Sell me on SL as compared to up-and-coming offerings

[ethnya]

I'm working for a web dev firm that's been in business a couple decades that is getting inquiries from current clients about building in the metaverse.  I tried SL some years ago but never really got into it seriously. 

Anyway, not to diss SL.  But what I'm asking you, dear reader, is to help make the case for SL as compared to say, Decentraland, or Sandbox, as a place for a real-world entertainment venue to step into as a cross-promotion.  Given that there will be some dev costs (not sure, but somewhere in the $30k-70k range is my guess) for this project, picking the right platform the first time is important.

So far my observations and concerns go like this:

Pro:

• When comparing it to other offerings, SL is unquestionably the most full-featured and customizable platform among competitors. 
• The parcels are not outrageously expensive, and new parcels can be created.

Con:

• It seems pretty laggy.  I don't have the newest system, but a decent middle of the road with a 1060, and i get non-stop chop even when reducing a lot of the settings.  
• I remember when I messed around with SL some years ago there was...let's say a strong tilt to certain proclivities of an adult nature...and while I know there have been some attempts to carefully segregate that, I'm wondering in practice how successful that has been.  

So while obviously I am approaching a biased audience here, hit me with your best shot.  Why SL versus others? 

[Silent Mistwalker]

People, in general, don't want a metaverse. They want a holodeck. SL is about as close to a holodeck as we're going to get any time soon.

[Rowan Amore]

No

[Alwin Alcott]

41 minutes ago, ethnya said:

as a place for a real-world entertainment venue to step into as a cross-promotion.  Given that there will be some dev costs (not sure, but somewhere in the $30k-70k range is my guess) for this project, picking the right platform the first time is important.

cross promotion for something in rl .. depends what but SL is already a sandbox for the residents.. what is Decentraland?... you might have to explain more.
During the old times, there were many firms present in SL, think nearly none still are around... success = zero.

The costs... well why should we think about that?.. it's for sure not SL thats going to pay that.

[Ajay McDowwll]

I'm the resident of a few virtual worlds, most notably SL and Sinespace.  Both have benefits and drawbacks.  The only true downside to SL, to my thinking, is the perception that it's all about adult activities.  That said, there are also regions that are rated General with no adult content permitted.  It's more about what you seek out, and there is so much to do in SL that involves nothing of that nature.  SL Mainland as a whole is either General or Moderate in rating, with the Adult-rated mainland limited to the continent of Zindra.

Private regions can set up their own land ratings and control the content there to whatever degree the region owner would like.

With regard to lag, one thing I've found that significantly raises FPS is using opaque water settings.  This helps even on landlocked parcels with no SL water visible.  I'm currently in a region with more than 30 other avatars present and I'm still getting over 20FPS.  Part of that is due to my graphics card, but it's also related to carefully tweaked graphics settings.

The Lab recently did an update which appears to have given us a nice bump on FPS as well.

Second Life's content creators are second to none.  A downside to this is that the world is not optimized (which adds to the lag); you're not dealing with fixed assets as you would be in an MMORPG, for instance.  But it does allow for endless personalization and creativity, both in one's settings (buildings, interior design, landscaping, etc) and for one's avatar.  Plus, with the number of years SL has been around, there is far more content available for purchase than exists in younger virtual worlds.

I was involved peripherally with the MuseWeb conference of 2020, which was moved online at the beginning of the pandemic. The formal sessions were held on Microsoft Teams, and then the leisure time was spent in SL.  Participants almost universally said one reason they enjoyed the SL socialization is because they could "run into" a colleague wandering the grounds of the region Linden Lab set up for it, and it gave more of a feeling of sharing physical space than a simple Zoom conference would give.

TL;DR:  Adult content can be controlled for, graphics settings can reduce lag, and holy cats the customization options are insane.  Worth it, IMO.

Edited January 29, 2022 by Ajay McDowwll

[bigmoe Whitfield]

the choppy issue is because of the complexity of SL.  everything is user generated.   there are a few steps that some of us can recommend.  low draw distance.  no more than 64.  and turn off shadows, they eat up vram quickly.

[Lucia Nightfire]

1 hour ago, ethnya said:

help make the case for SL as compared to say, Decentraland, or Sandbox, as a place for a real-world entertainment venue to step into as a cross-promotion

I think you need to explain to us how either Decentraland or Sandbox are even remotely entertaining with their NFT infused hellscapes and character designs worse than that of Horizons.

