Mobile and the Future of Second Life

[Bree Giffen]

Someone asked about SL on iOS on another thread, and I told them about an app called Moonlight streaming which is like an open version of Nvidia’s game streaming app. The UI uses a typical joystick style touchscreen input and it also had a touchscreen mouse emulation. SL’s user interface is not that bad on a tablet because it’s just like a small monitor. However, SL’s UI on a phone might be problematic because of SL’s large drop down menus which would drop down outside of the viewable screen area. I noticed this on the Firestorm VR viewer and it was super annoying. Think of your inventory folder and how big that is. All that scrolling becomes tedious.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

2. The benefit of Unity is one code base, build to multiple platforms.

This is interesting to me because normally, we see information about "Windows" vs. "Linux" viewers.

This makes me wonder if there may some day be a "Unity" viewer for iOS / Android / Windows / Linux.  And, if that may "solve" the issue of OpenGL (the viewer would migrate from OpenGL to Unity)..

I don't know anything about Unity.  

 

[Katherine Heartsong]

On 3/11/2023 at 12:11 AM, diamond Marchant said:

Nobody said anything about "what they claim they want a mobile viewer to be capable of ". I suspect that they DO NOT have an objective of recreating the current viewer on a mobile device. Rather, I hope they are going after something completely different that does not present a high barrier of entry due to complexity.

Agree. The best way to design for different platforms besides desktops and laptops, such as phones and tablets, is to ask yourself exactly what you expect a user to want to do on that platform, and tailor the experience towards those needs and wants. If that means hiding or eliminating features that are available on the desktop so that users are provided what they want to do, then you'll be successful. I've always been against the design mantra "mobile first" expressed in my field, because I think it's fundamentally important to understand how the user uses the platforms differently and engage them to specific needs on each platform, since we use different technologies for different (sometimes overlapping, sometimes not) things.

[Katherine Heartsong]

18 hours ago, EliseAnne85 said:

Any apps which include or promote adult content will not be passed by Apple.

Every day of the week ending in "y" in SL. Just look at the promoted events list this second ...

"Hottest girls on the grid" is the second promotion, and "XXX LBC Cinema. Come and watch the most exciting lesbian porn in SL. XXX" is not too far behind.

You think Apple will allow that on the store and I have a bridge to sell you over SFO Bay.

[Katherine Heartsong]

18 hours ago, Innula Zenovka said:

Can you provide an example of when Apple have refused to list, or have delisted, an app that you think gives cause for concern about their possible attitude to an SL app, or are your concerns based wholly on your interpretation of Apple's terms of service and how you think they might be applied?

They've banned apps that keep a tally of civilian Palestinian casualties caused by Israeli air strikes for heaven's sake. Making any sort of statement in your app supporting BDS is grounds for removal. Porn is way beyond just politics.

[Love Zhaoying]

I have wondered if maybe some iOS version would require "General-rated only" stuffs.

(Meaning, you could only search for content and events in the iOS SL viewer that was General rating.)

Edited March 13, 2023 by Love Zhaoying

[Sid Nagy]

2 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

Whilst the could start with those things they are only things that will interest current users. If that is the only demographic LL are looking at then, fine. I believe however that (and would assume LL would also) would be a waste of development cost considering the uptake of mobile for existing users will be small vs any expense they have put into developing it.

If they are looking at using mobile as a method to grow their userbase and most of all to show that SL is still a major player in the metaverse, as they should be looking this mobile viewer as, then they have to have systems from the start that will entice the mobile userbase to try it out. Basic functionality in this instance has to have at a bare minimum all of what you have said INCLUDING avatar customisation and basic placement of items, i.e. rez, move and rotate. It does not need creation to be provided. 

Why would anyone move from Avakin Life which is available on both Android, Windows and Apple, who offer building, editing, avatar customisation, socialising as well visiting clubs, etc, and support of RL businesses such as Nike and the like, if all Second Life's app offers is a glorified msn messenger and walking simulator. People seem to think Avakin Life is small compared to SL however it is the only virtual world comparable to SL with many more players.

All we have to do is look at how SANSAR performed to realise that Linden Lab releasing an unfinished non interactive viewer for mobile will make it take the same path as SANSAR, dead on arival as many of us hinted at to Linden Lab well before release. SANSAR failed due to may aspects but those aspects included lack of avatar customisation, lack of basic editing and lack of interactivity (ie not being able to sit).

