News Blog

The camera used for the new Second Life interface comes from 3DVsystems.

(Credit: handsfree3d.com)

While the Nintendo Wii has garnered attention from consumers and media alike for its innovative motion-based controls, Linden Lab is experimenting with a new way to interact with its Second Life virtual world with nothing more than a Webcam. Codenamed Segalen, the technology makes use of 3D Webcams, such as the ones from 3DVsystems, to track user's body gestures to let them navigate and edit within the environment.

In a YouTube video (embedded below), Second Life creator Mitch Kapor and Kapor Enterprises Inc. employee Philippe Bossut demonstrate the basics of moving around the 3D virtual world without the use of a keyboard or mouse--the traditional interface for most games. They mention that they took some cues from the way people use the Segway personal transport device to map out people's gestures and posture into a 3D world. The technology can also track facial gestures and match them onscreen in real time.

On Bossut's blog he notes that the project has only been in "real" development for a little more than three weeks. Second Life users looking to get their hands on it will have to wait, however, the 3D cameras in use for the project are still not readily available to consumers.

Similar efforts to use Webcams for gaming include the XBOX 360 and its Live Vision camera as well as the Playstation's EyeToy series, although neither had the 3D hardware capability that will give Kapor's Handsfree 3D its extra dimension of spacial control.

Griefing, like this prankster's 'Super Mario' barrage, is one of the reasons behind 'Second Life's' more-than-occasional server problems. To be fair, this Mario army did not crash the virtual world.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)

Virtual world Second Life, the centerpiece of this weekend's Second Life Community Convention in Chicago, has occasionally come under fire for its outages. Scheduled downtime, unpredicted outages, server crashes due to onslaughts of thousands of Super Mario graphics flooding the tubes (those are from griefers, natch)--it's a headache for newbies and avid residents alike.

But in his keynote at the convention on Saturday morning, Philip Rosedale, the founder and CEO of Second Life parent company Linden Lab, suggested that we all look on the bright side. The virtual world is active about 90 percent of the time, he said.

"If you look at our overall service performance lately, we're sort of somewhere above 90 percent availability once you include the planned downtimes for updates and you include the unplanned stuff that we seem to be doing to ourselves," he said self-deprecatingly. Then he added, "That's one nine, and it's better to have one nine than not any nines at all."

Cambridge, Mass.--The industry around virtual worlds, also referred to as the 3-D Internet, is chaotic and messy but on the brink of mainstream adoption, said Mitch Kapor, chairman of the Linden Labs and PC industry pioneer.

Kapor spoke here on Friday in an event organized by IBM and the MIT media Lab on virtual worlds. Linden Labs is the maker of Second Life, a popular virtual world environment.

During his talk, Kapor drew many parallels between the early days of the PC and virtual worlds: there are many people who are skeptical of virtual worlds and the product is not suitable for many tasks.

Mitch Kapor says virtual worlds are a disruptive technology on the brink of larger acceptance.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)

But people's passion for virtual worlds, albeit early adopters belie the potential impact of the technology, Kapor argued. That enthusiasm is mirrored in the deluge of media coverage of virtual worlds--sometimes hundreds of articles a day.

"What's driving this and why it's so darned disruptive is this shared sense of a few thousand crazy people thinking that it is really important and a really really big deal, even though they can't fully articulate it and don't know where it's going," Kapor said.

He described a moment of insight while watching a Suzanne Vega concert recorded in Second Life. He realized the potential of the medium when he saw the involvement of the spectators who could have been anywhere in the world and the simulation of Vega performing and interacting with people.

"I realized these virtual worlds become what we imagine they could be and the limits and constraints are enormously less than that of the physical world," he said.

"It reminded me of a drug experience in the days when we didn't know how dangerous recreational drugs could be," said Kapor, a self-professed product of the 60s.

Kapor said that some of the choices that Linden Labs has made will become more commonplace in other virtual worlds.

Specifically, he said having user the ability to generate content, rather grahics professionals--which was a radical notion when Linden labs was starting a few years ago--will become the norm.

Kapor predicted that, as a disruptive technology, the 3-D Internet opens up markets for hardware and software products. For example, hardware, such as goggles and gloves, to create a more immersive experience will emerge.

He also said that there will be huge demand for "reality acquisition devices" that allow people to create replicas of physical goods in the virtual world. More technical infrastructure, such as today's application servers, will be required to create more sophisticated and scalable applications and virtual worlds.

