Category: News-Opinion

Hi-Fi and the Lab: in the press, & further speculation from me

Posted on by Inara Pey
Logos via Linden Lab and High Fidelity respectively

Following the announcement that High Fidelity, the company co-founded by Philip Rosedale in 2013 and after his departure form Linden Lab, has invested money, patents and staff into the latter, the news hit a lot of on-line tech publications and even the Wall Street Journal – creating a buzz around Second Life that has so far, if we’re honest, somewhat eluded the Lab in the wake of all the broader “metaverse” chatter that has been going on.

Of these articles, the most detailed came via GamesBeat / VentureBeat (by the ever-informative Dean Takahashi), c|net and The Wall Street Journal (the latter via Archive to avoid the paywall)¹ that added butter to the bread of the original announcement, which I’ve summarised below, and which gave me further pause for thought.

To deal with the bullet point takeaways first:

  • The patents transfer from Hi Fi is for distributed computing, and include “moderation in a decentralised environment patents.”
  • In all some 7 members of the Hi Fi team will be moving to work alongside the Second Life engineering team, effectively increasing it by around 20%.
  • The move will mean that around 165 people will be working on Second Life and Tilia.
  • Two elements of the work Hi Fi staff will be involved in are:
    • SL’s “social aspects”, given as “avatars and digital marketplace”. I assume the former is a reference to things like “avatar expressiveness”, on which more below.  And the latter potentially greater accessibility to SL’s Marketplace by users using mobile options, etc.
    • Oberwager also indicated that Hi Fi’s work will be to assist LL in developing “the tools to make virtual economies work” and a concept for “underpinning FinTech to metaverse” – which I assume is a reference to involvement in Tilia, per my original speculations on the investment.
  • Separate to its involvement with LL, High Fidelity will continue to develop its spatial audio capabilities, which have already been licensed by a number of other companies.
  • In terms of SL itself:
    • 2020 still seems to be the platform’s most robust year, with the economy put in terms of a US $650 million GDP, with 345 million annual transactions (virtual goods, real estate, and services) and US $80 million cashed-out.
    • The platform boasts more than 1.6 million transactions per day and generates 1.8 billion messages (presumably user-to-user and Group IMs) per month.
    • Second Life won’t be moved to support VR headsets any time soon, simply because the latter need much more time to mature, both in terms of their technology and their market reach; something Rosedale believes (and I’d agree, for whatever that is worth) is unlikely to be reached in the next 5 years. However, once SL itself is more performant and better placed to naturally leverage VR hardware.
Philip Rosedale and Brad Oberwager, via VentureBeat / GamesBeat. Credit: Linden Lab

In terms of my own speculation, this primarily arise – and rather belatedly, given my own previous coverage of High Fidelity in this blog – as a result of a comment from Philip Rosedale in the piece by Dean Takahashi:

The tech changes are all about communication,” Rosedale said. “I don’t think it’s about pixels. I don’t think it’s about radical richness. I don’t even think it’s all about 3D. I think the problem and the opportunity is communicating with people in a naturalistic way where I can interview you.

– Philip Rosedale, speaking to Dean Takahashi

We already know from Linden Lab’s own review of 2021, which includes a bullet list of deliverables planned for 2022 – that “avatar expressiveness” to Second Life that will bring “camera-based gestures and movement to your avatar for a whole new level of interaction and connectedness”. This is something that marries up to Rosedale’s comments above. More particularly, it is something High Fidelity started to develop back in 2014, when the company was working on its own decentralised virtual spaces – even producing an informal video that helped demonstrate that early work – and which I’ve embedded below.

Yes, the avatars are someone cartoonish is looks, but this work was carried out in Hi Fi early days and before their avatars developed into something SL users might find more appealing, so don’t get too hung up on that fact.

What’s important is to note that how the avatars (faces and hand movements) reflect those of the people behind them. Take, for example, Emily’s face as she emotionally responds to the lyrics she is singing, and the way Ryan’s avatar (with the beard) makes eye contact with viewers as it looks directly out of the screen, and they way his eyes / head naturally move as he also addresses Chris and Emily who are sharing the same office space with him – plus the capture of his real-time hand-clapping at the end of the song! (And as a total aside specific to SL “old timers”, not that the guy providing the backing vocals is none other than Andrew Meadows (once (and again….?) aka Andrew Linden.)