My strong believe is, that Sansar mainly was presented too early because the money was too tight for the Lab to continue. Sansar was a new product.
The viewer will be another way to use an already 20 years established program.

I agree, that what I mentioned in my previous post can only be the start for further development, otherwise the development money could be better spend on other things. But if the existing users stay using the product who at the moment slowly drift away from SL, that would be a plus already and a good starting point IMHO.

[Qie Niangao]

11 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

This makes me wonder if there may some day be a "Unity" viewer for iOS / Android / Windows / Linux.  And, if that may "solve" the issue of OpenGL (the viewer would migrate from OpenGL to Unity)..

As I understand it, Unity is more comparable to some Lab proprietary software that currently uses OpenGL library calls and will soon(ish) port to Vulkan on PCs (and Linux), and on Macs to something like MoltenVK that basically translates between Vulkan and Apple's ridiculous Metal framework.

I guess it's possible the desktop viewer will eventually migrate to Unity, but Mojo seemed to say that's not a short-term goal.

Even if the desktop viewer were Unity based, I'm not following the logic that TPVs couldn't exist. Is it infeasible that a TPV team could compile and deliver executables with a Unity engine, using whatever glue code the Lab exposes as its open source viewer? (I have no guess about Unity licensing.)

[Love Zhaoying]

5 hours ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Title reads a little like 'tricycles and the future of Mercedes Benz'.

I find it rather silly, SL on a screen the size of your hand.

Or "handpaw", for some of us.

But, maybe it will be as easy as riding a bicycle.

[Love Zhaoying]

12 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

As I understand it, Unity is more comparable to some Lab proprietary software that currently uses OpenGL library calls and will soon(ish) port to Vulkan on PCs (and Linux), and on Macs to something like MoltenVK that basically translates between Vulkan and Apple's ridiculous Metal framework.

I guess it's possible the desktop viewer will eventually migrate to Unity, but Mojo seemed to say that's not a short-term goal.

Even if the desktop viewer were Unity based, I'm not following the logic that TPVs couldn't exist. Is it infeasible that a TPV team could compile and deliver executables with a Unity engine, using whatever glue code the Lab exposes as its open source viewer? (I have no guess about Unity licensing.)

Yep, makes perfect sense.

[Drayke Newall]

21 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

My strong believe is, that Sansar mainly was presented too early because the money was too tight for the Lab to continue. Sansar was a new product.

It wasn't because it was a new product. The potential was there for it to succeed. What caused it to fail was that they released it in stages of content. So they released a few features first, then the next etc. This despite everyone telling them to release a final product. Very similar to how you suggested mobile viewer.

There are certain expectations a person is going to have in downloading something. If for example a program is known for avatar customisation, chat, exploration as a main focus (such as second life) then those are going to be expected from the get go. The fact that Second Life has over 20 years worth of being around would even more so drive that.

Just as Sansar being advertised as a place where you can build and interact with the environment. People expected the interaction part, however, didn't get it from the start (it was more a museum of signs saying dont touch) so no one took a second look at it.

That all said, like I mentioned it is going to depend on what LL expected demographics are. If this thread is any example of what the existing user demographic uptake would be then based on responses here, it does not look good.

Edited March 13, 2023 by Drayke Newall
added last paragraph.

[EliseAnne85]

1 hour ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

20 hours ago, EliseAnne85 said:

Any apps which include or promote adult content will not be passed by Apple.

Katherine Heartsong said:  Every day of the week ending in "y" in SL. Just look at the promoted events list this second ...

"Hottest girls on the grid" is the second promotion, and "XXX LBC Cinema. Come and watch the most exciting lesbian porn in SL. XXX" is not too far behind.

You think Apple will allow that on the store and I have a bridge to sell you over SFO Bay.

I didn't say I thought so other than there is a clause which sounds to me like if adult content is hidden and one has to be on that actual website to reach adult content, it might be allowed.  IOW, the title of the APP on an APPLE APP Store couldn't read XXX-zHot-HOT Girls, Girls, Girls for example.

Here is the clause BELOW, not sure about it though nor how SL could keep Adult-Rated material inaccessible on the web itself. 

Bots already published  a website of SL content onto the web as some may know about that, but I'd think SL would have to shut down mysecondlife.com altogether.   

