Day: March 17, 2018

On Thursday, March 15th, 2018, Linden Lab CEO met with a group of invited participant for the Above the Book events at VWBPE 2018. Lasting some 80 minutes, the conversational  Q&A session was livestreamed for its first hour to the main auditorium at the conference. Also in attendance at the event was  Brett Atwood (Brett Linden), Senior Manager for Marketing at Linden Lab, was also in attendance.

The full transcript of the session, including a number of “after stream” questions not in the official video is available here. When reading, please note:

• The transcript notes don’t follow the chronological flow of the session, as I’ve attempted to group subjects by topic for more concise reference.
• Audio of responses to questions are provided for each section of the transcript.
• Questions are given in bold.
• Comments from Ebbe Altberg are prefixed EA; comments from Brett Atwood are prefixed BA.

The video of the session is embedded at the end of this piece for reference and for those who would prefer to watch it. My thanks to the VWBPE stream team for providing it.

The Short Form

For those who prefer,the following is a bullet-point list of the core questions asked, gathered into the same topic headings as the transcript notes. Links are given to the relevant part of the full transcript for those who would prefer to read / listen to the complete answers / comments.

Note: due to the nature of WordPress internal text anchors and scrolling, you may have to scroll up a little after jumping to a specific topic, in order to see the question.

The Lab and Education

• Education is, and remains, an important element of the lab’s thinking, both with Second Life and with Sansar. Jump to topic.
• For educators interested in engaging with the Lab, the best way to do so is by reaching out to Brett Linden, who himself is an educator with 15 years experience (and who currently teaches a course as Washington State University) and who sees himself as a advocate for virtual worlds in education.
  • There is also the SLED distribution list and the education  community forum through which educators can discuss idea and (with the SLED list) reach LL.
  • There is also the SLED wiki page to help educators.
  • Jump to topic.
• To help educators promote their endeavours, Brett suggests looking at SL Place Pages as a means to self-curate a web presence for in-world activities. Jump to topic.
• The Lab is willing to work with educators on putting together documents / information addressing the value proposition, safety, security, etc., of using virtual space in education which can be used by educators to help inform their administrators and IT experts. Jump to topic.
• The Lab is also willing to consider ways to make SL more attractive to the education market, preferably with a list of prioritised ideas from the education community, which can be compared with other requests for features / improvements, evaluated (technically and in terms of value / ROI, etc). Jump to topic.
• It’s unlikely that LL will, in the near future, provide a dedicated resource to the educational / non-profile community. However, the recent re-alignment of the Second Life and Sansar team structures means there is now a dedicated SL marketing resource, lead by Brett, to help and support SL communities such as the educational / non-profit community. Jump to topic.
• What has been the educational uptake with Sansar?
  • Relatively low profile, but the potential is there as demonstrated by the likes of the Voyage Live: Egypt experiences and the LOOT Interactive NASA Apollo Museum experience.
  • Jump to topic.

Product Accessibility and Ease-of-Use

• Access for the disabled:
  • Sansar is too early in its development to offer much in the way of ease-of-access for the disabled.
  • The Lab would like to hear of specific instances where more could be done to help with accessing Second Life by those with disabilities.
  • Jump to topic.
• What is the Lab’s position on speech-to-text, text-to-speech?
  • There are 3rd party tool already available, which the Lab might not look to directly integrate into their platforms.
  • However, major players like Microsoft, Google and apple are developing capabilities which the Lab might look towards integrating in the future.
  • Jump to topic.
• Providing a plug-in architecture for SL / Sansar to allow third-party extensions (text-to-speech, etc.), has been suggested.
  • Not n the current roadmap, as SL client already provides a lot of open-source extensibility.
  • Possibly something TPVs could implement / contribute.
  • For some services, would have an associated cost involved, adding complexity, simply because third-parties charge for their services.
  • Jump to topic.
• More broadly, Sansar has offered accessibility for people to be able to create and publish their own VR experience to the world without the need to develop their own platforms on which to run them. Jump to topic.
• Will Sansar have easier access to content tools? Jump to topic.

Second Life: Development, Land Cost and Fees

• The Second Life team numbers just under 100 people (engineering, support, operations, customer services, and not including finance, compliance, etc.). Jump to topic.
• Key focuses for SL are: enhancing the platform, growing  the user base and trying to re-balance the economic model away from a reliance on land fees.
  • Costs of involvement in Second Life remain a concern for the Lab, which is taking a high-level look at trying to pivot revenues away from the land model potentially towards more of a transaction-based model, while at the same time trying to reduce at least some of the burden of land costs (e.g. the 2016 private region buy-down offer and more recently, the Mainland price restructuring).
  • Jump to topic
• In time it is hoped that transitioning revenue away from land might lead to a further reduction in land costs to educators. Jump to topic.
• Other areas of focus include making SL more scalable, secure and performant. Jump to topic.
• The Lab will soon be publishing a roadmap announcement of improvements / enhancements to Second Life. Jump to topic.

Developing Second Life and Sansar

• Linden Lab has more clearly split the Sansar and Second Life teams; there are no longer people “floating” between the two and working on both.
• The Lab see a lot of overlap between the two products, with customers potential using both for different purposes.
• However, each has its own potential markets / its own selling points for those markets, allowing them to co-exist.
• The Lab believes that with 15 years of SL notwithstanding, the potential of virtual spaces has only been scratched, and both second Life and Sansar can do so much more.
• Jump to Topic.

Second Life and the Cloud

• Huge engineering effort, still in early stages, which will take “all of this year and then some” just to get transitioned and working.
• Benefits to the Lab:
  • Reduced capital investment and maintenance costs.
  • Potential to dynamically scale consumption, rather than having simulator servers always on.
• Potential benefits to users:
  • Potentially more flexibility in products and tiers, possibly defined by a mix of region use and use-case (e.g. high-powered, high capacity servers for popular events; more moderate, lower-cost servers for residential use).
  • Might add the ability to geographically locate simulators closer to dedicated audiences (e.g. regions serving South American communities could have their simulators running out of cloud locations in South America, reducing issues like latency for customers).
  • Not something that will happen immediately, as the Lab will need to transition services and then refine operations and investigate option.
• Jump to topic.

Second Life and VR / Browsers

• VR remains a challenge to implement in Second Life due to the high run-time frame rates required. As such, it is not something the Lab plans to pursue or re-deploy.
• Streaming Second Life to a browser / mobile devices has been tried by third-parties (OnLive with SL Go and Bright Canopy from FRAME).
  • It’s not something the Lab is actively pursuing at present, so they are leaving it to third parties.
  • As the cost of cloud-base GPU technologies come down it might be something the Lab re-examines in the future.
• Jump to topic.

“After Livestream” Questions

Note some !after stream” questions and comments are also addressed in the sections above.

• Will the Lab bring back the Teen Grid as “the Education Grid”?
  • Not at this time, as it doesn’t fit with current plans to move away from dedicated infrastructure and to the cloud.
  • Might be something to be considered after the move to the cloud: presenting grids for unique audiences.
  • Jump to topic.
• Can educators be given more control over their regions?
  • This would need indication from educators as to what is required (prioritised list again).
  • Jump to topic.