Future of the metaverse, and all that

[animats]

Then, there's Sominium Space. This was supposed to be a high-end metaverse. Supports VR, supposedly scalable to very large sizes, allows building. I hadn't looked at in a while. Today I did.

This is the map of Sominium Space. The whole world. A "small" parcel, the smallest size square you see there, is 200 m^2.

The most popular parcel right now. 6 users, somewhere. This is with the web client, which is limited, but you can log in and chat.

I thought this whole system was on Spatial OS and very scaleable. But apparently not. It's not very big, and the busiest parcel has 6 users right now. All the listed "popular parcels" together have 22 connected users.

You can build, using what seems to be a dumbed-down version of Unity. You can place and color objects from their inventory. You can't make new mesh objects. You then upload your entire parcel.

They have events. Here's the calendar.

A full schedule of exciting events!

This place sucks.

(But they get more press than Second Life.)

 

Edited July 2, 2021 by animats

[Coffee Pancake]

2 minutes ago, animats said:

This place sucks.

(But they get more press than Second Life.)

It's almost like the very notion of people in a virtual world is problematic enough to scare media away .. Sucksar makes so much more sense now.

[animats]

There's a new Korean metaverse: Ifland.

It's cartoony, but it's K-Pop grade cartoony. It's a follow-on to Zepeto, which was aimed directly at K-Pop fans. It's intended for mobile use. Both are from Korea Telecom. It's disjoint areas, not a seamless world like SL. Allows about 130 avatars per area, supposedly.

You set your avatar's facial expressions by texting emoji.

Edited July 18, 2021 by animats
Typo

[Drayke Newall]

17 minutes ago, animats said:

There's a new Korean metaverse: Ifland.

It's cartoony, but it's K-Pop grade cartoony.

Seems similar to Avikin. Only available on mobile and your have rooms that are premade. Cant really see business's using it but knowing Korea will definitely be big among younger people.

[Coffee Pancake]

12 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

Seems similar to Avikin. Only available on mobile and your have rooms that are premade. Cant really see business's using it but knowing Korea will definitely be big among younger people.

Doing serious business meetings numbers business in there, probably not. Doing business in there, oh hell yes they will.

[animats]

 

13 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

but knowing Korea will definitely be big among younger people.

Probably. What struck me about that is the fluidity and expressiveness of the avatar expressions. SL has gestures, but they suck. They're over-acted, don't have a useful emotional vocabulary, and are hard to use.

This is a good project for someone with acting and machima experience. Come up with a good gesture set  for Second Life conversation. The machinery is all there. You can define gestures and bind them to keys. You can make animations. Now make gestures usable. Give us, say, 9 gestures useful in conversation and bind them to the keyboard's number pad. Offer a gesture acting class, or make a video.

[Lucia Nightfire]

Expression capability is directly tied to the head the animations are made for.

That applies to any MMO.

Ifland looks like it only has one male and one female facial structure.

The problem with SL is there are hundreds of heads/shapes out there, all made by a few dozen creators.

[animats]

5 minutes ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

all made by a few dozen creators.

If someone did good gestures for Catwa heads, that would be a start. There are HUDs for facial expressions, but they're clunky, only useful for posing stills. Not for conversation.

I've been looking at other virtual worlds, and most of the successful ones have lively looking groups in conversation. In comparison, SL looks dead.

[Lucia Nightfire]

1 hour ago, animats said:

I've been looking at other virtual worlds, and most of the successful ones have lively looking groups in conversation. In comparison, SL looks dead.

Do you go anywhere or do anything in SL other than hang out at the same 1 or 2 places 24/7?

There are many communities out there.

[Quistess Alpha]

15 minutes ago, animats said:

've been looking at other virtual worlds, and most of the successful ones have lively looking groups in conversation. In comparison, SL looks dead.

7 minutes ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

Do you go anywhere or do anything in SL other than hang out at the same 1 or 2 places 24/7?

There are many communities out there.

Visually speaking, even when there's a group talking I can sort of see how someone might get the 'dead' impression. Even if maybe 2/7 people are using an ao with a lot of extraneous movement, from a visual standpoint, yeah, not everyone is using exciting typers (things that play an animation/make lots of particles while typing) and whatnot. so it looks like more than half the people are just standing there. The visual aspect isn't super important for me though, although I can see how it might be a bit off-putting t some who are more used to more modern looking things.

[animats]

4 minutes ago, Quistess Alpha said:

...although I can see how it might be a bit off-putting to some who are more used to more modern looking things.

Exactly. It's another small thing which gives SL an unnecessarily bad new user experience.

[Chroma Starlight]

Longer-term planning for the eternal preservation of this living grid will establish this place and time for all posterity; the oldest and largest continually-inhabited virtual cities that are meaningfully owned and created by their inhabitants in all the Internet-based metaverse. 

Linden and community partnerships are formed: a council to determine the historical significance of abandoned builds on the Second Life mainland and a process to realize whether they should preserved and curated or instead made available on the marketplace. 

One day, people may begin to use technologies like Second Life to organize how they associate and express in First Life. People may one day excitedly discover that by adding over additional layers, it's possible to enhance both experiences in various artful ways.

Edited July 19, 2021 by Chroma Starlight

[Coffee Pancake]

9 hours ago, Chroma Starlight said:

Longer-term planning for the eternal preservation of this living grid will establish this place and time for all posterity; the oldest and largest continually-inhabited virtual cities that are meaningfully owned and created by their inhabitants in all the Internet-based metaverse. 

A living world and preservation have no place in the same sentence when it comes to SL. 

Burn it down and build it new.