However, stuff from the SL forum can be pulled up via Google.  But, speaking of this SL forum, why does Google store all this stuff from years and years ago?  Isn't that expensive to store all these needless old threads and this is just one website?  Who pays for all that storage of all this old content?   I was just wondering if someone could explain to me why or how are all these old threads stored and who is  paying for that?  

If your app includes user-generated content from a web-based service, it may display incidental mature “NSFW” content, provided that the content is hidden by default and only displayed when the user turns it on via your website.

1.2.1 Creator Content
Apps which feature content from a specific community of users called “creators” are a great opportunity if properly moderated. ...

Edited March 13, 2023 by EliseAnne85
fixing words

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, Drayke Newall said:

It wasn't because it was a new product. The potential was there for it to succeed. What caused it to fail was that they released it in stages of content.

Sansar's omissions were the real killer, to this day it has almost no social tooling at all. It kind of gave the message that they didn't want people meaningfully and personally interacting beyond the bare minimum.

Sure there was local voice and a chat panel .. but no one at LL wanted to touch the question, what if someone had two friends .. and they weren't in same place gormlessly staring at their avatars and spamming gestures.

It was like they were trying to build the ultimate party .. having only ever seen pictures of a party, in the end it said far more about what LL thought a virtual world was about than anything else.

 

[Varistentia Varriale]

2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Sansar's omissions were the real killer, to this day it has almost no social tooling at all. It kind of gave the message that they didn't want people meaningfully and personally interacting beyond the bare minimum.

Sure there was local voice and a chat panel .. but no one at LL wanted to touch the question, what if someone had two friends .. and they weren't in same place gormlessly staring at their avatars and spamming gestures.

It was like they were trying to build the ultimate party .. having only ever seen pictures of a party, in the end it said far more about what LL thought a virtual world was about than anything else.

 

Don't forget Sansar had no actual water for more or less it's whole run with LL. How do you miss one of the four elements? Like how??? 😂

[diamond Marchant]

31 minutes ago, Varistentia Varriale said:

Don't forget Sansar had no actual water for more or less it's whole run with LL. How do you miss one of the four elements? Like how???

Apologies if I got this wrong due to only spending a total of 15 minutes in Sansar, but I always understood that the big problem they were trying to crack was scalability.... allowing an arbitrarily large number of avatars to be at an event. The solution was to clone the event many times so that a subset of the event goers were in each clone. Consequently, there was no world map and no going from point A to point B inworld. Accordingly, no need for traveling in vehicles as the way you moved around was teleporting. So water is decorative.

Can't believe I stayed there even 15 minutes.

Edited March 13, 2023 by diamond Marchant

[Varistentia Varriale]

8 minutes ago, diamond Marchant said:

Apologies if I got this wrong due to only spending a total of 15 minutes in Sansar, but I always understood that the big problem they were trying to crack was scalability.... allowing an arbitrarily large number of avatars to be at an event. The solution was to clone the event many times so that a subset of the event goers were in each clone. Consequently, there was no world map and no going from point A to point B. Accordingly, no need for traveling in vehicles as the way you moved around was teleporting. So water is decorative.

Can't believe I stayed there even 15 minutes.

True they tried that but that was not a really viable solution either since you and your friends could end up in different instances. And still water is one of the four elements in most worlds and instead of having the pretty animated water SL has there was just a blob of something blue and transparent. 

Edited March 13, 2023 by Varistentia Varriale

[Drayke Newall]

6 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Sansar's omissions were the real killer, to this day it has almost no social tooling at all. It kind of gave the message that they didn't want people meaningfully and personally interacting beyond the bare minimum.

Sure there was local voice and a chat panel .. but no one at LL wanted to touch the question, what if someone had two friends .. and they weren't in same place gormlessly staring at their avatars and spamming gestures.

It was like they were trying to build the ultimate party .. having only ever seen pictures of a party, in the end it said far more about what LL thought a virtual world was about than anything else.

 

Agree, and it is those same omissions that I think LL need to worry about with Mobile. Whilst yes, Sansar had different omissions that were 'eventually to be planned in future updates, like sitting, avatar customisation, or as you say better socials, if the SL mobile app is released the same way, with omission's that are expected and the excuse 'they will come later in future updates' then it will fail the same way as Sansar.

