And even work we did more recently with High Fidelity, which was very similar-a full VR environment, but with the headsets rather than with desktop-there are small groups of people that have gotten immense pleasure or opportunity to make money, and things like that, out of these environments.īut they're still not for everybody. I've worked on this a lot and it's been incredibly rewarding for the people for whom it has worked. So I think the reason why it didn't, and this reason is still very true today, is simply that most adults are not yet comfortable engaging with new people, or engaging socially, in a multi-player context online. And the hope that Facebook has is that there'll be a billion people using a metaverse. It's been growing more with COVID, but as you say, it didn't break out, it didn't become a billion people. But Second Life didn't grow beyond about a million people. If you talk about people wanting to go to a live concert, or wanting to go shopping or something like that, I think Second Life is still US $650 million a year in transactions and a million people using it.
The environments that are used by kids, such as Roblox, are very interesting as well but very different in terms of what they offer.
Rosedale: It's interesting to note that Second Life is, in my opinion, still the largest and the closest thing to a metaverse that we have as it relates to grown-ups. Why do you think it didn't break through to the mainstream? Spectrum: Second Life was almost like a proto-metaverse. And then the other one is simply Facebook's claim that it's an important thing and renaming themselves to try to align with it. I think there's a lot of the big companies trying to figure out how they can make some money from that. One is obviously COVID, where there has been the worry that maybe we would have to shift some social and entertainment activities online. Philip Rosedale: There are really two things that are external to the technology development itself that have happened recently. Why do you think the idea has suddenly started to catch on in such a big way? IEEE Spectrum: You've been talking about the metaverse for a long time. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. IEEE Spectrum spoke with him to find out the challenges involved in building an immersive virtual world. But despite some promising progress Rosedale says VR headsets are still too immature for mass adoption and the company has now put the idea on the back burner and switched focus to its spatial audio technology.Īs the creator of an early metaverse-like experience and someone well-versed in the limits of VR technology, Rosedale has plenty of insights for the latest pretenders to the metaverse crown.
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Its chief architect Philip Rosedale left Linden Lab in 2009 and now runs a new start-up called High Fidelity, which started out building software that let people design and deploy their own virtual reality worlds. But Second Life still has a dedicated band of regular users and is probably the longest running experiment in the possibilities of a metaverse-like experience. Second Life had its heyday in the late 2000s, and its keyboard and mouse controls and blocky graphics are a long way from the polished vision of immersive worlds beamed through virtual reality headsets that companies like Facebook and Microsoft are touting.
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Instead, users create a digital avatar to represent them and are then free to explore the world, meet other users, create their own digital content and even trade goods and services in the in-world currency, the Linden Dollar. In Second Life, there are no goals or objectives. Its creators, Linden Lab, go to great pains to emphasize that Second Life is not a game, unlike other proto-metaverse experiences such as Fortnite or Roblox. Since 2003, people have been gathering to do all of the above in the online world of Second Life. The idea isn’t as new as it might seem though. The tech world is abuzz with talk of the metaverse, a virtual world where millions of people could soon gather to work, play, and socialize.
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