Future of the metaverse, and all that

[Mr Amore]

On 8/20/2021 at 5:38 PM, Coffee Pancake said:

The word "Game" in his arguments is doing a tremendous amount of heavy lifting.

Imagine SL if land was free, we could all have as much as we liked to build anything we wanted, and everything everyone built was called "a game". At some point LL have to start clawing back money to pay the insane server bills, I wonder who's going to be paying the lions share of the bills....

The comparisons with steam are knowingly misleading, steam is just a marketplace, they do not develop all the game engines, provide all the tools or host and provide server space to run all the games.

But the "think of the children" angle when it comes to Roblox is going to get him far more traction. Lets feel sorry for the child who made a game and didn't succeed on his first try, because that's not at all representative of the actual experience indie game developers have on the other "fairer" platforms.

Of course established developers win more and get a huge boost with everything they do. That's how literally everything works.

To put this in SL terms - Are LL exploiting you if you build a club and no one comes - even if they gave you everything you needed, including the land, for free ... 

 

To take some numbers from that video, Roblox has amassed over 20 million experiences/games. I'm going to assume 3000 new experiences are being uploaded daily. The majority of these will never see the light of day, they're substandard projects from new users learning the process. Perhaps 30 are playable, and just 3 of those are real projects with time and effort behind them.

Once you sift through the chaff, that's still three new games entering the platform daily. The argument from the video was, the 'store front' isn't doing enough to support new developers and most games will fall through with the chaff. The counter argument is,  it's difficult to process 3000+ daily additions.

So the race is reduced to marketing, from what I understood Roblox operates a 'gacha' system where developers spend money, yet may or may not be featured. It's raising the bar for new developers, and supports those with the capital to invest heavily in promoting their experiences. All the better if they can bribe influencers to stream their games.

Then are the games who've survived the death race. Now I'm not certain if these figures are accurate, they're based on the video. For every $100 made:

Roblox takes a 75.5% cut of earnings = $24.5

When cashing out, Roblox takes a further 65% = $8.5 remaining for the developer.

 

In SL, there're far fewer venues to compete against, maybe 50 clubs at any given time? New club owners have access to an established network of groups to notice spam, and they can host popular performers who bring their own audience too. I don't frequent SL clubs, my understanding is they usually implode from internal drama, making mentally stable staff their most valuable resource.

[Lucia Nightfire]

1 hour ago, Mr Amore said:

I don't frequent SL clubs, my understanding is they usually implode from internal drama, making mentally stable staff their most valuable resource.

They implode because they don't make money to recoup operating costs like 95% of all venues in SL.

Such things should only be considered an expensive hobby at best, not a business.

[Coffee Pancake]

Virtual meetings in Second life from 2009

https://lindenlab.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/working-in-the-virtual-world/

An idea that just wont die.

 

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

12 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

They implode because they don't make money to recoup operating costs like 95% of all venues in SL.

Such things should only be considered an expensive hobby at best, not a business.

When I ran my club --- I did it for fun and to support the performers. But due to dealing with some illness and a performer whom I caught using a prerecorded set I decided to hand things over to someone else.

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

4 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Virtual meetings in Second life from 2009

https://lindenlab.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/working-in-the-virtual-world/

An idea that just wont die.

 

At least the avatars have legs unlike Freakbook.

[ChinRey]

12 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Virtual meetings in Second life from 2009

https://lindenlab.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/working-in-the-virtual-world/

An idea that just wont die.

 

Oh but it's obvious what's wrong with that picture: No coffee!!!

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

1 hour ago, ChinRey said:

Oh but it's obvious what's wrong with that picture: No coffee!!!

She's there, that's her laptop at the closer end of the table, she's taking the picture.

[ChinRey]

4 hours ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

She's there, that's her laptop at the closer end of the table, she's taking the picture.

Ummm, I mean coffee as in the beverage you need to stay awake through long dull meetings. There has to be a cup of it in front of each and every avatar for it all to work.

Edited August 26, 2021 by ChinRey

[Coffee Pancake]

I am not to be put in a cup.

😳

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

I am not to be put in a cup.

Some people in SL would probably like it but I suppose it's not your cup of tea.

Edited August 26, 2021 by ChinRey

[ChinRey]

On 8/25/2021 at 11:00 PM, Coffee Pancake said:

Virtual meetings in Second life from 2009

https://lindenlab.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/working-in-the-virtual-world/

An idea that just wont die.

 

A serious reply too.

