"Remember Second Life? It’s Now Taking On Big Tech’s Metaverse | WSJ"

[Rowan Amore]

3 hours ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

The most important take-away in the WSJ video, to me, is Phil Rosedale suggesting using webcams to emulate non-verbal motions of SL avatars. I think this is potentially a very important aspect of human to human interaction that's mostly ignored. Some rudimentary body motions are already in place and very underappreciated, in my opinion, like the SL avatar's eyes automatically following nearby moving and talking agents. (Sadly, most people turn this feature off in favor of a more mannequin-like appearance.)

Webcam motion tracing is already quite successful in the flight simulator world. I'm using a simple app, ViewTracker and a webcam to fly planes with in DCS.

The VR-like camera motions in this video are made by my webcam tracking my head movement, rather than using an actual VR headset.

Although it sounds interesting, I just know people will use it as another reason to scream, "STOP LOOKING AT ME!".

[Lindal Kidd]

When I first heard about it, I thought mapping one's RL body motions and facial expressions to one's avatar was a great idea.

Then I realized I use SL sitting down and typing on a keyboard and moving a mouse. I don't think that'll map very well to a standing avatar.

[Rowan Amore]

Just now, Lindal Kidd said:

When I first heard about it, I thought mapping one's RL body motions and facial expressions to one's avatar was a great idea.

Then I realized I use SL sitting down and typing on a keyboard and moving a mouse. I don't think that'll map very well to a standing avatar.

The squinting when I've forgotten my reading glasses.should look.awesome,.too.

[Ayashe Ninetails]

That is one feature I would never use. I've seen people use Animaze a lot on Twitch and YouTube and it's kind of cute depending on the avatar chosen, but SL's human avatars making all those faces all the time would creep me right out. Even smiling can be a bit odd on some of the heads I've got.

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

35 minutes ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

Why's your tail hook down?

I must have accidentally pressed a wrong key on my keyboard.  No biggie at subsonic speed, though. Pulled it back in at 0:58, though.

[Silent Mistwalker]

13 hours ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

I'm not, but I mean if you don't advance and progress with the times. Not be like an older person stuck in their ways. You will never succeed. Sure it's nice to have a niche market. But SL needs to really update everything, if they expect to get new users.

It's not like young people can't be or aren't stuck in their ways. Age has nothing to do with it. People really need to stop the agism. Prejudice is prejudice, no matter what label you try to cover it up with.

[Silent Mistwalker]

5 hours ago, davidventer said:

 

You're a little slow on the uptake. It's been all over the news for days now.

[Chris Corvinus]

The thing about Second Life, and I think the one thing that sets it back the most, is the fps (framerate per second). I know the whole thing here is you can create whatever you want but you can't. You can only create what your computer can handle. You can only go to places that your computer can handle and lets be real here, Second Life looks like utter crap on low graphics. Its not visually appealing at all. 

Years ago I took a 30k region and completely decked it out using up all 30k prims (why pay for so much and not be able to use them all?). Naturally as I added more, the fps went down and I tried to combat that by deleting many many many many scripts, alot were useless. Creators go script crazy in here. I even found a resize script for a plant! It helped but so many visitors complained they could barely walk around and mostly cammed which ruined the intent of finding many of the hidden areas and surprises. The place was made and designed as a lush AAA video game world. And I am sad to say, its not possible in Second Life to maintain that without a FPS of 5 or less which is unbearable even on low settings and I have a beast of a rig. I am comfortably on ultra half the time. Plus, the time it took to design the sim and someone comes in on the lowest settings, they aren't going to visually see the effort you put into it.

Second Life is not this platform where you can create anything you want. FPS ruins a lot of that from a landscaping perspective. Its not worth designing sims like that.

And the funny thing is, I promoted that sim outside of Second Life to help bring in new people. I brought in a few real life friends and after a few days, they just left and never returned. Their complaints? Lag/fps, visual quality, horrific ui, ridiculous learning curve, inventory,  and resource hogging. 

So while Big Tech is looking at the Metaverse, and while Linden Lab is one of the pioneers of it, they have also fallen deeply behind. Focusing on mobile and avatar motions with webcam is....to be blunt, quite stupid. No one is asking for either of those. As someone who has experienced severe issues with the platform even on a modern high performance rig, its a problem and it should be addressed.

[Bree Giffen]

The problem with webcam controlled face movements is that no one will look at SL avatar faces close enough to notice. We're not all facing the screen like a zoom meeting. Most residents use the over-the-shoulder view to interact with the world and all avatars look too small to notice a facial expression. I suggested before that the SL camera should zoom into avatars when they gesture and no one liked it.

I'm all for a graphic mobile SL though.