Edited January 29, 2022 by Lucia Nightfire

[Bree Giffen]

There are so many ways you can compare all the different online virtual worlds. I'm not sure you can call any of them the metaverse yet. I'll toss out a few idle thoughts.

1. The built-in residents. SL has a mature audience. By mature I mean, regular working-age to retirement-age adults. Decentraland has cryptobros. The Sandbox has cryptobros.  Any other NFT based metaverse has cryptobros. Fortnite has teenagers and their kid brother. Minecraft has that kid brother but his teen siblings join him from time to time. Roblox has all the kids...all of them. Facebook's Meta Horizons has all the people who love Facebook AND VR which is about 5 or 6 people including Mark Zuckerberg.

2. SL did corporate events back in the early 2000s. I remember it all. The hype was just like the metaverse. It wasn't that great.

3. Linden Lab made Sansar to cater to events only. Sansar still exists today under different company. It doesn't have residents. See 1. above.

4. SL is laggy but only when the region itself, the buildings and all other land assets, are designed badly. Also, SL's residents have the most complex avatars in any other virtual world. They lag the crap out of any location you visit. As soon as I turn off other avatars, boom, it's like a magic anti-lag pill.

5. SL has adult activities but they are segregated. I don't see them when I'm not looking. The problem is that anyone who goes into SL has a lot free time after events and they are pretty much anonymous so sneaking over the an adult sim becomes a guilty pleasure and, boom, your VP is a naked human-shaped fox.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

2 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

the choppy issue is because of the complexity of SL.  everything is user generated.

This is an important point that is sometimes overlooked: that anyone building a venue has a great deal of control over the lag and choppiness, simply by virtue of controlling the 3D content. Some lag is certainly generated by having a lot of people together in the same sim, but a lot of the problem can be mitigated simply by building carefully, and not using hideously complex and un-optimized 3D objects. The laggiest sims are often those in which the owner has stuffed the place with really lag-inducing stuff.

3 hours ago, ethnya said:

a strong tilt to certain proclivities of an adult nature

Both true, and not true. SL features a lot of sexuality, without question. To my mind, a bigger problem, from a public relations perspective, is the nature of some of that sexuality. There is some pretty dark stuff in SL (and no, I'm not talking about your run-of-the-mill BDSM dungeon).

That said, the adult stuff is pretty well segregated. To repeat something I've said elsewhere here recently, I travel around in SL a fair bit, and my destinations include Adult-rated sims, and I literally can't remember the last time I accidentally happened upon sex. If you're not specifically looking for it, the odds are good that you won't see it.

The "reputational" element is a separate problem, of course: SL does have a reputation as a place where sex, kink, sexual violence, etc. thrives. But that's a pretty distorted and partial view of the platform. I don't "do" sex here at all, and it really doesn't intrude upon my experience of the place.

Edited January 29, 2022 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Theresa Tennyson]

1 hour ago, ethnya said:

I'm working for a web dev firm that's been in business a couple decades that is getting inquiries from current clients about building in the metaverse.

You've asked us why they should build in Second Life. Now I ask you, why should they "build" at all? During the initial hype cycle around Second Life there were real-world groups who tried "building" without really thinking about why they were doing it - it was undirected FOMO and didn't do well. What is it about being in the "metaverse" that will benefit either your clients or the metaverse they are in?

[Ayashe Ninetails]

1 hour ago, ethnya said:

But what I'm asking you, dear reader, is to help make the case for SL as compared to say, Decentraland, or Sandbox, as a place for a real-world entertainment venue to step into as a cross-promotion. 

A real-world entertainment venue looking to promote in SL? Is this a place with a brick and mortar physical location? Unless this is a very large type of franchise with locations all over the globe, I'm not sure that's going to be the best way to go about it. Our population here is quite diverse - literally people from all over the world.

Assuming that's the audience you're going for, your best bet would be to hop in SL and talk directly with residents to gauge their interest in such a venture.

 

15 minutes ago, Bree Giffen said:

Facebook's Meta Horizons has all the people who love Facebook AND VR which is about 5 or 6 people including Mark Zuckerberg.