9 hours ago, Chroma Starlight said:

Linden and community partnerships are formed: a council to determine the historical significance of abandoned builds on the Second Life mainland and a process to realize whether they should preserved and curated or instead made available on the marketplace. 

You're talking about selling other peoples stuff on the SLM. Hell no.

9 hours ago, Chroma Starlight said:

One day, people may begin to use technologies like Second Life to organize how they associate and express in First Life.

Some of us have been doing that since the start, catch up!

 

[Quistess Alpha]

7 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Quote

One day, people may begin to use technologies like Second Life to organize how they associate and express in First Life.

Some of us have been doing that since the start, catch up!

I would love to be caught up on that, any mandatory reading?

[animats]

Facebook is going to try to do the Metaverse. Again.

"Mark Zuckerberg has said that Facebook will “effectively transition from … being a social media company to being a metaverse company”.

...

The metaverse, in Mr Zuckerberg’s vision, will be about “engag[ing] more naturally” with the behaviours we already exhibit – such as reaching for our smartphones immediately upon waking up.

“We have these phones. They’re relatively small. A lot of the time that we’re spending, we’re basically mediating our lives and our communication through these small, glowing rectangles. I think that that’s not really how people are made to interact”, Mr Zuckerberg said, saying that technology should emulate “some shared sense of space in common”.

"Mr Zuckerberg has made such comments before, hypothesizing that humans should “be teleporting, not transporting ourselves” into various environments through virtual and mixed reality environments. This could be through a number of devices, and while many people think of the metaverse in terms of virtual reality headsets, Mr Zuckerberg proposed that VR, AR (augmented, or mixed, reality), PCs, mobile devices, and game consoles would all be connected."

Facebook's track record with Facebook Spaces and Facebook Horizon, plus the mess they made of Oculus, is not encouraging. But they have the money to fail every year until they get a hit. Anyway, there are now three companies with tens of billions of dollars, Facebook, Roblox, and Epic, aiming at SL's niche.

Edited July 23, 2021 by animats

[Lucia Nightfire]

2 hours ago, animats said:

Anyway, there are now three companies with tens of billions of dollars, Facebook, Roblox, and Epic, aiming at SL's niche.

Secondlife is not on any competitive corporate entity's radar.

Secondlife does not create any standards that any competitive corporate entity would be interested in mimicking.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

A new venture doesn't have to mimic SL, it simply has to offer something appealing.

[animats]

1 minute ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

A new venture doesn't have to mimic SL, it simply has to offer something appealing.

Right. Facebook did not mimic MySpace. It did crush it.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

What secondlife/Opensim/new-venture has to try and break away from are the twin railway-lines of shopping and radio-with-animated-pictures. They might be well-travelled, but they're going round in a circle. 

You can't see twits on the radio. If I want to listen to music it's going to be of my choosing, and my current tastes wouldn't suit the dances - you can't boogie to Buxtehude.

[Qie Niangao]

"Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ‘starting to plant the seeds’ to step down: Author"

I'd judge SL less at risk from Facebook than from a Zuckerberg with missile-envy. Not that he'd "go after" SL in any conscious way, but SL could be collateral damage, flotsam in the wake of money seeking immortal relevance.

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

1 hour ago, animats said:

Facebook is going to try to do the Metavarse. Again.

Facebook's track record with Facebook Spaces and Facebook Horizon, plus the mess they made of Oculus, is not encouraging. But they have the money to fail every year until they get a hit. Anyway, there are now three companies with tens of billions of dollars, Facebook, Roblox, and Epic, aiming at SL's niche.

Hopefully FB won't attempt to buy Linden Lab/SL.  They have been known to buy out others or competitors.

[animats]

41 minutes ago, Kimmi Zehetbauer said:

Hopefully FB won't attempt to buy Linden Lab/SL.  They have been known to buy out others or competitors.

I hope not. A buyout by Roblox, though... I could see that. Roblox has an average user age of 13. Their users age out just about the time they get some buying power. SL, as a place to send Roblox users as they age out, could make sense for them.

[Da5id Weatherwax]

2 hours ago, animats said:

Facebook is going to try to do the Metavarse. Again.

"Mark Zuckerberg has said that Facebook will “effectively transition from … being a social media company to being a metaverse company”.

And unlike SL where staff are known by the "Linden" surname you will recognize FB staff by the fact their names are their employee ID numbers, all of which begin with 6....

[ChinRey]

4 hours ago, Da5id Weatherwax said:

you will recognize FB staff by the fact their names are their employee ID numbers, all of which begin with 6....

Only a single 6? Shouldn't there be three of them?

[lucagrabacr]

An acquirement by FB is unlikely considering how little SL is making compared to FB, they'd be more worried about possible "bad PR" from acquiring something like SL which, even though it has toned down over the years, would be re-amplified by the media if FB acquires SL

That is, unless, someone over at FB really sees the merit in the SL model and value the experiences of the people running SL, as well as SL's brand name, and believe that they can be upscaled with their capital (something that I and a lot of other pro-SL people believe as well)

If a buy offer does come, the outcome will most likely depends on whether or not Waterfield think they can get more money by keeping SL, or by selling it to Facebook

Either way,  whether you believe SL is better off not being owned by Facebook, or being owned by Facebook and possibly improve using their wealth and reach (FB do a lot of ethically questionable things but to be fair the IPs they bought do tend to thrive) the continued existence of SL as we know it rest on;

1. Our ability to demonstrate how the foundational values of the SL model is upscale-able in term of UVP and profit 
2. Our willingness to see and accept that SL doesn't exist in a vacuum, and how SL is presented will ALWAYS, even if only subconsciously, be compared to contemporaries, details matter 

If those two things can be tackled, no matter who or what owns SL, it will thrive