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:
