Linden Lab’s Second Life Viewer 2 Beta – what does it mean for business users?

By Sam Driver.

On February 23, 2010, Linden Lab announced the release of their Second Life Viewer 2 Beta program. The viewer is a downloaded application that creates the connection between your computer and the public virtual world of Second Life. The changes built into this new viewer improve the user interface (UI), making it easier to navigate and communicate in the environment, and to add some critical functionality (Shared Media).

As one of the most well known tools for immersive work, Second Life is where most business users first experienced a virtual world. The technology evolved from a recreational virtual world into a cosmopolitan environment that serves many types of users. From a business perspective, the DIY capabilities for building and animating 3D content have been a great boon for experiments and pilots performed by technology enthusiasts. As early adopters tried to bring this technology to a broader audience at work, they ran into a few hurdles: the UI was very complex, and the dizzying world around a new user could be overwhelming. (For more information see the Sept. 23, 2009 ThinkBalm report, Crossing the Chasm, One Implementation at a Time.)

The success of early experiments at work has led to a large collection of other technology vendors (list here) that design immersive technology application and content for work. This design gap represents a challenge for Linden Lab to remain competitive in a small and crowded market. The release of this new viewer is an important step toward making Second Life a modern and streamlined business tool.

Pressure on all of the vendors in this space is toward a simpler user experience, to appeal to the broadest array of potential users. We’ve defined some of the factors that are important to consider when you select an appropriate technology for your use case (See the January 19^th, 2010 ThinkBalm report, The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide). Resolving two of these factors, ease of use and core functionality, can often be difficult because they run counter to each other: if you want a lot of functionality, you’ll need controls, and more controls means more complexity. Finding the balance between these two is like trying to hit a moving target. As more capabilities become available, the market wants them, but in many cases, development won’t be backward compatible, so we see major version changes that can disrupt content or investments in earlier versions.

Our take: We see the release of Viewer 2 Beta and the Shared Media capability as fundamental improvements for work-related use of Second Life. Co-browsing the web and web-embedded media have been standard features of many tools for a year. There are still some features missing, and some web collaboration may be difficult due to synchronization issues. However, this is a typical approach for Linden Lab: they often build core content and rely on partners to develop additional content, applications and other assets. We expect that common document formats will be supported over time, either in the core product, or through third party developers. Feedback during the Beta period will drive a lot of this development.

• Many people will find Viewer 2 easier to use than previous versions. Personally, we find that Viewer 2 is a much easier UI than previous versions. The context for controls is more modern and in keeping with web style. The visual separation of public communication from private is a great addition as well. Fewer buttons at first glance make adoption by new users less intimidating, but all of the capabilities for power users are there, and in many cases, are more streamlined or easy to use.
• New Shared Media feature is a step forward. Shared Media and drag-and-drop web addresses on objects in Second Life is a tremendous upgrade from third-party tools or the dreaded image file upload process. There are still some steps to get content up on the web and in a format that will work in Second Life, but from there, drag-and-drop works. This is a stumbling block for many business users who don’t know how to upload content properly, or are prevented by corporate security restrictions. While application development is already underway by partners in the Second Life ecosystem, the prospect of managing third-party IP and assets has implications from purchasing policies to help desk support: large-scale deployments will have to factor in costs associated with these issues.
• You can still do everything you could do before — which is both good and bad. Viewer 2 Beta and Shared Media haven’t changed the nature of Second Life. As one of the few environments that allows end-user object creation within the environment, there is a layer of complexity that will complicate the UI. Use case and business needs will drive this decision: if you need user-generated content, you’ll have to accept a more complex tool. For those use cases where user-created content is an important consideration, the streamlined viewer and new web media capabilities are a great addition. The business model that supports Second Life results in a complex ecosystem of content developers that charge for their IP in many different ways, and the resulting permission system designed to protect these assets can be a major problem for end users.

Overall, we see this announcement as a healthy sign that the technology vendors are continuing to refine their products to suit user demand and incorporate rapidly advancing technology. For example, we saw a major upgrades to Teleplace (V3.0) and 3DXplorer (V5) in the second half of 2009, and the introduction of Forterra Meeting Labs prior to the acquisition of Forterra by SAIC. We expect further technology improvement announcements from Linden Lab and others in 2010.

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