If this capability could be brought into Second Life – and again, I have no idea how much further down the road Hi Fi got in developing / enhancing it and am aware that SL presents a range of its own technical challenges (range of mesh heads, rigging /weighting, etc.) – then clearly, it could offer considerable depth to avatar interactions for those who would care to leverage them. Take the SL live music scene, for example, and the potential for performers to add gestures to their music and (like Emily) have the emotions in singing transferred to their avatars. (I’ve also submitted a question on this subject for consideration in the upcoming Lab Gab session with Brad Oberwager and Philip Rosedale.)

There is a lot more that might be unpacked from these articles – such as the idea of a “decentralised environment” and what that might mean for thing like SL and mobile device access, and a lot to chew on regarding SL’s approach to virtual spaces and how it stands apart from the recent headline-grabbers like Facebook / Meta. Some of these comments should give comfort to those concerned about matters of privacy and the like, and Rosedale at least has carried his view on things beyond talking to journalists, embodying them in some of his tweets.

Philip Rosedale via Twitter,, January 15th, 2022

Given what is available for consumption between the three articles, I would recommend a reading of all three rather than having me drone on further here, or dilute the core speculation I wanted to put forward as a possibility. As such, I’ll leave you to peruse them in your own time, if you’ve not already done so.

Related Links

 

  1. While there were other articles on the announcement, most were either baseline reproductions of the original press release (with a sprinkling of commentary in some cases) or re-treads of one of these three pieces.

High Fidelity, Linden Lab, and the return of Philip Rosedale – updated

Posted on by Inara Pey
Logos via Linden Lab and High Fidelity respectively

Update: January 26th: this piece contains speculation (emphasis intentional) about High Fidelity’s spatial audio capabilities playing a future role in Second Life. Commenting on this at the Concierge and Land meeting, Wendi, Izzy and Vix Linden commented that they are unaware of any plans to move in this direction (or discussions on the same), and that for at least the foreseeable future, voice audio within SL will remain with Vivox. Comments can be found on this video (direct timestamp).

On Thursday, January 13th, Linden Lab officially announced that High Fidelity Incorporated was now an official investor in the company.

For the few who may not be familiar with High Fidelity, it is a company co-founded in 2013 by Philip Rosedale, one of the co-founders of Linden Research (Linden Lab), and who had initially departed Linden Lab in a hands-on leadership capacity in 2008, prior to severing all ties (management and board) in 2010.

The news came via an official press release from both parties, and also via blog post from the Lab to users – of which more at the end of this article.

Originally founded to build a distributed, VR-centric virtual worlds / virtual environments platform, High Fidelity was an interesting concept that attracted considerable inward investment (rounding-out at some US $73 million), and provided numerous innovative and unique features and capabilities. However, despite that investment, the support of luminaries such as Tony Parisi, the co-creator of the VRML and X3D ISO standards for networked 3D graphics, and numerous efforts to encourage the use of it (such as a US $15,000 “STEM VR Challenge”), the platform developed by High Fidelity failed to gain broad traction, Thus, in mid-2019, the company announced it would be pivoting its business to focus on a virtual workstation / environment that would allow people to work collaboratively whilst geographically separate (see: High Fidelity Changes Direction: the Reality of VR Worlds Today (& Tomorrow) and High Fidelity Changes Direction (2)).

Then, in December 2019, the company indicated a further change of direction to focus on a (then) unnamed new project, which was eventually revealed to be a new immersive spatial audio capability, which appears to form a part of the structure of High Fidelity’s investment in Linden Lab, as the official press release notes:

 The deal includes a cash investment and distributed computing patents. Members of High Fidelity’s metaverse team are joining the company, and Philip Rosedale, who is a founder of both companies, is also rejoining Second Life as a strategic advisor.
Philip Rosedale: inwards investment to LL via High Fidelity and a Strategic Advisor role with LL

It’s interesting to note that the press release does not indicate any potential board / direct management role for Rosedale – although I’ll be watching the Lab’s management page to see if it is updated subsequent to this announcement.

Certainly, that he, and other members of the High Fidelity team are joining Linden Lab might suggest High Fidelity’s audio capabilities could be playing a role in SL’s future – and it cannot be denied that a rich, immersive spatial voice audio could help SL better serve existing audiences – such as those in the educational sector – and potentially increase the platform’s appeal among potential audiences. I’m also curious as to whether such a capability might be used in overhauling SL’s other audio capabilities, such as through the introduction of audio materials and surfaces. Perhaps time will tell on that.

