Mobile and the Future of Second Life

[Love Zhaoying]

5 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

*sighs*  *hands his tail over*  *walks away and see's nothing*

* chases after with tail and brush * was joke!

[HeathcliffMontague]

1 hour ago, Bree Giffen said:

because SL isn’t the kind of game with a lot of movement.

edit

Edited March 11, 2023 by HeathcliffMontague

[Sid Nagy]

I see a good mobile viewer as an addition to the pc viewer. Not as a replacement in the future. People in the creation segment for instance always will need a PC.

But IMHO we are heading in the direction that the first baby with a smartphone grown to their hand is born. 😅

For large chunks of the new generations, when it isn't on the phone, it doesn't exist.
They watch Netflix, football games, news, what not on their phones. So if you want to be relevant as a company these days, you have to exist on the phone.

What I see at the home of my niece: 5 Adult people do all the Internet on their phones, their games on PlayStation. The family has a desolate old laptop for if everything else fails somewhere under a layer of dust, but take their phones and they are basically cut off from the digital world and quite helpless.

And don't forget the smart TV's. SL will work on most of them too through Android.
A good smartphone presence can really become a leap forward for SL  IMHO.

Edited March 11, 2023 by Sid Nagy

[Caeruleiae]

7 hours ago, 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.

Something that is not a continuation of the sandbox game.

What would this new thing be?

You make it seem like my saying what they want the mobile client to be capable of was some kind of insult, it wasn't. Creating a whole different thing that wanders too far away from what sl is-what people use sl for, would not be good. That's not the mobile client people are wanting or looking for. I have no doubt at all that it's also not what ll is wanting to create and wanting for sl either. A continuation of the sandbox game is exactly what people want-even the people who want a lite version of a client not necessarily capable of all things sl on a computer or laptop is capable of. 

The fact that it is difficult to create a mobile based viewer capable of doing at the very least most things people use sl for is not a bad thing-just presents some serious challenges. I'm glad they're taking them on. I'm realistic about their ability to match a mobile client to what people expect of sl and use sl for when on a computer or laptop though and how far they have to go to get it done. Even they said it's a long way away. 

[Coffee Pancake]

9 hours ago, animats said:

The hard part with mobile is the user interface. SL's huge collection of menus and HUDs just won't fit.

This is what I meant when I said "The medium is the message".

As soon as it is known  what Mobile HUDS need, HUDS will be changed so they do work on Mobile. Anything with a HUD that doesn't adapt to the new paradigm will be junk. If mobile imposes limitations on HUDS other than just screen real-estate, those capabilities will be dropped from HUDS even if that means a loss of functionality in the end product. This will be especially true if we don't get a scripted way to tell the target platform.

This goes much further and deeper than just HUDS though, mobile will influence everything. There is not a single part of the SL experience that wont be shifted by adaptions to the mobile experience, and most of those adaptions will grate with desktop users.

In an environment under pressure, the lowest common denominator always wins.

[diamond Marchant]

I rewatched the Lab Gab and wrote down exactly what was said about mobile...

Grumpity

Quote

we want to have all the glory of second life in our pocket

Mojo

Quote

community can experience everything they love about second life while on the go
full rendering of avatars with all their complex attachments and behaviors
full rendering of 3D environments

Patch

Quote

stay connected with your second life from anywhere

chat with friends, visit your favorite inworld hangout spots, and later do pretty much anything you can do with the desktop Second Live viewer without being tethered to your computer

bring the best of what you expect from Second Life to a mobile experience

your world, your imagination, anywhere any place

coming soon™

I wonder how this will play out over the coming years. Here are some guesses...

1. The mobile viewer attempts to capture all the tethered viewer functionality, recast in a mobile UI. The comments of Grumpity, Mojo, and Patch suggest this as an initial offering.

2. The mobile viewer is a subset of tethered viewer functionality. The main purpose is to facilitate "onboarding" and the expectation is that there will be migration to the tethered viewer for things like serious building.

3. The mobile viewer is a subset but inworld experiences are adapted so as to optimize the mobile viewer experience. For example, vehicles are upgraded to work well with a mobile UI. New inworld games are developed.

