After being pointed to a tweet mentioning “Project Skylight” involving some sort of browser-based access to Second Life, I asked Linden Lab about it. After all, such efforts were supposed to have been abandoned or at least indefinitely on hold during the war against crashes and lag. Or so I thought.
The Lab was surprisingly prompt in responding (thanks for that!):
One of our goals is to make it easier and faster for people to together experience the fun and immersive content Second Life has to offer.
We plan to test a number of ways to better provide that for more people, including a way to experience Second Life without having to download the full Second Life Viewer, and we’re testing that with SL Web Viewer in the next few weeks. As it’s just a test, we don’t have more information to share at this point.
These tests will run from time to time and for various lengths, and we may choose to further pursue some or none of these approaches, depending on what we learn from our testing.
Update:
It’s been pointed out to me (I should have asked if I could mention his name) that there seem to be a lot of accounts that are quite possibly related to this.
Wow, that would be pretty cool.
Any word as to whether their Web viewers will be able to access OpenSim worlds the way their downloadable viewers do?
– Maria
Maria:
That seems quite unlikely.
Looks like someone slipped and mentioned on twitter what should have remained deeply hidden behind an NDA. Oh well, we all suspected there was a web based viewer in the pipes someplace.
The problem really is that SL is heavy place, even with mesh its still heavy and the viewer will have to do a lot less in real time or its just going to end up in the same boat as the regular client. If they can do less, why haven’t they done it to the regular client and reduced the hardware barrier to entry ?
The lab also seem to be fixated with the ‘its hard to get into’ thing, and while that’s true to a point trying to remove every perceived barrier to entry is a dead end. Case in point, most MMO RPG games are hard to get into properly, yet the world behind the client sucks you in.
@Maria: I’ll agree with Maggie. I’d consider the odds of it being in any way cross-platform to be close to zero.
The system will be cross platform thats the idea of sticking it in a webpage, will it talk to servers other than it is specifically configured to, no. will LL release this viewer so others can embed it in there own pages, maybe … will you be able to set it up to talk to open grid … meeeyyaahh .. doubtful.
As others commented in the past, Linden Labs are placing a lot of importance on the future of a web viewer. Quietly behind closed doors.
The groundwork is beginning to be laid. Like no other viewer since the Emerald Incidenent have LL been so terse as not working with and killing Catherine Berry’s AjaxLife Browser based client.
Catherine herself is even pragmatic. Some, such as myself, are not, and have suspicions of motives.
As per Lindens reasoning: “The problem remains that the others have used the service for harassment and fraud, and we don’t have engineers available to integrate the IP address hash you’ve offered to forward on connection with the governance tools.”
Right there you see….the pragmatic business response to lock out a competitor that might allow the viewer into other worlds(Opensim).
Its all about the role Second Life will play in the realm of the social network heavy weights you see.
A number of simowners have been contacted and asked whether they would like to participate in testing Skylight. There’s no NDA or mysteries on that.
I look very much forward to participate.
Imagine if the “outer world” can just enter sims through a browser. They’ll see a (Sky)light version of SL eyecandy and if they want the full package of tools they can download the client.
A great leap forward! Be positive.
[...] Lab confirms Project Skylight, tests for a Second Life Web Viewer; http://eicker.at/Skylight (via [...]
twitter, the bane of Lindens lmao.
the issue with “connect and go to an event” now is there isn’t much left to do. Most of the people that used to run events quit. The venues are drying up fast. One of the longest running is being sold to whoever wants it. I’m sure if it is sold it will be closed. Most likely the region will be abandoned and the last “been here forever” venue will go the way the Edge went.
I even logged into inworldz to see if they all went there since I happen to know a lot of stream subscriptions are being sold there. But nothing to do there either. The concurrency there says over 100 but only 20 green dots on the map.
For the fast enter and go thing to work there has to be events to go to. LL now has a different issue since they have elected to whack small businesses with the way LL is gaming search to promote full sim sized parcels ahead of everyone else.
One step forward, a mile run back. Will the LL board ever put in someone as CEO willing to make the changes in staff and management needed to save SL from LL?
I just spent 10 minutes writing, deleting and re-writing sarcastic replies, but it’s probably better I re-delete them.
Anyway, this is AWESOME NEWS.
Also, Pop Art Lab is one of the best SL projects where to test this.
[...] and it’s the project that will hopefully deliver Second Life in a web browser. Tateru Nino got a confirmation from Linden Lab that testing will be occurring, so hopefully we’ll see some concrete examples [...]