Another aspect of High Fidelity that might be of relevance – although this is again highly speculative on my part – is whether or not the work and IP the company put into developing their own commerce and micro-transaction system might have a bearing on SL and (more specifically) Tilia Pay.

Obviously, given his work in establishing and running Second Life – a decade of being away not withstanding – and in formulating and developing High Fidelity both initially as a content platform  / virtual spaces environment and more latterly as a potential business tool, Philip Rosedale potentially has a broad enough view of digital spaces, coupled with a direct hands-on approach with software development that could be of significant benefit to Second Life as a it does seek to grow its audience(s).

Outside of what this means directly for SL / Tilia (and for the longer-terms futures of Linden lab and High Fidelity as a whole – e.g. future merger, allowing for respective investors?), this announcement is interesting for a handful of minor points.

The first is that When High Fidelity was being established, Linden Research was one of its early investors, albeit it (according to Ebbe Altberg) on a relatively small scale. The second is that Linden Lab’s Executive Chairman, Brad Oberwager, has been friends with Philip Rosedale for a long time (he has described Rosedale’s wife as one of his closest friends), and they appear to have like minds and approaches to things. Thus, Rosedale’s return in the role of a “strategic advisor” would seem to be a natural fit in helping to leverage  / define SL’s development and potential future directions.

Finally, the announcement that Rosedale will be joining Linden Lab as a “strategic advisor” (note: not as the “new CEO” as I’ve already seen flying around in one in-world group) actually marks his second “return” to a hands-on role at the Lab. In 2008, he handed the CEO reins over to Mark Kingdon (“M Linden”) – although for a while he retained had Board position albeit while working on other business ideas such as Coffee and Power – but then returned to the role on an interim basis for several months in 2010 following Kindgon’s departure and pending the arrival of Rod Humble as the de facto CEO at the end of that year.

Lab Gab Special

To mark Rosedale’s return to the Lab, and hopefully discuss more of what his and High Fidelity’s involvement with Linden Lab means for Second Life, etc., the Lab will be running a special edition of Lab Gab towards the end of January 2022, and – as per the official blog post – the event will be open to questions from Second Life users.

The show will feature both the Lab’s Executive Chairman, Brad Oberwager (Oberwolf Linden) and Philip Rosedale, and questions can be submitted via this form, prior to midnight (SL time) on January 16th, 2022.

Related Links

Space Sunday: touching the Sun and Martian organics

Posted on by Inara Pey
Parker Solar Probe. Credit NASA

The Parker Solar Probe has finally reached the atmosphere of the Sun.

The NASA spacecraft has spent more than three years winding its way by planets and creeping gradually closer to our star to learn more about the origin of the solar wind, which pushes charged particles across the solar system.

Since solar activity has a large effect on living on Earth, from generating auroras to threatening infrastructure like satellites, scientists want to know more about how the Sun operates to better make predictions about space weather, and gain a better understanding of the mechanisms at work in and around our star. Over the years, we’ve done this with a number of missions – but the most fascinating of all to date is the Parker Solar Probe, a NASA mission that has literally touched the face of the Sun.

The spacecraft – launched in 2018 – is in a complex dance around the Sun that involves skimming closer and closer to our life-giving star, and they sweeping away again, far enough to cross back over the orbit of Venus – indeed, to use Venus as a means to keep itself looping around the Sun in orbits that allow it to gradually get closer and closer, with the aim of actually diving into and out of the Sun’s corona, what we might regard as the Sun’s seething, broiling atmosphere.

In fact, the probe actually first flew through the corona in April 2021; however, it was a few months before the data to confirm this could be returned to Earth, and a few more months to verify it; hence why the news has only just broken about the probe’s success. One of the aims of pushing the probe into the Sun’s corona was to try to locate the a boundary called the Alfvén critical surface. This is the boundary where the solar atmosphere  – held in check by the Sun’s gravity – end, and the solar wind – energetic particles streaming outwards from the Sun with sufficient velocity to break free of that gravity – begins, creating the outwards flow of radiation from our star.

