‘Second Life’ is notoriously clumsy, with lag and lumpy framerates that put something of a damper on the virtual orgies. Containing an undiscriminating mixture of existing and fantasy technologies, and avatars and backgrounds that range from the Nintendo Wii-simplicity to the near photorealistic, it raises more questions than it answers. A much-parodied presentation video from 2021 depicted Zuckerberg and his associates as avatars exchanging excruciating dialogue (“Aw, I love that guy,” said Zuckerberg bloodlessly, on being shown a video of his dog). A handful of others followed him from Linden Lab to Facebook.įacebook is presenting its metaverse platform as an intuitive, immersive space, mixing virtual and real elements, in which users will be able to do everything they currently do online, such as socialise, shop, and work. The co-founding CTO of Linden Lab, Cory Ondrejka, joined Facebook in 2010 and helped spearhead its acquisition of VR company Oculus. “Facebook’s metaverse plans have been greatly and directly shaped by former Linden Lab staff,” says W James Au, who blogs at New World Notes about ‘Second Life’ and other metaverse platforms. CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to bring one billion people into VR and pledged to take on 10,000 employees in Europe alone to build the metaverse.ĭespite their philosophical divergences, Facebook will look to ‘Second Life’ as it builds its metaverse platform, and not only because Linden Lab came closest to fulfilling the Stephenson definition of a metaverse. Although its precursor metaverse platform, ‘Horizon Worlds’, has been tried by just 3 per cent of Oculus Quest (its VR headset) owners, Facebook has grand ambitions. “These things aren’t being considered, because the people who are developing them may be great at tech and may have wonderful ideas for the future as envisaged in whatever book they’ve just read, but ultimately a lot of this has been done before, and it doesn’t work.”īillions of dollars are being poured into metaverse platforms by the likes of Microsoft, Nvidia, Epic Games, and the company formerly – and commonly – known as Facebook. Anyone aware of how people behave in virtual worlds should have seen that coming and given all avatars collision boxes, which cannot be entered without permission, he adds. For instance, minutes after the launch of a Christian virtual world, ‘Church of Fools’, a woman kneeling to pray was made to look to be fellating a man standing in front of her. He believes the long history of virtual worlds is being overlooked amid today’s rush to build metaverse platforms: “It’s that distinct lack of understanding about the past and the lessons we already know, that is most discouraging about the metaverse,” says Bartle, now a professor of game design at the University of Essex. In 1978, Dr Richard Bartle co-wrote the text-based virtual world ‘MUD1’. This is one vision of the metaverse, as envisaged by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel ‘Snow Crash’ as the immersive successor to the flat internet. Although over 50 million people have tried using it, ‘Second Life’ peaked at around one million users and retained around half a million monthly users for most of its lifetime. It was launched in 2003 and organisations such as Harvard University, Nasa, the Swedish government, the news agency Reuters, and Burning Man all extended their presence into ‘Second Life’. ‘Second Life’ allows users to create avatars and connect, build, buy, and sell in a 3D virtual world that persists online. Its creator, Linden Lab, however, has been fairly clear about what it is not: it is not a game. It is difficult to define what ‘Second Life’ is.
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