😂

[Scylla Rhiadra]

6 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

During the initial hype cycle around Second Life there were real-world groups who tried "building" without really thinking about why they were doing it - it was undirected FOMO and didn't do well.

Right. And the key to correcting this is to give residents a reason to visit and use whatever you build. Most corporate additions to SL during the earlyish hype were uninspiring and uninteresting.

SL -- and the metaverse generally, I suspect -- are Web 3.0, not 2.0: it's active, and not passive consumption by users. Your offerings aren't going to just "cross my feed" because you've paid to boost them. I might learn that it exists, but I'm not going to waste my time visiting them unless I'm given a compelling reason to do so.

One of the few RL corporate crossovers that I remember working reasonably well, at least for a time, was the CSI sim: I didn't spend a lot of time there, as crime procedural isn't my thing, but it was fun, engaging, and interactive.

[Lindal Kidd]

2 hours ago, ethnya said:

a place for a real-world entertainment venue to step into as a cross-promotion

Just what sort of crowd size is your client contemplating? Second Life regions are generally limited to 50 avatars at any given time. If you put four regions together and then build your venue at the point where they intersect, you can have a theoretical audience of 200.

But that's theoretical. Lag becomes an issue long before the maximum is reached. Generally speaking, it's going to start becoming noticeable when attendance goes over about 20 avatars per region.

back around 2007-08, a number of real life companies (L'Oreal and Adidas come to mind) tried using SL as a way to advertise their products. The problem with that is that in SL, products are made of 3D objects, 2D textures, and scripts. The companies knew how to make, say, a great Real Life running shoe, but had no clue how to make a superior product for SL. Furthermore, while in SL, consumers are looking for products for their avatars, not shopping for their Real Life selves.

[ethnya]

1 hour ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

I think you need to explain to us how either Decentraland or Sandbox are even remotely entertaining with their NFT infused hellscapes and character designs worse than that of Horizons.

I'm not really trying to convince people to leave SL.  I'm trying to understand the space SL inhabits, and how it compares to others that at least ostensibly are competing, even if they really aren't what SL is.  I am not an expert on those others either, just what I read.  

[ethnya]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

That said, the adult stuff is pretty well segregated. To repeat something I've said elsewhere here recently, I travel around in SL a fair bit, and my destinations include Adult-rated sims, and I literally can't remember the last time I accidentally happened upon sex. If you're not specifically looking for it, the odds are good that you won't see it.

That seems fair.  The internet as a whole is essentially the same way.  Most of the time.  

[ethnya]

44 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

You've asked us why they should build in Second Life. Now I ask you, why should they "build" at all? During the initial hype cycle around Second Life there were real-world groups who tried "building" without really thinking about why they were doing it - it was undirected FOMO and didn't do well. What is it about being in the "metaverse" that will benefit either your clients or the metaverse they are in?

Truth be told, my gut agrees with you.  Have wanted to tell my colleagues more than once that I'm not confident in the hype that surrounds it.  Then again, it's hard to predict the future.  

[Rowan Amore]

Honestly, the only way for you to know, is to come and engage within SL and not ask a small handful of peop!e on the forums.

[Sid Nagy]

3 hours ago, ethnya said:

I'm working for a web dev firm that's been in business a couple decades that is getting inquiries from current clients about building in the metaverse.  I tried SL some years ago but never really got into it seriously. 

Anyway, not to diss SL.  But what I'm asking you, dear reader, is to help make the case for SL as compared to say, Decentraland, or Sandbox, as a place for a real-world entertainment venue to step into as a cross-promotion.  Given that there will be some dev costs (not sure, but somewhere in the $30k-70k range is my guess) for this project, picking the right platform the first time is important.

So far my observations and concerns go like this:

Pro:

• When comparing it to other offerings, SL is unquestionably the most full-featured and customizable platform among competitors. 
• The parcels are not outrageously expensive, and new parcels can be created.

Con:

• It seems pretty laggy.  I don't have the newest system, but a decent middle of the road with a 1060, and i get non-stop chop even when reducing a lot of the settings.  
• I remember when I messed around with SL some years ago there was...let's say a strong tilt to certain proclivities of an adult nature...and while I know there have been some attempts to carefully segregate that, I'm wondering in practice how successful that has been.  

So while obviously I am approaching a biased audience here, hit me with your best shot.  Why SL versus others? 