Up until Parker’s April 2021 passage into the corona, scientists has only been able to estimate where Alfvén critical surface lay, putting it at somewhere between 6.9 million and 13.8 million km from the gaseous surface of the Sun. As it passed through the corona, Parker found these estimates to be fairly accurate: the data it returned to Earth put the outer “peaks” of the boundary at 13 million km above the Sun’s surface – or photosphere; the data also revealed the boundary is not uniform; there are “spikes and valleys” (as NASA termed them) where the boundary stretches away from the photosphere at some points, and collapses down much close to it in others. While it has yet to be confirmed, it is theorised this unevenness is the result of the Sun’s 11-year active cycle and various interactions of the atmosphere and solar wind.

The Parker Solae Probe. Credit: NASA / I. Pey

The April “dip” into the corona lasted for five hours – as the mission goes on, future “dips” will be for longer periods). But give the spacecraft is travelling at 100 kilometres per second, it was able to gather a lot of data as it zipped around the Sun – and even sample the particles within the corona. The probe’s passage revealed that the corona is dustier than expected, the cause of which has yet to be properly determined, as well as revealing more about the magnetic fields within the corona and how they drive the Sun’s “weather”, generating outbursts like solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CREs), both of which can have considerable impact on life here on Earth.

To survive the ordeal of passing through the corona, where temperatures soar to millions of degrees centigrade, far hotter than those found at the Sun’s photosphere.  – Parker relied on its solar shadow-shield: a hexagonal unit 2.3 m across made of reinforced carbon–carbon composite 11.4 cm thick with an outer face is covered in a white reflective alumina surface layer. This shield is so efficient in absorbing / reflecting heat, whilst passing through the corona the sunward face is heated to around 1,370ºC, but the vehicle, sitting inside the shadow cast by the shield never experiences temperatures higher than 30ºC.

In addition to mapping the Alfvén critical surface, Parker’s April 2021 trip into the Sun’s corona, the probe also passed through a “pseudostreamer,” one of the huge, bright structures that rise above the Sun’s surface and are visible from Earth during solar eclipses. This was compared to flying into the eye of a storm the probe recorder calmer, quieter conditions within the streamer, with few energetic particles within it. Exactly what this means is again unclear at this time, but it does point to further incredibly complex actions and interactions occurring with the Sun.

Since April, Parker has dipped back into the corona twice more, with the November 2021 passage bringing it to around 9.5 million km of the Sun’s photosphere – although again, the data from that pass has yet to be received and analysed. The next passage in February 2022 will again be at roughly the same distance from the photosphere, with a further five passes to follow at the same distance in 2022/23, before a flyby of Venus allows Parker to fly even deeper in to corona. By December 2025, and the mission’s final orbits, it will be descending through the corona to just 6.9 million km from the photosphere.

An artist’s depiction of magnetic switchbacks in the solar wind. Credit: NASA Goddard/CIL/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez

But that’s not all. Because Parker is in an elliptical around the Sun, it spends a part of its time much further away. This both allows the craft to dissipate absorbed heat from its shield, and for it to observe the Sun from a distance, giving scientists much broader opportunities to study the Sun, such as allowing them to study the physics of “switchbacks”. These are zig-zag-shaped structures in the solar wind, first witness by the joint ESA-NASA Ulysses mission that occupied a polar orbit around the Sun in the 1990s.

In particular, Parker’s observations suggest that rather then being discrete events, switchbacks occur in patches, and that these “patches” of switchbacks are aligned with magnetic funnels coming from the photosphere called called supergranules. These tunnels are thought to be where fast particles of the solar wind originate; so switchbacks may have something of a role to play in the generation of the solar wind or they may be a by-product of its generation or, given they seem to have a higher percentage of helium than other aspects of the solar wind, may serve a highly specialised role as a part of the solar wind.

Right now, scientists are unclear on what might be the case, or what actually generates switchbacks; but gaining clearer insight into their creation, composition and interaction with other particles in the solar wind, and with the Sun’s magnetic field might provide explanations for a number of solar mechanisms, including just why the corona is so much hotter than the photosphere.

Mars 2020 Mission Update

Scientists with NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission have discovered that the bedrock their six-wheeled explorer has been driving on since landing in February likely formed from red-hot magma. It’s a discovery with implications for our understanding and accurately dating critical events in the history of Jezero Crater – as well as the rest of the planet.

