Philip Rosedale: Mainstreaming Virtual Worlds and Positioning Linden Lab
A large segment of my interview with Philip Rosedale focused on what it will take for virtual worlds to break into the mainstream, and on how Linden Lab® is positioned, relative to its competitors, to take advantage once that happens. I rely on Nic Mitham at KZero, whose graphs of the virtual worlds competitive landscape are now ubiquitous, to provide some context and analysis of Philip’s comments.
It doesn’t take much to get Philip talking on this topic, and my questions are pretty obvious from context, so for the most part I have just deleted them, to let Philip have his say.
PRE-INSTALLATION
By the way, I think the requirement for a software download, a standalone executable, which is true with every product that’s out there right now other than the most simplistic like 2D virtual worlds, like Habbo Hotel or something like that, the requirement that you install and run a piece of standalone software, that requirement probably has a greater impact on the acquisition rate of new users than any other factor. And, unfortunately, until we’re bundled with the operating system in some way, it’s really hard.
When the browser came out, you had to download the browser. Ultimately it got bundled initially into Windows 95. No, I’m sorry it wasn’t even Windows 95. It would have been Windows 2000 that had it. IE came out when you first got a browser in the operating system. But the requirement for the browser was a hard requirement. You had to get a new five megabyte or so application onto your computer, and that slowed down the adoption. But there are these changes in technology that I think are required to create the kind of experience that is, like Steve Jobs said, good enough to criticize. And you got to download an application to do that, and that slows things down right now, and I think it’ll continue to slow things down for a while.
GRAPHICS HARDWARE
You know, there’s an adoption cycle around graphics hardware. PC adoption cycles are pretty fast. It depends on what part of the world you’re talking about, but they’re typically less than two years, a year to two years. And I think that we’re still waiting through laptops being powerful enough to really put you into an immersive graphical environment.
Again, you can argue that you don’t need 3D graphics to create this kind of experience, but I actually think that’s not true. I think that there is a fundamental need for the 3D environment because it’s the one that matches our mental framing of things so well and makes this all so both engaging and easy once you’re in. So basically I think we still have to wait, particularly on laptops and low end laptops, we have to wait probably a couple years more to be in that situation where you absolutely know that everybody, whatever laptop is in their backpack, it’ll run Second Life just fine.
And, again, I don’t think there’s a magic solution in that interim timeframe that says, “Oh, well, we don’t need 3D graphics,” or, “Here’s a really neat way to do 3D graphics in the browser,” or something like that. I tell you, those solutions that they’re just not going to work. Look at modern video games. You have to have the full power of the graphics hardware there, and I don’t think there’s a way around that, and I don’t think we’ll need to wait too long for that to happen.
WI-FI: A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD
But I remember in the early days of the company, the rise of WiFi, which was actually a fascinating phenomenon to watch. In about 2001, it just really took off. It was problematic for me because it encouraged the use of laptops. And when I started the company in ’99, it was based on the prediction that desktop computers would by, say, 2002 or 2003, which is when we formally launched, that they would have the graphics hardware that you needed to run Second Life. A fact which turned out to be true, but I didn’t think about WiFi. You do your best as a futurist. But everybody started using these laptops, and many laptops still don’t adequately run Second Life.
LIVELY AND MULTIVERSE
Regarding Lively and other sort of entrants broadly into the virtual world space, like you said, I think there are a lot of different use cases for virtual worlds, but the most generalized form of virtual world, and I’m certain this is the case, that has real meaning for the future is the one in which there is a general capability presented to the end user to create complex content. And then I think there’s a secondary requirement which is that there’s some way for everyone in the environment to get access to and exchange that content, potentially for money. So I think that the general ability to create scripted, interactive, complex objects and the presence of an economy and a permission system in which people can exchange that content is absolutely the bright line that divides Second Life and a very few other systems from everything else. I think that you absolutely have to have those capabilities to be building something that is the sort of future that I’m concerned with and that I talk about.
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I think that if you look at something like Multiverse, Mycosm I’m not as familiar with yet – those are environments that have taken on the broader problem of arbitrary content creation. I mean I think there are all kinds of nuanced questions about which particular feature choices, or which use cases, or which types of content capabilities are likely to grow fastest and satisfy people most, you know, create the most interest. But our approach to that, as you know, has been to believe that there are likely to be very uniform, globally open standards for moving this content around.
Click here for Nic Mitham's takeat KZero, a leader in understanding the big picture of virtual worlds. And those who follow virtual worlds closely won't be surprised to hear that I followed up Philip's mention of open standards with some questions on OpenSim and the open grid project.
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