Have we even heard from LL whether interactivity is in the Mobile app from release? In the video seen there was no instance of being able to sit, touch, use, buy, etc only move and explore.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

16 hours ago, Sid Nagy said:

I don't think the first version needs to have a complete transition of all functions within SL.
Basic things would do for a start:

- teleport
- chat and IM
- Walk around
- see the surroundings and the others present
- take snapshots
- send items from your inventory to others (remote customer service for instance)

The rest could all be for later versions IMHO.

Maybe it would be a smart idea to do the mobile viewer in mouselook only to start with.
Being able to see yourself and play the dress up game could be for later versions too.

"Welcome, juvenile short attention span teenage Smartfone-Peasant, to SecondLife! Your world, your imagination!

Yes, it looks like a sucky first-person shooter but without the shooting, no you can't see your own character, no you can't customise your own character, no you can't actually USE any of the inventory you buy with the shopping tokens you bought with real money.

And remember, if you use an Awful Mac whyPhone, for every $110 that you spend on Shopping-Tokens, you will only receive $70 worth, because Awful Mac App Store Reg-U-Lations require us to give them 30% for doing nothing, and we take 10% in transaction fees!

So, would you like to register your daddy's credit card and buy some Shopping-Tokens and a Name that isn't crap!

Wait, where are you going? Don't leave! We NEED the the New Signup Retention!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

 

Yeah, brilliant plan Sid, that's BOUND to improve SL.

[Sid Nagy]

What is not to understand about  "for a start".
The beginning point, to start with.

Of course it needs further development after that to get a more complete functionality of the viewer.
Some things take longer to develop and get it smoothly. Like eh... sim crossings with a vehicle?

If you want a complete comparable with the desktop version viewer to start with, better not expect it the next couple of years.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

2 hours ago, Sid Nagy said:

What is not to understand about  "for a start".
The beginning point, to start with.

Of course it needs further development after that to get a more complete functionality of the viewer.
Some things take longer to develop and get it smoothly. Like eh... sim crossings with a vehicle?

If you want a complete comparable with the desktop version viewer to start with, better not expect it the next couple of years.

"What is not to understand about"    A sucky mobile based piece of crap total waste of time, effort and money viewer that won't be of any use to anyone who doesn't already use SL on a Desktop/Laptop most of the time, and which will actively drive away the mythical "potential whole new market of customers" that mobile loving morons keep claiming will "save SL".

Outsiders with short attention spans will drop the "MobileLife" app like a hot dog turd in under 5 minutes and never come back, when they find they are stuck in mouse look and cant change their Noob Island SUX fail-atar's appearance like all the old people using actual computers.

They certainly won't even consider spending 10 bucks on their first bunch of shopping tokens, when that comes with a rip-off buck and a half surcharge, never mind the 30% slice to Awful Mac.

The claim that an app running on whyOS will MAGICALLY bring in millions of upscale new customers who only use Awful Mac whyPhones, whyPads and whyLaps, is a pathetic Awful Mac Cargo Cultist pipedream.

 

Speaking personally, I don't want a "MobileLife" app at all, as firstly, it's a collosal waste of resources that could be better used elsewhere, and secondly, in the unlikely event that it did what the cultists claim, and brought in a huge influx of people who just don't GET SL, it would destroy the platform faster than doing nothing.

New people would be good, but the effort should be to find new people who think like us, SecondLifers who DON'T YET KNOW that they are SecondLifers, and NOT chasing mythical new markets of people who DON'T and WON'T want to be HERE.

[Qie Niangao]

I still don't know anything useful about Unity, and I wanted to see again just what was said at Lab Gab about it. In case anybody else wants a refresher, here are the two times I found it mentioned in the transcript (slightly tidied-up punctuation, etc.):

Quote

1:53 (in scripted presentation)

Mojo: The Second Life mobile viewer is built on Unity and that fact has paved the way for residents to be able to explore and engage across the virtual world using multiple mobile phone and tablet platforms including Android and iOS.

Quote

16:53 (during panel discussion)

Strawberry: Great so does this all mean that we're changing the graphics engine ?

Mojo: I guess that depends on what you mean. No, not really. Our desktop leverages a custom engine and we've been improving that: performance improvements, putting PBR into that custom engine, we plan on continuing to invest in that engine for desktop for the foreseeable future. We do have some parallel efforts: I showed you the mobile video—that's on Unity—but it's really specific to those efforts. Now if you're talking about the underlying Graphics API, we do have plans to change that. We're currently on OpenGL, our plan is to move over to Vulkan for underlying graphics APIs. I think this is going to be a tremendous help on performance and getting better support for more modern features from more graphics cards.

