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Second Life in a web browser: beta launches

November 16, 2010 By

With minimal fanfare, Linden Lab have launched a beta of their ‘Second Life in a browser’ offering AKA Project Skylight. Found here, you can sign-up and check it out in a session lasting up to an hour.

As always, Tateru Nino has scoped it out in detail, noting that not surprisingly it’s a bandwidth hungry beast and that once you watch the 45-second intro video a selection process occurs that determines whether you get to sign up to check out the web-based browser or not. If you get the normal Second Life sign-up page then you’re out of luck. Like me.

For those who do get to have a look, post your thoughts / impressions so the rest of us can get at least a taste. For me, this is Linden Lab’s only shot in the locker to secure the longer term future of Second Life beyond its plateaued growth. The gloss is there with this launch, here’s hoping the substance matches.

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  • Anonymous

    I believe that distance from the rendering servers makes a difference as to whether you can run it/be selected at all. I can’t, for example.

  • Anonymous

    I believe that distance from the rendering servers makes a difference as to whether you can run it/be selected at all. I can’t, for example.

  • Ms Georgianna Blackburn

    I gave it a try… Guest account has a one hour time, but you can come back again… the interesting part was at the end you get the option to join as a Basic User and the Premium User states in addtion get
    * Your own private 3D home
    * Virtual Currency to spend in thousands of shops
    * Adult-only (18+) area access*

    So, they are going to monetize the adult areas via premium accounts… thus keeping the 16-18 yr old at bay.

  • Laura Seabrook

    When I read in the Tateru Nino article that “Usage of the Skylight viewer is limited to one hour, by IP address, during which time it uses an estimated 1080MB of bandwidth” I lost most of my interest. May as well play Blue Mars if I want to burn up bandwidth.

  • http://twitter.com/SamDuel Sam Duel

    This is the Internet!!!!!! Distance from the servers? Wat rot – the problems will be blamed on routing, congestion, pickled onions on your modem, but this is all about bandwidth and the ability of their provider to service a global audience. Put simply – most people who have issues with SL bandwidth can download just fine on other sites. Linden Labs send me a fraction of my line speed and the video at the beginning timed out 3 times. As anyone who uses SL knows, its plateaued growth is down to poor performance and poor customer service, not the viewer/browser option.

  • Anonymous

    Nobody’s boosted the speed of light lately (which goes much slower in a fibre cable than in a vacuum) so distance will remain a factor in acceptable response times for streamed, server-rendered content.

    As for the video, it isn’t coming from Linden Lab (most of the content on that page isn’t) – it’s served up by Amazon’s high-speed S3 server cloud.

  • Anonymous

    Nobody’s boosted the speed of light lately (which goes much slower in a fibre cable than in a vacuum) so distance will remain a factor in acceptable response times for streamed, server-rendered content.

    As for the video, it isn’t coming from Linden Lab (most of the content on that page isn’t) – it’s served up by Amazon’s high-speed S3 server cloud.

  • http://twitter.com/SamDuel Sam Duel

    A ping to their servers takes 200ms so I cannot see long lengthy response times being the problem, LL gives me less than 100kb/sec most of the time, and I can download elsewhere at much higher speeds.

    But maybe I was not clear last time – I was not meaning to say your comment was rot, but that the situation you describe, and the excuses LL provides for its poor service do not stand up to closer scrutiny, so, sorry if I sounded obmoxious :)

  • http://twitter.com/SamDuel Sam Duel

    A ping to their servers takes 200ms so I cannot see long lengthy response times being the problem, LL gives me less than 100kb/sec most of the time, and I can download elsewhere at much higher speeds.

    But maybe I was not clear last time – I was not meaning to say your comment was rot, but that the situation you describe, and the excuses LL provides for its poor service do not stand up to closer scrutiny, so, sorry if I sounded obmoxious :)

  • http://twitter.com/SamDuel Sam Duel

    A ping to their servers takes 200ms so I cannot see long lengthy response times being the problem, LL gives me less than 100kb/sec most of the time, and I can download elsewhere at much higher speeds.

    But maybe I was not clear last time – I was not meaning to say your comment was rot, but that the situation you describe, and the excuses LL provides for its poor service do not stand up to closer scrutiny, so, sorry if I sounded obmoxious :)

  • Anonymous

    Not a problem :) We’re all friends here, more or less :)

    Actually the whole end-to-end grid-to-viewer bandwidth model is quite astonishingly complex. I’ll likely pen something about that very shortly.

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  • Djehan kidd

    The experience is very fluid, more than my own avatar on viewer with the same settings(sort of), like drawing distance, set to around 128.
    It is very stable, image quality is good, fps is smooth.

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  • http://virtualvector.com burhop

    Sorry I’m late to the comment party… but I like the web browser idea. My hour of playing with the web browser UI seemed to work pretty well. Oh, I’d rather user a fully functional client but there are a lot of people that just find it too heavy or too much work.

    When I can send someone who has never used SL a SLURL and have them show up at an inworld meeting, conference, 3D demo, etc, then I’ll really be impressed. Plus, a few of them may hang around in SL afterwards.