4. The mobile viewer enables functionality and Linden Lab policies that do not currently exist... new ways of monetizing Second Life and new commercial opportunities... the metaverse.

I hope that Brad Oberwager is asked about the mobile viewer at SL20B. He has the power, yanno.

Edited March 11, 2023 by diamond Marchant

[Coffee Pancake]

The other long term game plan to ponder .. if the mobile viewer is made in Unity. There is no reason why it can't run on desktop too .. which gives LL opportunity to end open source involvement and close the door on third party clients once and for all.

We're a few years from that being a possibility .. but that possibility now exists.

[Henri Beauchamp]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

As soon as it is known  what Mobile HUDS need, HUDS will be changed so they do work on Mobile. Anything with a HUD that doesn't adapt to the new paradigm will be junk. If mobile imposes limitations on HUDS other than just screen real-estate, those capabilities will be dropped from HUDS even if that means a loss of functionality in the end product.

There is already an ”HUD objects scale” settings in viewers, and while it applies to all worn HUDs, nothing would prevent to make it a per-HUD setting (based on the HUD inventory name, for example).

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

This will be especially true if we don't get a scripted way to tell the target platform.

That won't be hard for LL to implement (the viewer name is provided to the login server: it's just a matter of setting a flag on the connected avatar as a result, and make it available to scripts).

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

There is not a single part of the SL experience that wont be shifted by adaptions to the mobile experience, and most of those adaptions will grate with desktop users.

I really think this is an over-dramatization, since I do not see LL abandoning desktop PC SLers any time soon, even in the event of a massive mobile viewer adoption.

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

In an environment under pressure, the lowest common denominator always wins.

Totally wrong !

With this principle, arts won't exist at all, buildings would all be of the same model, etc... And innovation could not even exist !

 

Again, I do not see the mobile viewer and its future users as a menace for existing SL contents, features, and users !  Much to the contrary, I see it as an opportunity to develop SL in new ways, that will benefit everyone.

Edited March 11, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp

[Coffee Pancake]

8 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

Totally wrong !

We shall see .. although maybe you've missed the entire mobile revolution that is in no small part responsible for SL languishing.

Edited March 11, 2023 by Coffee Pancake

[TwilightAngel21]

21 hours ago, Istelathis said:

A few concerns of mine.

1. Battery consumption, if I am out and about will I be able to play around in SL for long or am I going to drain my battery in less than an hour.

2. Two different viewers, each of which will have to be independently updated to support new features as SL adds them. 

3. Google and Apple possibly having some control over SL as well as privacy due to... well google.  I don't have very much faith left in Google.

4. A possible demographic shift that will drastically change what SL currently is, into something completely different.

With that said, I am very impressed with what I saw.  This is likely to draw in a lot of new residents and extend the life of SL.

 

Any heavy usage of your phone will drain the battery life quickly. Most games tend to cut the battery life in half. While yes they could give a few options from a more battery friendly to heavy drainage.

What do you mean but Google having control of some of SL? While SL would have to follow apple/ Google store guidelines they wouldn't have any control over the game itself

[Randall Ahren]

Great, now we're going to have SL residents AFK on phones and PCs. The extra fees for the Infrastructure Investment are totally worth it; can't wait to download this new mobile app and experience the future of SL: AFK on a phone.

 

 

[Arielle Popstar]

4 minutes ago, Randall Ahren said:

Great, now we're going to have SL residents AFK on phones and PCs. The extra fees for the Infrastructure Investment are totally worth it; can't wait to download this new mobile app and experience the future of SL: AFK on a phone.

Or less because it is much more portable then dragging a desktop to the kitchen to cook dinner. 😉

[Randall Ahren]

18 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Or less because it is much more portable then dragging a desktop to the kitchen to cook dinner. 😉

I wish Epic Games would come up with a mobile app for Fortnite. Then I could play Fortnite while I'm frying chicken. 

