Second Life
Late last night I started watching a documentary on Netflix about Second Life – the online virtual reality community “game” that appeared about ten or fifteen years ago. More out of curiosity than anything I downloaded the client software at lunchtime – to see if it had changed at all (I had an account when they first launched about 10 years ago). It’s still awful – clunky, slow, resource hungry, and the interface is almost unusable.
A couple of years ago (after reading “Ready Player One”) I started playing “World of Warcraft”, with the thought that it might be fun to use as a virtual meeting place with a few friends. It was infinitely better than Second Life, but seemed a little crazy – installing a 20Gb game to use one feature of it.
I’m amazed that there is still no good, simple, straightforward 3D community environment out there – after Second Life appeared there were a few immitators (“There” comes to mind), but nothing has ever really gained any traction or evolved at all.