While Philip Rosedale returned to developing Second Life full-time a few months ago, Linden Lab was playing with cloud streaming the virtual world well before then:
"[T]he team had already experimented a bit with this technology a couple years ago," as he told me recently. "They started playing with it a while back. So it was something that we were just able to identify as a logical next mission… the mobile app, and then this.”
Hence the streaming project's internal name, Project Zero, a way of indicating that this a foundationally new approach to experiencing the virtual world.
“Meaning," as put its it, "zero download, zero login, zero crashing, zero UI... a way to greatly amplify the number of people that are desirous of using Second Life already and basically can't."
The current version of Project Zero -- which you can still try for free here, in increments of 10 minutes -- is still just the standard viewer, streamed to a web browser. But in the near future, Philip tells me, the UI will greatly change, and may even include some game hooks, as the company seeks to re-engage some of the 60 million people who've created an SL account over the years, but for various reasons, have strayed from the community:
Redesigning Zero's User Interface
Wagner James Au: So you're saying the UI [of Project Zero] is gonna be completely changed. You have someone in the design space who's working on it?
Philip Rosedale: [W]hen you see us deploy [in early January], it'll just be the existing Second Life client viewer. We've already started designing the framework for how we're going to refactor the UI on top of this experience. We're going to use modern HTML React controls on top of the web browser window.
That's cool, because that's going to give us stuff like 60 frames per second when you're typing text, no matter what, no matter what the back end render stream rate is.
But what we also hope is that we'll be able to start with the easy things and then work our way up to and conquer the hardest UX problems. And clearly, the hardest one that we've been laughing about with those videos, is getting [avatars] dressed. Dressing is the monster, you know, a problem that's completely remained unsolved, and, in fact, got worse over the last 15 years, right?
So we're gonna move very quickly. So what we'll do is, in January… we'll just start refactoring probably chat, the chat system first, and then just other components of the UX… [And then] we'll refactor things like dialogs, sitting, inventory offers.
And then we'll finally get to dressing. I don't think we'll get avatar dressing [UI] done in Q1, but we’ll be using exactly the same tools that we're building right now. So we'll build all these modern UX tools. Because, as you know, the other problem for us isn't so much the skill of the designers, it's the cycle time and just the modernity of the components. With Second Life, every time we mess with something in the old system, we break a whole bunch of other things, and people are pissed, and we're having to then roll back half our changes to accommodate something we broke, and we just end up with something that's not a full step forward.
So what we're going to try to do here is, and demonstrate it with the mobile client, is just start from scratch, add components one at a time in the order you need them.
I mean, the mobile client’s in the same state. We don't do dressing [in mobile] yet, it’s not like just putting a hat on. And so we're gonna pursue a kind of a similar strategy in [for the app].
WJA: Okay, how about for the first time user experience [in Project Zero]? Will that change with the UI?
PR: Well, that'll be what will change first. We're gonna put up an end point so that existing residents can test it, and everybody can play with it, complain about it, or whatever… unless you've got a killer machine, in which case, God bless you, we're completely happy that you're using Firestorm or whatever, and you're staying on that machine.
The other thing that's important to say is, unlike, you know, the debacle of Viewer 2.0 back in the day, or whatever that was, we're not anticipating that we need to refactor the [Firestorm UI]. We’re not going to change that. That's the advanced line. [SLers] use that, and they're completely comfortable with it. And I don't think it negatively impacts their experience.
But obviously, learning the Firestorm UI massively negatively impacts the experience of probably most of the new people that sign up for Second Life. You know, download Firestorm -- that's one of the things they do in their first six hours.
Re-imagining Project Zero with the community -- and adding game hooks
WJA: [Project Zero] seems like a great opportunity, maybe even more so than mobile, to just start fresh, to bring in new users and give them a completely different UI that, you know, doesn't have any of the friction points that we're dealing with now.
PR: Exactly. So we're going to start with chat. That'll be the first component you'll see us modernize. Will just be chat, movement and chat, which is basically not a UX at all. But communication, friending, the kind of the easy stuff you have to do to get acclimated in Second Life.
And then, as I said, if you ask people, Well, what's the problematic [UI improvement]? We all know the problematic one is dressing. Like, you just can't become a person who lives in Second Life right now until you’ve thoroughly created an avatar. That is not easy. So we recognize that last chunk [of UI] is very hard, and we've got to get to that.
That said, we've been doing all these meetings with content creators and bloggers and we've just done these meetings with large groups, which seems like a really good way to get frequent touch points with different important groups.
And one of the things that we're going to do is we're talking to [them] now in a way that we totally weren't a few years ago. We're talking to the biggest content creators, people that are building the successful games in Second Life, that are [driven by] HUDs, before we recode anything. And say… "What if we did it this new way with HTML and React, and you rewrote your HUDs to use this?" So we're going to co-design it with the people that are creating the most content.
WJA: I know you're adding game hooks to the mobile experience. Will those be in this streaming experience?
PR: It's different UI, but I mean, at a really high level, yeah, it'll make sense to do probably a lot of the same stuff.
That said, you know mobile has a specific design aesthetic, like people expect certain types of experiences on mobile. I don't know if that transfers directly [to Project Zero]. I think we'll learn as we go. We could do that because the components that we built for mobile are [also] React. So we could use them on top of this… we'll definitely be using some of the same components and art and stuff across between those two [platforms]. But I think we have to respect the fact that what somebody wants out of the immersive desktop [version] is probably not the same [as the mobile version] even when you get down to things like behaviors, or just fun factor loops and systems.
... And of course, we can also bring back the millions and millions and millions of people who have [tried SL before but] kind of fallen off the radar because they actually didn't upgrade their computers.
WJA: Do you still have their emails captured? You could theoretically email tens of millions of people. “Things have been somewhat improved since you tried to log in in 2010 or whenever.”
PR: Yeah, exactly. That's something we'll start doing. We haven't even begun doing that yet. But the other thing is, we talked about Brad leading this, is we're going to start marketing again early in [2025], and you'll, you'll see us doing a whole bunch of experiments.
Next week: Brad and Philip talk about re-engaging SL marketing, and much more!
This post brought to you by metaverse partner Hari Sutherland, author of the new SL coffee table, SECOND LIFE: The First, Best Metaverse in Words and Pictures.
One of the reasons that most people download Firestorm and other viewers is that the Second Life viewer does not support RLV.
Posted by: Jennifer | Wednesday, January 22, 2025 at 08:42 PM
Do we see previs images or will they just foist it on us coded and complete and say its 2 late to change it like they normally do?
Posted by: Judas | Thursday, January 23, 2025 at 01:55 PM