Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Over in last week's post on how Second Life might find a new audience on mobile, New World Notes' super savvy readers are picking up clues and speculating that Linden Lab is going to — or at least should — create what I'd describe as a lightweight, IMVU-like experience for mobile.

Take it away, Pulsar:

They are making dedicated mobile-regions now (just instant messages, but they plan to add a 3D view later). Here is the opportunity to start a sort of new SL from ground up: mobile-avatars on mobile-regions; meanwhile you keep your account, friend list, chat, L$ etc, that keeps you on the SL grid. And you would still be able to use the old style stuff in the old regions as before.

Mobile regions may have a clear grand total upper limit in texture and polygon count, instead of an obscure and exploitable "land impact". And they could be on demand, cutting the costs.

A mobile avatar could be a single item or it could be customizable by replacing the body parts with dressed parts, as other games do. Not that pile of attachments on top of each other that you see in SL. You could still colorize the parts, change head textures etc.

This approach would also make sense from a technical perspective, as "0xc0ffea" explains:

SL isn't designed with a mobile device's capabilities in mind, not at all.

A full fat SL true mobile experience is not going to happen, even if one was created for iOS, it's not something anyone is going to want to use without tethering their device to the mains (and doing that obliterates battery longevity, leads to swelling, etc – hence some of the app store rules).

LL appear to be working on a different idea, avatars are loaded up on special 'mobile client only' regions with no attachments, no local build and no local communication. You can be next to hundreds of other avatars and never know it.

We can realistically expect a full suite of IM chat tools, friend lists and (big maybe) group chatter.

It's unlikely there will be a big local chat room with all the other nearby mobile users as regular avatars wouldn't be able to participate and you might never see the same person twice – it would also end up like twitch chat due to size of local population and be functionally useless).

A mobile avatar viewer is also a possibility and should IMO be a priority feature. We might not be able to see the world, but being able to see our own and other avatars would be a big deal, toss in some photo tools, selectable backgrounds and ability to play poses from inventory .. and we have a solid basis for generating social media content.

Again, this all sounds plausible, and similar to IMVU's approach on mobile… which turned an also-ran competitor with Second Life into a mobile-centric metaverse with 7 million users.