pro will have an edge, at least for short a while, but that might give SL a small advantage in this market, before the competition swallows their pride and catches up.

More here. To be clear, Rec Room has been working with Apple on a Vision Pro version of its popular metaverse platform since the HMD was announced; though I suspect she's right that Second Life does have a head start over Meta/Roblox/Epic, if they choose to go the Vision Pro route.

Comments

[dk]

The Vision Pro is rumoured to be *incredibly* supply constrained because the displays that it uses are very hard to manufacture right now. The installed base for these things is going to be tiny for a while.

Should LL make an SL client for the VP? No. Should LL make the mobile client *also* be a VP app? Probably, if their cross development between Android and i(Pad)OS doesn't hamper i(Pad)OS/VisionOS cross development.

[Baiss Serf]

I have returned to SL on the VPro. It's what I had in mind in 2001 when I worked in the field of graphics. Now, completion problems, 1) can't design avatar 2) can't buy items and it's still slow. Please keep up the work.