Above: At my office in Waterhead via Project Zero
Starting now — and starting 2025 with guns blazing — you can try out browser-based streaming of Second Life, enabling you to experience the virtual world with maximum graphics settings displayed on a web browser, even on low-end PCs/laptops — go here to access it for up to 10 minutes.
I just tried it out, and it's pretty impressive, even in this early test phase. Teleporting to sims is quicksilver fast, taking less than a second. Right now, you access it through Linden Lab's existing default browser, but in future iterations, the streaming user interface will completely change. (More on that below.)
This streaming project, internally dubbed “Project Zero”, has been in development even before Philip Rosedale rejoined Linden as CTO in late 2024, is hands-on proof that the company is not completely pinning the future of Second Life to the new mobile app. Project Zero is shaping up to be the way new users will first experience the virtual world, seamlessly and beautifully, whether or not their machine can manage SL's full 3D graphics.
A Surprising Solution to Post-PBR Problems
Project Zero also an answer to a problem Oberwager acknowledged during another briefing last year: Second Life’s recent upgrade to PBR graphics caused a drop in log-ins among the existing user base, as people with lower end machine had trouble displaying physically based rendering.
“We have come up with an incredible fix that will have an amazing impact on all current and future residents," he told me last month. I initially thought he was referring to bug fixes, but no: It’s a whole new way of experiencing Second Life, and when it’s officially rolled out, will come with a modern upgrade to the UI, re-built from the ground up.
I should say a new old way: Linden Lab originally tested out browser-based streaming of Second Life in 2010, then again in 2015, from well-funded startup OnLive. (Disclosure: I helped OnLive launch that project on the marketing side.) It worked pretty well, but broadband and computing costs were too expensive back then to make it scalable. Since then, however, those prices have come substantially down, driven in part by the recent boom in large language model AI programs like ChatGPT.
2025, Linden Lab believes, is the year Second Life streaming is finally ready to deploy with Project Zero.
In internal testing, Philip Rosedale told me on a recent briefing, they’re getting zero latency. It doesn’t even necessarily require super high-end broadband. “If you can watch Netflix [on your machine],” as he put it, “you can do this.”
Another key difference from the 2010 and 2015 deployments:
(more…)
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 