One fun thing about writing about Second Life for The Atlantic was going through a rigorous fact-checking process. Take this passage:
The utopian paradox even extends into how Second Life was developed by employees at Linden Lab. Under the idealistic direction of Rosedale and his CTO Cory Ondrejka, the startup operated with a no-managers, "choose your own work" policy, cheekily dubbed the Tao of Linden. Their creativity thus unleashed, Linden developers wound up adding a farrago of persnickety features to the product with little unifying direction that might create a seamless, user-friendly experience. To this day, the Second Life application resembles an MMO game welded to a 3D graphics editor duct-taped to a social network crammed into an ancient television remote with infinite buttons.
But the program’s very complexity became a kind of initiation rite. Some 99 percent of new users would quit, overwhelmed and aggravated, usually within their first hour in the virtual world. Those who did stay long enough to learn how to use the software—usually guided by a patient “oldie” community member—found themselves welcomed into a rare, exclusive club.
The Atlantic's fact checker highlighted the passage in bold and asked me to demonstrate that the SL viewer really was that complicated. So I actually launched the program, and tallied up the default onscreen UI options:
How Second Life on Unity Can Improve the Virtual World's User Interface as Well Its Graphics (Comments of the Week)
Above: Current version of Chat/IM user interface on Crystal Frost
Many SLers are excited about Berry Bunny's Crystal Frost, the Second Life-on-Unity project, because of graphics enhancements like physics- enabled water. In Comments, veteran metaverse developer Gwyneth Llewelyn notes how this will also enable the community to improve the user interface:
I actually think improving the UI/UX is even more important than updating the graphics, at least in terms of having any chance at growing SL's user base.
As for the launch of Crystal Frost last weekend, the viewer's Patreon now has over 40 members, and their reaction with the first Alpha is pretty positive, Berry tells me:
"People are amazed, but their expectations have also been pretty well tempered by my being transparent and communicating what to expect... a severe bug has been found but it's already been isolated and will be fixed by the next release." They're planning that release for March 17.
As for Gwyn's thoughts on the UI, Berry's also replied in Comments, with some hints around how Crystal Frost might work as a mobile/tablet app:
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Posted on Monday, March 06, 2023 at 02:52 PM in Comment of the Week, SL viewer news | Permalink | Comments (5)
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