Even before the Mars 2020 mission arrived on Mars, there have been much debate about the formation of the rocks in the crater: whether they might be sedimentary in origin, the result compressed accumulation of mineral particles possibly carried to the location by an ancient river system, or whether they might be they igneous, possibly born in lava flows rising to the surface from a now long-extinct Martian volcano. However, whilst studying exposed bedrock at location dubbed “South Séítah” within Jezero, the science team noted a peculiar rock they dubbed “Brac”, selecting it as a location from which to collect further samples of Martian bedrock using the rover’s drill.

When taking samples of this kind, booth Perseverance and her elder sister, Curiosity, operating in Gale Crater half a world away, are both instructed to scour target rocks clean of surface dust and dirt that otherwise might contaminate samples. This is done by using an abrasion tool (think wire brush) mounted alongside the drilling mechanism. However, in checking the work on “Brac”, the mission team realised the abrasion process had revealed the rock was rich in crystalline formations.

Rather than going ahead and drilling the rock for a sample, scientists ordered the rover to study the formations using the Planetary Instrument for X-Ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) instrument  – which is designed to map the elemental composition of rocks. PIXL revealed the formations to be composed of an unusual abundance of large olivine crystals engulfed in pyroxene crystal, indicating the formations grew in slowly cooling magma, offering some confirmation that volcanism has at least be partially involved in Jezero Crater’s history. However, PIXL’s data also suggested the rock, once hardened, has subsequently altered as a result of water action – confirming free-flowing water also had a role to play in the crater’s past..

The crystals within the rock provided the smoking gun … a treasure trove that will allow future scientists to date events in Jezero, better understand the period in which water was more common on its surface, and reveal the early history of the planet. Mars Sample Return is going to have great stuff to choose from.

– Ken Farley, Perseverance Project Scientist

The Sample Return mission has yet to be fully defined, let alone funded, but is being looked at as a mission for the early 2030s, quite possibly with European Space Agency involvement. In the meantime, a question Farley and his colleagues would love to answer is whether the olivine-rich rock formed in a thick lava lake cooling on the surface of Mars, or originated in a subterranean chamber that was later exposed by erosion; knowing the answer to this could determine the early history of Jezero Crater and its surroundings.

This 60-second video pans across an enhanced-color composite image, or mosaic, of the delta at Jezero Crater on Mars. The delta formed billions of years ago from sediment that an ancient river carried to the mouth of the lake that once existed in the crater. Taken by the Mastcam-Z instrument aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover, the video begins looking almost due west of the rover, and sweeps to the right until it faces almost due north.

Also within the latest updates from the Mars 2020 team is the news that Perseverance has found organic compounds within the rocks of Jezero Crater and in the dust that covers them. This discovery was made as a result of a review of findings from the SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) instrument.

This does not mean that the rover has discovered evidence of past microbial life on Mars; these carbon compounds can be created by both organic and inorganic processes. However, the fact that they have been found at a number of locations explored by the rover means that the science team can map their spatial distribution, relate them to minerals found in their locations, and thus both further determine their organic / inorganic origins and trace the distribution of minerals, etc., within the crater.

Further, the fact that compounds like these have been identified by both the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers means that potential biosignatures (signs of life, whether past or present) could be preserved, too. IF so, then assuming they exist, there may come a time when one our other rover might happen upon them.

Continue reading “Space Sunday: touching the Sun and Martian organics” →

Lab announces change to e-mail preferences for Group notices

Posted on by Inara Pey

Tuesday, December 7th, 2021: Linden Lab have announced a forthcoming change to e-mail notification preferences in respect of the receipt of Group notices received via e-mail when users are not logging in to Second Life.

To quote the blog post in part:

We will soon be adding an option to email notification preferences. Currently, you can choose to receive IMs in your email when you are not logged in to Second Life. There will now be an additional setting that controls whether you receive Group notices in e-mail.
We are rolling this change out in stages. If you change your settings, it may be up to two weeks before it takes effect.
The default for the new setting affecting Group notices will be OFF. If you wish to receive Group notices in email, you will need to visit the web page and opt in.
This change is motivated by feedback from our community as well as residents frequently marking Group Notice emails as spam.  We want emails to our residents to be as relevant and useful as possible.

– via Linden Lab

The ability to opt-in to receiving Group notices can be found on your account dashboard at secondlife.com (there is a direct link provided in the official blog post), under Account → Change Email Settings.

Note that this is an option subject to multi-factor verification when accessing it, and the option includes a check box and dedicated Save button that must be clicked in order to update any changes, as per the image below.