You should talk with the newly returned advisor and former CEO of Linden Lab. Philip Rosedale.
He is totally in favor of people doing other peoples jobs for peanuts, next to nothing or free.
He called that experiment the Love Machine and it failed.
These forums ain't the Love Machine either. So I have basically the same answer as Rowan: No.
Don't let us do your job. Log into SL and figure it out by yourself. That is more helpful than hearing some opinions.

Edited January 29, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[Scylla Rhiadra]

43 minutes ago, ethnya said:

Truth be told, my gut agrees with you.  Have wanted to tell my colleagues more than once that I'm not confident in the hype that surrounds it.  Then again, it's hard to predict the future.  

I agree with Rowan and Sid, to a point. I actually think it's quite legit to come here and ask questions before visiting SL,though: most forumites are veterans of the platform, and not only know it well, but have also seen a lot of history. But you definitely should get in-world if you haven't already. You'll want to get a sense of the learning curve (which can be steep), and, once you've scaled that, of the sorts of things that can be done here. A good place to start for the latter is the Destination Guide, but be aware that this is only a small sampling: there is an ENORMOUS diversity of content here, good, bad, and just downright ugly.

I am sceptical, to be honest, that the FB metaverse is going to appeal to the general public much, at least for the next 5 years or so, until the technology has advanced to the point that immersive 3D experiences using headsets aren't so frickin' awful.

But the appeal to corporations is clear: FB will have access to data on everything that you do in in their virtual world. If you sneeze there, Zuck will know it, and find some way to monetize it. It's going to be a hitherto undreamed-of gold mine of monetizable data -- if people actually use it. And it will undoubtedly present boundless opportunities for direct marketing as well.

Unless there is a huge shift in SL's paradigm, that's not going to be available here. LL doesn't seem to harvest our data for much, if anything, and if Philip Rosedale is to be believed, that's not going to change: that's not the business model they plan to use. One reason for that, probably, is that the data collected in SL isn't as useful as it might be, because there is little or no direct connection between our SL accounts and our RL identities: LL can't take the data it might collect about the habits of "Scylla Rhiadra," and apply it directly to my RL self, because that connection is not (as it putatively is in FB) very clear and well-established. And, in fact, although there are lots of correlations between how I spend my time and money in SL, it doesn't translate in a simple way to my RL tastes and habits. So . . . there simply isn't as much to monetize here.

If you want a platform that enables really cool, creative, and engaging connections with people, SL is the better choice: the affordances here for creativity are amazing.

But if you want to scrape data and throw ads at me, you're better off in Zuck's Corporate Utopia.

[Galaxy Littlepaws]

I'll explain looking at it from a different angle.

I am very interested in virtual worlds and trying out new stuff. However, I don't have a lot of money (like most people). I do not currently have a VR headet (also like most people), but plan to purchase one sometime this year.

I have been using SL for a long while now, and before then tried offerings like There. I've also tried Sansar, High Fidelity (that one was great while it lasted), and VR chat.

 

When I try to use Sandbox this is what it was like:

• The avatars are extremely limited in regards to customization. The shapes are all the same humanoid voxel style. The colors are something you pick from whatever the devs think is good. I can't relate to these options but I'm forced to pick something anyway.
• LAND is prohibitively expensive. At the moment, the least-costly option is $9,225.81 USD worth of ETH, not counting the gas fees. The website at the very top is suggesting buying LAND is the top thing to do. I don't know many people who can afford to buy that. That's over six thousand taco bell tacos at $1.50, or you'd be eating about 16 tacos a day for a year to spend that much, maybe. Fuzzy maths.
• After making my avatar and seeing that I'll never be able to justify buying LAND (or even afford it), it's not clear to me how to get in and explore. I'm looking at the map and it's like SL's but blockier and the custom images are smoother. But I still don't see how to jump in.
• Creation, one of the things I love to do the most. I see I need to download and install a "Game Maker Alpha" program, which is available for Windows and Mac is coming. People using Linux seem to be out of luck, but thankfully I have Windows installed. It installs fine.
• Game Maker Alpha is loading. I see more voxel stuff. Are we completely limited to voxels? I don't want to be trapped in a voxel world. It runs and it says "Create new experience". This feels not unlike minecraft but with drag and drop. I look at stuff to toss in and it feels more like making a video game level, and apparently that's what I'm doing. I see no option for making objects or assets anywhere in this program.
• I look at the website again and see tabs for "VoxEdit" and "Avatar". VoxEdit seems to be what I want. Windows and Mac downloads are available.
• I run VoxEdit. More voxels. I'm frustrated and exit out of the program because I don't want to invest my time into learning this tool for creating voxel models.
• I look and I apparently can't even upload my models unless I'm one of the first thousand people accepted into this "Creator Fund Grant", so any time I took to try to make something would be wasted anyway. it looks like a job application, and when I click to see the form it's closed. Complete opposite of SL.

