pick the targets for those. But I think that you do want to see a palpable difference. I am hoping, and I can be reasonably confident that you will see a palpable difference in those things, including, I hope in the user comments, the customer comments, related to those things.
But the real sort of magic is in the user experience and the user interface. Like I said, there are a lot of things that you can do, and there are a lot of things that are known to be good ideas in the industry in similar industries in general. But there is this element of catching lightening in a bottle. It's not easy to do. We do think that we've got really great design sensibility here, really good product sensibility that will continue to grow. It's very significant for us to bring in a great CEO like Mark Kingdon, to bring in a chief product officer like Tom Hale. These are guys with a lot of product experience in their backgrounds. And you know, obviously those are two very important executive positions, and we hired them to make real improvements in these spaces. But it's not like those things we were talking about before, you set 'em up, you nail them, everybody knows that you do these things, it'll work. There are some things you can definitely improve. You can definitely take out some of the complexity, you can definitely improve some tools, improve some search, some findability, the discovery of the experience, but at the end, that last 10% which makes all of the difference sometimes is just magic, which you've just got to keep iterating toward the (muddled).
Industry Standard: One last question: Will we ever see Second Life in a Web browser?
Yoon: I think that that is something that you know, if the demand requires it, it is something that we develop towards, surely. But I don't think that that's the magic. I know that the common refrain in the industry is "Oh, it's got to be in a browser, everything has got to be in a browser." But there are plenty of experiences that are in a browser, that are supposed to be in a 3D world, and that doesn't do it. Maybe that's necessary, but it's not sufficient? Everybody is aiming toward these little bits, "we've got to get everything together in one package," but you know it's pretty hard to do. It's pretty hard to do for a company of our resources, which is probably the largest in the virtual world space. But it is also harder to do with a company with significantly more resources. There are many very large companies are interested in this space and are doing things, but you just can't solve everything at once. I don't believe that the browser is the magic formula.
Sources cited, referenced, or consulted: Ginsu Yoon, Lindenlab.com, Secondlife.com, New World Notes (nwn.blogs.com), Chris Ulbrich/Lewis PR, Riversrunred.com, Mimi Harris/Rivers Run Red.
Comments
Such a long article and no mention of gray textures or objects that appear only after you've flown past them. Six years or more of Second Life and still the claim that used to be on the secondlife.com site "the world appears before you turn to it", has not been fulfilled.
When internet speeds increase to a certain point, won't that eliminate the advantage offered by the use of Second Life prims, enabling the use of meshes instead? Meshes which can be made in programs outside of the Second Life viewer, thus eliminating the need for Second Life builders, i.e., prim builders?
@Chuck - Speeds won't eliminate the advantage because a) less streaming content is always better ... especially in areas where providers start throttling service, and b) prims could be much more complex than what is currently offered. Prims are more like CAD data (e.g. Pro/E); meshes are what you get from a non-CAD 3D modeler (e.g. 3DSMax). As someone who uses both professionally, I'd personally be pleased if they improved the prim tools (e.g. allow builders to draw profiles for extrusions). However, as someone who knows that the platform could benefit from greater support from the broader 3D community, I'm supportive of an importer.
That said, Linden Lab has already broached the subject of both upgrading the prim modeling tools and allowing the import of mesh files. The issue wasn't which to do, but which should take priority. I believe mesh import won.
Why would business people want to use Second Life as a collaborative tool, when there are so many easy to use conferencing and collaborative tools that are specifically designed for the task at hand?
The Second Life system itself is too unreliable for business meetings. Just ask any player (er.. resident) about server and database downtime or client (on your PC) crashes.
The avatar is an extra layer of complexity that business people don't need. The learning curve is steep, and not everyone masters 3D navigation quickly, if at all.
A meeting of avatars is like going to a business meeting where each person has to operate a puppet, and can only communicate with the others through that puppet's actions.
If this works, I'm going to open a puppet supply house targeted at the Fortune 500.
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