Meetings, conferences and lectures are basically the same. They are all about communication and to communicate effectively, we need to use the tools and methods available to make the participants as receptive as possible to each others' input. (Communication is always two-way btw, never forget that.) The various channels we have - face-to-face in RL, text only (chat rooms, email exchanges etc.), voice only (phone calls, voice chats etc.), video conferences and virtual reality meetings - all have their unique pros and cons.

What I've seen in all initiatives from Linden Labd and Facebook and other service providers is that they attempt to emulate RL events as closely as possible. With that approach we tend to end up with a situation with most of the disadvantages and few of the advantages RL has to offer and with very limited (if any) use of the possibilities a virtual world can offer and RL can't.

A different approach is to start with the unique qualities of a virtual reality and see if they can be used to create an environment conductive to "serious" communication. There have been several private innitiatives trying to do this but although many of them look very promising, they've all been hampered by lack of resources and inadequate support from the platform owners, so it's still impossible to say for sure whether this is a viable option. It's worth looking at though and it's the only option that has any potential at all.

[animats]

19 hours ago, ChinRey said:

What I've seen in all initiatives from Linden Lab and Facebook and other service providers is that they attempt to emulate RL events as closely as possible. With that approach we tend to end up with a situation with most of the disadvantages and few of the advantages RL has to offer and with very limited (if any) use of the possibilities a virtual world can offer and RL can't.

A different approach is to start with the unique qualities of a virtual reality and see if they can be used to create an environment conductive to "serious" communication. There have been several private initiatives trying to do this but although many of them look very promising, they've all been hampered by lack of resources and inadequate support from the platform owners, so it's still impossible to say for sure whether this is a viable option. It's worth looking at though and it's the only option that has any potential at all.

That's a useful comment. Can you say more?

There seem to be people working on that, but not in SL.

• Philip Rosedale's "High Fidelity" is now about audio, and they're trying to make group audio work better.
• Presentation video systems have improved. Early approaches from universities showed the backs of people writing on blackboards. Today we tend to have a small picture of the user's face plus a big picture of the presentation. Here's that being done in VRchat. That's a nice effect.
• Being able to do Zoom calls in and out of Second Life would be useful.
• We need better display boards in SL. Text is far too hard to set up. Media on a Prim is too clunky.

None of this is rocket science. SL should have had this fixed back in 2009, when "SL for Enterprise" was going to be a thing.

[Coffee Pancake]

56 minutes ago, animats said:

• Philip Rosedale's "High Fidelity" is now about audio, and they're trying to make group audio work better.

If only we could have that in SL ... It seems like a no-brainer, but here we are.

56 minutes ago, animats said:

• Today we tend to have a small picture of the user's face plus a big picture of the presentation. Here's that being done in VRchat. That's a nice effect.

Oh that will catch on .. Just what you want to see in a tutorial video. Not a hot visual mess at all.

56 minutes ago, animats said:

• Being able to do Zoom calls in and out of Second Life would be useful.

Pointless exercise.

OBS Virtual Camera can broadcast anything you like to a zoom call. Even an avatar from SL, or your toon from a video game. I doubt that would be acceptable in the context of a zoom call.

Hi Mr Serious person, why yes I showed up to this call as an Anime potato in a fancy hat that I decided would be appropriate. Of course I take you and this meeting seriously, did you know I can do the guilty gear meme pose? 

Getting Zoom inside SL .. that's just zoom with extra steps. I'm sure it already works and no one is doing it, because why would they when they have a web browser and a phone right there.

Avatar to Avatar zoom calls .. come on. Remember when SL had avatar calling? Remember how well that worked .. remember anyone who ever used it ?

 

[Mr Amore]

20 hours ago, animats said:

• We need better display boards in SL. Text is far too hard to set up. Media on a Prim is too clunky.

This is a dream feature I've wanted, but we may never see. Imagine how informative and interactive HUDs could become. Along with inworld displays too.

[ChinRey]

On 8/27/2021 at 8:34 PM, animats said:

That's a useful comment. Can you say more?

I can say a lot more, way too much for a post on a message board.

But one important thing to keep in mind is that learning (in the widest possible meaning of the word) is an activity. You can't passively receive information. Your brain has to process and interpret the new info and associate it with old knowledge for it to stick. If that doesn't happen, everything just goes "in one ear and out the other".

Classes, conferences and to a large extent meetings, are inherently based on the outdated and false concept of passive learning where the lecturer, speaker, allmighty boss or whatever pours knowledge into the brains of the ignorant audience the way you pour water into an empty glass. Good communicators have many techniques to overcome this flaw. Unfortunately many of those techniques don't work well (or at all) in a virtual environment and this is one of the two main reasons why simply transferring an RL conference/lecture/meeting to a virtual environment is a bad idea.

