Not long ago Second Life was everywhere, with businesses opening branches and bands playing gigs in this virtual world. Today you’d be forgiven for asking if it’s still going.
Once upon a time Second Life had a Twitter level of hype. Even those without a cartoon version of themselves couldn’t plead ignorance due to blanket coverage in newspapers and magazines.
The BBC posted a story recently asking what happened to the Virtual World known as SecondLife, created by Linden Labs in 2003. It had so much promise – finally, a 3-D immersive metaverse where we could interact with each other “face-to-face,” but the promise really did not pan out.
The article lists several reasons that you can read for yourself, but there are several that stand out for me. I actually just starting using SecondLife for work (via SecondLife Enterprise), so these are personal impressions.
- Difficult to control: Someone helped me set up an account and got me familiar with the navigation controls in the 3-D environment, but it is still insanely difficult to move around and make your avatar do what you want it to do. Seems to take a lot of work just to get around.
- Walking/running/flying takes too long: Sometimes I just want to GO RIGHT THERE and instead I have to sit there, holding the “Up” key until I get there. Seriously? I have better things to do.
- Pay pay pay: I got in once and decided to try and customize my avatar. So I went to some clothing shops. And had to pay a bunch of money. Nevermind. I found some free clothes and tried to put them on and… some weird glitch. Help files? Useless.
- Bandwidth issues: At work we have to access SecondLife over a Verizon AirCard, and that is painfully slow. Even at home, though, on my fast cable Internet connect? It takes a very long time for the world to load. Again – I have better things to do, like use the real Internet
- What is SecondLife good for? This stems from the article and summarizes perfectly why I haven’t really tried to get good at SecondLife – what is the point? Is it a game? No, not at all. Is it a social networking site? Well… we have IM, Skype, e-mail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter… I could go on. Is it a tool for creating your own 3-D environment that you would like to live in? Perhaps, but not my thing.
So what IS it good for? Well, the Navy is starting to push into SecondLife – not just a public presence, which doesn’t really have any real-world use. They are starting to develop some modeling and simulation tools to prototype new technologies cheaply and create augmented cognition training tools. Honestly, there is some neat stuff being developed, but it is very Navy-specific.
The creation of SecondLife Enterprise will really help this along, but public SecondLife is… well, sometimes you get pummeled with -censored-
Some of the “motivation to learn” issues I listed above will be tackled because I will actually have to use SecondLife. The bandwidth issues will be solved because it will be hosted behind the Navy firewall, so that will be fast. So, for my job, SecondLife will soon become useful to me. I do not, however, expect to use it in my free time. Which could very well be a problem for SecondLife as a whole.