[Chris Corvinus]

3 minutes ago, Bree Giffen said:

The problem with webcam controlled face movements is that no one will look at SL avatar faces close enough to notice. We're not all facing the screen like a zoom meeting. Most residents use the over-the-shoulder view to interact with the world and all avatars look too small to notice a facial expression. I suggested before that the SL camera should zoom into avatars when they gesture and no one liked it.

I'm all for a graphic mobile SL though.

Avatar facial expressions are already horrible and terrifying. 

Full 3D mobile SL was already achieved with Lumiya. I am worried if LL does it, how much of a resource hog that will be on a phone. 

[Arielle Popstar]

3 minutes ago, Chris Nova said:

Avatar facial expressions are already horrible and terrifying. 

Full 3D mobile SL was already achieved with Lumiya. I am worried if LL does it, how much of a resource hog that will be on a phone. 

Lumiya is falling behind now though as there have been no updates to it since 2017. I do hear quite a few looking for an up to date mobile option, though not here on the forums.

Rather than the facial expressions, I'd rather see a puppeteering option where the avatars arms and legs can be controlled by mouse clicks or keyboard shortcuts rather than having to have a premade animations for every movement. There was a university that even set up a web cam option for full body tracking using Xbox Kinect sensor bar.

[Chris Corvinus]

3 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Rather than the facial expressions, I'd rather see a puppeteering option where the avatars arms and legs can be controlled by mouse clicks or keyboard shortcuts rather than having to have a premade animations for every movement. There was a university that even set up a web cam option for full body tracking using Xbox Kinect sensor bar.

I mean, I'm not saying its a bad idea. I'm saying now is not the time. I think they need to stop adding features and fix performance before adding more to it.

[Sammy Huntsman]

2 hours ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

It's not like young people can't be or aren't stuck in their ways. Age has nothing to do with it. People really need to stop the agism. Prejudice is prejudice, no matter what label you try to cover it up with.

I was talking about old people I have known who are stuck in their ways. I wasn't meaning all old people. But the way SL it is like it is somehow stuck in the past. Not wanting to let go of the good old days.

[Arielle Popstar]

2 minutes ago, Chris Nova said:

I mean, I'm not saying its a bad idea. I'm saying now is not the time. I think they need to stop adding features and fix performance before adding more to it.

I've noted over the years that performance issues seem to be cyclical, meaning they fix them and things are ok for a while and then start to drop again. Personally I think they should not have upped the allowable Li per region but I'll bet a lot of region owners were pretty happy with that. They could start being more strict with allowable mesh uploads or texture sizes but then there will be crying from the creative sector. Performance is a difficult issue because there are multiple sides to it, so considering how slow they are with new features, I vote they get some new features and tackle the performance on an ongoing basis.

[Chris Corvinus]

6 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I've noted over the years that performance issues seem to be cyclical, meaning they fix them and things are ok for a while and then start to drop again. Personally I think they should not have upped the allowable Li per region but I'll bet a lot of region owners were pretty happy with that. They could start being more strict with allowable mesh uploads or texture sizes but then there will be crying from the creative sector. Performance is a difficult issue because there are multiple sides to it, so considering how slow they are with new features, I vote they get some new features and tackle the performance on an ongoing basis.

There is no point in allowing 10k more prim on a region when you can't even use it from a performance standpoint. Theres no point in 20k prim regions either for the same reason. The more you add, the lower performance there will be. 

[Arielle Popstar]

1 minute ago, Chris Nova said:

There is no point in allowing 10k more prim on a region when you can't even use it from a performance standpoint. Theres no point in 20k prim regions either for the same reason. The more you add, the lower performance there will be. 

Well yes, exactly. No good for residents and visitors but a boon for slumlords. What good is it for a view if one has to shorten their draw distance to 32 meters to stay above 20 fps?.

[Sammy Huntsman]

NGL, why do we need motion-tracking things in SL? I mean it's useless when SL is just mouse and keyboard or just keyboard, depending on your settings. That and we sit in a desk. Also, why do we need puppeteering or webcam facial expression thingies? I mean it seems like people want SL as a VR-only platform.  If that were the case, I would quit SL. I don't need to get Nauseous  and I am sure as heck not investing a lot more of my RL money, just to enjoy SL. 

[Solar Legion]

13 minutes ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

NGL, why do we need motion-tracking things in SL? I mean it's useless when SL is just mouse and keyboard or just keyboard, depending on your settings. That and we sit in a desk. Also, why do we need puppeteering or webcam facial expression thingies? I mean it seems like people want SL as a VR-only platform.  If that were the case, I would quit SL. I don't need to get Nauseous  and I am sure as heck not investing a lot more of my RL money, just to enjoy SL. 

