Stall The Ball

After hearing and reading much hype about Second Life I decided to take a wander into this metaverse and see for myself what the fuss was about.

There are serious businesses in there, Reuters have sent in a reporter, Reebok or Nike or some sports clothing crowd have opened up in Second life were many of the headline reports I had heard.

Psychologists are having a field day working out the nuances of people’s online personas versus real life or “First Life” as the real world is called.

So I bit the bullet. Signed up for an account, was promised x amount of free Linden Dollars to spend (which failed to materialise, probably because I refused to hand over my credit card details) and then downloaded the Second Life client. Oh that was fun. Very fussy about graphics cards, driver levels colour settings etc. Any way I persevered. Next fun bit was as my firewall threw a hissy fit when it saw the number of connections that Second Life tries to use. A quick blitz through the FAQ and I quickly reconciled myself to allowing the firewall to open any port Second Life went out on.

The loading page kicked off and after a minute I was in Second Life. Initial impression was it reminded me of using AutoCad. Change a view and wait as the software rebuilds your view, building blocks, adding textures and bitmaps etc. Walk forward and wait for some more of the 3D world to be generated.

[UPDATE]

If you think I wasn't too impressed, have a look at The Registers views!!!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/12/terdiman_secondlife/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/16/reuters_embeds/

Follow up:

After following the orientation course I got the hang of the controls, well mostly. A few niggles but nothing major. A quick blitz around the training island and not a lot to see so I searched for something interesting. An event or concert or something. Well if I wanted porn there was tons of it. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valour I searched for Dublin as I had heard that someone or some people had built a replica of St Stephens Green and Grafton St.

A quick search and highlight Dublin had me “teleported” to a blank landscape. So I tried to walk around and kept hitting invisible barriers. Ooopps they are not invisible, they are buildings that haven’t been drawn yet by the rendering software. So I wait a minute. Then I toddle off to make a cuppa. Come back to see a reasonable facsimile of Dublin in or around Dame Street. Pretty impressive actually. But it looked like a ghost town. Walked around for a while and started to see random chat text appearing in the bottom of the screen. Aha! I thought, there are other people around. 5 minutes of wandering around got me bored, unimpressed with having to wait for the entire world to be redrawn every time I move and decidedly unimpressed with Second Life. And It’s still like a ghost town, all I needed was some tumble weed and a low whistling noise to finish off the whole impression of sheer loneliness. Suddenly I spy an avatar walking towards me. I tag along and watch as the avatar walks through a wall into a bar. So I follow through the magic wall, but as I approach it changes to a doorway. Rendering Software getting confused again I suspect.

Now I’m inside what looks like a bar. The Blarney Stone. The few people/avatars I interacted with were very helpful, pleasant and seemed nice people. But lets face it, if I want to meet strangers in a bar, wouldn’t I at least have the luxury of having a real drink as well in a real bar?

So I hang around for a while, there seems to be regulars who know each other, two females getting into a domination/Mistress conversation and role play, much hello goodbye banter. And that was that. Well apart from the music being streamed, which was very good and the “owner” of the bar who was very helpful when I encountered some GUI settings problems.

So I decided to explore, searching for places, teleporting into them, wandering about waiting for the rendering software to catch up, seeing no one and leaving. For an hour. Bored.

To be fair when you stay still and the entire view is rendered, it is pretty good. The customisations of your avatar are well thought out. I’m not sure whether it’s a bandwidth issue or software issue, but it is annoyingly slow. And empty. Way too much real estate for far too few people in my opinion. And I hit it at evening time in the US so it wasn’t that I picked a bad time.

I am going to revisit it to see if I missed something and suggestions are welcome. To me, the whole experience was fine as a novelty, an interesting idea and let down by the actual experience. As it stands, the hype is far in excess of the reality. Next stop on my metaverse investigations is World of Warcraft.