Finally, Kapor sees a parallel in what the PC did for desktop publishing and what the 3-D Internet can do for three-dimensional printing, where specially designed printers spray layers of powder to create physical goods.

Moving forward, Kapor said that the technical infrastructure of Second Life will become increasingly standards-based and open. The first step to doing that was open sourcing the client software.

"Long-term, there shouldn't be any single proprietary standard protocol used in the thing so Second Life becomes part of something larger," he said. "My view is that it's very prudent to do this because if we don't do it, another company will and we will end up being crushed."

Amid a healthy dose of skepticism, Second Life publisher Linden Lab held a town hall meeting Thursday to address some of the concerns raised last week in an open letter complaining about many of the most severe performance issues suffered by users of the popular virtual world.

Among the issues raised in the letter were regular issues with grid stability, inventory loss and build tool problems.

During the town hall meeting, which took place in Second Life, Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka answered questions for more than an hour. Many were unrelated to the specific issues raised in the letter, but many others were spot on.

One resident at the meeting asked Ondrejka, "Where does stability and performance fall in the priorities for (Linden Lab) development. There is a problem literally every other day and it seems like there is very much room for improvement in this regard."

To which Ondrejka answered, "Sixty nine percent of the development staff at Linden Lab are currently on scaling and stability. And the percentage is rising over the next few weeks. It is the highest priority and the focus of the majority of our design, coding and QA work."

Asked later if Second Life users should simply be patient and wait for slow change or if they can expect quick resolutions to the most pressing answers, Ondrejka took the middle road.

"The answer, of course, lies somewhere in between," he said. "We are working to fix bugs and enable incremental improvement. At the same time, we are building the foundations for the next-gen architecture that will radically improve our ability to scale."

For the most part, Linden Lab has been mum on precisely what that next-gen architecture would include, though Ondrejka did say it would include a new search system designed to make it easier to find things in-world and to overcome spam problems.

Despite Ondrejka's attempts to mollify resident dissatisfaction with many of the most pressing problems, there was a high degree of hostility on display during the meeting. Many people shouted out--in text, as the entire meeting was conducted in a text format--that they have severe difficulties getting responses from Linden Lab when there are problems.

Ondrejka and other members of the Linden Lab staff told residents that Second Life offers many ways to submit feedback and get direct responses. But some in attendance were not satisfied.

Ondrejka had also answered some of the issues in a blog entry posted Wednesday.

It's notable in any case that Linden Lab is willing to put senior executives on the firing line for unfettered questions so soon after such a public spanking as it received with the open letter. And while residents left without definitive solutions to some of their problems, they had to be impressed that the company was so quick to respond at all.

As the virtual world Second Life has grown and grown, with its total number of users heading into the several hundreds of thousands and concurrent users nearing 40,000, it has been going through some very visible growing pains.

Now many of the most visible members of the Second Life community, including land baroness Anshe Chung, as well as many others, are circulating an open letter to the virtual world's publisher, Linden Lab, spelling out their concerns and clamoring for positive action.

Among the problems identified are regular issues with grid stability--that is, that the virtual world's performance is suffering in many ways; inventory loss--that through successive new versions of the Second Life software people are losing items they've bought and can't get them back; build tool problems--that the basic design elements break too often; and more.

"In the past eighteen months, Second Life has expanded, growing from a small community of early adopters to a platform supporting millions of users," the letter begins. "There are some consistent, ongoing problems that are getting worse under heavy load, not better, and are not simply irritants but problems that are causing financial loss in some cases, which is unacceptable."

According to the organizer of the letter campaign, Cristiano Diaz, who is known in Second Life as Cristiano Midnight, the letter will be run on many Web sites and blogs related to the virtual world, and that there are already several hundred signatories.

For anyone who has been around Second Life for a while, many of these problems are quite familiar, and Diaz and the signatories clearly hope that by bringing more public awareness to the ongoing issues, Linden Lab may take it upon itself to do more to address them.

"It is not an effort to embarrass or anger Linden Lab, who we do have a great amount of respect for," Diaz wrote, explaining the letter. "It is simply using the tools we have available to express ourselves collectively, since other outlets have been removed."

It will be very interesting to see how Linden Lab responds or reacts, if at all.