All in all, I am not a fan of Sandbox and I can't seem to do anything I'm interested in. I can't use it. I can't make things. I think it's a closed video game and not an open virtual world platform.

 

Now I will try to use Decentraland. Here is what it's like for me.

• It already looks nicer than Sandbox and the models are smoother. It has an easy "let's get started" thing.
• Sweet, as soon as I make my account it loads up in the browser.
• Avatars still seem limited to two human shapes, and even more limited skin tones. I have no idea why the avatar is making sounds and saying things while I'm customizing it, but I can manage the annoyance. Hair color is also limited.
• It tosses me in the world without any issues. I'm still in my browser. It's jerky camera movement until I get used to it, but there's this cute robot guide! Voice seems to be on in this starter location for some reason but the feature isn't being abused, so far. The robot guide explains how to move, use the chat, use voice and all that.
• Exploring isn't that hard. Stuff seems laggy and low poly but I can manage.
• Land seems to cost more here than it even did in Sandbox. The current cheapest listing is being bid for $10,912.48 USD, and apparently the reserve price hasn't been met yet. Yikes!
• Creating stuff, my favorite thing. Apparently you can't build unless you own land. Boo!

So for Decentraland, it's not that bad if you want to explore and look at stuff, but bad for creators who want to start from the ground up in regards to funding. You are also stuck being a limited variety of human.

 

Now, someone else may be able to point out some stuff I've missed or clarify things that confused me, but this is what it was like for me as a Second Life resident trying to get into those platforms and use them like I do Second Life.

I think I'll stick to Second Life over those options, where the barrier of entry is a lot lower and I can do and be what I like. I can be a human, I can be a dragon, I can be a cat made out of star dust and magic. Land is also much more affordable! And I can make things even if I don't own land and can upload and make whatever I like (within ToS, of course).

I hope this is helpful to you. Others in this thread have also pointed out good things to consider.

Edited January 29, 2022 by Galaxy Littlepaws
typo fix

[ChinRey]

4 hours ago, ethnya said:

Anyway, not to diss SL.  But what I'm asking you, dear reader, is to help make the case for SL as compared to say, Decentraland, or Sandbox, as a place for a real-world entertainment venue to step into as a cross-promotion.  Given that there will be some dev costs (not sure, but somewhere in the $30k-70k range is my guess) for this project, picking the right platform the first time is important.

I think the strongest argument is the staying power. Do you really want to spend that amount of money on a platform that may be gone tomorrow? Second Life, Opensim, Sinespace, IMVU and Roblox are the only safe choices here. The others are still new and it's impossible to say which of them will survive. Some of them, including Decentraland I'm afraid I have to say, look like obvious cash grabs that'll probably vanish as soon as the owners have bled their marks for enough money.

I think we can safely rule out IMVU and Roblox and probably Sinespace too for your project which leaves us with only SL and Opensim. These two are similar enough that a build for one of them can easily be ported to the other (as long as you have the legal rights to the content of course). So the choice between them isn't too critical at the initial stage of the development process although you have to decide at some point of course.

For a project that isn't targetted towards the existing SL clientelle and doesn't rely on the existing SL content I would normally recommend Opensim (sorry LL) but I think I'll make an exception for an entertainment venue because of the voice issue. Both have always used Vivox for their voice services but now that Vivox has been bought up by ... Ninetendo was it? ... that is coming to an end. Opensim is still struggling to find a replacement whilst LL has allied themselves with High Fidelity and will itnroduce their vastly superior voice system soon.

 

4 hours ago, ethnya said:

• I remember when I messed around with SL some years ago there was...let's say a strong tilt to certain proclivities of an adult nature...and while I know there have been some attempts to carefully segregate that, I'm wondering in practice how successful that has been.