Further, there are quite a few offerings out there that have VR as the primary use case. All of which are more restrictive than Second Life.

[animats]

16 hours ago, animats said:

Systems which just host multiple little independent worlds are very niche. Sansar, SineSpace,  and High Fidelity were all like that, and they all had user counts in 2 digits. Big, explorable worlds with content from more than one user in the same space are a bigger niche.

Sansar is still turned on. Here are its user stats:

Yes, what's left of Sansar has 11 concurrent users. Will the last one to leave please turn off the server?

Here's Decentraland.

Decentraland has 1860 users right now.

The servers all show the same world, but with different users. It's sharded. They seem to turn on more servers when the load is higher, although not sure about this. Yes, despite all the press coverage and all the NFT hype, Decentraland has a tiny user base.

Here's VRchat:

VRchat has 24,857 users online right now. They've been showing growth for a while. They're getting to be serious competition.

Second Life has 55,612 users online right now. About typical for a Saturday.

Roblox has 1,407,058 users online right now. They were smaller than Second Life before the Sansar mistake. Market cap of US$37 billion right now, but not profitable.

Nobody seems to have public user counts on Facebook/Meta's Horizon World.

If Second Life were on Steamcharts, it would be in 17th place right now, behind "Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege". That's pretty good.

All of these are figures as of a few minutes before this post, mostly from third party sites.

So that's a quick overview of the competition.

[Sammy Huntsman]

14 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

Further, there are quite a few offerings out there that have VR as the primary use case. All of which are more restrictive than Second Life.

I just don't think going the route of motion tracking, or webcam tracking is what we need in SL.

[Solar Legion]

Ah yes, more Formica being compared to Apples ...

[diamond Marchant]

Second Life is the biggest ADULT virtual world.

I believe that we are not well represented in the "metaverse" discussion because that currently concerns things like crypto, NFTs, web3, and immersive hardware.... and SL is not about those things. SL self describes as a virtual world where the main objective is FUN (explore, discover, create)... and it's up to the residents to find their own fun.

Recent events indicate that the Facebook model of mapping the our RL networks to a virtual "social network", harvesting our observed attributes and preferences, and using that to sell us stuff... is being out competed by the TikTok model of using an algorithm to build an addictive virtual "content network"  that exposes us to influencers who subtly sell us stuff.

The trend is more anonymity, more privacy. (This bodes ill for Meta.)

Second Life has the (imho) strength that it only tries to sell us things related to our virtual world and it does not monetize our "data" (I hope). Also, LL appears to be working out (over many years) the nuts and bolts of actually making an ADULT virtual world palatable for humans.

Summing up, I think SL is trending towards being more metaversy and less facebooky. Linden Lab does take our credit card info, but I have a feeling that the metaversy places will do that to as crypto appears to be a cash only thing and to scale it up, you need credit. The metaversy places will eventually be derivatives of virtual worlds like SL.

And just for fun....  check out IcelandVerse

[Solar Legion]

4 minutes ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

I just don't think going the route of motion tracking, or webcam tracking is what we need in SL.

I'm in agreement there.

My comment was to indicate that the places wherein such systems would fit in ... are primarily geared for VR.

[Sammy Huntsman]

1 minute ago, Solar Legion said:

I'm in agreement there.

My comment was to indicate that the places wherein such systems would fit in ... are primarily geared for VR.

That is one thing that keeps me out of the VR community, I get easily motion sick from it and 3D movies. So why invest money in something that I can't actually use? And I know you were agreeing with me, I was just saying that both of those are pointless. Nor do I want a wreck it Ralph  two or ready player one type of metaverse. Where you would get pop up ads like no tomorrow. I can imagine you will get that on FBs meta. Not that SL is a metaverse. It's a virtual world, always has been.

[Nick0678]

11 minutes ago, animats said:

VRchat has 24,857 users online right now. They've been showing growth for a while. They're getting to be serious competition.

Second Life has 55,612 users online right now. About typical for a Saturday.

Roblox has 1,407,058 users online right now. They were smaller than Second Life before the Sansar mistake. Market cap of US$37 billion right now, but not profitable.

Nobody seems to have public user counts on Facebook/Meta's Horizon World.

If Second Life were on Steamcharts, it would be in 17th place right now, behind "Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege". That's pretty good.

All of these are figures as of a few minutes before this post, mostly from third party sites.

So that's a quick overview of the competition.

Apart from Roblox everything else is practically speaking dead in terms of users (considering the fact that all those are supposedly used in global scale)

The LCS channel alone (League of Legends) on Twitch has 108.000 viewers atm.. had about 130k a few minutes ago but now is on a break..