Strawberry: So this is all planned for later this year and the coming years?

Mojo: It is. It is what's planned for later this year. We got a full docket of of work for for the viewer team.

[Love Zhaoying]

11 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

  Quote

1:53 (in scripted presentation)

Mojo: The Second Life mobile viewer is built on Unity and that fact has paved the way for residents to be able to explore and engage across the virtual world using multiple mobile phone and tablet platforms including Android and iOS.

"Including Android and iOS"..interesting.  As if it would work on any old phone or tablet "browser" (if not "bound" to Android or iOS). But if that were true, "browser" etc., they'd mention it. So, I won't hold my breath that there's some "other" phone and tablet OS they are also targeting.  Like "ChromeBooks".

[Arielle Popstar]

27 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

"Including Android and iOS"..interesting.  As if it would work on any old phone or tablet "browser" (if not "bound" to Android or iOS). But if that were true, "browser" etc., they'd mention it. So, I won't hold my breath that there's some "other" phone and tablet OS they are also targeting.  Like "ChromeBooks".

Chromebook compatibility with Android is Google's department and is a work in progress:
https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/chrome-os-systems-supporting-android-apps

[Qie Niangao]

36 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Chromebook compatibility with Android is Google's department and is a work in progress…

That brings to mind a different platform: Windows 11 devices such as the Surface Tablets. I've never been in a position to try a desktop SL viewer on them, but now you've got me wondering whether an Android app running on Windows 11 (also "a work in progress") might be an option.

I realize both Chrome OS and Windows 11 are trying to aggressively minimize overhead in their Android apps. This would put that to the test. There must be other Unity-based games that do that now, I've just never cared before.

[Arielle Popstar]

2 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

"What is not to understand about"    A sucky mobile based piece of crap total waste of time, effort and money viewer that won't be of any use to anyone who doesn't already use SL on a Desktop/Laptop most of the time, and which will actively drive away the mythical "potential whole new market of customers" that mobile loving morons keep claiming will "save SL".

Outsiders with short attention spans will drop the "MobileLife" app like a hot dog turd in under 5 minutes and never come back, when they find they are stuck in mouse look and cant change their Noob Island SUX fail-atar's appearance like all the old people using actual computers.

They certainly won't even consider spending 10 bucks on their first bunch of shopping tokens, when that comes with a rip-off buck and a half surcharge, never mind the 30% slice to Awful Mac.

The claim that an app running on whyOS will MAGICALLY bring in millions of upscale new customers who only use Awful Mac whyPhones, whyPads and whyLaps, is a pathetic Awful Mac Cargo Cultist pipedream.

Though no fan of anything mac related myself, I have not seen or heard anything  stating that the mobile mac user would have to purchase S/L tokens through their store. You have a link for that?

 

Quote

 

Speaking personally, I don't want a "MobileLife" app at all, as firstly, it's a collosal waste of resources that could be better used elsewhere, and secondly, in the unlikely event that it did what the cultists claim, and brought in a huge influx of people who just don't GET SL, it would destroy the platform faster than doing nothing.

New people would be good, but the effort should be to find new people who think like us, SecondLifers who DON'T YET KNOW that they are SecondLifers, and NOT chasing mythical new markets of people who DON'T and WON'T want to be HERE.

 

The Lab should waste more years of resources on more pretty skies and new shiny PBR's? Those are features which have a very limited ooh ahh impact except for maybe photographers. Five minutes into the login the novelty wears off and one looks right past it because the focus is on the chat, RP or Marketplace and the pretty shinies fade into the background. 

Much better spending their development time on things that matter to a wider range of new people and residents like making the workflow of interacting in the world more efficient and effective and overall decrease the learning curve involved in buying, selling, and generally moving about in the world. That S/L only appeals to those who have long attention spans is a problem not a solution. No matter how you look at it, the dwindling concurrency combined with new users being mainly just regurgitated residents taking another kick at the S/L can, points out the problem that the Lab needs to focus on reducing the steep learning curve rather than how to make it even more complicated with questionable low impact features .

Hopefully rather then trying to shoehorn the present viewer into a mobile viewer, they will look at some of the inefficient processes involved in interacting with this virtual world so that it will be more compatible on a mobile platform but also make the desktop viewers easier to navigate.