In case you missed it amid last week's hoopla over Linden Lab's announcement that they are (finally) developing a native mobile for Second Life built on Unity, there already is a user-run project to bring Second Life to Unity.
It's called Crystal Frost, and it's still going full-guns.
pai
"It's not going to change," as lead dev Berry Bunny (Kallisti#2038 on Discord) tells me today. "Linden Lab is taking it in a different direction, and they're unlikely to use it for their desktop viewer. If anything it just means I won't have to worry about making a mobile version."
In other words, the era of Second Life on Unity is here.
Berry's original idea is to create a version of Second Life that's optimized to run in PCs and VR, and that remains the goal. Yes, Second Life in VR, with hands-on prim-based creation, a version of SL that can compete with VRChat.
"I'll have the 2D user interface pop up as a holographic display in front of you and can be pulled up with a customizable gesture," Berry explains. "If possible I will be tapping in to the puppetry system that Linden Lab is developing, and barring that I'll be using an LSL bridge to transmit IK targets for hand and full body tracking."
As for Linden Lab's SL on Unity/mobile project, Berry tells me from painful personal experience that they are going to hit some huge challenges:
Responding to our question on how many active users on the Quest VR headset there are, a reader points us to a recent market survey which suggests that use is quite tiny, especially among Gen Z:
Piper Sandler completes 43rd semi-annual Generation Z survey of 7,100 U.S. teens...
While 26% of teens own a VR device, just 5% use it daily. 48% of teens are either unsure or not interested in the Metaverse
This prompts reader "lieisacake" (LOL) to observe: