O.K. it’s time to inject a little levity (thanks, Neobela!):
It’s so funny because it’s true. Second Life users make friends and build communities not based on physical proximity, but on mental and emotional connections between their avatars. That very basic fact, common to all virtual worlds and social VR platforms, may be a life-saver to those people who, either by choice or by circumstance, are forced to self-isolate in their homes because of quarantines and the imposition of social distancing policies by their governments.
And it’s not just Second Life. It’s any virtual world, and the concept applies to the newer social VR platforms like Sansar, too.
I am one of those depressed people who often walks away from a real-world interaction with a friend or acquaintance with an uplift in my mood. And I know that I often can replicate that response, when I interact with other people in a virtual world, too. My brain literally does not know the difference between a real-world interaction and a virtual-world one, and it responds the same way.
Of course, this works both ways: someone in my real life or or in virtual one can just as easily bring me down and depress me further. But the fact remains that social VR platforms and virtual worlds are built on the foundation of human communication. It literally doesn’t matter if those humans are living right next door or at the other end of the globe in our modern era of information technology. We can find our own community, people who share our thoughts, goals, and dreams, and literally build new worlds!
So, while the SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 outbreak continues, don’t forget to sign into your favourite social VR/virtual world platform(s) from time to time, to reconnect with your communities.
One evening last week, I decided to take a break from the Educators in VR conference sessions, and I did something I had not done in at least two months—I loaded up an anonymous alt and I paid a visit to Sansar.
Like most other worlds in Sansar, the Galleria shopping mall I visited was utterly deserted, despite showing up at the top of the Popular list in my Codex. (There were certainly no more than forty avatars total in all of Sansar on this particular evening.) After half an hour of morose window-shopping, I signed out again, feeling even more depressed than when I signed in.
I find it almost inconceivable that a mere eleven months ago, we had not one but two social VR platforms, into which their respective companies had poured years of software development work and millions of dollars, throwing splashy, well-attended events in an effort to outdo each other. Today, both of those companies have laid off dozens of staff, one platform has shut down completely, and the other is actively shopping around for someone to take it over, or it will probably shut down too.
Sansar user Zero Cheese posted the following three-minute recording of the most recent Sansar Product Meetup to his Twitter, where the users took to the stage instead of the Linden Lab staff, and instead of cheering me up, all it did was break my heart:
Throughout my three-year journey as a beta tester and blogger, one of the most special things about Sansar has always been its intrepid community of users and content creators, who may have been small in number but mighty in spirit.
There was always the feeling that the next wave of users would be just around the corner, that the next update with its shiny new features would be just enough to entice people to come in, to pay return visits, to move in, to set up homes and stores, and to build a new world.
It never happened. Why?
There will be no shortage of onlookers (armchair quarterbacks) who will speculate on what they think High Fidelity and Linden Lab did wrong, but I would suspect that many of their answers would revolve around one word: hubris.
To the ancient Greeks, hubris referred to extreme pride, especially pride and ambition so great that they offended the gods and led to one’s downfall. Wikipedia says:
Hubris (/ˈhjuːbrɪs/, from ancient Greek ὕβρις) describes a personality quality of extreme or foolish pride or dangerous overconfidence, often in combination with (or synonymous with) arrogance.
Simply put, it was that the people who ran High Fidelity and Linden Lab thought they already knew very well what people wanted, largely based on their shared past corporate experience with Second Life. Oh, they still sought input from the users, from time to time, but overall, they went ahead and did exactly what they pleased, confident that (to borrow a line from the 1989 movie Field of Dreams) if they built it, people would come.
Well, they built it (or, at the very least, they made a good solid start of building it). But the people didn’t come. Why?
I think that Ebbe Altberg and his team at Linden Lab can’t win no matter what they do. If they continue to throw too much time and money at Second Life, Sansar will suffer and they’re betting the future on Sansar…Yet if they try to promote Sansar…folks who are wedded to Second Life get upset.
Wagner James Au of the long-running blog New World Notes received a torrent of comments from Sansar haters when he reported on the current uncertain status of the Sansar project last Friday. It would appear that many Second Life users are still extremely upset at what they feel were all the resources that Linden Lab put into Sansar—time and money that they feel strongly should have been invested into improving Second Life. (Note that we do not know, and will probably never know, what outside investors put their money into Sansar, if any.) That visceral hatred fed into the perfect storm of events that has put the Sansar project in the position it is now in, being shopped around by Linden Lab in hopes of finding investors, lest it pull the plug completely.
Reading through all the comments in Wagner’s blogpost got me to thinking: how could Linden Lab have handled this situation better? Hindsight is 20/20, but to me it seems clear that the company could have handled its messaging about Sansar to Second Life users a lot better than it did.
The message from Linden Lab was clear: Sansar was not intended to replace Second Life; they were meant to be two separate platforms. While that might have allayed the many initial fears by Second Life users that their beloved virtual world was imminently going to be shut down, it also sidestepped the bigger question: how was Linden Lab going to move users from Second Life to Sansar? Because it rapidly became obvious that most Second Life users, in fact the overwhelming majority of them, were very happy with SL, thank you very much, and nothing and nobody was going to entice them to move.
Galen, in his most recent guest editorial, was right: Linden Lab should have built some bridges between Second Life and Sansar, in order to make it easier to gently encourage SL’s userbase to begin to explore Sansar. Expecting users to give up their inventories and start over again from scratch in a new virtual world was probably a tactical error. Why couldn’t we have used the Linden dollar in Sansar, for example?
I do remember that, at some point in the past, I read that Linden Lab was going to “reserve” all existing Second Life usernames in Sansar, so they could be assumed by SL folks who wished to migrate over and keep their identities. What happened to that plan? What happened to any plan to make it easier to Second Life users to migrate?
Linden Lab’s mismanagement of communication with its Second Life users with respect to Sansar and their intentions was, I believe, a key factor in their downfall. We will probably never know what Linden Lab’s big game plan was with Sansar vis-à-vis Second Life. Perhaps they didn’t even know themselves. But it’s clear that they felt they knew how to repeat that early success with Second Life. And they have been proven wrong.
Philip Rosedale, the founding CEO of Linden Lab and creator of Second Life, also thought he knew the secret to creating a successful, popular successor to Second Life. And he, and the team he led, were also proven wrong.
It has been a rather spectacular downfall for both companies.
Where does everybody go from here? Hell if I know. I just report on the events; I have long given up trying to predict them. My track record is crap. For example, I predicted Cryptovoxels would fail, only to see the platform thrive. I predicted Virtual Universe would be a success, only to see it fail and fold. And I was completely taken by surprise at both High Fidelity’s and Sansar’s layoffs over the past twelve months.
It remains to be seen whether the newer crop of social VR platforms and virtual worlds will learn from what happened to High Fidelity and Sansar, or even what the lessons to be learned are. More remains to be written, but I will leave that to another day.
This scanning electron microscope image shows SARS-CoV-2 (yellow)—also known as 2019-nCoV, the virus that causes COVID-19—isolated from a patient in the U.S., emerging from the surface of cells (blue/pink) cultured in the lab. Credit: NIAID-RML
Although I said I would no longer write daily updates about the Wuhan coronavirus (now officially called SARS-CoV-2), I feel that now is a good time to talk about how a potential global pandemic could impact the still-nascent virtual reality market.
The world may be facing a situation not encountered in 102 years, when the 1918/1919 Spanish influenza pandemic swept around the globe in three successive waves in 18 months (in an era before commercial air travel), infecting one third of the world’s population and killing over 50 million people, more than the total number who died in World War I.
Residential lockdowns of varying strictness — from checkpoints at building entrances to hard limits on going outdoors — now cover at least 760 million people in China, or more than half the country’s population, according to a New York Times analysis of government announcements in provinces and major cities. Many of these people live far from the city of Wuhan, where the virus was first reported and which the government sealed off last month.
Humanity has no natural immunity to this coronavirus (despite the hucksters taking advantage of the situation to sell you various “immunity boosters”). There is no vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, and there will not be one for at least a year. The World Health Organization has already stated that existing pneumonia vaccines are useless against the specific kind of pneumonia caused by SARS-CoV-2.
In other words, you really can’t prepare your body for this infection. It is true that some people seem to have very light or no symptoms at all (but are still able to infect others). The virus appears to be deadlier to older people, overweight people, and people with pre-existing health conditions, such as asthma and diabetes. (In other words, I am a sitting duck.)
Researchers are still trying to calculate the infectiousness (R0 or R-naught) and case fatality rate (CFR) of this new viral outbreak, and experiments with various treatment options are currently being conducted on infected patients to see what works and what doesn’t. However, all the preliminary reports suggest that the SARS-CoV-2 is about as easily transmissible as the regular, seasonal influenza we see every year.
As an interim measure, it is possible (some would say, likely) that we will begin to see the same kind of social distancing and quarantine policies currently seen in China being implemented by governments around the world. Travel between countries has already been and will continue to be negatively impacted. Major international conferences, such as the Mobile World Conference, are already being cancelled.
All of the preceding discussion is merely preamble to the point I am trying to make: that a potential pandemic will both help and hurt virtual reality.
How will a potential coronavirus pandemic help VR?
I believe that this truly unprecedented combination of circumstances might actually drive more people to embrace virtual reality technology and social VR platforms as a way to safely attend conferences, training sessions, and other events, where it is not physically possible due to pandemic quarantines and social distancing policies. In other words, more people will be exposed to VR, and sooner than predicted, due to the impact of SARS-CoV-2.
This situation might even lead to a boom in the use of various social VR platforms (and perhaps even non-VR virtual worlds such as Second Life). We will probably begin to see many more conferences held partly or completely in virtual reality, such as this week’s Educators in VR 2020 International Summit, where presenters and attendees can share ideas and mingle without the worry of being exposed to an infectious virus!
How will a potential coronavirus pandemic hurt VR?
Many factories have shut down production of goods in mainland China, where many of the computer gadgets we use everyday are manufactured. While a potential pandemic might strengthen demand for VR headsets, it might also make it much harder to get your hands on one.