For those educators not priced out of SL by the tier increases, Skylight could be a game-changer.
I’ve used Jibe to look at demo areas in Reaction Grid. It would be a perfect way to show administrators how virtual worlds work without making them look like fools with a UI they cannot master. Most of these folks are decidedly not gamers so anything like a game UI stymies them.
Of more import to LL, students HATE the SL clients because they don’t run well on non-gamer laptops and on wireless connections. IF (a big Q) LL wants the 18-22 college kid population, they’d better offer something that runs on smart phones and low-end hardware.
I’ve been saying for a while that if it isn’t written for WebGL, it doesn’t count.
If there’s a decent JavaScript API akin to AS3′s ExternalInterface stuff (see http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/flash/external/ExternalInterface.html ), it’ll barely count.
+1 for popart, Claus Uriza is doing some amazing things with music and art
I agree WebGL (or similar, but WebGL is vastly preferable) would technically be the preferable way to do this. But if the rationale for this is to increase market penetration, I’m not sure WebGL is a viable approach.
Look at what UMVU says:
“We also looked at our client hardware metrics and the Unity hardware survey. We cobbled together our 15th percentile computer. This is a prototypical machine which is better than 1/8th of our user’s hardware: 384mb of ram, a 2ghz Pentium 4 and no hardware graphics acceleration. These machines commonly reproduced issues that our business class dell boxes never would. Many of our users have intel graphics “hardware”, which is so inefficient at 3d that it’s a better experience to render our graphics in pure software.” — Timothy Fitz, “Continuous Deployment for Downloadable Client Software” http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/cd-for-client-software/
@Ann
I don’t have any problem finding events in SL. Most of the time I have a problem deciding which one to got to.
If I recall correctly, there was talk some time ago or working on a web browser version of the SL viewer to allow people to log in from most anywhere. Sadly there will be pros and cons to this move. On the plus side, you will probably have increased numbers of people logging on but that will add to the lag we already have, even in sims with only 1 person there. If this turns out to be a laggy version of farmville, it will fail horribly. I really wish LL would fix the problems they currently have instead of chasing every idea they get in their heads.
I can see why Linden Lab might be pursuing this, considering their preoccupation with trying to retrofit Second Life to be a Web 2.0 experience. I think this is misguided, for two reasons:
First, you’re better off doing one thing well than trying to change your product to fit whatever management or marketing buzzwords are flying around this season. If you’re chasing some new fad and trying to make yourself look “hip”, you have identity issues. Instead of trying to BE cool, Linden Lab should be trying to DEFINE cool. We don’t go to SL to have that Web 2.0 experience. We already have that with Facebook, Twitter and Plurk. Let them do what they do well. Second Life does massively contiguous, user-content-driven shared online 3D experience well, and it’s the only service that does. Let’s not dumb that down, or find new magical ways to break it by saddling it with technology it was never designed for.
Second, if you think it’s hard to control the asshat problem now, wait till you put SL in a web browser. This strips away pretty much everything Linden Lab can do to keep the human toadstools off the service. Linden Lab has a history of not thinking through the ramifications of the “improvements” they make to the system, and of ignoring the fact that it’s not just a system. People actually have to want to use it and stay on it. If you completely anonymize the connection to SL, it will open the floodgates to bad behavior and make it very hard to do any business or community building.
It’s been pointed out to me (I should have asked if I could mention his name) that there seem to be a lot of accounts that are quite possibly related to this.
Observe.
Even though I’m widely (and accurately) known as a “fix what’s broken first” curmudgeon, I don’t begrudge the effort to make this work, if it ends up being a small portal into SL that entices users who won’t have the motivation to download and run the existing fat-client viewer until *after* experiencing an actual virtual world.
Let’s realize something. We’re fond of thinking of Linden Labs as a “start up” and the viewer as “leading edge software”.
Neither of those is true.
Linden Labs was founded in *1999*. It’s over a decade old. And the current viewer has been as far as I know unchanged in its fundamentals since 2003. If a web-based viewer brings folks in world, and gets them engaged enough to download the fiull experience, that’s a good thing.
The alternative is to have SL eventually become a money-losing cult of oldbies. That’s not sustainable. Think of the web-based viewer as a “gateway drug”…
Tarheel, if the only throttle we have to control asshattery is the fact that it’s difficult to get in-world for the first time, we’re doing it wrong.