Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Originally published on my Patreon here

Just before Linden Lab test launched "Project Zero", its code name for streaming Second Life on a browser, I had a deep dive conversation with CTO Philip Rosedale on how Zero fits into the overall strategy of growing the SL user base.

One point he mentions (that I initially missed, coming back from the holidays): Starting last week, they're letting a select number of new sign-ups try out Project Zero, to see if that helps retention.

"Basically, their first session will be just completely over the browser," as Philip told me last month.

I'll follow up on that soon, but for this week, here's part one of my Q&A with Philip on Project Zero's overall strategy — including price considerations, why they're launching it now, and much more:

Philip Rosedale: We're gonna see if we can get streaming to work well enough to be a mainstream way of accessing Second Life. What we're doing, one, is we're using a streaming infrastructure to transmit the actual rendered view of the world. And then the second thing is, in a manner a little bit similar to the mobile app, we're gonna rebuild the UI from the ground up using modern HTML components…

For right now, there's going to be limited capacity and time limits on that, but it's going to be like, probably 10,000 people a day or more should be able to roll through and just try it out a little bit, so everybody can kind of see what we're doing and get a feel for it. 

And then a few days after that, probably on Monday the 6th, we'll start factoring as an A/B test, a good fraction of the user signups through this thing. Basically, their first session will be just completely over the browser.

Our feeling is there's a lot more people that are similar to the people using Second Life today that could be using it than the number of people we currently have. 

So our mindset there — and this affects how we're approaching marketing and branding and everything else — is that what we what we should do first, is remove the two big barriers that doubtless keep people, like all people that are in Second Life, from using it: One, basically just the inability to run it on their computer, or the fact that it just runs way too slowly on their computer to get access to Second Life. 

As you know, different groups of people that are using [SL], there's lots that clearly would like to be able to use it with lower end machines. And in fact, we have a large cohort of people — which we've really seen over the last couple of quarters, because we've been challenged by the updates to PBR and rendering, the rendering core and everything that went out with Firestorm in June. We can tell that there's lots of people that don't quite have fast enough computers to run this stuff anymore, and so moving directionally worse for them, not a good thing. 

So we basically started working on [streaming] a couple of months ago. and we're ready to start testing it. 

Right now, the way we're doing it stage one, is we are just streaming the existing Second Line viewer UI as it is, no changes to it. But then during January, you'll see us start turning off most of the elements of the UI and then rewriting, in the most important order, basically rewriting the UI as modern HTML React , in the same way that we've been able to do with the mobile client. 

Wagner James Au: On any browser?

PR: We've been obviously mostly testing on Chrome because that's the most common target, but it works on Mac and Windows, no dependence on GPU. And the thing we're gonna say to people, is it's basically just, If you can watch Netflix on your computer, you’ll be able to [stream Second Life].

Next up: Latency tests, pricing considerations, and riding the back of failed AI experiments.

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