So, the coronavirus is a double-edged sword with respect to virtual reality.
Good Sources of Information on SARS-CoV-2
Here is my updated list of good, credible, authoritative resources to learn more about the Wuhan coronoavirus (formerly called 2019-nCoV and now officially called SARS-CoV-2; the disease the virus causes is now called COVID-19):
Another instructive YouTuber to watch is Dr. John Campbell, a British nurse educator who very clearly explains what you need to know
If you prefer to get your informtion via audio, the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) has started a weekly half-hour podcast on SoundCloud, called COVID-19: What’s Happening Now.
P.S. Effective today, I have created a new blogpost category called Virtual Reality (General), under which I will put those blogposts that talk about VR in a general way that don’t fit under a more specific existing category. I will try to go back and add this category to older blogposts, but obviously, at 1,700 blogposts written to date, I can’t go back and do them all!
Yes, I can laugh about it, today. But only because I’ve also had a really good cry about it this week. By all reports, the Sansar project is struggling, and I’m still feeling devastated and upset at the news.
I’ve written before about my soft spot/blind spot when it came to Sansar, after I responded so strongly to the first big layoff of staff in October 2019, flip-flopping back and forth like a fish out of water about whether or not to continue writing about the social VR platform, which of course was my whole reason to start this blog in the first place. (And yes, I’m still flip-flopping, obviously. But I will not be writing about anything currently going on at Linden Lab with respect to Sansar, beyond what I have already reported. Expect nothing but radio silence on that matter.)
The backlash to my blogpost about the second round of layoffs (including a fair share of hate messages), triggered a downward spiral where I landed up spending a good chunk of this week lying in bed, in a black pit of depression out of which I am only now starting to crawl.*
Ryan took a lot of heat for that blog post — some from Sansar Discord account holders. He followed with an apology and last night he stated that he was closing his blog.
I can’t say that I applaud his blogging methodology; it certainly wasn’t responsible journalism. Ryan has stated (via Discord) that he is not a journalist, only a blogger. But that isn’t cutting it with me. We are ALL responsible for what we say and what we do — as well as the manner in which we do it. That being said, the “facts” put forth in his article have not been officially refuted as of this writing and I have publicly defended him on that count. That same public — and especially the people in Sansar — do have a right to know what is going on. I hope that Ryan rethinks his position on closing.
Yes, I have indeed rethought my position on shutting down this blog. I have been heartened by the small outpouring of support and encouragement I have received this week from numerous people, including one very well-timed pep talk from Lorelle VanFossen, blogging evangelist and organizer of the Educators in VR group, when I was ready to pull out of speaking at their upcoming conference. (Thanks, Lorelle.) The overwhelming message I got back was that people did not want to see me stop blogging. So I won’t.
And, of course, Chic is absolutely correct. Whether or not I call myself a journalist is beside the point; what matters is how I do my job as a blogger, and I made several grievous errors in judgement this week. I rushed to publish a story without taking into consideration its potential impact to Sansar users, Sansar content creators, and Linden Lab employees. I should have reached out to Linden Lab for a comment before publishing the story, particularly to double-check that Sansar was indeed shutting down (as I had originally, and erroneously, reported).
I fucked up royally, and I’m sorry.
I realize now that I have an obligation to you, my blog readers, to get the facts of the story correct, and to provide as many different perspectives as possible in covering that story. I know that many of you come to this blog to get your news about social VR, virtual worlds, and the metaverse—I now get between 600 and 6,000 views per day—and I have a duty to use that growing power and influence responsibly. This is not just a hobby blog, not any longer. I am a journalist, whether I like it or not.
And my talk next Saturday at the Educators in VR conference will be slightly different from what I originally planned. The moderators have given me permission to talk about whatever I like, so in addition to speaking about social VR and libraries, I will also share some lessons learned the hard way in my two-and-a-half years of writing this blog. Think of it as two talks for the price of one!
And I will slowly be easing back into blogging over the next two weeks. I still think that I need to take a break, but of course the world does not stop. February 20th, 2020 will see both the official public launch of Decentraland and the relaunch of version 2.0 of Somnium Space, for example. I will try to report on various news and events as they happen.
And thank you to all the people who did reach out to me, to express their concern, constructive criticism, encouragement, wisdom, unbiased third-party perspective, and support. Sometimes it takes a crisis to find out who your friends and supporters are, and it would appear I have many that I did not realize I had gained over the past 2-1/2 years. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you.
I’ll be all right. The blog will continue.
*It didn’t help matters that, over the past three weeks, I had taken on the extra burden of blogging daily updates about the Wuhan coronavirus (also known as 2019-nCov and then COVID-19), in an effort to get people to begin to prepare for a potential global pandemic. I worked and worried myself into an anxious, doom-porn-addicted, stressed-out mess, and as a result I took this blog into a very weird tangent that confused a lot of my regular readers. Lesson learned. I’m sorry.
I will leave the pandemic advice and counsel to the many experts out there. I don’t need to become the world’s self-appointed saviour from this coronavirus. (As some of my sassy gay friends would tell me: “Get off the cross, honey. People need the wood.” 😉 )
