Pictured: Alexia in High Fidelity (as a cloud)
Rather than write yet again about what went wrong with Second Life way back when, I recently asked veteran game designer Alexia Mandeville what could go still go right.
She's in a very good position to offer her perspective: An SL user herself back in the day, she's now a designer at Niantic (creator of Pokémon GO, the massive AR-based virtual world), and a designer on the early iteration of Horizon, Facebook's social VR world. Even more pertinent, she was also a UX designer at High Fidelity, Philip Rosedale's follow-up virtual world to Second Life. She sees a shared corporate culture to that startup and SL developer Linden Lab, which has hampered consumer adoption of both their virtual worlds:
"[A]cquisition was never a strength at these places," as she puts it. "You need a strong aesthetic style (Minecraft/Roblox/Fortnite) and the ability to communicate your use case articulately to attract mainstream people."
So what are her recommendations to Linden Lab, to grow the Second Life userbase when so many previous attempts by the company have failed?
Ms. Mandeville makes four key suggestions:
Virtual World Concerts Aren't Ideal for Acts With Great Real Life Stage Shows
Protip: It's not a great idea to announce "X in virtual worlds is the future of Y" before checking to see if there are instances of Y successfully happening without X.
For instance: "Live performances in virtual worlds are the future of music concerts." It's part of that future, we can safely say, but as reader "Mint" reminds us, it's definitely not the only one:
Yes: Top bands are making quite a lot of money just from selling tickets to oldschool video streams of live shows, without the added addition (and time, and money) of creating a whole Travis Scott-in-Fortnite-type virtual world experience on top of that. As Minty notes, fans of artists like BTS will probably prefer watching the live real world stage act that's core to the BTS experience. Where virtual worlds will probably shine most is by elevating shows put on by performers who don't have a lot of dancing and other choreography in their stage acts. (Off the top of my head: my neighbor* Billie Eilish has a great stage presence, but a virtual world performance which turns her dark and moody songs into interactive 3D animation would be amazing.)
Which isn't to say there's no place for amazing stage acts like BTS in virtual worlds -- as a matter of fact, they mocapped some of their dance moves for avatars to buy and use in Fortnite:
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Posted on Monday, January 25, 2021 at 03:14 PM in Comment of the Week, Making the Metaverse | Permalink | Comments (1)
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