Quite successful I'd say. For something like this you want a free standing region well away from everything else in SL so it should be easy enough to isolate it from unwated activities.

 

4 hours ago, ethnya said:

• It seems pretty laggy.  I don't have the newest system, but a decent middle of the road with a 1060, and i get non-stop chop even when reducing a lot of the settings.

It often is. I have a brand new top range game computer with an RTX 3090 GPU and even it is struggling to cope at the laggiest locations in SL.

It doesn't have to be that way though and with a budget as big as your client's you can easily afford to comission professionally made low lag content. Set these limits right from the start:

• No more than 500,000 tris for the entire build (although you can go as high as a million if everything is very well optimized for LOD)
• No sculpts
• All meshes must have LOD solid enough to work with LOD factor at least as low as 2, preferably 1.25
• Ideally no more than 250 and definitely no more than 500 megapixels worth of textures, normal maps and specular maps for the entire build.*

This is just a tiny fraction of what we usually have to deal with in SL but still more than enough to create a great full sim scene of any kind. Anything more than this is just a waste of computing resources.

That being said, we still have to deal with the bloated SL avatars. hese days a single avatar may well be as render heavy as a complete top notch computer game. LL has made some half-hearted attempts to remedy the situation but it's totally out of control and I don't think they're even trying anymore. This is probably SL's biggest downside at the moment but there's no perfect solution out there and considering all the advantages, I think I'd still recommend SL.

 

* Translating megapixels into common texture/normal map/specular map sizes:

• 1024x1024: 1 megapixel
• 512x512: 0.25 megapixels
• 256x256: 0.0625 megapixels

Edited January 29, 2022 by ChinRey
Corrected a few typos and added a footnote

[animats]

As someone who follows the crypto worlds, a bit of info.

Second Life has about 35,000 to 50,000 logged in users at any time. Decentraland has about 1000. Sominium Space has under 100. Roblox has millions, but the average user age is 13. Fortnite has millions and likes making deals to get major-brand content into their game. You have to be at the Marvel/Disney level for such deals.

Now, if you have clients that have fear of missing out on the Metaverse and are drawn to the crypto worlds, make them aware that few people go there. They just trade assets. Asset issuers ("minters") make money as a class, while asset buyers ("suckers?") lose as a class, because it's a zero-sum game. The NFT fad seems to be winding down. The biggest NFT player was Axie Infinity. See the chart for their Smooth Love Potion token, the one that large numbers in the Philippines played to earn. After looking at that chart for the last year, you will see the problem.

There are a number of metaverse systems from the NFT crowd that are supposed to be really great Real Soon Now. Most of them underestimate how hard it is to make this work, and some are outright scams. If you can't log in right now, pass.

The real problem here, I suspect, is that you have clients who've heard the metaverse hype. They've seen NFTs being advertised on billboards in New York City. They think it's time for brands to jump in. It's not. The brand-oriented metaverse has not yet happened. It may not happen at all.

Second Life is not oriented towards branding. Second Life is not ad-based. There is very little in-world advertising for businesses that are not operating in world. There's nothing prohibiting that. It's just that nobody is very interested. Second Life has cars, for example, but the car brands (Entourage, Paladin, Sultan etc.) are businesses within Second Life, not licensed properties of major real world brands. The same is true for clothing. Second Life makers have their own brands, with their own reputations.

The onboarding experience for Second Life is rather harsh. First, you have to download a viewer. Then there's a basic tutorial. At the end of that, you have an avatar that's not all that great, you exit the tutorial at a social area full of people who prey on new users, and have no clue what to do next.

If you want to hold an event in Second Life, and are willing to staff the event, that's practical. You can have some people of your own in world to shepherd the attendees through the onboarding, plus a phone number and web site for help. That's a good way to get warmed up on doing this. Get your guides and support people up to speed and in place and invite some people to come to an event or exhibit. Take video from a new user's viewpoint. You'll learn the problems involved, and it's not  expensive to experiment.

You can also do that in Open Simulator, and have total control over the experience. Setup is harder and performance may be lower, but no one will be in that you don't let in.

