The Electric Sheep Company's

by Surfdaddy Orca

Go to www.cbs.com or www.secondlife.com and you’ll get the pitch: “Virtual CSI:NY—Now in Second Life—You’ve Seen the Show, Now BE the Show!” How is it that new hoards of TV couch potatoes will end up following actor Gary Sinise’s CSI:NY character “down the rabbit hole” into Second Life (SL) to find Venus before she kills again?

Typically it takes at least two to three hours to learn how to begin to navigate the SL virtual landscape. The chance of a newbie user actually making it through SL’s Orientation Island according to mentor DoteDote Edison is one in three. In other words, only one third of those who sign up actually make it through orientation. And of those who survive, according to Linden Lab metrics, roughly one third stick around to become ongoing residents. That’s maybe one in ten who master the learning curve and stick around.

Enter The Electric Sheep Company’s (ESC) new OnRez viewer. Essentially this is a new user interface (UI) “skin” with a remapped menu and button structure designed to ease “newbs” (new users) into the SL Wonderland. Electric Sheep Company CEO Sibley Verbeck comments, “Our goal is to make virtual worlds easy and fun to use for the mass-market consumer. By launching a more intuitive consumer interface, we’re allowing brands to maximize the appeal of their virtual world initiatives.”

Long-time SL resident Tateru Nino describes her first reaction to OnRez in the Second Life Insider. Says Tateru, “First impressions? Nothing is where my fingers expect it to be, and my visible view of the world is a bit reduced. Second impressions? I rather like it.” Does she plan to stick with it? “On the whole, I’d stick with it, except for [low contrast on her monitor]... I didn’t notice it at first, 30 minutes with OnRez has been enough to start my eyes watering.” In all fairness, I did not find the contrast to be an issue on either my MacBook Pro or my Dell LCD.

OnRez begins to fulfill the promise of Linden Lab’s strategic move to release viewer source code back in January 2007—which is in this case, a new and improved mousetrap built using Linden Lab-supplied open source by a third-party content creator, The Electric Sheep Company. Linden Lab’s release of open source effectively expanded the developer community so that anyone can extend and improve the SL platform. In this case, the “mice” to be trapped are actually broadband users who like to watch the popular CBS Crime Scene Investigation TV series and may already know a little something about 3D online communities and MMOGs.

“While the OnRez viewer is an outgrowth of Linden Lab’s open source initiative,” says Wagner James Au in his New World Notes, “OnRez itself is close sourced, created with a special commercial license the Sheep received from Linden.” This type of business model—free source to developers, licenses to distributors—is common in the industry. It means that enhancements to the OnRez code base will have to be built and released by Electric Sheep developers rather than by the broader community of Linden Lab open source developers. And The Electric Sheep Company can resell the product. OnRez key features highlighted in the company’s press release cover UI items only:

• Redesigned interface to improve the user experience
• Built-in search, shopping, and virtual currency purchasing services from the OnRez software suite
• Improved location navigation allowing users to easily jump back and forth among Second Life sites, just as they do on the Web
• Improved integration and browsing of the Web from inside the virtual world

Let’s take a quick look at each of these features.

Redesigned Interface

The first thing you’ll notice is the change in layout for both the menus at the top of the viewer and the button bar at the bottom. The good ol’ familiar SL viewer has a series of blue buttons along the button bar including Build, Snapshot, and Fly.

The OnRez viewer’s button bar has a nice chrome look with buttons for Gesture, Talk, Nearby, IM History, and Friends that expose more commonly used features of SL in a more intuitive layout. Perhaps confusing to long-term SL residents at first, but clearly of benefit to newbs.

The OnRez menu bars provide an even more radical departure, with the most significant features being Me and Here drop-down menus, and dynamic menu items under View that appear only when shown. It is also very intuitive to simply pull down Me > My Stuff to view inventory.

The use of progressive disclosure is a standard UI design technique to hide complexity. OnRez hides the Build and Import functions under the View menu. Select View > Show Build.

Built-in Search, Shopping and Currency Purchasing

Underneath the menu bar is a set of buttons that can be toggled on/off. These include a Location box, a Search box, a My Stuff (inventory) button, and a Shop button. The Buy L$ button is always visible—buying Linden dollars is now only a click away.

Type a search term into the Search box, and you’ll see the familiar tabbed Search window pop up.

Shopping has never been easier. Click the Shop button and you’ll see the Shop Viewer, which is a variant of the SL Exchange not unlike Robbie Kiama’s Meta Mart or Felix Wakmann’s SL Browser. You get a list of items related to your search term and can choose to Buy this Item!, Send as gift, or Add to favorites.

Improved Location Navigation

The “classic” way to navigate is to use the Map button to find a location and then teleport to it. Once you have a landmark, you can find it in your inventory and then use it to teleport.

OnRez makes this process considerably simpler. You can type a location into the location box and instantly teleport to it.

OnRez keeps a history of your locations so the next time around you simply pull down on the list at the top of your screen and select a location. This is a major timesaver.

Browsing the Web from Inside the Virtual World

Type a web address into the location box at the top of the screen and you’ll pop up a full-sized Mozilla browser window that displays that web page—inside the OnRez viewer.

Wagner James Au comments, “By integrating HTML addresses and virtual locations into the same navigation interface, the OnRez version of Second Life effectively swallows the Web.” This may be slightly overstated.

While an embedded web browser is definitely an ease-of-use feature (you don’t have to start a separate browser instance), there are limitations to what you can actually do using this in-world web browser—it doesn’t run Flash and some other key plug-ins, and YouTube doesn’t work correctly. More to the point, you can’t display the web page on a prim for other residents to view. I suspect that most SL users have enough RAM to run a separate full-featured browser and lay it on top of SL to check e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, or to Google a map or image.

The idea of unifying SL locations with web sites is good, nevertheless, and the OnRez implementation is a step in the right direction.

Memory and Lag

The Electric Sheep Company’s press release does not mention reduced memory footprint, improved memory management, or more effective pooling of database handles to reduce lag, which would be of interest to long-term SL residents. These don’t appear to be announced design goals, but might be nice side effects of the UI redesign and testing. The Electric Sheep indicated during a recent Dr. Dobb’s “GridTalk” event that they did stress tests involving over 450 sims provided by Linden Lab to make sure that network load balancers could handle the increased traffic expected from the CSI:NY event. It is likely that performance-related bugs were discovered and fixed in the new OnRez viewer as a result of this testing.

A few quick tests on Microsoft Windows XP Professional using an avatar with a 10K inventory showed comparable results between the SL and OnRez viewers in the 390,000 KB to 450,000 KB range, with slightly higher memory utilization for OnRez. While this is clearly not a reduced memory footprint, it could indicate some optimization of caching algorithms. However, without access to the source code and stress test results, this is only speculation. Universal 3D Browser?

Universal 3D Browser?

Is OnRez an improvement on the standard SL viewer? Exposing the more commonly used features currently hidden in the SL viewer is a big plus. Turning the purchase of Linden dollars, search, and shopping into buttons and a search box are also winners. Providing an easily accessible list of locations in SL-like browser bookmarks eliminates the need to search inventory for landmarks. And, as Wagner James Au points out, having a full-sized Mozilla browser window inside the viewer is helpful. All these features are positive steps in the direction of what will hopefully someday be a universal 3D browser that will allow you to point-and-click at a virtual world—whether SL, There, Gaia, Kaneva, Multiverse, Wonderland, or a roll-your-own world—and have the 3D browser smart enough to do the rest.

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