Here’s another bit of old news. Alright, it’s over a year old so it can hardly be called news in any sense of the word. It sometimes takes me a little while to get around to clearing out my reading list.
But back to the topic, Sean Buckley penned an article for Engadget on SL’s second act: “Second Life’s second act will be a social networkfor virtual reality”. In it he starts from the all too familiar Second Life? Is that still around? and moves on to some interesting thoughts about how Linden Labs is well positioned to ride the coming wave of consumer virtual reality technology.
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| Second Life’s second act will be a social network for vi…Eight years ago, I was slouching through my college’s required mass-media course and silently groaning while my professor excitedly mapped out the promises of S… | |||||||
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A year plus later, these thoughts are only more relevant as Oculus Rift slouches toward release and HoloLens wows not to mention a bevy of 2nd tier players who are rushing out their entries into the field. Second Life has already solved a lot of the problems other VR worlds are bound to encounter. They should be in a good place to work with these new technologies.
The author talks a bit with Ebbe Altberg about SL’s future direction and the next generation product. At this point the author’s position becomes a bit confused. He seems unable to settle on a consistent vision of what Second Life or its successor want to be when they grow up. But really, this should not surprise him.
Second Life, and presumably what comes after, is not simply the vision of a CEO or a development team at a gaming company in Silicon Valley. It’s the collective aspirations of a whole society that makes and lives with everything in it. And what society has ever been able to say consistently what it wants to be when it grows up?
Thinking Outside the Plywood Box 