[Sorciaa]

13 minutes ago, Randall Ahren said:

I wish Epic Games would come up with a mobile app for Fortnite. Then I could play Fortnite while I'm frying chicken. 

thats what i use my surface for

[Caeruleiae]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

We shall see .. although maybe you've missed the entire mobile revolution that is in no small part responsible for SL languishing.

There's definitely a mobile shift to just about everything on this planet these days-but I don't think that has anything to do with sl failures or languishing. I think most of that responsibility sits square in the hands of ll who take far too long to do anything meaningful including fixes features and even bugs they've introduced-or even not meaningful. It's poor management from the top down and poor workmanship from the bottom up that's caused most of sl's strife and lack of audience. It's not the audience-the users that have caused most of the problems, it's the company that owns sl.

Sl would have all these same problems even without a push to more mobile accessibility being available everywhere at all times and for all things. It's the same kinds of problems sl has always had even before we came along with our desire to have everything at our fingertips. Maybe the push to mobile will light a fire under ll's rear end to actually start getting things done. I hope so-eve if the viewer ends up being crap or not working or not available for years to come. Anything that lights their rear ends on fire and gets them to start listening is probably a good thing-in the end anyway. 

[Love Zhaoying]

Think about alllll the people who have a capable phone, but no capable PC (whether Windows or Linux-based). Potential customers!

[Sorciaa]

1 hour ago, TwilightAngel21 said:

Any heavy usage of your phone will drain the battery life quickly. Most games tend to cut the battery life in half. While yes they could give a few options from a more battery friendly to heavy drainage.

What do you mean but Google having control of some of SL? While SL would have to follow apple/ Google store guidelines they wouldn't have any control over the game itself

i think they mean the app shops for each as i am unsure on their TOS about apps they have adult content in them.

[benchthis]

Is one of the reasons why mobile games perform so fast minimal lag because the screens are smaller, if so is that why vr headsets run so fast? Playing SL on my ipad with ability to use a bluetooth keyboard and mouse would be just like a computer, better highly likely, and then mirror that on my tv. While they are doing all the graphic betterment, it would be nice to have set resolution choices in display settings. I use a pretty large tv as display and support has mentioned that lag or problems could be due to my monitor/tvs resolution. Most of the time I just full screen and forget about it, but if there were a few set resolutions for optimization of program would be useful. During events could lower the screen size and resolution to increase performance. Have actual set sizes that the program understands vs ungridsnapped persay screen resizing. 

[Quistess Alpha]

1 hour ago, benchthis said:

is one of the reasons why mobile games perform so fast minimal lag because the screens are smaller

The screens on many smartphones are actually as big or bigger than desktop monitors in terms of pixel dimensions.

(as an example, 1920x1080 on my desktop, 2961x1440 on my phone. )

Setting your resoluton lower can increase your FPS quite a lot though, try setting your debug setting 'renderResolutionDivisor' to 2 or 3 some time.

Edited March 11, 2023 by Quistess Alpha

[Drayke Newall]

9 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

I really think this is an over-dramatization, since I do not see LL abandoning desktop PC SLers any time soon, even in the event of a massive mobile viewer adoption.

Unfortunately like all things it will come down to money spent vs profit.

Providing support, development, etc on two different viewers will take a lot of development time and money especially if they intend to make the mobile viewer have all the features of the desktop which the Lindens at LabGab implied. Also given that one runs on unity/vulkan whereas the other runs on openGL which was last updated to its stable version in 2017 would also impact on the future.

In the end it will more than likely mean that the whichever viewer garners the most users and is easiest to update will become the default which is what we see in even large gaming companies with far bigger profits. It is very rare now for a gaming company for example to make a separate PC version when console is the dominant userbase. Instead the PC version becomes a port of the console version.

If the mobile unity version becomes the more profitable viewer, offers far more scalability and allows for more newer features, it is almost guaranteed that that viewer will be merged to the desktop version in some manner bringing over, as Coffee stated, things that will affect every aspect of the second life current desktop experience.

[Innula Zenovka]

8 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

It is very rare now for a gaming company for example to make a separate PC version when console is the dominant userbase. Instead the PC version becomes a port of the console version.