As from December 15th, 2021, anyone wishing to receive Group notices as e-mails when they are not logged-in to SL will have to explicitly update their account e-mail options in order to do so

Finally, and as per the comment in red on the Change Email Setting page, and the note within the official blog post, this option must be checked by anyone who wishes to continue to receive Group notices via e-mail when not logged in to Second Life, from December 15th onwards. Also note:

  • From December 15th the IM’s to e-mail preferences setting within the viewer will no longer be valid; only the web page options will work to change these preferences. Until the option is removed from the viewer, attempts to use the Preferences option to change the setting will return an IM directing users to the web page).
  • This change does not see any change in the current cap on IMs-to-e-mail caps. However, if Group notices are set to off (the default), the cap should only apply to off-line IMs, rather than counting both IMs and group notices.

On reaching fifteen in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey

Yup fifteen years as Inara Pey; I’m pretty sure that in SL terms, that officially make me a OAP – where can I claim my pension? 🙂 .

Usually I try to write something on the occasion my rezday, but this year I really don’t have a lot more to say than I noted in 2020, I continue to log in (pretty much daily), I’m still blogging – and appreciative of all who read my ramblings and take the time to offer comments / feedback. I’m still enjoying kitbashing, building, landscaping, exploring et al. So really, not that much has changed in the last year :).

Sadly, unlike many others this year, I don’t have any stats from Linden Lab that I can share about my on-line times, etc., (not that I set much stock by such things as they always seem to have an air of elitism about them (or maybe that’s me just being crabby 🙂 ). That said, were I to approximate the amount of time I spend in SL, the answer would likely be “too much!”, as I don’t think there has been a day in the last 36-ish months (at least!) when I haven’t logged-in.

I’m not sure if that reveals something about me or about Second Life – or both. Admittedly, a lot of the time when I am logged-in, I’m actually parked somewhere, either blogging about it or something else, or actually off away dealing with physical world matters (like stuff that pays the bills, given I work from home), but at least my avatar can impersonate an answer machine for catching incoming IMs!

I’ve certainly not got a lot to reflect on SL-wise or personally; things have chugged along on both front pretty much “as is” throughout the year. Platform-wise, as the work on “bedding in” SL at AWS draws to some kind of initial completion, there will hopefully be a lot more to play with and ponder in 2022, but we’ll see.

On the personal side, I did make the decision early-ish in the year (with thanks to Vinyl for giving me little nudges!) to re-engage in some of the things I was involved in years ago, and this has been fun. I’m still happily settled in Second Norway (with my Linden home as a useful bolt hole from region restarts and the like!); after some 15 months since moving, I have absolutely no hesitation the estate and Vanity and her team to anyone looking for a island parcel with plenty of open water access for sailing / boating / flying, but which maintains its own sense of tranquillity by being off the more regular boating / sailing routes.

One of the things I’m still enjoying is playing with the home island – kitbashing house models, scratching building (in prims) and landscaping

Back in 2016, I pondered on whether a decade of virtual living was really enough, and that perhaps it was time to consider stepping away. Truth be told, I still have such thoughts from time-to-time; I think any of us who have been engaged in SL for an extended length of time has similar thoughts. Yet, here I am, half as much again beyond that point, still enjoying the many forms of freedom of expression SL offers all of us.

In this regard, when we discuss SL, much is made of its “secret sauce”, with people pointing at this or that. To be honest, I don’t believe there is a single “secret sauce”; rather it is – like many recipes – made up of multiple ingredients, of which one of the core items is that freedom of expression (which in some technical respects is also SL’s Achilles Heel). With all the hype and yack-yack around “the metaverse” we’ve seen this year, this freedom we enjoy in SL – be it to create, to generate an income, to role-play, to use SL as an artistic outlet, to socialise (and find romance) – is what really already separates SL from anything we might see spawned by the likes of Meta, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, et all.

This doesn’t mean I think those “big players” won’t succeed – likely they’ll all end up with there own walled gardens of various sizes. Rather, I mean that I just don’t see any of them being remotely interested in offering such broad-based freedoms of expression we have with SL. Thus, and while such freedoms may not be something the vast majority are looking for in this age of instant gratification, I tend to feel that there enough people with a similar outlook as those of us who remain engaged in SL year-on-year such that if LL can find a balanced means to market SL and make initial engagement smoother for those who are out there who can appreciate SL’s potential, then there is no reason why this walled garden cannot continue to flourish in its own modest corner of the digital landscape for the enjoyment of users and the pockets of investors, unnoticed by those now rushing to put their own stamp of authority in “the metaverse”.