However, a virtual environment offers a number of other methods to increase receptivity and if we can find ways to exploit those methods to their full potential maybe, just maybe, virtual conferences, meetings and lectures can become a viable option.

[animats]

New article: "Will the Metaverse bring the Second Coming of Second Life"? Venture Beat interviewed Oberwager. Quotes:

• "Second Life remains solid in its 18th year, with the best financial performance in the first half of the year in more than a decade."
• "Just 3.5 years ago, we were the same size as Roblox,”
• "Linden Lab also invested $30 million in Tilia Pay"

Nothing about future plans, though.

[Madelaine McMasters]

18 minutes ago, animats said:

New article: "Will the Metaverse bring the Second Coming of Second Life"?

From the article: "More than 2 billion user-generated assets have been created to date."

I think around half of those are named "Object".

Edited September 3, 2021 by Madelaine McMasters

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

6 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

From the article: "More than 2 billion user-generated assets have been created to date."

I think around half of those are named "Object".

I know! Too many and always cleaning those out of my inventory.

The article did bring up some future stuff, like the Zenescope project and Upland using Tilia for handling the $$.

[Coffee Pancake]

57 minutes ago, animats said:

New article: "Will the Metaverse bring the Second Coming of Second Life"? Venture Beat interviewed Oberwager. Quotes:

• "Second Life remains solid in its 18th year, with the best financial performance in the first half of the year in more than a decade."
• "Just 3.5 years ago, we were the same size as Roblox,”
• "Linden Lab also invested $30 million in Tilia Pay"

Nothing about future plans, though.

$ 30,000,000 for Tilia.

That's 7.5 Billion L$.

How much are vulkan render pipelines? Asking for a me ...

[Jenna Huntsman]

9 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

 

vulkan render pipelines

dreams

[Ardy Lay]

6 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

From the article: "More than 2 billion user-generated assets have been created to date."

I think around half of those are named "Object".

Something like that, and this is after expunging the 1.7 TRILLION that were deleted from in-world and left in trash folders for years.

[animats]

Burning Man is in its own private "Metaverse" this year.    The Financial Times reports.

It's live now, if you have an Oculus Rift lying around. The FT reporter said that flying around Burning Man in VR headgear produced nausea, though. Not surprised.

Last year the Burners had a presence in SL, but it was only one sim. In their own world, they could have the full 7 square miles.

[Lucia Nightfire]

Quote

It uses AI to stop such theft and it honors Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests from brands. It has undercover avatars to police bad behavior.

What a crock.

[Mr Amore]

On 8/29/2021 at 10:31 AM, ChinRey said:

Classes, conferences and to a large extent meetings, are inherently based on the outdated and false concept of passive learning where the lecturer, speaker, allmighty boss or whatever pours knowledge into the brains of the ignorant audience the way you pour water into an empty glass. Good communicators have many techniques to overcome this flaw. Unfortunately many of those techniques don't work well (or at all) in a virtual environment and this is one of the two main reasons why simply transferring an RL conference/lecture/meeting to a virtual environment is a bad idea.

However, a virtual environment offers a number of other methods to increase receptivity and if we can find ways to exploit those methods to their full potential maybe, just maybe, virtual conferences, meetings and lectures can become a viable option.

 

How to meet the untapped potential of virtual learning?

It's generally falling to the familiar forms of teaching as you've described, over the past years I've been to many conferences and SL classes(Blender).  The attendance ranges from 20 - 50 avatars. Interestingly, women are the overwhelming majority, I've been to classes with just a couple of men and 20+ women.

Is the classic structure still working in virtual worlds? Anyone can take a look around Blender Bender's exhibition area and see the mesh items and images of students' creations. These are people who probably never would have taken up Blender, who have now learned to create, texture and upload their mesh to SL. It's difficult to see how Blender could be taught in any other way in SL.

But other subjects could benefit hugely from interactive experiences. Imagine being taught the medieval period at school, through a survival-style crafting game, with new chapters every week unlocking other facets of medieval life. After having immersed your students into the experience, they can write an essay. It's exposing the class to similar levels of content as a lecture, but I'm certain they'll retain more of the information.

Then mathematics could be taught like this too, but in a 3D environment (It's a great channel for gaming maths):

 

 

[Coffee Pancake]

So .. WHY isn't there a published roadmap for SL going forward?