21 Reasons the New Second Life Viewer 2.0 is a Huge Improvement

Viewer 2.0 is, in fact, dozens of long-requested features. The fact that these features we've asked for years and years of Linden Lab to deliver for the Second Life platform is a testament to the teams and leadership, and is a very good sign for the longer-term viability of Second Life as a platform. Two of the most stand-out features are HTML on a prim and treating a browser like a browser. But there's lots more.

First and foremost, I want you readers to understand that "Viewer 2.0" goes beyond the browser, and shows a fundamental shift in the thinking and working at Linden Lab.

1. Presentation with Machinima

I've said since 2005 that machinima is the single best way to show off virtual worlds. I'm hardly alone in this opinion. The gorgeous videos produced by the Ill Clan to promote Second Life shows that Linden Lab gets it, too.


Different use cases are illustrated, making room for business and education as well as the fun and escapism.

Further, the videos that are there to promote the new Viewer are produced by PookyMedia. These are nothing new, as Torley has a whole bunch of instructional videos that he has been creating for years. However, they have always seemed to be a sidenote, whereas now these videos *are* the launch, front and center.

Linden Lab still has a little ways to go - I still don't see similar videos on the Business side of things, such as on secondlifegrid.net. However, Linden Lab is promoting these other cases to the media.

2. Media Outreach for Business and Educational Use

One of the long-standing criticisms of Linden Lab in promoting Second Life has been the focus of "Second Life is a fun escapist place" that is the dominant way people think about Second Life. I was impressed with this interview Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon did with Robert Scoble that was released today at Building43.


In it, Kingdon clearly mentions business uses, cost-saving for travel, and simulation of "not possible in real life" uses. I was disappointed with one aspect, however, as he compared Second Life to Las Vegas, where one might have a business convention during the day, and then go to a nightclub at night. That could have just as easily been compared to San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, or London, and not have the negative, overt connotation of sex and immorality that Vegas touts.

3. HTML on a prim.

When I first started thinking about virtual worlds, back in college, and how I would design my own, one of my fundamental assumptions was a sort of "reverse compatibility". HTML. A virtual world, to be an evolution of the web, must easily handle all the current uses of the web.

When I joined Second Life, I was surprised when this was not the case. Second Life for years has been a virtual walled garden, with little to no interest of interacting with the rest of the web or social media. As Second Life gained popularity in 2005 and 2006, this attitude changed, but by then a lot of work was needed to enable web pages in Second Life.

Years later, we now have interactive websites within Second Life, with a robust permission system. And while the webpage display as media stream and being able to make httprequests out to servers via Second Life's in-world scripting language helped, they provided only a tiny subset of possible uses of the web in Second Life.

Being able to interact with the web natively in Second Life is a fundamental shift for the platform. I will have to post a followup blog post just about this subject, because the possibilities are so vast and expansive. A brief off-the-top-of-my-head list:
- working on documents in Google Apps
- watching YouTube videos in-world with friends
- adding multimedia content to everything: social, business, and educational uses
- replace awkward interfaces in-world with web-site driven interface
- replace text display in-world with websites.
- virtual goods sellers can now update all of their kiosks around Second Life from one website, and create sales interface through Xstreet online.

4. New Navigation Ideology

We have decades of experience, as a culture, working with computers and interacting online. There are many paradigms that have been tested, rethought, and improved. There have been alternative methods tried and failed. Ultimately, we have a set of behaviors that people use while using the Internet that work pretty well.

Until Viewer 2.0, most of these have been ignored. People call Second Life a game, frankly, because Second Life looks and feels like a game:
- The arrow-key / WASD control scheme.
- The avatar.
- The over-the-shoulder-camera.
- The health system.
- Pie menu navigation.
- Mouse-driven view changing

Add to that even more foreign concepts:
- 3-D building toolkit
- Inventory system that looks nothing like a PC or Mac's file system.
- Flying

Now, many of these are inherent to the platform, such as the avatar, flying, and so on. But the big picture was that Second Life's original viewer was designed by game designers, not web designers. Though, to be fair, we're talking 2001, before Firefox was anything but a 1982 Clint Eastwood movie.

The new browser is designed from the perspective of, "Second Life is part of the 3-D web, and let's use some of the behaviors we know and love from the web."

5. Back Button / History / Search Bar

What did the new browser ideology give us? A few of my favorites are the back button, the history of visited places, and the search and URL bar being at the top of the screen.

Back Button

If I recall correctly, Electric Sheep Company had this in their browser that they released for the CSI tie-in that they did with Second Life. This feature was certainly widely suggested before that, and it is a natural behavior.

History

Along the same lines, storing a history of places a user has visited is another natural web browser feature that fits with a virtual world.

Search Bar and URL Bar at top

This is not only about making Second Life work more like a web browser, but about the ability to do common tasks easier. Search in Second Life has been hitting Control-F. The average user doesn't know this. While this is a standard among web browsers and software, it's not a user's preferred choice for web browsing. The URL bar is really only a slight alteration, space-wise, from the previous browser, which listed the full name of the simulator at the top of the screen. But instead of having to poke open a map to navigate, one can just copy and paste a url, or even more simply:

6. Lip-Sync is on by Default

What is Lip-sync? When you talk via headset or microphone, your avatars lips move along with your voice. Is it perfect? No. Does it add to the immersion, and help dispel the "creepy telepathy" feeling I get when people talk without it. Yes! Is it buried in a developer "Advanced" menu? Not anymore!