Obviously, whether or not I’m right in thinking this will be revealed in time. For now, I think I’ll just got on with getting the start of my sixteenth year in SL kick-started!

Looking at the Second Life Search facelift

Posted on by Inara Pey
Second life Search home page

On Monday, November 22nd, 2021, and following on from comments made by Reed Linden at the November Web User Group meeting, Linden Lab launched the new look for Second Life Search (as seen both via the web and in the viewer). The launch was accompanied by a blog post – New Look for Search – that outlined the update, with several screen shots of various aspects of search return displays, etc., and a resident-launched forum thread discusses the changes.

Before going any further, it is important to note a couple of points, even though in general terms they have been noted:

  • This is an update to the web pages / style sheets defining how search and search results are displayed. It does not mark any changes in how the actual search algorithm works – so things like relevancy in search results, etc., will not be altered or improved as a result of this facelift.
  • However, a further overhaul of search which does include tightening the algorithm and improving results / relevancy and general performance will be initiated in 2022. This will apparently utilise third-party Search tool development expertise external to LL in an attempt to get a “first class” search implementation.

I’ll admit my first reaction on seeing the new search home page, both in the viewer and on the web page was, “ugh!” It was a shock to see the minimalism of Flat Design, even though this has been common to operating systems for a good while now, and has been something LL has started pushing towards. Frankly, it is not something I personally like as I find it bland and, in some executions, not particularly intuitive. However, if LL do want to make their product more in-line with current aesthetics with operating system and application design, and if they are serious about making SL more accessible through mobile / portable devices as well as modern desktop operating systems, then the move is understandable.

I’m not going to comment too much on functionality here, simply because this is a makeover, not a change in quality of returns of searches, etc. I’ll save such comments until after the complete overhaul of Search has been completed. So here are some fairly basic thoughts on the visuals.

Search in the Viewer benefits from not displaying the Classifieds (unless scrolled to via the bottom bar), but suffers from a lack of immediately-visible results

Home Page

Pros:

  • Looks clean, options easy to identify, and the colour change when and option is selected is good approach for those who may have visual impairments that make seeing checks in boxes difficult.
  • The left-side tabulation for high-level search categories is better than the old drop-downs, with the tailored options for each category are a further good moves.

Cons:

  • A terrible waste of space in the banner area, which is particularly noticeable when viewing Search within the viewer. Frankly, the SL logo looks as if it is about to be swallowed by the Great Charcoal Void.
  • Do the left sidebar tabs really need to be so broad, given the font size and the depth of each tab?

Results Listings

Pros:

  • Much better listing layout and improved readability. The left-side tabs are useful to have, together with Maturity ratings.
  • Changes impacting the list of results (such as changing the Maturity rating) are responsive and obvious.
  • As a largely legacy search user when it comes to search places, I’m not sure if the linking to Place Pages for additional information is new or not, but if it is, then it’s a good move even if Place Pages are drastically under-utilised and in need of Lab TLC.
  • Tucking thumbnails into the result title helps to compress the amount of space taken by individual results.
Search page responsiveness on actions appears good

Cons:

  • The last point made, the number of results displayed before scrolling is required is an annoyance, and something of a step back. Yes, individual items in a set of returns are a lot more readable, thanks to a larger, cleaner font, but this does come at a price.
  • In this, the fixed column width with two sidebars also doesn’t help. Why not make Classified part of the left sidebar below the items already there? Or make them a toggle off / on option so the display area for results could expand sideways and allow for a few more results to be displayed before scrolling becomes necessary?
  • There are also some informational elements lacking (such as traffic); should they return, this could further impact the number of returns.

General Thoughts

At the end of the day, any UI change is going to cause consternation of varying degrees and for a variety of reasons: most of us are prone to react negatively to changes we perhaps hadn’t been expecting; plus we all tend to consider ourselves armchair UI experts. Search is a particularly emotive subject as it is a tool that is especially important to some for their business, etc., and thus doubly hard to balance out to satisfy all needs. As a more “casual” user of Search, and spending a good portion of the day playing with it, I can live with the shortfalls and can appreciate the improvements, and will await further changes to see how things fair.