 

[Sid Nagy]

Okay 1 free tip:
Whether or not you succeed to find your way in Second Life (SL) within a few hours, already shows if it is usable for your clients or not IMHO.
I'm not thinking of all the in and outs of SL, but the look and feel.
Do you know how to navigate to walk and fly, travel (teleport), take a landmark and store it, make (usable) contacts, find interesting places, have any clue about how to change or update your avatar, how to purchase SL currency (L$) to spend in SL, how to unpack what you have bought, how to send a message to others, how to use voice?
If a lot of answers are still "no, not yet" after a few hours actually using the platform (being inworld), that should be an indication about how your clients will most likely like to use Second Life.

Edited January 30, 2022 by Sid Nagy
I know what the outcome will be, but I will not give it to you.

[ChinRey]

6 hours ago, animats said:

The onboarding experience for Second Life is rather harsh. First, you have to download a viewer. Then there's a basic tutorial. At the end of that, you have an avatar that's not all that great, you exit the tutorial at a social area full of people who prey on new users, and have no clue what to do next.

I don't know of any virtual reality that doesn't require you to download software for it so that's not a special problem for SL.

As for the not-so-basic tutorial and social areas, for something like this you can just bypass them and make your own streamlined substitute.

When it comes to the starter avatar issue, make your own selection of good looking ones. Base them on Ruth 2/Roth 2 so you don't have to worry about licensing and hand them out at the entry point. As a nice bonus, that should also fix the avatar lag problem I mentioned. There is at least one fairly easy, allbeit slighlty clumsy, way to semi-automatize (or automatize on Opensim) an initial avatar swap so no big deal.

 

5 hours ago, Sid Nagy said:

Do you know how to navigate to walk and fly, travel (teleport), take a landmark and store it, make (usable) contacts, find interesting places, have any clue about how to change or update your avatar, how to purchase SL currency (L$) to spend in SL, how to unpack what you have bought, how to send a message to others, how to use voice?

Why would somebody who joins Second Life for a single purpose on a single region need to learnall of this? All they need to know is how to walk around, how to click on stuff to make things happen and how to communicate with others.

This is the big mistake LL and all the privately run welcome facilities I know of make and apparently always will make. They try to cram way too much info into the brains of the poor newcomers in one go.

Look. Walk. Touch. Talk.

That's all a newcomer need to know before they venture into their first great experience that makes them want to stay and - eventually - learn about the more advanced functionalities of SL.

It's not hard to make a newcomer-friendly welcome facility for SL or Opensim where they could learn all they really need to know at first in a minute or two. It's just that nobody has ever really tried (except for Linda Kellie once, come to think of it). I could make one in a week if somebody paid me for it (athough I suppose somebody else should design the starter avatars they get to choose from there - that's not really my field of expertise).

 

6 hours ago, animats said:

You can also do that in Open Simulator, and have total control over the experience. Setup is harder and performance may be lower, but no one will be in that you don't let in.

There are several ready made solutions for setting up a sim, or even an entire grid, on Opensim and the performance depends on how much server capacity you are willing and able to invest in it. The server software is an open source clone of SL and with the same computing power it seems to perform just as well as SL; even better in some respects. The viewer software is the same with only some minor modifications.

Edited January 30, 2022 by ChinRey

[Sid Nagy]

I just try to be honest about the very steep learning curve of Second Life.
The OP is thinking about shelling out 30-70K for an inworld presence for a company, because the buzz word metaverse is in the magazines at the moment.

All business attempts were failures during the first hype.
Nothing fundamentally changed since then, other than adding some nice shiny and a way more complicated avatar enhancement procedure.
LL chose to add nice skies and lighting and implemented half finished projects. But hey it is their world.

It's not fair to make someone believe it is justified to shell out those shekels for a business presence in Second Life.
And as a former teacher I chose to advise a self learning experience. That shows more about how the situation in Second Life really is and it saves someone a lot of money and stress afterwards. 
Expectations should be based on every day realities, not on assumptions and colorful painted advise and simplifications from others. 

Second Life will not be the leader in the future Metaverse IMHO most likely not even part of it.

If that Metaverse ever will take off in the future that is.
It is like that advertisement: Lost Hair Shampoo now with DX11 !
Sounds great, but what the **** is DX11 exactly?

 

Edited January 30, 2022 by Sid Nagy
There you go, now I'm lured into the Love Machine role after all.