I don't think that comparison works, though, because we're not talking about making different versions of the same content -- the game -- to download onto either a PC or a console, but different viewers to accessing the same content, which remains on LL's servers, depending on whether you're using desktop/laptop or a mobile device.

A better comparison, to my mind, would be with either newspaper and magazine publishers offering their own app for reading on your mobile device the same content you'd read on a desktop with a regular web browser, or with the makers of web browsers making different versions of their apps for use on pcs and mobiles.    I'm aware neither of those is completely analogous, but I think they're better than the comparison with games.

You talk about "the more profitable viewer," but what does that mean?   LL make their money not from viewers but from land, subscriptions, and fees on marketplace sales, L$ sales and purchases and cash-outs.  They're interested in whatever keeps people engaged enough in SL to keep on coming back to buy or rent land, take out premium subscriptions and buy stuff in-world and in the marketplace.   

Making it easy to access SL wherever you are and whatever you're doing would seem to be a good way of promoting engagement and retention, and people will doubtless use different platforms, depending on what they're doing at the time and what they want to do.    I can certainly see how being able readily to access SL at times and in places when otherwise it wouldn't be possible or convenient will help build engagement and retention so that people come back and spend money when they do have time.    

[Sid Nagy]

9 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

Unfortunately like all things it will come down to money spent vs profit.

Providing support, development, etc on two different viewers will take a lot of development time and money especially if they intend to make the mobile viewer have all the features of the desktop which the Lindens at LabGab implied. Also given that one runs on unity/vulkan whereas the other runs on openGL which was last updated to its stable version in 2017 would also impact on the future.

In the end it will more than likely mean that the whichever viewer garners the most users and is easiest to update will become the default which is what we see in even large gaming companies with far bigger profits. It is very rare now for a gaming company for example to make a separate PC version when console is the dominant userbase. Instead the PC version becomes a port of the console version.

If the mobile unity version becomes the more profitable viewer, offers far more scalability and allows for more newer features, it is almost guaranteed that that viewer will be merged to the desktop version in some manner bringing over, as Coffee stated, things that will affect every aspect of the second life current desktop experience.

The aim of LL is not only to cater the existing crowd but also to try and attract new people, especially since SL is still their only successful product (Tilia still lives out of the pockets from SL too at the moment).

Since the smartphone and tablets are becoming more and more the Internet standard devices, it is logic IMHO that LL wants to be present on those two with SL.

And, they already make different viewers for Windows and Apple since like forever. So nothing really new to be seen.
Only a possible opportunity to give Second Life a second life. This time on the smartphone and tablets.

And while they are at it, LL should have a look at sims 4, how they guide new members trough the first steps of their game. This approach could be something for SL too. Might be good for retention rates.
 

[Love Zhaoying]

I wonder - for iOS version of SL Mobile, if @ppole will allow for L$ payments or try to force payments through their system.  

[Sid Nagy]

16 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I wonder - for iOS version of SL Mobile, if @ppole will allow for L$ payments or try to force payments through their system.  

Do they force Amazon customers to pay through the apple app?

I think as long as LL isn't gonna charge for the download of the app @ppole has very little influence about what and how payments happen inside the app.

Edited March 12, 2023 by Sid Nagy
Englisn, as always.

[Istelathis]

We are talking about two entirely different versions of the clients to access the servers, not different ports of the same software which is much more manageable but two entirely different viewers using different engines.  It only makes sense that one will eventually overtake the other, to do otherwise is almost insanity.  Porting the existing viewer to mobile is probably not going to happen..

It is likely unity will over time be the winner, which might be the end of TPVs, so no more firestorm, catznip, alchemy, and any other viewer and much less transparency.  We are further talking about an UI that favors mobile users.

An influx of new users, and popularity will bring an opportunity for people to have a new tool to radicalize others to their ideology, be it political, religious, whatever.  That is when Google and Apple step in and start imposing rules to be pushed upon the masses or threaten to yank the product from their stores.  What we end up with is a much more bland product, just like what has happened to the majority of the Internet.

But, if this does happen, it will be a few years from now.  Most of you will not see it coming for quite a while.

Edited March 12, 2023 by Istelathis