7. Drag and Drop landmarks.

I think this is a cool feature. Drag a landmark from your inventory or history directly to your URL bar at the top, and you teleport. Simple.

8. Flash Support

Which I still don't see for the iPhone or the iPad. Just saying.

9. Tattoo Layer and Alpha Mask Layer

What is this, you ask? A Second Life avatar is assembled by the viewer and transmitted to other users in-world. It has a variety of "layers", such as "shirt", "undershirt" and "skin". Each layer can be changed independently, allowing third party content creators to sell individual items, such as pants or photo-realistic skins, rather than being forced to sell entire avatars looks as a set. What was missing was a "tattoo" layer.

Now, one might say, "How many people want tattoos on their avatar?" In the traditional sense, perhaps it might be a priority. But in the avatar sense, we're talking about make-up.

The same goes for alpha layer. This basically means that parts of a body can be made transparent, and non-human avatars can be made much more easily.

Content creators have long since wanted the ability to create tattoo and make-up separate from the skins, as well as an alpha layer for avatars. These will open up a whole new market for content creators in-world, while giving more flexibility to users who want to customize their avatars.

10. The Sidebar

The new sidebar is an attempt at putting all the commonly used things: profiles, inventory, landmarks, etc, into one standard format and easy to hide. I think it needs some work, but it's superior to the old interface.

11. Touch-Menu Interaction Improvements

Death to the Pie-menus! Huzzah! Linden Lab opts for the more universally recognized pull-down menu style.

12. View Presets

At the bottom, there's a button "View", and the eyeball icon lets you select one of four presets. This allows a user to quick go to first-person, over-the-shoulder, view of one's avatar from the front, and traditional view.

Unfortunately, this has a drawback... they stick even if you close the view. But the ESC key will break out of any view, just like mouselook, so it's really not that big an issue.

Various Interface Improvements

13. Chat History is replaced with an up-arrow next to the chat input box.

14. The top pull-down menus make far more sense.

15. Simplification of advanced features with "more" buttons that expand more features. (such as the snapshot window)

16. Line numbers on the left-hand side of the script programming window.

17. The annoying blue llDialog box is now: 1. In the same style as the rest of the browser. 2. At the bottom near chat, which is a more useful place that up in the top right corner.

18. "Nearby avatars" is now a tab in the "People" sidebar that let me quickly see who is around me. Super useful!

19. It's Still a Small Download

While Second Life requires about a gig of hard drive space (this seems far more trivial now than it did in 2004), the download is only 22.4 megabytes. Piece of cake.

20. All The Old Controls Still Work

Experienced SL users will have some time getting used to new locations for chat windows, but really an hour with the new viewer and I've got it. The big thing is that all the hotkeys and controls all still work.

21. Things still in the works

The other thing to be excited about are some announcement of initiatives still in the works. They include:

- In his interview with Scoble, Mark Kingdon spoke about Second Life providing connection to larger web - social tools to "break down walls", as he said. The purchase of Avatars United was cited as a valuable asset in this step. The SL Profiles that appeared a few months ago shows that this initiative has been in motion for a while.

Second Life will die as a walled garden. As it opens itself for interaction with external social media platforms, it will thrive.

- The programming language C# is being integrated into the scripting system so that more people can use existing programming knowledge to do programming with Second Life.

- "Inventory hasn't been updated yet". Catch that quote from the Intro To Viewer 2.0 video? I'm assuming this means Linden Lab is developing a long-awaited overhaul to the inventory system.

What I'd like to See From Here:

Well, since Linden Lab has now accomplished many of my major gripes about the platform, and is working on others, here's some features I'd like to see next:

1. Compatibility with standard 3-D formats. This will allow people with traditional design skills to work with Second Life, and immediately bring in a slew of new content, as there are lots of free and inexpensive 3-D art out on the web.

2. Better Facial expressions. I can't say this enough. Second Life's communication is already more meaningful that a simple telephone call. It could grow by an order of magnitude if it had accurate facial expressions mapped via webcam.

3. Drag and drop with your PC or Mac. I want to be able to drag the following from my desktop directly to Second Life:
- image files, 3-D objects, and avatar animations, and have them upload exactly in the folder of inventory I want.
- URLs, and have them automatically apply to the surface of an object
- standard document types, such as word processing / presentation / spreadsheet formats, that I can drag in-world and have them display. (Perhaps I'll settle for Google Apps, now that HTML is in-world)

3. "Portaling" objects. Essentially, I want the equivalent of a hyperlink in Second Life. I click on a door, I can go anywhere. Not a landmark, but a seamless transition from one space to another space. And, eventually, to other grids.

4. Increased privacy and functionality with "Inside / Outside" spaces, as I described here.

5. SL-in-browser. It can be done. One day. I dream.

6. More diverse types of sims.
I would like to be able to run a simulator with:
- no avatars, where the trade-off is a much higher concurrency rate.
- instantiated on-demand, where I can create copies of simulators as need arises, and pay on-demand prices rather than monthly blocks
- more space, more objects, less avatars.

7. Better privacy controls. I should be able to mute not only an avatar, but any object an avatar owns. I'd like to be able to turn off my parcel so that no one permitted can even load the contents, not even Linden Lab admin without a court order. Secure chat that can't be hacked by a third party client.

Conclusion

But for now, I'm extremely pleased with the new Viewer 2.0 release. Many, many doors have just opened for the possibilities of Second Life. Having interactive HTML and flash support alone makes lots of possibilities available. Combine with an array of interface improvements, and this really is a much cleaner, better experience.